Hamas has ruled Gaza and the lives of the two million Palestinians who live there since 2006. Hamas Contained, first published in 2018, offers a history of the group, drawing on interviews with organization leaders and their publications. Tareq Baconi maps Hamas's thirty-year transition from fringe military resistance towards governance, culminating in Israeli efforts to contain the movement to the Gaza Strip. Baconi argues that under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been marginalized in favor of military action against Hamas, and by implication, all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This dynamic—a violent equilibrium between Hamas and Israel and the movement's containment in the Gaza Strip—lasted for sixteen years, until it was decidedly shattered by Hamas's offensive on October 7, 2023.

Now with new material that provides an analytical framework and reflection on Hamas's offensive of October 7, 2023, and Israel's ensuing war on Gaza, Hamas Contained is an even more essential guide to understanding Hamas and the brutal violence of Israel's war on Palestinians.

Exposes Arabella Advisors as a major "dark money" operation that channels billions into progressive causes through opaque networks and deceptive grassroots groups, revealing its significant influence on U.S. politics and its far-reaching impact on issues from Supreme Court nominations to election manipulation.

"Ever heard of Arabella Advisors? Probably not. And that’s strange, since they’ve done a lot to destroy the world you grew up in. You should know, so read this book."

—Tucker Carlson 

While billionaires like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett are well known as left-wing megadonors transforming the country’s politics, few Americans know about Arabella Advisors, a “dark money” operation that channels much of this money into particular causes via pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots outfits. Citizens across the spectrum will be shocked to learn how Arabella’s empire secretly operates using arrangements that produce the darkest of “dark money.” 

Thanks to the author and his colleagues at the Capital Research Center, which first exposed Arabella, even the mainstream press have begun to report on this scandalous story. As this book reveals, Arabella is a major player in battles over Supreme Court nominations, environmentalism, abortion, Medicare for All, fake local news outlets, “Zuck Bucks” that manipulate election offices, lawsuits brought by Democratic super-lawyer (and Steele dossier booster) Marc Elias, and much more.

The money is staggering. In the 2018 election cycle, Arabella’s nonprofits took in $1.2 billion, more than double the fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee combined. In the 2020 election cycle, Arabella’s fundraising spiked to $2.4 billion.

This mountain of money explains why the left-leaning major media are alarmed. Arabella is “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money,” warns the Atlantic. A “dark-money behemoth,” says Politico. An “opaque network,” says the New York Times, that funnels “hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes.” 

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.

Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.

Selected among Foreign Affairs's "Best of Books 2024"

From a globally renowned expert on Russian military strategy and national security, The Russian Way of Deterrence investigates Russia's approach to coercion (both deterrence and compellence), comparing and contrasting it with the Western conceptualization of this strategy. Strategic deterrence, or what Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky calls deterrence à la Russe, is one of the main tools of Russian statecraft. Adamsky deftly describes the genealogy of the Russian approach to coercion and highlights the cultural, ideational, and historical factors that have shaped it in the nuclear, conventional, and informational domains. Drawing on extensive research on Russian strategic culture, Adamsky highlights several empirical and theoretical peculiarities of the Russian coercion strategy, including how this strategy relates to the war in Ukraine. Exploring the evolution of strategic deterrence, along with its sources and prospective avenues of development, Adamsky provides a comprehensive intellectual history that makes it possible to understand the deep mechanics of this Russian stratagem, the current and prospective patterns of the Kremlin's coercive conduct, and the implications for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sanctions have enormous consequences. Especially when imposed by a country with the economic influence of the United States, sanctions induce clear shockwaves in both the economy and political culture of the targeted state, and in the everyday lives of citizens. But do economic sanctions induce the behavioral changes intended? Do sanctions work in the way they should?

To answer these questions, the authors of How Sanctions Work highlight Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world. Comprehensive sanctions are meant to induce uprisings or pressures to change the behavior of the ruling establishment, or to weaken its hold on power. But, after four decades, the case of Iran shows the opposite to be true: sanctions strengthened the Iranian state, impoverished its population, increased state repression, and escalated Iran's military posture toward the U.S. and its allies in the region. Instead of offering an 'alternative to war,' sanctions have become a cause of war. Consequently, How Sanctions Work reveals how necessary it is to understand how sanctions really work.