New Books in Political Science

The Crisis of American Political Economy: On the New Conservative Policy Agenda with Chris Griswold

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this sixth episode of Season 5, I interview Mr. Chris Griswold. An alum of Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was formerly a senior advisor to then Senator Marco Rubio, and is currently the Policy Director for American Compass—a leading center-right public policy think-tank.

Recently, he contributed to the book, The New Conservatives (2025), an anthology edited by his colleague, Oren Cass, that re-articulates a conservative economic vision for the country. Drawing on it, we discuss the crisis of America’s political economy, from questions surrounding current AI, automation, and the end of free trade; political instability and populism; how economic policy can best serve American workers and families; and what makes us hopeful for the country’s future during its 250th anniversary.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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The Information State: How is the State Surveilling and Manipulating us These Days?

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny interviews Jacob Siegel, writer, Army veteran, and author of The Information State. Siegel traces how military information operations, post‑9/11 surveillance programs, and Silicon Valley’s rise converged to create a new public‑private regime of control over information, attention, and consent. He discusses the intellectual roots of technocratic governance from Francis Bacon and Leibniz through progressivism, World War I propaganda, and cybernetics, and explains how the “information state” differs from classical authoritarianism. Finally, Siegel reflects on Trumpism, the tech counter‑elite around figures like Elon Musk, and how AI may usher in a more “Pharaonic” and quasi‑spiritual form of politics beyond traditional expert‑driven technocracy.

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Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands.

The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Professor Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Professor Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Dr. Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ladder or Lottery? Gary Hoover on the Consequences of Broken Economic Promises

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Gary Hoover about his new book, Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead (University of California Press, 2026). Gary is Professor of Economics and Executive Director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. One of the most challenging aspects of life is that sometimes, despite our very best efforts, we still miss the mark. Life can feel like a lottery, where success comes down to luck or the privilege to have the resources to buy as many lottery tickets as possible. For some, life appears like a ladder. No matter where you start, all you need to do is climb to get to the top. These metaphors encapsulate the dilemmas explored by Gary in his important work, as he examines in a variety of case studies whether economic conditions look more like a ladder or more like a lottery. When enough people feel that the system is more like a lottery than a ladder, social order breaks down, protests erupt, and, on occasion, revolutions take place. To take on this weighty topic, I’m thrilled today to have Gary Hoover on the podcast.

Gary A. Hoover is Executive Director of the Murphy Institute, Professor of Economics, and Affiliate Professor of Law at Tulane University.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz, "The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge" (U California Press, 2026)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The global refugee regime has shifted under our feet. Over the last forty years, international asylum practices have expanded to include the queer and trans displaced. At least thirty-seven countries now recognize LGBTIQ refugees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, with some states providing specialized support. Yet amid this expansion, backlash has intensified against refugee protection as well as the hard-earned rights of LGBTIQ people. In this disquieting context, the protection of LGBTIQ refugees remains partial and exclusionary.

The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge (University of California Press, 2026) examines the complexities of queer and trans displacement around the world. Centering personal narratives of LGBTIQ refugees, the book exposes the shortcomings of an international protection regime that is unable to address the harms that drive displacement.

Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz's analysis of the stakes of queer and trans inclusion in accounts of displacement justice offers a vibrant example of theory brought to life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has been published in 2025 by Oxford University Press.

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Jane Vaynman, "Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how uncertainty from domestic political changes, such as leadership transitions or social unrest, can enable arms control.

The book identifies two paths to agreement: during periods of uncertainty, states that previously relied on informal understandings hedge by establishing lightly monitored agreements, while those that anticipated deception take calculated risks through agreements with intensive verification.

Through comprehensive data analysis and rich case studies, Jane Vaynman challenges conventional wisdom about uncertainty in international relations while offering policymakers insights. As states confront challenges from nuclear competition to emerging technologies, understanding when arms control becomes viable is more vital than ever.
Our guest is Professor Jane Vaynman, an Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)"

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found its way into popular discourse as well as academic work and was somewhat unclear in terms of application and understanding. Kessel notes in the book and in our conversations that her thinking about the idea of rape culture owes a great deal to black feminists who had been writing about and discussing the underlying issue at the heart of rape culture, which is not just about violence against women, but more broadly about the political, societal, and cultural dimensions of domination, victimhood, and human value. Rape Fantasies develops this understanding and provides fascinating examples of this intersectional concept. One of the key claims of the book is that sexual violence is not accidental, it is not necessarily based on physical urges that just cannot be controlled; it is, instead, based in the dynamic of political domination thus making rape itself a political act. Part of the unexamined problem with rape is that it is built around an entitlement to dominate, which also makes the threat of sexual violence a political act. Rape Fantasies traces this idea through a number of different case studies that unpack the dimensions of this threat of sexual violence in a variety of circumstances and situations, tied, inevitably, to the duality of domination and subordination or victimization, which is also wrapped up with questions of who is deserving of protection and who is not as deserving.

