August 23, 2023

Why Palestinians Are Known as the World’s “Best Educated Refugees”

Anne Irfan

In September 2018, a report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found that Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The finding chimed with the Palestinians’ long-running reputation as the world’s “best-educated refugees” – a...

November 15, 2022

Q&A: Reed Brody on To Catch a Dictator

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale while enjoying full American and Western support. After his overthrow, his victims and...

January 26, 2022

A Soviet Futurist in Beijing

Sergei Tretyakov’s Internationalist Aesthetics

Edward Tyerman

“You are travelling to Beijing. You must write travel notes. But not just as notes for yourself. No, they must have social significance.” These are the opening words of “Moscow—Beijing,” a 1925 travel sketch written by the Soviet writer Sergei...

September 20, 2021

Announcing Our 2021-2022 Politics and International Affairs Catalog

Letter from the editors: Greetings and welcome to the Columbia University Press 2021–2022 catalog for politics and international affairs. In international relations, we are pleased to publish the first book in our series Columbia Studies in International Order and Politics,...

June 17, 2021

Challenged Friendships in Challenging Times

From the Introduction to U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century

By Abraham Denmark

As the twenty-first century seems to be dominated by great power competition between China and the United States, everyone wonders whether war will come and how to avoid it. In U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century: Empowering Allies and Partners,...

June 17, 2021

Camp Century in a Changing Arctic

By Kristian H. Nielsen and Henry Nielsen

When Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken paid an official visit to the Kingdom of Denmark on May 16–20, 2021, he engaged with ministers from the Danish, Faroese, and Greenlandic governments. We know that they discussed bilateral ties and joint...

June 17, 2021

Which Way for the Biden/Blinken World Liberal Order?

By Leon Fink

In the spring 2017, Antony Blinken, then a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, taught a seminar on America’s role in the world. Against a background of growing doubt among many Americans about the advantages of...

June 17, 2021

Browse Our SHAFR 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth with Stephen Wesley

Hello there, I’m Stephen Wesley, the American history editor at Columbia University Press. Since the coronavirus pandemic has canceled most of the spring conferences—the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations annual program included—we are mounting virtual book exhibits on...

April 5, 2021

Not Doing Global Fieldwork (At Least Not Right Now)

By Jesse Driscoll

Many graduate students imagine their comparative advantage will be original data collection. Fieldwork, in this idealized conception, provides an opportunity to (try to) break free of the rigid, sometimes cruel, hierarchical status structures imposed by the ivory tower in a...

April 5, 2021

Browse Our ISA 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth with Caelyn Cobb

Hello, and welcome to the second annual (and hopefully the last) Columbia University Press International Studies Association Virtual Exhibit Booth! I’m Caelyn Cobb, the editor for global and international politics, coming to you live from my apartment in Queens, New...

December 7, 2020

Three Questions That Make One

By Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh

“Drawing on philosophy, politics, poetry, psychoanalysis, and history, and extending from North Africa and the Mediterranean to Europe and North America, this powerful book poses the Arab and Jewish questions as inextricable, intimate, and hybrid forces that shape our desires...

September 12, 2020

Browse Books in Global Politics with Caelyn Cobb

The world may be on pause, but politics—and the study of it—continues apace. From gender and globalization to comparative politics and methodology, the global politics list at Columbia University Press is here to help you keep up. This spring saw...