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On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the eras great transatlantic Greyhoundsthe fastest liner then in serviceand her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwiegers U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly smallhubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and moreall converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but dont, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.

El Salvador’s civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later.It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorising and targetingof civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death anddisappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador’s vibrantlife-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict—includingmemoirs and testimonials—Erik Ching seeks to understand how thewar has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what thatmeans for their society today.Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate nationalpostwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, andworking class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories,these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a “narrative battle”for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in themarketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans’ attempts to negotiate thewar’s meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinatedreconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime,El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma,is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus ofneoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

El Salvador’s civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later.It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorising and targetingof civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death anddisappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador’s vibrantlife-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict—includingmemoirs and testimonials—Erik Ching seeks to understand how thewar has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what thatmeans for their society today.Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate nationalpostwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, andworking class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories,these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a “narrative battle”for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in themarketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans’ attempts to negotiate thewar’s meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinatedreconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime,El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma,is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus ofneoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

Cowinner of the APSA Conflict Processes Section Book AwardIn The Remote Revolution Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security – but not in ways one would expect. Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decision-makers to deploy military force. Yet as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are in fact less likely to evolve into broader, more intense conflicts than similar operations involving traditionally crewed assets. Even as drones increase the frequency of conflict, the decreased costs of their operations reduces the likelihood of conflict escalation.Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of US and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. First, they enable states to gather more or better intelligence that may avert or reduce the chances of high-stakes conflict. Second, drone attacks are less likely to affront a target state's honor and therefore less likely to provoke aggressive responses. Lastly, leaders are less likely to take escalatory actions when drones are attacked than they are with incidents involving inhabited assets.Lin-Greenberg's findings prove conclusively that drones are far less destabilizing than commonly argued. Drones add rungs to the proverbial "escalation ladder" and, in doing so, have brought about a fundamental change – a revolution – in the character of statecraft. With the use of unmanned technologies only set to grow in coming times, The Remote Revolution is critical reading about their possibilities and politics.