📚 Books
Political Risk by Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart
This book specifically focuses on political and geopolitical risks to corporations.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy Zegart
Zegart provides brilliant scholarship on how new technologies, especially AI, are changing intelligence analysis and collection for both the government and private sector. 

No Higher Honor by Condoleezza Rice
This is the former Secretary of State’s memoir, but it reads more like a foreign policy book that explores important diplomatic, security, and geopolitical issues. Rice’s writing style makes the prose easily consumable for readers.

Just War Against Terror by Jean Bethke Elshtain
Ethical concerns are a critical aspect of security discussions. In this book, Elshtain applies Augustinian just war theory to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but she also uses theorists and theologians like Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to explore the ethics of violence.

Making War to Keep Peace by Jeane Kirkpatrick
Following the Cold War, American foreign policy ran into several problems. Kirkpatrick provides a survey of American military operations from 1991-2003 and demonstrates how mismatching force with political objectives leads to loss.

What Terrorists Want by Louise Richardson
Richardson gives an excellent introduction to the topic, history, and behavior of terrorists. This book is useful for creating a base framework of information.

Oil, the State, and War by Emma Ashford
Ashford is a scholar focusing on the global oil market and geopolitics, and this book explores the geopolitical implications of oil production and export in states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth
Cybersecurity includes a marketplace for offensive tools, and Perlroth documents how governments and hackers buy and sell these tools that can cause significant damage. There are several fascinating episodes where she describes attending literal marketplaces and meeting with some of the major black and white hat hackers. 

SPQR by Mary Beard
No education in security is complete without understanding the Roman Republic and empire, and Beard is a leading scholar on the subject. This is one of the best one-volume works on ancient Rome that anyone can read.

Deep Dive by Rae Baker
OSINT is primarily about a mindset, and Baker’s book focuses on several anecdotes to demonstrate how to apply that mindset while using the best available tools. This is an especially useful book to learn how to do OSINT and apply the mindset.