Adelphi series
About the Book Series
The Adelphi series is The International Institute for Strategic Studies' flagship contribution to policy-relevant, original academic research.
Six books are published each year. They provide rigorous analysis of contemporary strategic and defence topics that is useful to politicians and diplomats, as well as academic researchers, foreign-affairs analysts, defence commentators and journalists.
Planning for Protraction: A Historically Informed Approach to Great-power War and Sino-US Competition
1st Edition
By Iskander Rehman
November 09, 2023
As Sino-US relations have deteriorated, concerns have grown in Washington over its ability to defeat China in a major conflict. A conflict between such peer competitors would likely become a protracted war of attrition drawing on all dimensions of national power, but this reality has yet to receive...
Changing the Narrative: Information Campaigns, Strategy and Crisis Escalation in the Digital Age
1st Edition
By Lawrence Freedman, Heather Williams
March 22, 2023
Narratives provide the storylines of conflict and in doing so become an arena of conflict themselves. When states mount information campaigns against each other, they are trying to change the narrative. The digital platforms of the new information environment have been identified by various ...
Australia’s Security in China’s Shadow
1st Edition
By Euan Graham
March 21, 2023
A major shift in the paradigm undergirding relations between Australia and China has become clear in the early 2020s, with geopolitical concerns trumping economic considerations. Canberra has implemented a range of new policies in response to the risks it perceives in Australia’s economic relations...
The Digital Silk Road: China’s Technological Rise and the Geopolitics of Cyberspace
1st Edition
Edited
By David Gordon, Meia Nouwens
November 29, 2022
Concerns about China’s ambitions to return to global centre stage as a great power have recently begun to focus on the Digital Silk Road (DSR), an umbrella term for various activities – commercial and diplomatic – of interest to the Chinese government in the cyber realm. Part of (or a spin-off from...
Overseas Bases and US Strategy: Optimising America’s Military Footprint
1st Edition
By Jonathan Stevenson
August 01, 2022
Overseas military bases have been the bedrock of the United States’ ability to project military power, exert political influence and deter potential adversaries since the Second World War. But fatigue with America’s ‘forever wars’, as well as more nuanced financial and strategic reasons, has ...
Japan’s Effectiveness as a Geo-Economic Actor: Navigating Great-Power Competition
1st Edition
By Yuka Koshino, Robert Ward
April 05, 2022
Geo-economic strategy – deploying economic instruments to secure foreign-policy aims and to project power – has long been a key element of statecraft. In recent years, it has acquired even greater salience given China’s growing antagonism with the United States and the willingness of both Beijing ...
Asia’s New Geopolitics: Military Power and Regional Order
1st Edition
By Desmond Ball, Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Tim Huxley, C. Raja Mohan, Brendan Taylor
September 29, 2021
Intensifying geopolitical rivalries, rising defence spending and the proliferation of the latest military technology across Asia suggest that the region is set for a prolonged period of strategic contestation. None of the three competing visions for the future of Asian order – a US-led ‘Free and ...
The Responsibility to Defend: Rethinking Germany's Strategic Culture
1st Edition
By Bastian Giegerich, Maximilian Terhalle
June 09, 2021
The rise or resurgence of revisionist, repressive and authoritarian powers threatens the Western, US-led international order upon which Germany’s post-war security and prosperity were founded. With Washington increasingly focused on China’s rise in Asia, Europe must be able to defend itself against...
French Arms Exports: The Business of Sovereignty
1st Edition
By Lucie Béraud-Sudreau
March 26, 2020
Ever since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958, France has believed its strategic independence to be predicated on self-sufficiency in modern weapons. In order to maintain the requisite defence-industrial base, in the context of limited domestic orders, successive governments have ...
A Historical Sensibility: Sir Michael Howard and The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1958–2019
1st Edition
By Michael Howard, Benjamin Rhode
February 17, 2020
With the death of Professor Sir Michael Howard, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) lost not only its president emeritus but the last of its founders and intellectual parents. The foremost military historian of his generation, Sir Michael embodied and epitomised a historical ...
Europe's Strategic Future: From Crisis to Coherence?
1st Edition
By Sarah Raine
June 05, 2019
Europe has suffered a decade of crises, with sovereign-debt troubles leading to austerity policies that exacerbated divisions inside member states and between them. Thereafter the Union was confronted with the challenges posed by a revanchist Russia in Ukraine and by a surge in migration from the ...
Uncertain Future: The JCPOA and Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Programmes
1st Edition
By Mark Fitzpatrick, Michael Elleman, Paulina Izewicz
January 17, 2019
In July 2015, eight parties – France, Germany and the United Kingdom, together with the European Union and China, Russia and the United States on the one side, and Iran on the other – adopted the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal. Under the agreement,...