With the new academic year about to begin, we asked our staff, fellows and research associates what they’ve read recently that they think is a must-read for students of diplomacy, international relations and development.

Dr Tim Oliver: Castlereagh by John Bew (2011). Professor John Bew’s biography rehabilitates Lord Castlereagh, the much-maligned British Foreign Secretary who helped design the post-Napoleonic European order at the Congress of Vienna. Bew, who led the writing of the UK’s 2021, 2023, and 2025 national security strategies, shows how Castlereagh’s balance-of-power diplomacy shaped British and European geopolitics for the rest of the 19th century. This ginormous biography, weighing in at 752 pages, not only illuminates how diplomacy works but is also a testament to Bew’s skills as a historian, scholar of international relations, and writer.

Prof Aidan McGarry: Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Dúran (2026). It explores the relationship between tech entrepreneurs and fascism, including how Silicon Valley has incubated far-right ideas and influenced the corridors of power in the US and beyond. 

Dr Cristian Notoiu: The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West by Amitav Acharya (2025). Acharya challenges Western-centred accounts of international order by tracing systems of diplomacy, trade and interstate cooperation across approximately 5,000 years of global history. His idea of a “global multiplex” offers a theoretically richer alternative to the conventional claim that the world is simply becoming multipolar.

Dr Monika Brusenbauch Meislová: Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Kristin Anabel Eggeling, The Brussels Bubble: Inside the European Union in the Digital Age (2026). A fascinating and wonderfully written book for its exploration of how digitalisation is changing the everyday practice of EU diplomacy. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with diplomats, civil servants, spokespersons and interpreters in Brussels, it shows how digital technologies are reshaping trust, tact and authority against the backdrop of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine. What I particularly like is its portrayal of digitalisation not as a neat technological revolution, but as a messy and deeply human process of negotiation over how diplomacy works and what Europe itself means in the digital age.

Dr Adam Steinhouse: A Woman Named Edith: Émigré, Photographer and Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart by Daria Santini (2026). If you want to learn about anti-fascism and art, this is the biography for you!  Edith Tudor Hart was a photographer who spent her early years in Vienna, trained at the Bauhaus and then emigrated to Britain.  Throughout her life, Tudor Hart was deeply committed to the ideals of communism and was a secret agent for the USSR.  Despite being watched by MI5 for decades, she was never caught and she never confessed. Adam also recommends Patriot by Alexei Navalny (2024). You should read this book if you want to learn more about the mindset of the Putin regime and the courage of his opponents.  Navalny was poisoned in 2020 by the Russian security services, recovered in Germany, where he began writing these memoirs, and then he returned to Russia, where he was imprisoned and murdered in 2024.

Dr Nick Wright: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914 by Christopher Clark (2012). This is a masterful account of the politics, diplomacy, and brinkmanship that saw the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo become the trigger for the most brutal conflict Europe had ever seen up to that point. Clark offers a lucid and highly readable account of the different perspectives in the major European capitals, and the tragic miscalculations that made a far from inevitable conflict happen. (Especially noteworthy is his account of the politics of the Balkans at the time that are byzantine in their complexity.) It’s a brilliant work of history and I would say essential reading for any student of politics and IR who wants to understand how and why diplomacy can fail and siloed thinking and path dependencies can be so hard to escape.

Dr Nicola Chelotti: Gideon Rachman, “Football has given Europe a rare geopolitical victory,” Financial Times, 3 August 2026. Rachman uses Europe’s dominance of global football to make a witty point about geopolitical power: Europe may struggle to project influence in trade, security, or technology, but football is one of the rare areas where it still controls a global “chokepoint.” It is worth reading because it turns this unusual European victory into an engaging way of thinking about leverage, strategic dependence, and where power really comes from.

Prof Helen Drake: Last year I read UK historian Julian Jackson’s France on Trial: the Case of Marshal Pétain (2023). It is a meticulously reconstructed account of the trial of France’s wartime Vichy leader Marshal Pétain. It brings the courtroom to life and allows the reader to feel as well as think about what took place in France during World War II, when international diplomacy had to fit around France’s capitulation and collaboration with Germany.  Interestingly, Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle (A Certain Idea of France: the Life of Charles de Gaulle) was the basis for the excellent two-parter film about de Gaulle and France during the war, about to be released in the UK (De Gaulle – Résistance and de Gaulle – Liberté). The director, Antonin Baudry, is a former French diplomat and his understanding of diplomatic ambiguity brings nuance and perspective to the film’s undisputed creative and artistic prowess. 

Dr An Jacob: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (2008), a raw memoir of his childhood, time as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone, and rehabilitation under UNICEF. The book offers a rare insight into the transition from a carefree childhood to becoming a child soldier (and following DDR processes), in particular because many war stories come from outside observers, while this book shares a unique insider’s view. 

Dr Tatevik Mnatsakanyan: Costas M. Constantinou and Eleni Christodoulou, ‘On making peace with nature: Visions and challenges towards an ecological diplomacy’, Review of International Studies, 50 (2024), pp. 579–599. Part of the Special Issue of the Review of International Studies entitled Global Politics: The Next 50 Years, the article is both a critique of the dominant modes of diplomacy today and an outlining of a paradigm shift in diplomacy which, the authors argue, is a prerequisite for the promise of a sustainable global future to turn into viable reality. The practices around the UN’s own calls “to make peace with nature” and its Sustainable Development Goals are riddled with “contradictions, oscillations and policy incoherence”.  The “new diplomacy” to break through such predicament will require a reconfiguration beyond the sovereignty paradigm into an ecological diplomacy that is concerned with more-than-human relations and an eco-social contract” diplomacy across species and for biotic communities. Should this challenge be taken seriously, they conclude, diplomacy “both as a field of study and as a practice will increase in importance in the next 50 years” a most rewarding time for us to study diplomacy, indeed! Costas M. Constantinou is a scholar in the tradition of Critical Diplomatic Studies and the author of the tradition-defining book On the Way to Diplomacy, as well as numerous more recent articles directing key debates in the field. The article, as well as the full Special Issue are open access and available for everyone to read.