In my conversation with Prof. Emmanuel Y. Lartey about his new book, Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures: Sacred Wisdom for the Care of Persons in an Intercultural World, published by Georgetown University Press in 2026.

Our conversation highlighted the importance of taking African religious worlds seriously, not merely as objects of academic study but as rich sources of knowledge about care, healing, suffering, community, spirituality, and human flourishing.

Prof. Lartey’s work challenges long-standing stereotypes that have often shaped the study of African religions. The book highlights the depth and diversity of African spiritual traditions, including practices related to ancestors, healing, ceremonies, the afterlife, and experiences of evil.

For me, this conversation also resonates with a question that runs through much of my work: What can we learn when we take seriously how people understand and practise care, healing, and well-being?

Across African and diasporic communities, religion is not merely a matter of belief. It can be how they make sense of their lives, navigate suffering, sustain relationships, and imagine possibilities for healing.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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France is a leading intelligence power, but we know very little about its premier intelligence agency: the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE). Damien Van Puyvelde's latest book, The DGSE: A Concise History of France's Foreign Intelligence Service (Georgetown University Press, 2026), examines France's foreign intelligence service from its rebranding as the DGSE in 1982 to the present.

It covers the legacies of the Second World War, how decolonization and the Cold War shaped the organization, the organization's workforce and leadership, as well as public and (pop) cultural perceptions and representations of intelligence in France. The emergence of the DGSE, following the election of socialist President Mitterrand, opened an era of change, marked by a series of reorganizations and new threats over the horizon. Some readers will recall the Rainbow Warrior fiasco, when DGSE operators sank Greenpeace's flagship, causing the death of a photographer in 1985. Others will be more familiar with the popular TV show The Bureau, which portrays the lives of non-official cover DGSE officers operating in contemporary hotspots. These vignettes, just like much of the media coverage, paint a misleading portrait of the DGSE as a group of dedicated but reckless officers. Van Puyvelde shows how France's leading intelligence agency has successfully adapted to political and security requirements from the late Cold War to today's international security threats.

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The development of the Russian military's strategic thought is an understudied and thus misunderstood subject in the West. Strategy in Russia encompasses the broader context of foreign and domestic policy as well as the military's ties to the country's leadership. The military's strategic thought is closely linked to Russia's existence as a state and explains patterns of Russian confrontation.

In Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War (Georgetown UP, 2025), the renowned scholar Gudrun Persson offers novel insights into Russian military thought on doctrine and strategy, from the Crimean War to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Persson dismantles the simplistic notion that Russian military thought is "backward," instead presenting a deeper analysis of the drivers that influence the changes in Russian military strategy. Through archival research based on Russian language sources, Persson offers a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on theoretical insights from history and political science that enable her to make a nuanced, qualitative analysis.

This book will be essential reading for practitioners, scholars, and students who seek to understand the mind-set of the current Russian leadership and the constraints that shape Russia's future possibilities.
Gudrun Persson is an associate professor of Slavic studies at Stockholm University. She is the author of Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking 1859–1873 and a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of War Sciences, Chatham House, and the Swedish Writers' Union.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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