Geopolitics has continued to excite in 2026, with no shortage of conflict and confusion. With the US midterms delivering a cohabitation government, continued uncertainty around the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and political crises propagating across wary and economically stretched populations, 2027 promises to be no less intense. All of this has continued to remind the world of the criticality of geopolitics for governments, businesses, and populations alike. In this annual piece – which supplements our regular geopolitical book reviews – we recommend the best books for analysts, students, and other global affairs-watchers to better understand what drives geopolitics, how best to interpret world events, and what their future consequences could be. Members of the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team offer you their personal choices to help you better understand geopolitics in 2027.
Disclosure: Purchases made using the links in this article earn referrals for Encyclopedia Geopolitica. As an independent publication, our writers are volunteers from within the professional geopolitical intelligence community, and referrals support our ability to create future content by funding server and domain fees. As such, we strongly encourage you to liberally indulge in your book-buying urges through our links! You can also support Encyclopedia Geopolitica and contribute to the running costs of the site directly via Patreon (where you can get access to special perks) or by tipping us on Ko-fi.
Books written by the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team
Merchants of Power: The History of Corporate Geopolitics – Colin Reed & Lewis Sage-Passant – 2027
Corporations can outlive empires, accumulate more wealth than nations and project power with more persistence than armies. Kings and continents have bent to their will, and wars and coups have been launched at their command. Yet despite this legacy, corporations have been largely overlooked as geopolitical players, and modern companies seem lost as they navigate a global order that closely resembles the imperial great power politics of the past. In their forthcoming book, Colin Reed and Lewis Sage-Passant explore the long history of corporations as geopolitical powers, from the diplomatic alliances of the Hanseatic League to the commercial intelligence networks of Venice; from the sprawling armies of the East India Companies to the Cold War coups of the United Fruit Company; and from the country-shaping monopolies of the Japanese Zaibatsu to the satellites of Starlink, Merchants of Power explores how corporations have routinely and profoundly shaped geopolitical history.
Private Sector Intelligence: How Corporations Navigate Geopolitical and Security Risks – Maria Robson-Morrow, Angela Lewis-Miller, & Lewis Sage-Passant – 2027
Private Sector Intelligence explores intelligence conducted by and for the private sector, contrasting it with public sector intelligence. From Fortune 500 companies to non-profits, this book explores the full range of intelligence activities, from direction through to dissemination, from collection through to counterintelligence, and how corporations use them to survive in a geopolitically-turbulent world. The book guides readers through career options in the field, including challenges such as maintaining a LinkedIn presence in a post-agency career, and how to network in a network-obsessed field. Finally, the book explores the ethics of the field, and its future in a world changed by AI and technology.
Books recommended by the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team
Lewis Sage-Passant – Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Economica – Victoria Bateman – 2025
Victoria Bateman’s Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power challenges a tendency to overlook the role of women in economic history. Spanning from ancient trading societies to industrialisation and the modern economy, Bateman explores how both prominent and ordinary working women shaped economies. Arguing that women’s freedom to earn, own, and control resources has consequences for wider prosperity underscores the importance of this book for analysts seeking to understand the economic foundations of national power. Economica offers analysts a counterweight to historical accounts overwhelmingly focused on the role of statesmen and industrialists, and is recommended for intermediate-level geopolitical readers, particularly those interested in economic history.
Surviving Chaos – Mark Leonard – 2026
Geopolitical analysis often rests on a belief that the current global instability will eventually settle back into a recognisable international order. In Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, Mark Leonard challenges this, arguing that disruption may itself become the defining condition of global politics. Leonard contrasts between Chinese adaptability and European attachment to established institutions, providing a useful starting point for examining both approaches. This book is particularly relevant for analysts interested in Europe’s strategic choices, as well as those seeking to understand the chaotic global environment more broadly.
Aleksandra Szylkiewicz – Deputy Editor
How to Win a Trade War – Chad P. Bown and Soumaya Keynes – 2026
The past few decades have been marked by a significant increase in economic statecraft, including a sharp rise in nation states’ use of trade measures like tariffs or export controls. Ask most people to picture a trade war and they will imagine US President Trump in the Rose Garden, holding up a poster of tariff rates. Indeed, Trump’s second mandate in particular has been marked by a highly visible resurgence of threats related to trade measures, impacting friends and foes alike – catapulting the weaponisation of trade flows at the forefront of international relations observers. However, this new era of trade conflict did not start with Trump. In How to Win a Trade War, economists Bown and Keynes propose a witty and highly instructive reading of the new reality of international commerce, covering the stakes, players, rules, defence, and attack angles of trade conflicts. They skillfully demonstrate how China has been waging a slow, quiet trade war for years through its subsidy-soaked economic model, while laying out why and how trade wars occur, and the pitfalls trade belligerents can find themselves in. How to Win a Trade War is essential reading for anyone interested in trade and the global economy. It’s also a valuable guide for anyone tasked with helping public or private organisations navigate the multipolar world of the 21st century.
