Love Hidden Geopolitics? Readers share 100 books like Hidden Geopolitics...

By John Agnew,

Here are 100 books that Hidden Geopolitics fans have personally recommended if you like Hidden Geopolitics. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The New Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future

Alexander Diener Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on 21st century borders.

Why am I passionate about this?

Beyond my fascination with borders as historical sites of conflict and shifting markers of control, Iā€™ve spent an academic career studying the simultaneity of barrier and juncture. This research has led me to witness licit and illicit border crossings, refugee camps, commercial ports, smuggling, and conservation through cloistering. In my travels, Iā€™ve perceived my vulnerability at certain borders and ease of passage at others. All of this afforded me insights into the human division and demarcation of space and resulted in books and articles on varied facets of bordering in the hope that I might contribute to inhibiting the bad and facilitating the good where territories meet.  

Alexander's book list on 21st century borders

Alexander Diener Why did Alexander love this book?

I found this book eminently readable. Itā€™s like a story about borders, offering vivid portrayals of real conflictual political geographies. Dodds makes clear that borders play political, social, economic, and environmental roles that must be considered for any prospect of peace in the future.

This is the sort of book that educated readers, from college students to international jet setters, would find enlightening as to bordersā€™ breadth of relevance in the 21st Century.

By Klaus Dodds,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The New Border Wars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A thrilling insight into international geopolitics by one of the worldā€™s leading experts, examining the past, future, and present meaning of borders from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, Palestine to Pakistan, North Korea to Trumpā€™s Wall, and beyond

What do the worldā€™s best-known, most dangerous, and most unexpected border conflicts mean for our changing international relationships?

In The New Border Wars, border expert Klaus Dodds journeys into the geopolitical clashes of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of border wallsā€•literal and figurativeā€•from the Gaza Strip to the space race. In the Himalayas, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, the tensionā€¦


Book cover of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place

Alexander Diener Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on 21st century borders.

Why am I passionate about this?

Beyond my fascination with borders as historical sites of conflict and shifting markers of control, Iā€™ve spent an academic career studying the simultaneity of barrier and juncture. This research has led me to witness licit and illicit border crossings, refugee camps, commercial ports, smuggling, and conservation through cloistering. In my travels, Iā€™ve perceived my vulnerability at certain borders and ease of passage at others. All of this afforded me insights into the human division and demarcation of space and resulted in books and articles on varied facets of bordering in the hope that I might contribute to inhibiting the bad and facilitating the good where territories meet.  

Alexander's book list on 21st century borders

Alexander Diener Why did Alexander love this book?

I was drawn to this book for its depth of thought and critical perspective on bordering as a process. Paulina Ochoa Espejo covers the rich ground of political geography, mixing philosophical considerations of human place-making and how borders are integral to that process.

I returned to various chapters of this book whilst writing about other topics and regions. The book pulls readers from their comfortable perspectives and compels both fruitful and necessary reconsiderations of borders. 

By Paulina Ochoa Espejo,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked On Borders as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn?

Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities--but not both. Theā€¦


Book cover of Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability

Alexander Diener Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on 21st century borders.

Why am I passionate about this?

Beyond my fascination with borders as historical sites of conflict and shifting markers of control, Iā€™ve spent an academic career studying the simultaneity of barrier and juncture. This research has led me to witness licit and illicit border crossings, refugee camps, commercial ports, smuggling, and conservation through cloistering. In my travels, Iā€™ve perceived my vulnerability at certain borders and ease of passage at others. All of this afforded me insights into the human division and demarcation of space and resulted in books and articles on varied facets of bordering in the hope that I might contribute to inhibiting the bad and facilitating the good where territories meet.  

Alexander's book list on 21st century borders

Alexander Diener Why did Alexander love this book?

Iā€™m drawn to this book for shaking the tree. The environment is commonly depicted as a global cause. This book explains how self-interest and varied forms of disparity framed by an infrastructure of borders impede efforts to mediate the negative impacts of human activity.

Rather, oxymoronically, territorial interests inhibit human capacity to extract from extant patterns and practices that harm the natural systems upon which we rely. This book shows the role of borders on environmental issues and the planetary impact of the nation-state system. This is not a screed or a sermon but a well-reasoned consideration of how the political geographies affect the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. 

By Simon Dalby,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Anthropocene Geopolitics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With the new geological age known as the Anthropocene heralding dramatic disruptions in the earth system, geopolitics needs to be fundamentally reconsidered to deal with these new circumstances. Planetary boundaries and ecological change are now the key contextualization for considering future global political arrangements.

We now find ourselves in a new geological age: the Anthropocene. The climate is changing and species are disappearing at a rate not seen since Earth's major extinctions. The rapid, large-scale changes caused by fossil-fuel powered globalization increasingly threaten societies in new, unforeseen ways. But most security policies continue to be built on notions that lookā€¦


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorā€”and only womanā€”on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route upā€¦

Book cover of Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary

Alexander Diener Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on 21st century borders.

