The five titles shortlisted for the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize look to the recent past for lessons for our collective future.

The $15,000 prize, awarded annually to a nonfiction book in English, was established in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber and aims to recognize the world’s best nonfiction book written in English on global affairs. The prize is presented by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Foreign Policy magazine.

This year’s shortlisted titles are:

• To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa, by Emily Bass (Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group)
• The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, by Rush Doshi (Oxford University Press)
• Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Random House)
• The American War in Afghanistan: A History, by Carter Malkasian (Oxford University Press)
• In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, by Jeffrey Veidlinger (HarperCollins)

The shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of Canadian political scientist Janice Gross Stein, American journalist and author Janine Di Giovanni, American historian Francis J. Gavin, American scholar James Goldgeier, and Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders.

The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on April 12.