This list,compiled by the CGA Faculty, is a living document comprised of 111 key texts for global affairs that range from history and policy to fiction and memoirs.
**Click to download Essential Texts for Global Affairs.
Top 20: Our Faculty Picks
Sampler: Global Affairs in Ten Books (10)
Diamonds in the Rough: Underappreciated Texts (15)
Don’t Know Much About History? (7)
Love ‘em or Hate ‘em: Controversial Texts in Global Affairs (6)
Classics & Deep-Dives (20)
Memoirs (10)
Philosophy & Method (4)
Reading and Writing (3)
Fiction in Global Affairs (6)
This Just In: New and Intriguing Books Recently Published (10)
Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics
Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force
Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics
John Ikenberry, After Victory
Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars
John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Edward W. Said, Orientalism
Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret Keck, Activists beyond Border: Advocacy Networks in International Politics
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China
Susan Strange, States and Markets
J Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics
Sampler: Global Affairs in Ten Books (10)
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Barry Buzan, et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis
Johan Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization
Michael Haas, International Human Rights: A Comprehensive Introduction (2nd Edition)
Valerie M. Hudson, et al., Sex and World Peace
Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t
Thomas G. Weiss, et al., The United Nations and Changing World Politics 8th Edition
Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
Diamonds in the Rough: Underappreciated Texts (15)
Amitav Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (The Radical Imagination) 1st
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Kimberly Marten, Warlords
Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons
David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
Susan Rose-Ackerman and Bonnie J. Palifka, Corruption in Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes To Improve the human Condition Have Failed
Ann Tickner, Laura Sjoberg, eds. Feminism and International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present and Future
Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization
Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers
Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom
Don’t Know Much About History? (7)
Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy
Margaret McMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
Love ‘em or Hate ‘em: Controversial Texts in Global Affairs (6)
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (3rd Edition)
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
Kenneth Waltz, Man, The State, and War
Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality
Graham Allison, Essence of Decision
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Eric Hobsbawm, The Making of the Modern World (4 volumes)
Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (4 volumes)
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
Charles Tilly, Credit and Blame
Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir
Eamon Collins and Mick McGovern, Killing Rage
Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?
Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington
Elie Wiesel, Night
Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers
Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (4th Edition)
William Zinsser, On Writing Well
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Homer, The Iliad
George Orwell, 1984
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice
This Just In: New and Intriguing Books Recently Published (10)
Alyssa Ayres , Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World
Ana Arjona, Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War
William Durch, Joris Larik, and Richard Ponzio, Just Security in an Undergoverned World
Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State
Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy
Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon, The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World
Mike Martin, Why We Fight
Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping
Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony
Readings on Race and Global Affairs
W.E.B. DuBois, “Worlds of Color,” Foreign Affairs. Vol. 3. No. 3 (April 1925).
Randolph B. Persaud and R. B. J. Walker, “Race in International Relations,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2001).
Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy, June 2020.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persaud, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Vineet Thakur, Duncan Bell, Karen Smith, Toni Haastrup, Seifudein Adem, “Why Is Mainstream International Relations Blind to Racism?,” Foreign Policy. June 2020.
Annette Gordon-Reed, “America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2018).
Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics (Cornell University Press, 2017).
Errol A Henderson, “Hidden in plain sight: racism in international relations theory,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2013).
Pinar Bilgin, “Thinking past ‘Western’ IR?,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008).
Zeynep Gulsah Capan, “Decolonising International Relations?,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017).
Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ed. Decolonizing International Relations. (Rowan and Littlefield, 2006).
Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics. (Polity Press, 2021).