Join us as CIC Victoria branch president and Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy Fellow, Chris Kilford, meets with Hannah Lucinda Smith to discuss her latest book Hinterlands – The New Cold War Brewing at the Peripheries of the West.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, a Pulitzer grantee and acclaimed foreign correspondent, has devoted well over a decade to intrepid, on-the-ground reporting where few dare travel: the small, often disputed territories at the edges of Europe and Russia, spanning Cyprus, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Her latest book, Hinterlands, offers a rare glimpse into the ghost towns of Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the cryptocurrency farms of Transnistria, the brittle border communities of Bosnia and its Republika Srpska, and the enclaves of Northern Cyprus that Russian oligarchs call home. In rarely seen places in Crimea and the Caucasus, frontiers have shifted and new countries have been made. Informed by her encounters with politicians, combatants, and the ordinary people caught in the crosshairs, she paints a vivid portrait of the places where geopolitical alliances are forged and broken. Her account of events in the gray zones of Eurasia gives vital context to our rapidly changing world and sounds a clear-eyed, urgent warning: We ignore the hinterlands at our own peril.

Hannah is also the author of Erdogan Rising, an account of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power, and Zarifa, the memoir of Afghan human rights activist Zarifa Ghafari.