2024’s “Most Un-Diplomatic” Reads

List-making time is my favorite time of year. I didn’t read as many books as I’d hoped this year—and only one of these was published in 2024—but here are my faves.✌️

Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, by Benjamin Hopkins

For an academic book, this was an enjoyable read that shed a lot of light on the relationship between colonialism, racial hierarchy, frontier spaces, and insecurity. I’ve incorporated Hopkins’s work into some of my research on the Pacific Islands (which has not yet made it into public view).

The meta argument—that the experience of today’s peripheral “failed states” is the product of deliberate imperial designs that imagined and created “frontiers”—offers the kind of root-cause, empirically grounded insights that international relations needs to do a lot more of if it’s going to survive as a discipline. I also learned a lot from the historical cases, which included British frontier governance in India, American frontier governance of Indians in the desert Southwest, and Argentina (about which I knew nothing before reading this).

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The Architecture of Modern Empire: Conversations with David Barsamian, by David Barsamian and Arundhati Roy

This unusual book is actually a series of conversations with the great Arundhati Roy spanning two decades, starting around the year 2000. It’s a breezy read, but also quite radical in the best way. The conversations meander across many topics—Enron, how capitalism is changing, the Iraq invasion, Hindu fascism in India, oppression in Kashmir, how nationalism goes wrong, writing as a craft or compulsion, the pathologies of US society, etc.

The book makes you feel like you’re on an extended road trip with Roy, just chatting in the car across space and time. Much in this book was especially prescient, including 1) that she warned us that Narendra Modi was a violent ultra-nationalist 20+ years ago, and 2) that the War on Terror was going to blowback on the US while making things worse for everyone else. Not just good analysis that proved correct, but also in the early chapters a time capsule of a moment (2000-2011) that Washington would prefer to memory hole.

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Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, by Gareth Porter

I came across this book during my visit to Monterey earlier this year. I stayed a couple nights with a friend who just happened to live next door to the late Senator (and presidential candidate) Mike Gravel. He had inherited a big stack of books from Gravel’s personal library. The stack was fascinating in how it revealed the sometimes contradictory ideas floating around his head. But among those books was Perils of Dominance.

Gareth Porter was one of those New Left-era activists who took seriously foreign policy analysis and international relations theory. This book, endorsed by no less than Robert Jervis, shows meticulously and unambiguously that America’s favorable imbalance of power was the crucial factor incentivizing US escalation in Vietnam. A balance of power in the international system needs to be about balance, not dominance, control, or overmatch.

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Class Struggle and the New Deal: Industrial Labor, Industrial Capital, and the State, by Rhonda Levine

Class Struggle and the New Deal first came out in 1988, but it’s aged well. The Bidenomics folks would have really benefited from reading this book—a book that underpins much of my economic critiques of the Bidenistas. Levine argues that class conflict caused the New Deal.

The National Labor Relations Act—the best thing that’s ever happened to the working class in America—was a direct response to labor militancy at a moment when union density was meaningful and the economy was shit. The lesson was that good things come from fighting for the working class, and progressive policy must prioritize building working-class power relative to the capitalist class, which Bidenomics—for all its virtues—did not even try to do.

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Hope for Film: A Producer's Journey Across the Revolutions of Indie Film and Global Streaming, by Ted Hope¹

In a parallel universe, I spent my career making movies for a living. I sometimes find myself nostalgic for the indie spirit of the ‘90s, and I’ve always been fascinated by how movies get made. Little surprise, then, that a memoir of the film industry by indie super-producer Ted Hope would do it for me. Memoir is probably my favorite genre anyway, but this was by far the best one I came across this year.

This book is many things—a story about a guy finding a purpose in life, a history of the indie movie scene, a peak behind the curtain of what film producers actually do, a reflection on what has gone terribly wrong in cinema as an industry. If you like memoirs, have any curiosity about film, or just want an indie nostalgia bath, you’ll like Hope for Film.

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Twelve Lessons of Feminist War, by Cynthia Enloe

Enloe is one of the sharper minds I’ve come across in my field. This book does a great job distilling a career’s worth of insights about the relationship between feminism and war into a single, highly readable volume. Feminism comes in many flavors, but the version I find most principled and analytically useful converges with other critics of power like Edward Said. Their counsel: Center, or at least take account of, who pays for what we do with state power.

1. Disclaimer: I’m friends with Ted and his wife, Vanessa, who also makes films. I wrote about my adventure with them during the Doc Edge Film Festival in Christchurch earlier this year.