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No War | Reading List

Key texts on war, imperialism, and the West's efforts to reshape the Middle East.

Verso Books17 June 2025

No War | Reading List

The West's imperial machine has pushed the world to the brink of war. The books below were selected to provide an array of perspectives on global conflict – from the analytical to the historical and the philosophical. War is catastrophe. It is not an option.

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War and Money

War and Money

by Maurizio Lazzarato

Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey

Maurizio Lazzarato’s War and Money explores the connections between capitalist expansion, international economic conflict, and war, via an analysis of the imperialism of the American dollar. He exa...
The Rest and the West

The Rest and the West

by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dyn...
America's Fatal Leap

America's Fatal Leap

by Paul W. Schroeder

Introduction by Perry Anderson

America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of internat...
Moral Abdication

Moral Abdication

by Didier Fassin

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Wes...
An Army Like No Other

An Army Like No Other

by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner

The Israeli army, officially named the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who believed that ‘the whole nation is the army’. In ...
Resisting Erasure

Resisting Erasure

by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resi...
Behind Enemy Lies

Behind Enemy Lies

by Patrick Cockburn

In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Tur...
Israel-Palestine on Record

Israel-Palestine on Record

by Richard Falk and Howard Friel

In this scathing analysis of Israel-Palestine coverage in the US media, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal the persistent ways the New York Times has ignored principles of international law in or...
Blaming the Victims

Blaming the Victims

Contributions by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, G.W. Bowersock, Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein, Muhammad Hallaj, Rashid Khalidi, Peretz Kidron and Elia Zureik

Edited by Christopher Hitchens and Edward W. Said

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of...
Combat Trauma

Combat Trauma

by Nadia Abu El Haj

Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans' psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve?As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the A...
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

by Perry Anderson

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...
The Killing of Gaza

The Killing of Gaza

by Gideon Levy

Translated by David B. Green

Gideon Levy is one of the most respected critics of Israel's apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. He is the outspoken award-winning journalist who has been writing on the conflict for...
Plowshares into Swords

Plowshares into Swords

by Arno Mayer

In this authoritative text, Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and onward development of the Israeli state. He recovers for poste...
Carbon Democracy

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...
Sinews of War and Trade

Sinews of War and Trade

by Laleh Khalili

On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities—iron ore, coal, oil—arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufa...
The Spoils of War

The Spoils of War

by Andrew Cockburn

Fully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washingto...
Israel and Palestine

Israel and Palestine

by Avi Shlaim

With characteristic rigor and readability, Avi Shlaim reflects on a range of key issues, transformations and personalities in the Israel–Palestine conflict. From the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the...
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

by Norman G. Finkelstein

First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexam...
Iran Without Borders

Iran Without Borders

by Hamid Dabashi

“No ruling regime,” writes Hamid Dabashi, “could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people.” For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in...
Yemen in Crisis

Yemen in Crisis

by Helen Lackner

The democratic promise of the 2011 Arab Spring has unraveled in Yemen, triggering a disastrous crisis of civil war, famine, militarization, and governmental collapse with serious implications for t...
The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...
America: The New Imperialism

America: The New Imperialism

by Victor G. Kiernan

Preface by Eric Hobsbawm

The invasion and occupation of Iraq have sparked considerable discussion about the nature of American imperialism, but most of it is focused on the short term. The classical historical approach of ...
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The Global Gamble

The Global Gamble

by Peter Gowan

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc presented policy makers in Washington with a temptation reminiscent of Faust’s, opening up vistas of hitherto unimaginable global power; but the cold breath of Mephi...
First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship

First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship

by Richard Lachmann

The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the U...
Cities Under Siege

Cities Under Siege

by Stephen Graham

Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political v...
Exterminism and Cold War

Exterminism and Cold War

Edited by New Left Review

A collection of essays on the nuclear revolution and the end of the Cold War by E. P. Thompson, Mike Davis, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Lucio Magri, Etienne Balibar, Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Jo...
Frames of War

Frames of War

by Judith Butler

In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prose...