1 курс (2 модуль)
IR&GS: Academic Reading, 1st Year, 2nd module (2025-26)
M.Holmes "Face-To-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations"
Face-to-face diplomacy has long been the lynchpin of world politics, yet it is largely dismissed by scholars of International Relations as unimportant. Marcus Holmes argues that dismissing this type of diplomacy is in stark contrast to what leaders and policy makers deem as essential and that this view is rooted in a particular set of assumptions that see an individual's intentions as fundamentally inaccessible. Building on recent evidence from social neuroscience and psychology, Holmes argues that this assumption is problematic. Marcus Holmes studies some of the most important moments of diplomacy in the twentieth century, from 'Munich' to the end of the Cold War, and by showing how face-to-face interactions allowed leaders to either reassure each other of benign defensive intentions or pick up on offensive intentions, his book challenges the notion that intentions are fundamentally unknowable in international politics, a central idea in IR theory.
S. Starr. “The long game on the Silk Road: US and EU strategy for Central Asia and the Caucasus”
The Long Game on the Silk Road reads today like an advance briefing. Long before the 2020 Karabakh war and the post-2022 reset of Eurasian logistics, Starr and Cornell warned that Western policy toward Central Asia and the Caucasus was fragmented — values, security, and economics ran on separate tracks — and argued for a single, coordinated transatlantic strategy built around connectivity, corridor diversification, and long-horizon engagement.
That is precisely what we’ve watched unfold: the EU and US rediscover the region through energy Memoranda(s) of Understanding, the “Middle Corridor,” and sanctions-proof supply chains; NATO/EU instruments re-aligned with infrastructure and border management; and a renewed emphasis on balancing Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Turkish influence without abandoning reform agendas.
The book’s most durable insight is conceptual: in Western scholarship and policy analysis, Central Asia is inseparable from the Caucasus. The authors treat them as one functional system — Greater Central Asia — because pipelines, railways, ports, and security externalities cross the Caspian in both directions. Transit politics, Afghanistan spillovers, Caspian maritime law, and Black Sea access link the two subregions more tightly than many country-by-country studies admit. By insisting on this integrated lens and by mapping practical tools for a US-EU “long game,” the book anticipated the post-2020 turn to corridor geopolitics and gives readers a still-useful playbook for understanding why Brussels and Washington now think — and act — regionally across the Caucasus–Central Asia continuum.
R.Fisher, W.Ury 'Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving'
Based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution, it offers readers a straightforward, universally applicable method for reaching mutually satisfying agreements—at home, in business, and with people in any situation. Read Getting to Yes to learn, step-by-step, how to disentangle the people from the problem, focus on interests, not positions, work together to find creative and fair options and negotiate successfully with anybody at any level.
B. Obama ‘A Promised Land’
In "A Promised Land", Barack Obama offers a candid, often intimate account of the road that led him to the presidency, and the obstacles, large and small, that tested his conviction along the way. Written with the same care and deliberation he brought to public life, the book invites readers not simply to observe events, but to inhabit them. Obama's prose has a way of pulling you close to the events he narrates. One moment, you're standing beside a younger version of himself, going through the things at his grandfather's garage and discovering dog-eared (as he calls them) books that sparked big ideas. The next, you're walking the halls of Harvard Law School witnessing his unlikely rise to the law journal's editorship. You catch the tentative spark of his first conversations with Michelle, who would become his partner in every sense of the word. And, eventually, you find yourself on the platform at the Capitol, feeling the winter air and the weight of history at his first inauguration.
Among the book's most gripping passages is Obama's account of the 2008 financial crisis unfolding in real time as the campaign accelerated, and reaching its pivotal moment just as his administration took office. Rather than tagging who's to blame, Obama focuses on the painstaking work of governing: the excruciating decisions, the late-night meetings, the quiet calculations required to pull the nation back from the brink.
In "A Promised Land", readers encounter not just a chronicle of political events, but a source of hope. A mediation on the belief that, against long odds, people can reach for something better. It is a story worth reading, and perhaps now more than ever, tracing the early steps of a journey defined by doubt, determination, and the belief that even in difficult times, progress is possible. As Obama himself reminded a nation: "Yes we can".
!!!!Due to its length, the book is structured in two parts. In this class, we will be reading Part One (ending with Chapter 14)!!!!