For a more in-depth review of the book, visit our article here. Stay tuned for a How to Get on a Watchlist podcast episode with Bown and Keynes, to be released in 2027.
The Undersea War – Elisabeth Braw – 2026
In a world where our digital, connected way of life is a highly-vulnerable and attractive target for hybrid warfare and winning the AI race constitutes a strategic imperative for nation-states like the US and China, the crucial role of subsea cables as a crucial vector for leverage or targeting is undeniable. In times where cyberattacks target supermarket refrigerators and blood banks, and where (critical) infrastructure sabotage is increasingly accepting of civilian harm, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which damage to the cables that enable everything from our modern healthcare systems to our defence capabilities could cause durable disruption and deadly destruction. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with relevant parties, Braw proposes a sharp analytic take on one of the major security challenges of the 21st century, focussing not only on fiber-optic undersea cables but also global oil and gas pipelines. Media highlighted numerous cable-cutting incidents in recent years, with similar actions likely to multiply in the coming years, disrupting operations of governments, societies and businesses alike. Undersea War is therefore a timely and important read to equip readers with an understanding of the scale of exposure and related vulnerabilities, and how rising geopolitical tensions will shape the undersea bed in the years and decades to come.
Colin Reed – International Security Analyst
The Intelligence Intellectuals – Peter C. Grace – 2026
In the aftermath of the Second World War, global security challenges abounded. The new superpower United States, determined to avoid the catastrophic surprise of Pearl Harbor, sought to create a professionalized intelligence service capable of assessing the world in order to detect change and eliminate strategic surprise. Now, as then, intelligence services and their private sector counterparts debated how much of the analyst’s craft should be rebuilt according to new technological methods, which makes Peter Grace’s account of the first great rebuild unusually well timed. Grace, a lecturer at the University of Otago, describes how a string of unwelcome surprises, the Soviet atomic test and the North Korean invasion of the South chief among them, had left the young CIA’s analysts with little credibility in Washington. Walter Bedell Smith, who took over the agency in late 1950, sought to bring in the leading minds of the era to solve this challenge. Grace follows the professors who answered the call – Harvard’s William Langer, Yale’s Sherman Kent and MIT’s Max Millikan prominent among them – as they set about turning what had heretofore been improvised judgement into a repeatable method. Built on declassified records and the personal archives of those involved, the book shows that the CIA was not alone: the same faith in social science was remaking how corporations were run, which gives it a natural second readership among private sector analysts. In a time when AI systems are provoking intelligence analysts to again ask difficult questions about the reliability and utility of Kent’s processes, the most humanizing thread in Grace’s work is Kent himself. The man often called the father of intelligence analysis privately doubted he was up to the job, and by Grace’s account that self-doubt never left him – a small consolation for any intelligence professional grappling with the challenge AI poses to the craft today.
Time and Narrative in Intelligence Analysis – Joshua Yaphe – 2025
The American intelligence community likes to think of its analysts as something close to scientists, weighing evidence without fear or favour and writing in a voice scrubbed of anything resembling an opinion. Joshua Yaphe, who served as senior analyst for the Arabian Peninsula in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, believes that picture misdescribes what analysts actually do, and that the profession pays a significant cost as a result. In a book that shares its title with Paul Ricoeur’s classic study of hermeneutics, he reaches for tools from literary theory, semiotics, philosophy and the writing of history to make his case. In Yaphe’s terms, the analyst is a storyteller, not a robotic processor of information, meaning that every assessment bears the marks of the person who wrote it. He takes issue with the pretence that the author is absent, which he believes costs the community the subject-matter experts it most needs, and fails to account for the dynamic relationship between a storyteller and a reader that actually defines analyst-policymaker relations. While sections of this work can be demanding, especially for those unfamiliar with philosophical texts, most of the book’s sections pair a theoretical chapter with an applied case study of a declassified analysis product, with cases ranging from apartheid South Africa to the survival of Saddam Hussein. These help keep the text understandable and useful for hands-on practitioners. Readers on the private sector side of the profession should pay particular attention to the conclusion, which follows government tradecraft into the corporate teams that hire former officials, and sets the community’s growing appetite for automation against an approach that leaves room for the analyst’s own perspective and empathy. The book is free to read in open access, and is unlike most of the works today’s intelligence analysts are encouraged to read, making it a very welcome addition to the canon.
