2026 Summer Reading List
July 2026We asked our team and experts what they are reading, watching, and listening to this summer. The list ranges from Xenophon's account of Greek mercenaries in 370 BC to a documentary on the Battle of Mogadishu, by way of gang ethnographies in Rio, tax collection in the Philippines, and a few novels that have very little to do with our day jobs at all. We hope you find something here worth picking up this summer.
Armed groups and the world
Xenophon, Anabasis
James Barnett went back 2,500 years to this classical account of Greek mercenaries fighting for a Persian prince, and found similarities to contemporary wars:
All the talk about the resurgence of PMCs [private military contractors] around the globe convinced me to finally read this classic text on mercenaries. While some aspects of war have changed — typically for the better, such as the fact that we now have norms (however fragile) against the wanton pillaging of civilians that Xenophon recounts matter-of-factly — the parallels are also striking.
John Lechner, Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare
This book traces the Wagner Group’s arc from Kremlin proxy force to the group that marched on Moscow, built on impressive reporting and interviews with its members. Recommended by both Koen Vlassenroot and Ashley Jackson.
Dennis Rodgers (ed.), Gang Lives: Global Portraits from the Streets & Beyond
Patrick Naef recommended this collection of gang-member life histories for its human, comparative lens on criminal governance, resisting the usual stereotypes:
By foregrounding individual experiences rather than stereotypes, it highlights both the diversity of gang lives and the broader social, political and economic dynamics that shape them — an important contribution for anyone interested in armed groups, urban violence and ethnographic approaches to criminal governance.
The volume also features a contribution from Centre expert Kieran Mitton, who follows a former gang member turned poet-farmer in Sierra Leone. (And its open access)
Laura Blume, The Art of Trafficking
Recommended by Nicholas Barnes. Blume explores what drives violence levels associated with drug trafficking across Central America, based on immersive fieldwork across Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.
(See also: Barnes's own Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro, on when gang rule benefits residents and when it doesn't, and Patrick Naef’s The Unbearable Resilience of Medellín)
Tanya Bandula-Irwin, The Determinants and Dimensions of Armed Group Taxation
Vanessa van den Boogaard calls this one of the most comprehensive studies she’s seen on why armed groups tax:
Taxation by armed groups is about much more than revenue extraction: it is also tied to governance, legitimacy, institution-building, and relationships with civilian populations. For anyone interested in how armed groups exercise authority in practice, it offers a rich and nuanced account that moves beyond the usual focus on violence and coercion.
Tricia Bacon, The Counterinsurgency Dilemma
Tricia Bacon builds on her extensive body of work on foreign fighters to explore how and why foreign fighter influence evolves within a given conflict, and which factors enable and constrain it throughout the life of an insurgency.
Tameem Bahiss, Emerging Non-Traditional Security Threats in Afghanistan
Written before the current Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict, its argument about cross-border conflict feels newly urgent. Tameem explains:
It looks at how Afghanistan’s instability and non-traditional security threats can spill across borders, particularly into Pakistan, and why these challenges require political management, regional coordination and steps to reduce tensions.
Nadwa al-Dawsari, From Coalition to Confrontation: Saudi-UAE Rivalry in Yemen and Iran’s insurance policy: Why the Houthis have stayed out of the fight
This analysis places explores Gulf competition and the drivers of Ansar Allah’s current positioning. As Nadwa explains, together these pieces:
examine why the Houthis have refrained from escalating in the Bab al-Mandab in support of Iran against the United States and Israel. The question remains the subject of ongoing debate and is particularly relevant to current developments across the Middle East.
“A propulsive read with rich lessons for anybody who interprets the accounts of civilians from conflict zones.”
– Sophia Dawkins on Dreamcount
Popular power and great powers
Guillermo Trejo, Lucía Tiscornia & Juan Albarracín, Accountability Shock: Why Transitional Justice Prevents Criminal Wars in New Democracies
Nicholas Barnes recommends this one, which explains why some of Latin America’s ‘third wave’ democracies transitioned peacefully while others became engines of criminal violence.
Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in Southern Lebanon & Gilles Dorronsoro, Le plus grand des maux
Koen Vlassenroot picks two books. One explores tobacco farmers’ and goatherds’ relationships with the land as a form of resistance and survival amid landmines and repeated bombardment. The other is a reckoning with what civil war actually does to the societies that live through it.
Christine Cheng, The Paradox of Protection
From Christine Cheng, on grey-zone attacks against open societies by the Chinese state (though she warns readers might be in for a fright if they follow the links to her sources).
Kenneth Rosen, Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic
A recommendation from Ashley Jackson:
Amid climate change and melting polar ice, the battle for the Polar North is already underway. The whole Greenland controversy has faded from the headlines but geopolitical tensions and subterfuge near the Arctic Circle are not going away.
