Carnegie Council

Listen to events at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Speakers and interviewees include distinguished authors, government and UN officials, economists, policymakers, and businesspeople. Topics range from the ethics of war and peace, to the place of religion in politics, to issues at the forefront of global social justice. To learn more about our work and to explore a wealth of related resources, please visit our website at http://www.carnegiecouncil.org.

Eyes In The Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens

Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America’s enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. […Learn More]

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

The next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies.

Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field—which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code—has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. […Learn More]

The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography comes a sweeping yet intimate story of the most influential humanitarian you’ve never heard of—Bob Gersony, who spent four decades in crisis zones around the world. […Learn More]

The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo began a decades-long trek from Venice to China along the trade route between Europe and Asia known as the Silk Road—a foundation of Kublai Khan’s sprawling empire. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the Chinese regime has proposed a land-and-maritime Silk Road that duplicates exactly the route Marco Polo traveled. […Learn More]

Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy

An eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the U.S. and China

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies. […Learn More]

Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India

The first true people’s history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world’s biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people–especially those living in disputed border regions. […Learn More]

The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. […Learn More]

Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism

Those who championed globalization once promised a world of winners, one in which free trade would lift all the world’s boats, and extremes of left and right would give way to universally embraced liberal values. The past few years have shattered this fantasy, as those who’ve paid the price for globalism’s gains have turned to populist and nationalist politicians to express fury at the political, media, and corporate elites they blame for their losses. […Learn More]

Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

Journalist and law professor Rosa Brooks goes beyond the “blue wall of silence” in this radical inside examination of American policing

In her forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law’s troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world—and whether that world can be changed. […Learn More]

Book cover of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? by Graham Allison

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydide’s Trap

From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China??—??and how it might be prevented.

China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. […Learn More]