CFR Academic

Teaching Notes

  • South Korea

    Summary The U.S.-South Korea alliance has been the cornerstone of bilateral cooperation and the U.S. security presence in the Indo-Pacific region for over seven decades and continues to serve as a…
  • Russia

    Getting Russia Right offers a practitioner’s account of why the great post-Cold War hopes for an enduring U.S.-Russian strategic partnership grounded in free markets and democratic values gave way to a bitter adversarial relationship that puts the United States and Russia on opposing sides of the critical issues in global affairs today.
  • China

    Sparks tells the story of how underground writers, filmmakers, and journalists are challenging one of the pillars of Communist Party rule: its control of history. In underground documentary films, samizdat magazines, and guerilla journalism, they document famines and political campaigns of years past and write about ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, Sparks challenges the idea that independent thought in China has been crushed, revealing one of the world’s great battles of memory against forgetting—a struggle that will shape the China that emerges in the coming decades.
  • China

    In Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World, CFR's Joshua Kurlantzick analyzes China's attempts to become a media, information, and influence superpower, seeking for the first time to shape the domestic politics, local media, and information environments of the United States, East Asia, parts of Europe, and the broader world.
  • North Korea

    In North Korea’s Foreign Policy: The Kim Jong-un Regime in a Hostile World, CFR’s Scott A. Snyder and University of British Columbia’s Kyung-Ae Park offer a robust examination of North Korean foreign policy under Kim Jong-un, including its domestic drivers, summitry diplomacy, and nuclear program.
  • United States

    In The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, CFR President Richard Haass offers a provocative guide to how we must reenvision citizenship if American democracy is to survive.
  • Globalization

    In The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, CFR Vice President, Deputy Director of Studies, and Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies Shannon K. O'Neil offers a powerful case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the last forty years.
  • Wars and Conflict

    In Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias, CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Stephen Biddle explains how nonstate military strategies overturn traditional perspectives on warfare.
  • China

    In Toxic Politics, CFR Senior Fellow Yanzhong Huang discusses how China’s environmental crisis is undermining public health and becoming an Achilles heel in its reemergence as a global power.
  • Nigeria

    In Nigeria and the Nation-State, John Campbell explains what makes Nigeria different from other countries in Africa, how it works, and why understanding it is vital if we are to avoid the mistakes the United States made in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as U.S. security and economic relations with Africa intensifies.
  • U.S. Foreign Policy

    In his new book, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World, CFR Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan explores the nation's past to uncover the ideological and political roots of U.S. grand strategy, understand the recent return of isolationist sentiment, and examine how the nation can bring its foreign commitments back into line with its means and purposes.
  • U.S. Foreign Policy

    An insider’s perspective on why U.S. policymakers repeatedly underestimate the costs and consequences of intervention to both the United States and the people of the Middle East.
  • World Order

    Providing readers with the essential background and building blocks necessary to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world, The World focuses on crucial history, what makes each region of the world tick, the many challenges that globalization presents, and the most influential countries, events, and ideas that shape the world and in turn shape our lives.
  • Climate Change

    Building a Resilient Tomorrow draws on international and national examples, some revealed for the first time, to provide an interdisciplinary narrative covering a range of climate resilience solutions.
  • Public Health Threats and Pandemics

    For the first time in recorded history, bacteria, viruses, and other plagues and pestilence do not cause the majority of deaths or disabilities in any region of the world. Curbing infectious diseases has extended lives and prevented child deaths in poor societies, but also brought new and unexpected challenges—like rising youth unemployment, overcrowded and underbuilt cities, and surging rates of premature chronic diseases—that many nations are unprepared to handle. In Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, Thomas J. Bollyky traces the rise and fall of infectious disease in human history and the challenges and opportunities that unprecedented health achievements pose for our future.
  • Arab Spring

    In False Dawn, Steven A. Cook examines why Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey did not transition to democracy, explaining how and why Middle East uprisings didn’t succeed.
  • Refugees and Displaced Persons

    A quarter billion people worldwide live outside their country of nationality. One-tenth of them are refugees fleeing political persecution and other acute threats.
  • China

    In The Third Revolution, Economy reveals Xi Jinping’s new China model—more controlling and authoritarian at home with a more ambitious and activist role abroad—and asks us to fundamentally rethink how the United States and others approach this complex and increasingly powerful country.
  • Nigeria

    Rapid economic growth and improved governance across Africa in the twenty-first century are part of the “Africa rising” narrative and have renewed interest in the continent. In Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, John Campbell and Matthew T. Page provide an accessible, one-of-a-kind overview of Nigeria. Using a question-and-answer format, they discuss what makes Nigeria unique, how it operates domestically and internationally, the challenges it faces, and why it has the potential to become Africa’s greatest power.
  • Conflict Prevention

    As the principal guarantor of international peace and security in an increasingly turbulent world, the United States is at risk of being drawn into potentially costly conflicts that, over time, diminish its power. In Preventive Engagement, Paul Stares offers a new comprehensive strategy for lowering this risk by reducing the demand for U.S. power overseas in the long, medium, and short term.
  • U.S. Foreign Policy

    In chronicling CIA operative Edward Lansdale's adventurous life and approach to counterinsurgency, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War.
  • Middle East and North Africa

    In Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring, Elliott Abrams tells a personal story of the development of U.S. human rights policy in the last forty years and makes an argument, both "realist" and principled, for supporting the expansion of democracy in the Middle East.
  • Laos

    In his book A Great Place to Have a War, Joshua Kurlantzick tells the story of the CIA’s covert war in Laos during the Vietnam War. He examines how the country became, surprisingly, a U.S. policy priority, and analyzes why and how the CIA was able to build the war into one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history. He further uses the Laos war as a prism to examine the CIA’s operations in the global war on terror today.
  • Energy and Environment

    Solar energy, the world’s cheapest and fastest-growing power source, could one day supply most of the world’s energy needs. In Taming the Sun, however, Varun Sivaram warns that solar’s current surge is on track to stall, dimming prospects for averting catastrophic climate change. Brightening those prospects, he argues, will require innovation—creative financing, revolutionary technologies, and flexible energy systems.