Zhao S. "The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy"
China is unique in modern world history. No other rising power has experienced China's turbulent history in its relations with neighbors and Western countries. Its sheer size dominates the region. With leader Xi Jinping's political authority unmatched, Xi's sense of mission to restore what he believes is China's natural position as a great power drives the current course of the nation's foreign policy. When China was weak, it was subordinated to others. Now, China is strong, and it wants others to subordinate, at least on the issues involving what it regards as core national interests.
What are the primary forces and how have these forces driven China's reemergence to global power? This book weaves together complex events, processes, and players to provide a historically in-depth, conceptually comprehensive, and up-to-date analysis of Chinese foreign policy transition since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), arguing that transformational leaders with new visions and political wisdom to make their visions prevail are the game changers. Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping are transformational leaders who have charted unique courses of Chinese foreign policy in the quest for security, prosperity, and power. With the ultimate decision-making authority on national security and strategic policies, these leaders have made political use of ideational forces, tailoring bureaucratic institutions, exploiting the international power distribution, and responding strategically to the international norms and rules to advance their foreign policy agendas in the path of China's ascendance.
B.Allen ‘Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World’
Beijing Rules is a superb expose which reveals how China learned to master capitalism which it now wields in its own authoritarian form to achieve global dominance. As Bethany Allen, the China reporter for Axios, reveals, the long-standing belief that free-trade capitalism is a democratizing force -- the assumption underlying much of American and Western policy since World War II -- is demonstrably false. Capitalism is actually a two-way street: if democratic values can travel in one direction, authoritarianism can travel in the other. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully engineered what Cold War champions believed to be impossible: an unabashedly Communist Party leading a prosperous capitalist state.
Written by the first American journalist to expose covert Chinese influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of western institutions bowing to Beijing's coercion -- a glimpse of what American's future might look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.
H.Kissinger ‘The Age of AI and Our Human Future’
Generative AI is filling the internet with false information. Artists, writers, and many other professionals are in fear of their jobs. AI is discovering new medicines, running military drones, and transforming the world around us—yet we do not understand the decisions it makes, and we don’t know how to control them.
In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.
Buzan B., Wæver O., De Wilde J. 'Security: A New Framework For Analysis'
Traditionalists in the field of security studies tend to restrict the subject to politico military issues; while wideners want to extend it to the economic, societal, and environmental sectors. This book sets out a comprehensive statement of the new security studies, establishing the case for the broader agenda.
The authors argue that security is a particular type of politics applicable to a wide range of issues. Answering the traditionalist charge that this model makes the subject incoherent, they offer a constructivist operational method for distinguishing the process of securitization from that of politicization. Their approach incorporates the traditionalist agenda and dissolves the artificial boundary between security studies and international political economy, opening the way for a fruitful interplay between the two fields. It also shows how the theory of regional security complexes remains relevant in today's world.
K.Zetter 'Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon’
The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction—in this case, on an Iranian nuclear facility.
In these pages, journalist Kim Zetter tells the whole story behind the world’s first cyberweapon, covering its genesis in the corridors of the White House and its effects in Iran—and telling the spectacular, unlikely tale of the security geeks who managed to unravel a top secret sabotage campaign years in the making.
But Countdown to Zero Day also ranges beyond Stuxnet itself, exploring the history of cyberwarfare and its future, showing us what might happen should our infrastructure be targeted by a Stuxnet-style attack, and ultimately, providing a portrait of a world at the edge of a new kind of war.
Gelvin, James L. 'The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know'
In The New Middle East, renowned scholar James L. Gelvin explains how in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the American invasion of Iraq, and the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, a new Middle East has emerged. Syria, Libya, and Yemen have become "crisis states," where warlords vie against governments and each other. The economies of Iran, Turkey, and Lebanon, weakened by corruption, sanctions, and neoliberal economic policies, have imploded. Some states have doubled-down on repression, while others intervene in the internal affairs of their neighbors with impunity.
This edition explores these hallmarks of the New Middle East, along with the end of American hegemony in the region, the expansion of "conflict zones," the continued centrality of the Saudi-Iranian competition, and the ramifications of the breakdown of the Israel-Palestine peace process. It also highlights the crisis of human security brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, bad governance, stagnant economies, poor healthcare and educational delivery systems, climate change, food and water insecurity, population growth and imbalance, and the unprecedented displacement of populations. Gelvin outlines the social, political, and economic contours of the New Middle East, illuminating the current crisis in the region and exploring how it is likely to evolve in the decades to come.