We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence – Avner Barnea – 2021
As we argued in our full review earlier this year, the striking thing about today’s geopolitical shocks is not that they are truly surprises, but that governments and companies keep professing surprise at threats that were in fact visible for years. Avner Barnea, a former senior official of the Israel Security Agency now at the University of Haifa, asks why this recurring institutional failure seems immune to improvement by placing national security failures alongside corporate ones to see what they have in common. His most useful contribution is a distinction between two kinds of surprise. In diffused surprise the threat has no clear source, as with the First Intifada in 1987; in concentrated surprise the adversary is known and watched but its intentions and capabilities are misread, as on September 11. Applied to IBM’s near-collapse in 1993, the framework reveals a dominant firm succumbing to the same anchoring and groupthink that afflict intelligence agencies convinced their adversaries will behave rationally. The book’s chief limitation is that its business cases come almost entirely from competitive intelligence. That passes over the much older tradition of corporate geopolitical intelligence documented in Lewis Sage-Passant’s Beyond States and Spies, which offers a far closer parallel to the work of a state service. Even so, for analysts who sit at the junction of government and business, Barnea supplies a vocabulary for surprise that travels between the two worlds better than most studies, which neglect to note the private sector implications of institutional surprise.
The DGSE: A Concise History of France’s Foreign Intelligence Service – Damien Van Puyvelde – 2026
Intelligence studies, as Damien Van Puyvelde has observed, rests mostly on the experience of the American and British services, with a few others at the margins. That imbalance is harder to justify now that European capitals are weighing how far they can keep relying on Washington, forcing their own services to carry more of the load. Van Puyvelde, a French scholar who heads the Intelligence and Security Research Group at Leiden University, has thus given us the most accessible and contemporary English-language history of the DGSE, France’s foreign intelligence service, from its creation in 1982 to the present. Over that span the service has travelled from the disgrace of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985 to a remit that now takes in terrorism, proliferation, foreign meddling and the protection of France’s commercial interests. His richest source, he says, was the record of French parliamentary reports and hearings, which he supplements with interviews and officers’ memoirs. Rather than march through the decades, he takes the service apart theme by theme, from who has led it and whom it works with to how French popular culture has portrayed it. The author is candid that the book holds no smoking guns; by his own account, its value lies in the fine detail, including fresh light on France’s decision to stay out of the 2003 Iraq war. It sits naturally beside Steven Ward’s history of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence in the same Georgetown series, which Simon Schofield recommended in our 2025 list. The entire series is worth reading, but particularly in an era where Western intelligence services are being asked to wade once again into economic espionage, France’s experience is useful even to non-specialist audiences.
Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy – Ben Macintyre – 2026
Vladimir Kuzichkin, codenamed Redwood by MI6, was the KGB officer in Tehran who handled Moscow’s contacts with Iran’s communist Tudeh party after the revolution, and his reasons for approaching the British were intensely private. In Redwood, this little-known agent gets the Ben Macintyre treatment, as the author traces his recruitment, his handling by Ian McCredie of MI6 and his escape from Iran with the pace his readers have come to expect. The book’s weight, though, lies in the aftermath. Within a year of the defection, Khomeini’s government had arrested the Tudeh leadership and well over a thousand of its members, and put party leaders on television to confess to spying for Moscow. It then banned the party and expelled eighteen Soviet diplomats, with British and American intelligence having helped point Tehran towards its targets. That outline is not, strictly, untold: the link between Kuzichkin and the purge was reported at the time and again in the mid-1980s. What is new, though, is Macintyre’s signature feel for the human aspects which make intelligence work so complex, revealed in carefully presented, previously unseen, archival material and interviews with former officers of MI6, MI5, the CIA and the KGB. The most readable work on this list, Macintyre books are eminently giftable for the casual enthusiast of history or spy stories alike. For active practitioners, it doubles as a sharp case study in what becomes of intelligence once it is handed to a government whose interests only partly overlap with your own.
