Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.–Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Research and analysis of the post-Soviet Russian experience of political, economic and social change have generally focused attention on the complications and influences of the Soviet legacy on the transition process with most early main stream studies emphasizing the difficulties of the adoption of the institutions of democracy and a free market economy to the centralized command and control legacy structures carried over from that adjacent system to the more recent analyses that have attempted to explain why the Putinist hybrid authoritarian democracy emerged to take control of the Russian state. The complex nature of the Russian experience of political, social and economic change had yet to be explained as a long-term legacy analysis until now with the linkages presented in this study of the legacies and structures that have defied attempts at reform by the Bolsheviks, the Soviets and the modern Republicans. The political geography of Russia represents a districting system that defines the people and places and represents an influential legacy structure that has had a long reach from the Russia of Imperialism to the Russia of Putinism and the twenty first century. A clearer understanding of the influences the Imperial legacy brings to the Russian transformation enables the student of post-Soviet Russian transition an opportunity to contextualize the strong linkages of historical governance structures with the one hundred years of Bolshevik and Soviet system capture and the struggles of transformation faced by the government and people of Russia today.

This book analyzes the process of evaluating Iran’s nuclear project and the efforts to roll it back, resulting in the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA). Despite its aura of scientific exactitude, nuclear intelligence is complex and susceptible to methodological disagreements and political bias at the international oversight level—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—and within the countries involved in the rollback project – Israel and the United States. To highlight both the technological problems of assessing compliance and the politicization, each chapter in the book uses a real-time comparison of the nuclear developments in Iran, and the perception of Israel and the United States. This methodology yielded some significant results. Essentially, two camps had formed in each country; those who were pushing for an agreement with Iran and those who opposed it. The Israeli intelligence agencies – the Mossad and the Military Intelligence – as well as the highly secretive Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) which advised them considered the program to be weak and slow moving. The right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Iran was steps away from the “point of no return,” making it an existential threat to Israel. A virtually identical split emerged in Washington. While the intelligence community and the advising scientists from the National Nuclear Laboratories, considered Iran progress to be relatively modest, the Republicans and the Israel lobby - the Jewish organizations and the Christian Zionists— warned of the imminent danger of a nuclear Iran. With the Obama administration pushing for the JCPOA, a fierce debate took place in Congress. The Israeli intelligence and military chiefs led by the Mossad chief Meir Dagan, which had previously blocked Netanyahu from a preemptive action, quietly supported the agreement. In Washington, the Israel lobby, and the Republicans, helped by Netanyahu, mounted an all-out effort to defeat the deal in Congress. The pro-deal coalition fought back by mobilizing the scientific community, military and intelligence officials, the business lobby, and grassroots Democrats. The JCPOA represents the first successful effort of peaceful counterproliferation. At the same, excessive politicization has clouded its legitimacy and cast doubt about its future.