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Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft
Lindsay, Jon R. (Cornell University Press, 2025-09-05)
At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception, Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context. To make sense of this, Lindsay offers a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—that explains why spies and hackers alike depend on clandestine organizations and vulnerable institutions. Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponization of pagers by Israel in 2024, he traces both continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way, he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counterdeception. Provocative and persuasive, Age of Deception offers crucial insights into the future of secret statecraft in cyberspace and beyond.
Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters
Davidson, Denise Z. (Cornell University Press, 2025-09-05)
Surviving Revolution explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement. Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters. By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.
The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma
Pauly, Reid B. C. (Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
The Art of Coercion presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics. Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Reid B. C. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey. Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do. Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.
Freedom of Conscience in (Post)Soviet Space: Legacies of Michael Bourdeaux and the Keston Archive
(Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
Freedom of Conscience in (Post)Soviet Space, a collection of original essays edited by Julie K. deGraffenried, Michael Long, and Xenia Dennen, is inspired by the work of Michael Bourdeaux, the holdings of the Keston Archive, and continuing questions of freedom of conscience. Ranging from England to Siberia and moving chronologically from 1917 to the twenty-first century, this book reveals the unique organization and methodology behind the Keston's collection of materials and the ways those in the West thought about religion and communism during the Cold War, including the connection between religious liberty and human rights. The essays demonstrate the depth and breadth of current research on religion in communist and postcommunist contexts, a much-needed corrective to contemporary political uses of religious freedom. Bourdeaux's activism and preservation of materials influenced many fields of study, as reflected by contributing authors' varied disciplines—history, theology, sociology, languages, and literature. A preface by the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams comments on Michael Bourdeaux's life and significance.
The Caspian World: Women's Labor and the War in Kachinland
(Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
The Caspian World is a wide-ranging exploration of the strategic, political, and commercial significance of the Caspian Sea, a site where empires—Russian, Persian, Ottoman, and British—competed, warred, and collaborated. As with the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, or the Black Sea, the geography of the Caspian Sea creates a sphere of unique political dynamics and possibilities, and the essays in this volume describe the role of the Caspian as a force of connection, as well as a source of threats, to the states on its shores. Rather than narrating history through binary, state-to-state relationships, however, The Caspian World uncovers the sea as a space of multi-sided exchanges and numerous centers, tracing how the Caspian has shaped the commercial, intellectual, diplomatic, and imperial projects throughout the region.
Persistent Illusions: Visual Culture and Historical Memory in Interwar Hungary
Veszprémi, Nóra (Cornell University Press, 2025-06-15)
Persistent Illusions examines the visual representation of history in interwar Hungary, where interpretations of the past were suffused with references to the country's recent territorial loss. In these images of history, nineteenth-century themes and motifs took on new forms to promote twentieth-century political ideas through the new media of modernity. Nóra Veszprémi illustrates how modernization created resilient imagery that persists in cultural memory through a wide range of paintings, prints, stamps, public spectacles, and monuments. In doing so, she challenges the assumption that the official culture of the right-wing, authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy was characterized by a superficial revival of historical styles. Instead, she argues that the regime drew on history in complex, modern ways that disseminated motifs and ideological frameworks across political divides. By analyzing how ideology shapes enduring concepts of the past through the evocative power of images, Persistent Illusions encourages the reader to critically examine the legacies of interwar ideas and imagery in the present day.
Reproducing Revolution: Women's Labor and the War in Kachinland
Hedström, Jenny (Cornell University Press, 2025-06-15)
In Reproducing Revolution, Jenny Hedström explores the Kachin revolution in Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, female activists, and women displaced by the violence in northern Myanmar. Hedström argues that the household is an inherently gendered, militarized, and political space that impacts, and is in turn impacted by, the external conflict with which it coexists. In this context, women's everyday labor—the gendered work of childcare, farming, fighting, and forging connections both across households and between the household and the army and the nation—is key to revolutionary survival. Hedström calls this labor militarized social reproduction, and in Reproducing Revolution she demonstrates that such labor is critical to the military effort, and that warfare itself is shaped through everyday domestic action.
Constant Crisis: Deconstructing the Civil Wars in Norway, ca. 1180–1220
Orning, Hans Jacob (Cornell University Press, 2025-04-05)
Constant Crisis focuses on the culmination of struggles in the medieval Norwegian kingdom to examine whether these conflicts underscored a breakdown of society and polity or whether they created an equilibrium among factions that in fact "served to contain violence." Applying the term "constant crisis" for its deliberate "dissonance," Hans Jacob Orning observes that two properties were manifest in Norwegian political and social structures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a systemic balance achieved in an environment of "endemic power struggles," and a normalization of these conflicts that made it "possible to maneuver and make plans and strategies." The kings' sagas Sverris saga and Böglunga sögur are virtually indispensable sources of information on this period of Norwegian history, and Orning relies extensively on them, as well as on other medieval sources, to depict this era and its protagonists, including the major rival armed groups (the Birchlegs and the Croziers); and among kings, bishops, and earls, the person of King Sverre himself.
Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970–1997
Mertha, Andrew (Cornell University Press, 2025-04-05)
Bad Lieutenants is a riveting account of how the Khmer Rouge remained a force to be reckoned with even after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea—and of the men behind the movement's strange durability. In 1979, the Vietnamese army seized Phnom Penh, toppling Pol Pot's notoriously brutal regime. Yet the Khmer Rouge did not disintegrate. Instead, the movement continued to rule over swathes of Cambodia for almost another two decades even as it failed to become a legitimate governing organization. Andrew Mertha argues that the Khmer Rouge's successes and failures were both driven by a refusal to dilute its revolutionary vision. Rather than take the moderate tack required for viable governance, it pivoted between only two political strategies: united front and class struggle. Through the stories of three key leaders—Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Ta Mok—Mertha tracks the movement's shifting from one strategy to the other until its dissolution in the 1990s. Vividly written and deeply researched, Bad Lieutenants reveals the powerful grip political ideology can have over the survival of insurgent movements.
Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union
Rindlisbacher, Stephan (Cornell University Press, 2025-03-15)
Borders in Red shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks' fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis. Comparing how party and state managed issues of national diversity in the core regions of Soviet federalism—Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia—Rindlisbacher provides insights into their policymaking and into the roots of current territorial conflicts. President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.

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