Three SAIS Faculty Members Are on Foreign Affairs List of Best Books of 2024
Every year, Foreign Affairs magazine publishes a list of the very best of the hundreds of books on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine during the year, selected by the magazine’s editors and book reviewers.
Three faculty members of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) are on this year’s list:
Henry Farrell, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs
Sergey Radchenko, Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor
Anne Applebaum, Senior Fellow of International Affairs
In the book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Farrell and co-author Abraham Newman describe how the United States has turned its control over information networks into a hidden tool of economic domination—and warn of the risks of Washington’s weaponization of data power for ordinary people, as well as for the global financial system.
Radchenko’s book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, examines the former Soviet Union’s competing ambitions for revolution, security, and legitimacy—and how Soviet leadership, blinded by its own hubris and aggression, set the stage for the downfall of the USSR.
In her Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Applebaum focuses on the sophisticated and networked world of autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny, and argues that what separates hardcore autocratic states, such as China and Russia, from softer illiberal and authoritarian regimes, such as those in Hungary, India, and Turkey, is the ruthlessness and reach of their dictatorial power and their deep hostility to the Western-led democratic world.