Why am I passionate about this?

Beyond my fascination with borders as historical sites of conflict and shifting markers of control, Iā€™ve spent an academic career studying the simultaneity of barrier and juncture. This research has led me to witness licit and illicit border crossings, refugee camps, commercial ports, smuggling, and conservation through cloistering. In my travels, Iā€™ve perceived my vulnerability at certain borders and ease of passage at others. All of this afforded me insights into the human division and demarcation of space and resulted in books and articles on varied facets of bordering in the hope that I might contribute to inhibiting the bad and facilitating the good where territories meet.  

Alexander's book list on 21st century borders

Alexander Diener Why did Alexander love this book?

While somewhat of a departure from my prior favorites in scope, I love this book because it is a deep dive into a specific stretch of border in 21st-century Central Asia. Though most may be unfamiliar with the myriad complexities at the juncture of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Nick Megoranā€™s ethnographic treatment offers a window into how borders in the 21st century are lived with and through.

This is because changing a borderā€™s porosity alters the routes, businesses, educational opportunities, and relationships of people on both sides and beyond. Megoranā€™s book puts you on that border and compels you to think about how the decisions made in capital cities radically affect the citizens at the margins of state territories. 

By Nick Megoran,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Nationalism in Central Asia as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region. Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance,ā€¦


Book cover of Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Meredith F. Small Author Of Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World

From my list on maps and exploration changed the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University, where I taught 20-year-olds for thirty years. It was my job to explore the world, learn about it, and then educate others, underscoring the notion that all peoples and cultures are equally interesting and valuable. I started out, as a graduate student, watching macaque monkeys for my research, testing if their behavior might give us clues to the evolution of human behavior. But then I switched to science journalism for the popular audience and have, for decades, written for magazines, newspapers, and many books about the intersection of biology and culture on human thought and behavior. 

Meredith's book list on maps and exploration changed the world

Meredith F. Small Why did Meredith love this book?

When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word ā€œgeopoliticsā€ is spot on. 

You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shopā€”itā€™s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.  

During much of our lives, we donā€™t even think aboutā€¦

By Tim Marshall,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Prisoners of Geography as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this New York Times bestseller, an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powersā€”ā€œfans of geography, history, and politics (and maps) will be enthralledā€ (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only about our current location or where we are going but about the world in general. And yet, when it comes to geo-politics, much of what we are told is generated by analysts and other experts who have neglectedā€¦


Book cover of The World According to China

George Magnus Author Of Red Flags: Why XI's China Is in Jeopardy

From my list on on understanding modern China.

Why am I passionate about this?

I used to be Chief Economist at the UK bank SG Warburg and then at UBS, starting out in 1987 and finally cutting the cord in 2016 as Senior Economic Advisor. I visited China twice or three times a year from about 1994 and then the pandemic intervened. After the financial crisis, I decided that China would be the worldā€™s next big thing. So I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out whatā€™s going on there and for the last few years, I've been an associate at the China Centre at Oxford University and SOAS in London. Red Flags was a book I simply had to write. Maybe thereā€™ll be another. We shall see.

George's book list on on understanding modern China

George Magnus Why did George love this book?

Liz Economyā€™s grasp of international relations is compelling and insightful as she sets out to explain how China sees itself in the world, especially in the light of the pandemic. Looking to recover its past glory and status, China under Xi Jinping has seized both on what he sees as the Westā€™s economic and political failings, and Chinaā€™s own accomplishments and size to advance new agendas. At home, a leftward lurch resembles a throwback to the Mao era. In the world, China wants to reshape global institutions to reflect better its interests and to get others, for example in The Belt and Road, to support Chinaā€™s narratives. 

How Xi intends to do this, whether he is likely to succeed and how the United States and the international community should respond and prepare for the challenge ahead will hold your attention to the last page.

By Elizabeth C. Economy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The World According to China as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An economic and military superpower with 20 percent of the world's population, China has the wherewithal to transform the international system. Xi Jinping's bold calls for China to "lead in the reform of the global governance system" suggest that he has just such an ambition. But how does he plan to realize it? And what does it mean for the rest of the world?

In this compelling book, Elizabeth Economy reveals China's ambitious new strategy to reclaim the country's past glory and reshape the geostrategic landscape in dramatic new ways. Xi's vision is one of Chinese centrality on the globalā€¦


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. BrenƩ Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,ā€¦

Book cover of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Stefan J. Link Author Of Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order

From my list on economic and political history.

Why am I passionate about this?

Economic history is, quite simply, my job: I write about it, I research it, and Iā€™ve been teaching it for ten years at a small liberal arts college in New England. Iā€™ve always felt that the best way to make sense of economic change is not by studying formal laws but by reading what past actors have left behind. Numbers and statistics are indispensable, but they acquire meaning only in relation to ideas and power. In any case, thatā€™s what I take the books on this list to suggest. I think of these booksā€”and others like themā€”as trusty companions. Perhaps you will, too.

