Topics in Strategic Studies – Spring 2026 Series

Tuesdays, 7-9 pm ET

Join us for a new format for the “Historical Roots…” study, reworked for 2026 as Topics in Strategic Studies. We will select and read one significant book of political theory or history a month, focused on understanding the stresses and directions for change in the present moment. Each week, we will invite one of us or a guest to present a current topic along with optional readings. This new format will enable us to dig into breakthrough studies and analyses while also ensuring continuing new and lively discussions on topics of interest.

This month, we are reading The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy by Pierre Dardot et al. Alberto Toscano calls this work “a trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare.”

As we confirm additional readings for the spring and summer, we will add them to a new syllabus which you can request, while continuing to update our long-term bibliography of supplementary readings.