Edwin Tran – Levant Region Analyst and “How to get on a Watchlist” Producer
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century – Steve Coll – 2008
Twenty-five years have passed since the September 11 Attacks, when al-Qaeda operatives launched the deadliest terrorist attack on the United States. Much has been written about those behind the attacks, from Osama bin Laden to the hijackers themselves, and yet, there remains an even wider and deeper context. Steve Coll’s timeless book The Bin Ladens is an excellent narrative that looks beyond the single Bin Laden and rather at the wider family. It peers into the family’s history, dramas and legal struggles, and how their dynamics played a role in shaping al-Qaeda and their later activities. The work remains an excellent piece that charts the history of Saudi Arabia, of one family, and of the events that led up to one fateful day on September 11, 2001.
Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities – Bethany Hughes – 2017
The story of Istanbul is a grand narrative of history itself. Sitting along the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, this single city has been defined by its strategic and geopolitical significance, standing along the crossroads of Europe and Asia, of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Even today, Istanbul maintains a key position in global grain and energy supplies, in trade and commerce, in the flow of migrants and refugees. There is no better work to understand this single city and its significance today than Bethany Hughes’ Istanbul. The book artistically traces the city’s origins and tracks its developments throughout the ages, following it through the days of Rome and Constantine, up to the era of the Ottoman Turks and into the present. Throughout, Hughes examines specific themes, whether it be the city’s economic development or the emergence of its modern transit system, to paint a full portrait of the city. As Türkiye continues to expand its regional influence, Istanbul looks poised to continue its legacy into the modern age, and there is no better work to contextualize these developments than Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities.
Eamon Driscoll – Russia and Former Soviet Spaces Analyst
The Return of Russia – James Rodgers – 2026
This book explores Russia’s transformation from the collapse of the Soviet Union through the Yeltsin years and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Rodgers examines how Russia’s experience during the turbulent 1990s shaped its political identity and increasingly adversarial relationship with the West. It provides valuable historical context for understanding the Kremlin’s foreign policy, including the roles of nationalism, historical grievances, military power, and perceptions of Western influence. Particularly useful for understanding Russia’s interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as its broader ambitions in the former Soviet space, this book helps explain why Moscow continues to regard its neighbouring republics as strategically important. It offers a foundation for understanding contemporary Russian foreign policy and the historical thinking behind the Kremlin’s actions, rather than simply following individual geopolitical events.
The Successor – Mikhail Fishman – 2026
Using the life of the late Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia’s most prominent opposition politicians, Fishman tells the story of modern Russia’s political evolution. He explores the political possibilities that existed following the Soviet collapse, the rise of Vladimir Putin, and the consolidation of power around the Kremlin. This book provides insight into the relationships between political elites, oligarchs, opposition movements, and state institutions, helping explain the weakening of democratic institutions and the increasingly authoritarian nature of Russian politics. Nemtsov’s opposition to Putin and his views on Russia’s relationship with Ukraine make the book particularly relevant to understanding today’s conflict. It also offers a human dimension to Russian political history, showing how the country’s transformation affected those who tried to shape its future. For those who want to understand the changes within Russia since 1991, and the effect of those changes on its neighbours, Fishman has put together an excellent narrative on both the real and alternative developments in Russia that have made the country what it is today.
Small States, Russia & the West – Eduard Abrahamyan – 2026
Abrahamyan examines the geopolitics of the South Caucasus, focusing on Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and how each country navigates its relationship with Russia and Western powers. It explores how Russia’s military interventions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 have affected the regional balance of power and challenged the ambitions of countries seeking closer integration with Europe and the West. Abrahamyan uses a framework of international relations theory to explain why smaller states make different strategic choices despite sharing the same regional environment. Particularly interesting is the comparison of the three countries: Armenia’s historically close but increasingly complicated relationship with Russia, Azerbaijan’s more independent and multi-directional foreign policy, and Georgia’s pursuit of closer ties with Europe and the West. The book also considers the influence of geography, history, political identity, and relationships with other regional powers. It is a valuable read for understanding why the Caucasus is such a strategically important crossroads between Russia, Europe, Turkey, and Iran, and how these smaller countries attempt to protect their sovereignty and pursue their own interests amid competing geopolitical pressures. This is particularly relevant for anyone interested in the countries of the former Soviet Union beyond Russia and Ukraine. It provides a country-by-country examination of the South Caucasus and helps explain why Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have followed different geopolitical paths despite their shared Soviet history.
