Sean Malloy's recent work Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the transnational dimensions of the black power movement. Studying the Black Panther Party through an international lens, Malloy brings new understandings to how the BPP's leaders developed their ideologies within the context of global events and actions. Malloy argues,

While much scholarship on the BPP has focussed on their domestic policies and placed tremendous emphasis on their responses to local conditions and concerns, Malloy adds important perspective on how an international focus and ideological frameworks influenced BPP actions and ideas. Compared to more static assessments of Black Panther Party internationalism, Malloy highlights the dynamic nature of the BPP's theoretical and practical international ideology. Of note, Malloy highlights Eldridge Cleaver's intellectual transformation as he found himself exiled from the US to Cuba, and eventually Algeria. Malloy chronicles how the BPP's leaders, acutely aware of changing geopolitical relations sparked by the Sino-Soviet split, and, later, Nixon's engagement with China, reshaped their own international strategies to better engage these new realities. In doing so, Malloy highlights the real accomplishments (raising awareness and gaining credibility) and limits (unequal engagement and lack of backing for domestic action) that came from working with supranational organizations – like the UN – and geopolitical rivals to the United States – like Cuba.

Where Malloy's work shines brightest is in the epilogue. In assessing the legacy of the BPP, Malloy concedes that the Panthers largely failed in their efforts to bring about revolutionary change to American systems, but calls on readers to critically assess the success of alternative approaches. With the rise of mass incarceration, the persistence of black poverty and police violence, Malloy challenges the notion that liberal approaches have found much more success than the Panthers and their call for revolution. Drawing on lessons stemming from the BPP's shortcomings, he notes the ways in which contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter have avoided the pitfalls of male-dominated, hierarchal leadership, but still provides a note of caution at the way capitalist structures have made inroads into coopting and disempowering the movement.

Malloy's largely intellectual-history approach relies on a mixture of writings from Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, and a thorough examination of BPP newspapers and publications. While focussed on the ideas of BPP leaders, Malloy attempts to bridge the theory and practice of the BPP by chronicling the way their connections to international allies in anticolonial struggles created tangible changes in actions within the organization. In this effort, Malloy encounters his greatest difficulty. Beyond highlighting the depth of the conflict over shifting strategies between leaders of the BPP, the internationalism that altered the ideologies of Cleaver, in particular, is largely absent from the day-to-day operations of the Oakland-based organization as chronicled in this account. Nevertheless, this work provides an invaluable contribution to scholars’ understandings of the important influence geopolitical developments and internationalist ideologies had in shaping the BPP and the black power movement as a whole.