Stefan's book list on economic and political history

Stefan J. Link Why did Stefan love this book?

I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Toozeā€™s telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germanyā€™s way out of isolation.

Itā€™s so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registersā€”absorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorousā€”as he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjectsā€”foreign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial warā€”come to life to awesome and awful effect.

By Adam Tooze,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Wages of Destruction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Masterful . . . [A] painstakingly researched, astonishingly erudite study...Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism." -Financial Times

An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages ofā€¦


Book cover of Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World

John Shovlin Author Of Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order

From my list on economics and geopolitics.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a historian, Iā€™ve always been fascinated by the mutual influence of power and economics. Iā€™ve written about the political-economic origins of revolution, war, and the search for world peace. I believe that to understand the sweeping geopolitical transformations that have shaped recent centuriesā€”imperialism, the world wars, decolonization, or the fall of the Soviet Unionā€”we need to consider the deep pulse of economics. The books that really grab me open up the worldviews of people in the past, explain how they believed economics and geopolitics shaped one another, and show how these assumptions impelled their actions in the world.

John's book list on economics and geopolitics

John Shovlin Why did John love this book?

The ā€œcompany-statesā€ of the bookā€™s title include the East India companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their peers in other regions, like the Hudsonā€™s Bay Company. These corporations enjoyed many of the powers of states: they hired troops, armed ships, waged war, and signed treaties with foreign rulers. Some came to govern empires. The authors explain how these hybrid geopolitical actorsā€”part capitalist businesses, part politiesā€”came to acquire a key role in global politics, and why they subsequently lost it. Modern multinationals can be geopolitical actors too, we imagine, but Phillips and Sharman show how different the capitalist order of the past was from the world we live in today.

By Andrew Phillips, J.C. Sharman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Outsourcing Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world's first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empires shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states'not sovereign states'drove European expansion, building the world's first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, whileā€¦


Book cover of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History

Alan Forrest Author Of The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution

From my list on the history of the French Revolution and Empire.

Why am I passionate about this?

Now an emeritus professor of history at the University of York, I have long been fascinated by France, by its history and identity, and by its innumerable tensions and contradictions. In the course of my career I have published more than a dozen books on different aspects of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, ranging from a biography of Napoleon in 2011 to more specialized works on the experience and memory of war ā€“ on the soldiers of the Revolution, on the letters and memoirs they wrote, and on the legacy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars for nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. My current research focuses on Franceā€™s place in the wider Atlantic world and on the significance of the Revolution and Empire in world history.

Alan's book list on the history of the French Revolution and Empire

Alan Forrest Why did Alan love this book?

Although the Napoleonic Wars are most commonly discussed from a French perspective, with their roots in ideology and the Wars of the French Revolution, they are increasingly being understood as the climax of conflicts over power and colonial possessions that had raged between the major European powers across the long eighteenth century. In this hugely ambitious and highly readable book, Alex Mikaberidze considers the Napoleonic Wars as part of a wider global conflict in which France and Britain struggled for dominance, a conflict that extended to the Americas, Egypt, Iran, the Indian Ocean, even to China and Japan, and assesses their role in defining the post-war world.

By Alexander Mikaberidze,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Napoleonic Wars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread from France as a result, overshadow the profound repercussions that the Napoleonic Wars had throughout
the world.

In this far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood with an international context in mind. France struggled for dominance not only onā€¦


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Book cover of Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

Harry and Arthur by Lawrence J. Haas,

With Franklin Rooseveltā€™s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as Americaā€™s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan timeā€¦

Book cover of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

Philip Cunliffe Author Of The New Twenty Yearsā€™ Crisis 1919-2019: A Critique of International Relations

From my list on liberal international order in the 21st century.

Why am I passionate about this?

Having come of age at the End of History in the late 1990s, it seemed to me back then that the only big political questions left were international ones. Everything in domestic politics appeared to be settled. As I pursued this interest through my scholarly work as an academic, I came to understand how questions of international and domestic order were intertwined ā€“ and that one could not be understood without the other. As weā€™re now living through the end of the End of History, unsurprisingly weā€™re seeing tremendous strain on political systems at both the national and international level. These books will provide, I hope, some signposts as to what comes next.  

Philip's book list on liberal international order in the 21st century

Philip Cunliffe Why did Philip love this book?

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s ā€“ when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeriaā€™s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy ā€“ a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb ā€“ prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US hasā€¦

By Helen Thompson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Disorder as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.

The 21st century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilised the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories - one about geopolitics, one about theā€¦


Book cover of The New Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future
Book cover of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place
Book cover of Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability

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Interested in geopolitics, globalization, and economics?

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