The shortlist for the 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize has been announced by jury chair Janice Gross Stein. The five titles – selected by Stein (the Belzberg professor of conflict and global affairs at the University of Toronto, and founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs) and a jury comprising international academics Ramachandra Guha of India; Desmond King of Oxford, U.K.; David M. Malone of Tokyo; and Jeannette Money of the U.S. – represent the best in the year’s English-language non-fiction on foreign affairs. No Canadians appear on this year’s shortlist.

The finalists are:

• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Raincoast Books)
• Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum (Signal/McClelland & Stewart)
• The Future of War: A History by Lawrence Freedman (PublicAffairs/Hachette Book Group)
• The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (Simon & Schuster)
• Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century by Richard McGregor (Viking/PRHC)

The winner will be announced March 13 and is invited to speak at a free public event at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto on April 17. Podcasts with each of the five shortlisted authors in conversation with Robert Steiner, founder of the fellowships in global journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs, are available for download in iTunes.

Founded in honour of Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber in 1989 with an aim to increase awareness and public debate on significant global issues, the $15,000 award is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Foundation in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine.