Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán analyze more than a century of Latin American political history, hunting for the root causes of dictatorship and democracy.

In his new book, Shibley Telhami analyzes extensive polling data from the Middle East, finding that public opinion embraces regional uprisings but dwells on old grievances.

A new book by Neil Irwin recounts the extraordinary measures undertaken by central bankers to avert a global depression. The formula to end economic malaise, however, remains undiscovered.

The authors of a new history of modern China argue that nationalism, not communism, has propelled the country's political evolution and its rise as an international power.

Three new books examine how it happened that, 12 years after going to war in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies are preparing to withdraw from a nation still largely ungovernable and pervaded by corruption, warlordism, and insecurity.

A new book by Anne Applebaum offers a heavily detailed, ground-level history of the arrival of communist rule in postwar Eastern Europe. The author aims, she says, to understand “totalitarianism in practice.”

A new book meditates on Haiti before and since the 2010 earthquake, and about the do-gooders who visit, armed with “a kind of condescension filled with pity.”

A new book recounts the history of the international human rights movement, a movement that of late has become in part an instrument of war.

A new book details how US policies under George W. Bush helped sour Vladimir Putin on the West, leaving him in the paranoid funk that still colors his outlook today.

A new book about a fugitive from North Korea casts chilling light on the world's last remaining national system of concentration camps.

A freelance journalist living in Somalia studied the buccaneers who have seized ships in the Gulf of Aden and captured the attention of navies and news media.

A new book portrays 12 iconic Latin Americans—politicians, poets, revolutionaries—who sought to set right the wrongs of the past, often with ambiguous results.

A new book finds the sources of Arab unrest not only in fury at corrupt regimes and stagnant economies, but also in a popular culture that scorns Islamist extremism.

Of course critical differences distinguish democratic from authoritarian governments. Still, a new book argues that all politicians, in striving to gain and keep power, consult essentially the same handbook.

A new book recounts the events of December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the presidency and the Soviet empire disappeared.

Henry Kissinger in his latest book parts company with international-relations realists who believe China's rise will necessarily entail conflict with the United States.

A new book traces the political development of South Africa and Zimbabwe through the personal histories of leaders who started as revolutionaries and became presidents.

A collection of essays by Timothy Garton Ash argues that Europe's velvet revolutions succeeded by broadcasting images of popular defiance: images now recurring elsewhere in the world.

A new book argues that Latin American countries, having left behind their banana-republic past, will serve as exemplars for developed nations to follow.

A new book suggests the East will surpass the West in social development, but not until the next century, and in any case the whole world will likely rise or fall together.