The Architects of International Relations: Building a Discipline, Designing the World, 1914–1940. By Jan Stöckmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 280p. $110.00 cloth.

author rightly notes herself when citing M. B. Sattar’s 2020 bookGreed and Politics Is Burning Down the Lungs of the Earth in the discussion of climate politics in Brazil, “the Brazilian people ... were aware of [Bolsonaro’s] intension to destroy large parts of the Amazon rainforest to make way for capitalist development” (p. 112 [p. 44 in Sattar 2020]) and still elected him. Moreover, in all three cases that the author discusses, these were citizens that willingly brought all their political leaders to power, which brings up a question of why people elect leaders that act against collectively beneficial goals. In view of this, what could have been mentioned more explicitly, given that the author discusses the importance of a free press, is the information manipulation that influences people’s policy priorities and political choices. On a similar note, some political scientists might disagree with Darian-Smith over her conceptualization of authoritarian rule. While countries governed by “freemarket authoritarianism,” as classified by Darian-Smith, have embarked on a path of democratic backsliding, it is somewhat preliminary to call them authoritarian. The links between corporations and governments in Brazil, the United States, and Australia might not be a question of a regime type but of economic structures in these countries. As a result of these economic structures, countries underprovide policies that could help deal with climate change and prevent the suffering of societies, but, again, the underprovision of certain policies does not necessarily make political regimes undemocratic. Despite these ambiguities, the bookmakes an important contribution to both political science and interdisciplinary discourses on climate politics. It clearly demonstrates the vicious circle of how right-wing populists that gain more power every year can signal their support to corporations with antienvironmental interests and thus exacerbate the problems of both climate change and inequality, which makes the impacts of climate change more catastrophic. Such illustrations are crucial for developing our understanding of how to break this pattern. Perhaps not explicitly, the book also makes an important contribution to the long-standing debate on whether democracy is a suitable system for tackling climate change or whether it should be replaced with a more efficient authoritarian alternative. The book points to the fact that the shift to authoritarianism in the modern age is driven by populist leaders whose common feature is not only ultranationalism but also antienvironmentalism and withdrawal from multilateralism. As climate change is a global problem that requires multilateral agreements and compliance with these agreements through countries’ environmental political agendas, the current form of authoritarianism, toward which many democracies are sliding, is certainly not the answer. Future research can draw inspiration from DarianSmith’s book and continue exploring the links between right-wing populism, antienvironmentalism, and inequality in other countries to confirm that these worrying trends are a regularity and are not bound to the selected cases. Future studies can also explore whether connections between corporations with environmental interests, such as renewable energy businesses, and their sitting governments, can bring hope for climate action.