Richard Reid, The African Revolution
A big-picture history of late precolonial Africa which shows how African political dynamics shaped European colonisation. James Barnett says:
Reid adeptly writes a big-picture history of late precolonial Africa that balances a focus on the experiences (and dramatic military successes) of key African leaders with an insightful, longue durée analysis of the structural factors that contributed to the continent's upheaval across this time. This history — the African political dynamics that shaped how and where the Europeans eventually colonized as they did — is essential to understanding all that came after, yet it's often been missing from the discussion.
“Salih Basheer's The Return looks at the situation for Sudanese refugees, and partly consists of dispatches from moments of calm that unnerve narratives that hold that war is simply destruction.”
— Joshua Craze
Bearing witness
Jonathan Littell & Antoine D'Agata, An Inconvenient Place
Joshua Craze was drawn to this study of erasure and absence, part of his own ongoing search for images that resist the “doom scroll.”
(See also Craze’s piece Knowledge Will Not Save Us at n+1, for a preview of his forthcoming book on similar themes in the wars in the Sudan)
Salih Basheer, The Return
Craze also recommends this look at Sudanese refugees, capturing moments of calm that push back against narratives of war as pure destruction:
I've been weighed down with images in the past year. How does one think about the spectacle of violence that one encounters when considering the wars in Sudan and South Sudan, where I work. One approach has been to chronicle other moments. Salih Basheer's The Return looks at the situation for Sudanese refugees, and partly consists of dispatches from moments of calm that unnerve narratives that hold that war is simply destruction.
(See also Craze’s essay for the book, The War No One Wanted, published earlier this year, with some of Basheer's photographs, in the Boston Review)
Abdalhadi Alijla, Fearful in Gaza
What does it mean to grow up afraid, and to have that fear become so familiar it stops feeling like fear at all? A son’s narrative is interwoven with his mother’s, of childhood, exile, and survival. Ashley Jackson calls the book beautifully written and heartbreaking.
Conflict, Security & Development special issue on research ethics and the study of armed actors
This special issue has gained new resonance given the pressures many US-based researchers now face, but many of the dilemmas it explores are long-running and core to the work we do. Christine Cheng reflects:
We started working on it about five years ago, long before Global North politics was completely upended, but the whole special issue has new resonance now. So many of the dynamics we collectively wrote about applied to doing research under duress, precisely the conditions many of our American counterparts now find themselves in, even if they can't say so aloud.
“These podcasts help to bring cogent and clear-eyed analysis in a time when there is often hype and politics coloring perspectives.”
— Tricia Bacon on CounterCheck, Hold Your Fire! & The Horn
Fiction and entertainment
Amitav Ghosh, Ibis trilogy
Both Florian Weigand and Elliot Rooney picked this historical fiction on the exploitative geopolitics of the British Empire in Asia this year.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count
Sophia Dawkins recommends this novel for how it complicates ideas of memory, agency, and gender-based violence, asking its readers:
to reconsider what counts as valid memory and agency. It questions what we should mean by sexual and gender-based violence in spheres adjacent to civil violence. Dream Count is a propulsive read with rich lessons for anybody who interprets the accounts of civilians from conflict zones.
Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy & C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series
Christine Cheng’s picks, exploring state-building via novels:
Both are so good at helping us imagine how states are organised in ways completely different than they are today, and they show us how power is used politically.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (illustrated edition)
A newly reissued illustrated version of the famous novel, gifted to Ashley Jackson. The story is told through a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, with each short chapter detailing a different fantastical and surreal imaginary city.
Matthew Crist, The misinterpreted tragedy of Zaire at the 1974 World Cup
Elliot Rooney’s pick, offering a corrective to reductive narratives around DR Congo's World Cup qualification:
DR Congo’s qualification to the knockout stages of the World Cup this year has drawn a lot of comment on their last appearance, some of it derisive. This article offers a useful corrective to the reductive narratives that seem to get bandied about.
Other novels on this year's list include Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (early-20th-century East Africa), Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sri Lanka's civil war), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and The Committed (the US-Vietnam war and its aftermath), and Judy Aldrick’s The Sultan’s Spymaster, on 19th-century espionage in Zanzibar.
“Both are so good at helping us imagine how states are organised in ways completely different than they are today, and they show us how power is used politically.”
— Christine Cheng on Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy
and C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series
Podcasts
Scam, Inc
Recommended by Ashley Jackson:
We’ve been researching scam factories in Myanmar, which sent me down a rabbit hole of podcasts on the topic. This one is the best by far, tracing the collapse of a small Kansas bank into a scam economy now larger than the illicit drug trade.
Blowback
Elliot Rooney recommends this podcast for its:
deep dives into U.S. foreign policy, with each series focussing on a particular country during a particular era – Iraq, Cuba, Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Angola so far. They also use Afrika Bambaata and John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)’s great 1984 electro-punk track, World Destruction, as the theme tune, which is a treat each time it comes on.
CounterCheck, Hold Your Fire! & The Horn
Tricia Bacon says:
I have gotten into listening to CounterCheck and I’m a pretty faithful listener of Hold Your Fire, as well as The Horn, both from the Crisis Group. These podcasts help to bring cogent and clear-eyed analysis in a time when there is often hype and politics coloring perspectives.