Alex Smith – Asia Pacific and China Military Affairs Analyst
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the World – Kevin Rudd – 2025
Xi Jinping has accumulated power like no leader since Mao, taking the CCP and China in a radical new direction. In this hefty work adapted from his PhD, China scholar and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sets out to answer a tricky set of questions about the ideology thought to be driving this change. What role does Xi himself play? What has shaped his world view and ideology? Is this ideology truly a driving force or retconned after the fact to justify decisions? Rudd plumbs the depths of ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era’ so you don’t have to, to answer these questions and many more, arguing that Xi is moving China to a more Marxist, state-controlled economics, a centralised, Leninist politics, and a nationalist, right-wing foreign policy. On Xi Jinping is not a book for the casual reader (what book with this subject matter could be?), but it is a well researched and well argued tome that is an absolute must for anyone trying to understand modern China.
China’s New Navy: The Evolution of PLAN from the People’s Revolution to a 21st Century Cold war – Xiaobing Li – 2023
In ‘China’s New Navy’ Xiaobing Li gives the English speaking audience the punchy operational history of the PLA Navy we needed. Li traces the PLA Navy’s growth from its beginnings as a mere appendage to the PLA, through decades of neglect as an underfunded light force focused on coastal defence, to the modern ‘blue water’ force we see today. As an operational history that on draws on Chinese sources and interviews, ‘China’s New Navy’ covers the tactical development – from suicidal night attacks by early PLA Navy sailors using Maoist infantry tactics at sea, to the all important reforms of Liu Huaqing in the 1980s that laid the foundations for the modern navy we see today. A great read for the China specialist or the naval history enthusiast alike.
The Retreat From Strategy – David Richards and Julian Lindley-French – 2024
The Retreat From Strategy is a frontal assault on decades of British strategic failure. Containing many of the arguments that those familiar with Lindley-French’s long-running blog will be familiar with, refined into a single, forcefully argued volume. The authors trace Britain’s post-Cold War strategic drift from doing what was necessary to trying to do ‘good’ and the resulting failure to make the end – ways – means calculations that are a foundation of any successful strategy. The book claims the British intervention in Sierra Leone (which then-Brigadier Richards commanded) as Britain’s last successful strategic calculation before the series of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, and exposes the plethora of strategic documents by successive governments for the hollow pretence they are. It is not, however, a taxonomy of British decline. The authors offer solutions – a clear-eyed view of Britain’s place in the world, a focus on interests, and a restructuring of the armed forces, to name a few. Two scenarios are also offered as possible outcomes; ‘Britain Defeated’ warns of what we will face if Britain continues on the path it is, while ‘Britain Defended’ offers a hopeful, and importantly feasible, outcome should Britain summon up the blood to reverse its strategic ineptitude. Richards and Lindley-French cover a lot of ground to explain this decline with an incisiveness born from decades of first hand experience and intellectual pursuit, delivered with the plain speaking of a Yorkshireman by Lindley-French. At a time when effects of decades of defense cuts and fourth-rate leadership are finally dawning on the UK population and commentator class, The Retreat From Strategy deserves to find its way onto the bookshelves of every policymaker and security analyst.
Purchases made using the links in this article earn referrals for Encyclopedia Geopolitica. As an independent publication, our writers are volunteers from within the professional geopolitical intelligence community, and referrals like this support our ability to create future content by funding server and domain fees. As such, we strongly encourage you to liberally indulge in your book-buying urges through our links! You can also support Encyclopedia Geopolitica and contribute to the running costs of the site directly via Patreon (where you can get access to special perks) or by tipping us on Ko-fi.
Conclusion
Encyclopedia Geopolitica celebrates its 10th birthday this month, and as always, we owe our success to our loyal readers, who have supported our work on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. We are especially grateful to patrons of the site, who help fund our website and podcast running costs directly on Patreon, or indirectly via book purchases using our affiliate links.
The site’s founder and editor, Lewis Sage-Passant, would also like to extend a special thanks to the hardworking team of analysts and co-editors, without whom the project could not continue. As a volunteer organisation, their contribution has been as critical as ever to this project! We suspect that 2027 will bring more geopolitical shocks as the international tectonic plates continue to shift. We plan to keep bringing you insightful and informative articles on those niche and under-examined geopolitical developments that we have tried to accurately capture this year, and hope that these books will help you to understand the world’s challenges a little better. Thanks as always for reading!
Encyclopedia Geopolitica is a collaborative effort to bring you thoughtful insights on world affairs. Our contributors include Military officers, Geopolitical Intelligence analysts, Corporate Security professionals, Government officials, Academics and Journalists from around the globe. Topics cover diplomatic and foreign affairs, military developments, international relations, terrorism, armed conflict, intelligence, espionage and the broader elements of statecraft.
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