A nation's grand strategy rarely serves the best interests of all its citizens. Instead, every strategic choice benefits some domestic groups at the expense of others. When groups with different interests separate into opposing coalitions, societal...

Stunning shifts in the worldviews of states mark the modern history of international affairs: how do societies think about—and rethink—international order and security? Japan's "opening," German conquest, American internationalism, Maoist...

Since the early 1990s, refugee crises in the Balkans, Central Africa, the Middle East, and West Africa have led to the international spread of civil war. In Central Africa alone, more than three million people have died in wars fueled, at least in...

Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? U.S...

In a provocative book about American hegemony, Christopher Layne outlines his belief that U.S. foreign policy has been consistent in its aims for more than sixty years and that the current Bush administration clings to mid-twentieth-century tactics—to...

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass...

Do some technologies provoke war? Do others promote peace? Offense-defense theory contends that technological change is an important cause of conflict: leaders will be tempted to launch wars when they believe innovation favors attackers over...

Mueller argues that war is an idea, like dueling or slavery, that has been substantially discredited, reduced to its remnants—or dregs—and thugs are the residual combatants.

Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the United States was embroiled in competitive inter-state politics. Although it did not directly involve itself in European affairs, the United States did engage regularly in dangerous struggles with...