IACSP Homeland Security Bookshelf V29N3 2025

Counterterrorism & Homeland Security Bookshelf

Reviewed by Dr. Joshua Sinai

This column capsule reviews 13 books on counterterrorism, military warfare, and homeland security-related subjects.

Conventional Warfare

Alex J. Bellamy, Warmonger: Vladimir Putin’s Imperial Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK: Agenda Publishing Limited/Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2023), 208 pages, $99.00 [Hardcover], $30.00 [Paperback], ISBN: 978-1-7882-1647-0.

An excellent account of how Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was part of a series of regional invasions by Vladimir Putin, including in Chechnya and Georgia, in pursuit of his imperial ambition to establish a Greater Russia. To examine this thesis, the book’s chapters cover Russia’s military interventions in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, the disputed region of Nagorno-Karbakh, and others. Russia does not only engage in direct military interventions, the author points out, but engages in hybrid war against its Western adversaries, which involves “the use of subterfuge to break the enemy’s will” by employing propaganda and disinformation, proxies and mercenaries, kidnapping and assassination, against its Western adversaries (p. 151). Putin’s rationale, the author concludes, is that “whatever I believe to be right, what is mine is what I can take by force and fraud. Putting’s march towards Kyiv exemplifies this disposition perfectly” (. 168). The author is Professor of Peace and ...