In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in Afghanistan also worked to rationalize the harm inflicted upon Afghan civilians.
Drawing on declassified documents and interviews with coalition officials, the book traces how civilian protection was reimagined as a martial tactic rather than a humanitarian imperative, with coalition officials reframing civilian casualties as strategic setbacks that could imperil the entire mission.
Gregory examines the restrictions that coalition officials imposed on combat operations to minimize unnecessary harm to civilians, whilst showing how these restrictions served to constitute civilian casualties as necessary in certain situations, rendering their lives losable and their deaths ungrievable. At the same time, it examines the post-incident mitigation measures coalition officials used to prevent civilian casualties becoming strategic setbacks, including the condolence payments that were offered when civilians were harmed. Rather than seeking to make amends for the harm inflicted upon them, it claims that these post-incident mitigation measures are best characterized as a necropolitical device concerned with managing mortality more effectively. Crucially, Weaponizing Civilian Protection shows that co-opting civilian protection into a martial logic that is more concerned with winning wars than protecting the civilian population works to devalue and dehumanize civilians, leaving them more vulnerable to death and destruction in future conflicts.

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The Warring States Period is one of the most important times in China’s history. It marked the end of one dynasty–the Zhou–and the beginning of a new imperial era, under the Qin. It’s an era that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history: The fall of the old aristocratic order, the birth of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism, and the creation of the imperial system that would shape China for over two thousand years.
Andrew has put together one of the first English comprehensive histories of the Warring States period in his new book To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford UP, 2026)
Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Rule All Under Heaven. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relationships. In Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences (Oxford UP, 2026), Robert Wilson proposes an alternative view that does not separate kin relations from biological facts about reproduction that are universally known, such as the fact that human females are pregnant before they give birth. On the Progenerative View, kinship is the cultural elaboration of reproductive relations, which act as constraints on kin relations. Wilson, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia, also analyzes incest avoidance from this perspective, and draws on clinical findings, primatology, and philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology to develop his biologically-based yet non-reductive and culturally variable view of kinship.

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly.

Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Meghan Garrity examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.
This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Baruch Fischhoff's Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems: A Vision for Management Science (Oxford University Press, 2025), part of the Clarendon Lectures in Management series) tackles a central tension in academia that disciplines are organized around narrow, bounded methods and theories, while the real-world problems society faces such as climate change, public health, financial crises, technology risk are messy, unbounded, and refuse to respect departmental boundaries. Fischhoff argues that business schools are uniquely positioned to bridge this gap because they already house faculty with both rigorous analytical training and applied, real-world orientation. The book proposes concrete ways management schools can restructure incentives, training, and collaboration so scholars can excel in their discipline while still meaningfully engaging with intractable societal problems.

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