16 reasons why I publish books and articles on this site
12 December 2013 Why am I self-publishing on this site?
December 12, 2013
Diplomatenleben
Akteure, Schauplätze, Zwischenrufe – Ein Lesebuch 2013. 436 S. Geb. CHF 48.00 / EUR 39.50 ISBN 978-3-0340-1206-5. [buy this book] A must-have for German-speaking students of Swiss diplomacy (and diplomacy generally) since the Second World War is Dr. Max Schweizer’s recently published Diplomatenleben. This contains 60 texts – mostly in German – written by career [...]
November 11, 2013
Embassy attics and roofs
11 November 2013 The revelations by Edward Snowden, supplemented by aerial photography, have merely highlighted what has long been known to some
September 14, 2013
Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a political survivor
(Pan Macmillan: London, 2013), pp. 582 (incl. index). ISBN 978-1-4472-2276-7. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] Jack Straw was the ablest and wisest of Tony Blair’s foreign secretaries and served in this capacity from 2001 until he was ungratefully dumped without warning by his leader in 2006. Afterwards he hit the headlines by courageously publishing his [...]
June 14, 2013
British Diplomacy and the Descent into Chaos: The career of Jack Garnett, 1902-19
(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012), 280 pp (incl. index). ISBN 978-0-230-34897-4. [buy this book] [Kindle ed] I am in favour of biographies of relatively obscure individuals like Jack Garnett because there are plenty of them on the famous; moreover, studies of this kind often turn up interesting details (including how the famous were seen from the [...]
April 30, 2013
Transformational Diplomacy after the Cold War: Britain’s Know How Fund in Post-Communist Europe, 1989-2003
(Routledge: London and New York, 2013), 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN13: 978-0-415-69203-8 (hbk). ISBN13: 978-0-203-38158-8 (ebk). [buy this book] This is the long awaited history of the Know How Fund (KHF) produced by the recently retired Foreign and Commonwealth Office historian Keith Hamilton. Like other FCO ‘internal histories’, it was initially written ‘to provide background [...]
January 13, 2013
Expeditionary diplomacy
13 January 2013 A lot was beginning to be heard about ‘expeditionary diplomacy’ before the disaster at US ‘Special Mission Benghazi’ on 11 September 2012, somewhat less since.
January 16, 2012
21st Century Diplomacy: A practitioner’s guide
(Continuum: London and New York, 2011), 372pp (incl. index). ISBN: 9781441168382. Available in pb at £19.99. [buy this book] Kishan Rana is a man of lengthy and varied experience in the Indian Foreign Service, ending his career as ambassador to Germany. Since then he has spent many years as a globe-trotting trainer of junior diplomats [...]
September 17, 2011
Economic Diplomacy: India’s experience
(CUTS International: Jaipur, 2011), 285pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978 81 8257 139 6. Kishan Rana is a widely published former Indian ambassador and Bipul Chatterjee, his co-editor, is the deputy executive director of the Indian NGO, CUTS International http://www.cuts-international.org/ , the publisher of this book. Both editors are also trained economists. Their volume consists of [...]
February 9, 2011
The Practice of Diplomacy: Its evolution, theory and administration
2nd ed (Routledge: London and New York, 2011), pp. 317 (incl. index). [buy this book] [Kindle ed] First published in 1995, the long-awaited second edition of this valuable textbook on the history of diplomacy has at last appeared. The first chapter has been expanded to include non-European traditions, and a wholly new chapter has been [...]
July 25, 2010
Five best books on diplomacy
25 July 2010 On 5 July 2010, at the beginning of a week devoted to ‘Diplomacy’ by the ‘Five Best Books on Everything’ site, I was interviewed on my own choice of the five best books on this subject.
March 10, 2010
The Queen’s Ambassador to the Sultan: Memoirs of Sir Henry A. Layard’s Constantinople Embassy, 1877-1880
(The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2009), pp. 721 (incl. index), ISBN 978-975-428-395-2. Sinan Kuneralp (ed.), Twixt Pera and Therapia: The Constantinople Diaries of Lady Layard (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2010), pp. 279 (incl. index), ISBN 978-975-428-398-3. Once more students of Ottoman diplomatic history are in debt to the scholar-publisher, Sinan Kuneralp, for Sir Henry Layard was [...]
November 24, 2009
Diplomats at War: British and Commonwealth diplomacy in wartime
(Martinus Nijhoff: Leiden and Boston, 2008), pp. 304 (incl. index). ISBN 978 90 04 16897 8 In their Preface, the editors of Diplomats at War say that the two world wars in the twentieth century had a “catalytic impact upon the practice of diplomacy”; among other things, they continue, this produced “an unprecedented revolution” in [...]
July 9, 2009
The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell diaries
(Hutchinson: London, 2007), pp. 794, incl. index. ISBN 9780091796297 Until his resignation amid huge controversy in August 2003, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s official spokesman and director of communications and strategy – ace spin doctor, closest confidante, and constant travelling companion. His diaries have probably been mined chiefly for their astonishing revelations about the internal [...]
February 19, 2009
Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice, 1963-1976
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2008), pp. 224, incl. index. ISBN 978-0-521-83916-7 Some years ago, John Young, Professor of International History at the University of Nottingham and long-serving Chair of the British International History Group, turned his thoughts and research in the direction of diplomatic procedure. This is the first monograph to be the product of [...]
December 17, 2008
Just a Diplomat
Zeki Kuneralp, Just a Diplomat, trsl. by Geoffrey Lewis with a preface by Andrew Mango (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 1992), pp. 152, incl. appendices and index. ISBN 975-428-029-0 Theophilus C. Prousis, British Consular Reports from the Ottoman Levant in an Age of Upheaval, 1815-1830 (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2008), pp. 289, incl. index. ISBN 978-975-428-360-0 [...]
September 25, 2008
Cyprus: the search for a solution
(I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2005), pp. 256 incl. index. ISBN 13 978 1 85043 665 2 [ buy this book ] Lord Hannay, a senior British diplomat with great experience of multilateral diplomacy, retired in 1995 but was then persuaded to accept the position of Britain’s Special Representative for Cyprus. In this [...]
June 19, 2008
Diplomacy and Developing Nations: Post-Cold War foreign policy-making structures and processes
(Routledge: London, 2005) pp. xi 280, ISBN-10: 0714654035 [ buy this book ] Guest Review by Kishan S. Rana This book is a valuable addition to the slim body of literature on foreign ministries and the process of external policy making. The book is all the more welcome as it examines the situation in that [...]
October 10, 2007
The Twenty-First Century Ambassador: Plenipotentiary to Chief Executive and Asian Diplomacy: The Foreign Ministries of China, India, Japan, Singapore and Thailand
Kishan S. Rana, The Twenty-First Century Ambassador: Plenipotentiary to Chief Executive (Malta and Geneva: DiploFoundation, 2004), pp. xiii + 258. ISBN 99909-55-18-2 (Paperback). Kishan S. Rana, Asian Diplomacy: The Foreign Ministries of China, India, Japan, Singapore and Thailand (Malta and Geneva: DiploFoundation, 2007) pp. xiii + 246. ISBN 978-99932-53-17-4 (Paperback). [buy these books] Guest Review [...]
Diplomacy with a Difference: The Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880-2006
(Martinus Nijhoff: Leiden and Boston, 2007), pp. 353, incl. Index. ISBN 978 90 04 15497 1 [buy this book] In writing her history of the origins and evolution of the office of high commissioner, Dr Lloyd, who is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University, has drawn on a vast range of sources. [...]