Understanding Indonesia's political processes is a daunting yet critical task. With general elections due next April, how do politicians succeed in a democracy just two decades’ old with 260 million citizens?

Although it joins a growing list of jeremiads about the possible end of Western civilisation, Edward Luce’s book usefully puts the debate in context. He argues that President Trump is a symptom, not cause, of many of America’s and the world’s problems.

Asia is commonly depicted as the most rapidly growing and economically dynamic region in the world. John West's book offers a useful corrective to the Asian Century hypothesis and a strong challenge to the notion that the 21st century will inevitably belong to Asia.

While it comes out 60 years after most of the events it describes, this book shows that the fate of the earth is still in the hands of a few war planners in Washington and Moscow and the automatic doomsday machine they created. Nuclear winter could still wipe out humanity from the world.

Nostalgia paints 1948-1958 as a golden era of economic growth and modernisation in Venezuela. Lisa Blackmore challenges these views by examining the deceptive ideology of the Jiménez military dictatorship.

Against the backdrop of the Doklam plateau standoff last year, P.S. Suryanarayana’s book is a timely, comprehensive and judicious volume that provides a detailed analysis of both historical and contemporary India-China relations.

This is a fascinating book by a pioneer of international relations scholarship in Australia. Tony Palfreeman founded the study of international relations at the University of New South Wales and taught the subject for almost 50 years at three Australian universities.

In the post-World War II period, significant shifts have occurred in the place of Indigenous servicemen and servicewomen in the Australian armed forces.

One of the key lessons of Kautilya’s great manual of statecraft, the Arthashastra, is that the effective management of an adversary often involves allying with one’s enemy’s enemies. But as Avinash Paliwal’s rich and readable book shows, this is easier said than done.

How well did former diplomat Sir Keith Waller measure up against the three duties of the diplomat outlined by Arthur Balfour and the dictum of Talleyrand? An extract from his biography explains.