Kessel explains that in examining sexual violence, what she found was multifaceted reflections and refractions, since the issue and the individual’s experience with sexual violence are neither simple nor linear. And the examples and case studies that make up the thrust of the book present this multidimensional nature of sexual violence. This multifaceted thinking about sexual violence also integrates an intersectional analysis, drawing on work from indigenous studies, feminist and women’s studies, feminist theory, black feminism, political theory and other connected schools of thought. The interrogation of rape and rape culture, particular in context of the political valence, “occurs across multiple axes of oppression, including white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, cisgender, settler colonial, and capitalist axes.”[1] The case study examples in Rape Fantasies include bathroom bills across the states, the idea of the frontier and modes of extraction, consent contracts and consent apps, and OnlyFans and intimacy on demand. Each example is deeply researched and unpacked, providing the reader with historical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and societal analyses of these complex areas of domination and entitlement.

Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence is an expansive undertaking, bringing together theoretical frameworks from different schools of thought and analysis, threaded with important case studies that help the reader think deeply about this concept and how it is operationalized in our daily lives. Even if we are not aware of these narratives, they surround us and shape so much of our thinking about how the world works. And why sexual violence remains so persistent.

Susan Liebell is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Lilly J. Goren is a Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

[1] Alisa Kessel. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Oxford University Press, 2025. p. 6.

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Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer, "The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Dr. Larry M. Bartels and Dr. Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation (U Chicago Press, 2026), it was Americans’ diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil.

Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans’ political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer supplement this historical record with in-depth interviews with dozens of the original students, painting a detailed picture of the generation’s individual and collective political development. By tracing the responses of the Class of ’65 to major events of their political lifetimes—including the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, the Vietnam War, the shifting role of religion, escalating economic inequality, immigration, and the rise of Donald Trump—Dr. Bartels and Dr. Cramer shed new light on the evolution of public opinion and the unsteady progress of American democracy.

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Daniel A. Bell, "Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Daniel A. Bell joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future (Princeton UP, 2026). This isn't your standard, dusty history — it’s a series of modernized dialogues that grew out of Bell’s own classroom at the University of Hong Kong. In this episode, Daniel tells us about the time he spent as an academic Dean at Shandong University, and where he saw firsthand how ancient Legalist ideas about strict punishment were making everyday life, and even faculty meals, feel rigid and 'joyless'. We talk about why he chose to write the book as a 'heavyweight match' between the descendants of thinkers like Confucius and Zhuangzi, and why he believes the ancient concept of 'harmony' is actually about celebrating differences rather than enforcing sameness. Whether we're talking about the 'fire exit' of modern divorce laws or the high stakes of corruption in Beijing, Daniel shows why these ancient voices are still the most relevant ones in the room.

The book is an entertaining introduction to ancient Chinese thinkers, and what they can teach us about today’s most pressing political questions in China and beyond. China’s most original, diverse, and fascinating political debates took place more than two millennia ago, but they have profoundly shaped Chinese political thinking and practice ever since and, remarkably, their influence on the country’s leaders is only growing today. Yet these timeless debates which are very likely to influence the answers to such questions as whether China should use military force to take control of Taiwan seem far too little understood in the West. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Professor Bell takes the greatest thinkers from China’s past — Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi—and puts them in dialogue with each other in modern settings.

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Victor Li, "Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) examines the 1930 Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a turning point in American judicial politics. Alarmed by some of his past statements and opinions, labor and civil rights groups mounted a fierce campaign to block his confirmation. Not only was control of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, but Parker's nomination symbolized a profound clash of ideologies, political agendas, economic doctrines, and interpretations of the Constitution. Their efforts sparked a dramatic Senate revolt, marking the first successful grassroots campaign to block a Supreme Court nominee.

By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose rulings helped shape the South's legal response to Brown v. Board of Education. Beyond the nomination fight, it delves into Parker's political campaigns, judicial opinions, and relationships with key public figures, charting his dramatic rise, humiliating defeat, and enduring influence.

Packed with intrigue, strategy, and the clash of competing ideologies, this is the story of how one nomination forever changed the rules of the game.

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Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.
Lisa Siraganian’s The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots (Verso, 2026) reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand’s Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Siraganian uncovers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, “she” is transformed into a subject in the law without the corresponding legal duties that protect us from her.
At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA). Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

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Radio ReOrient 14.2: State of the Ummah: Authoritarianism and Resistance: Bangladesh and Pakistan, Hosted by SherAli Tahreen and Shehla Khan, with Tanzeen Doha and Salman Sayyid

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Radio ReOrient’ s occasional series The State of the Ummah, SherAli Tahreen, Shehla Khan, Tanzeen Doha, and Salman Sayyid unpack the intertwined stories of authoritarianism and resistance in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Moving beyond Orientalism, methodological nationalism, and Indological approaches, they explore Bangladesh’s relative success in overthrowing Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule, while Pakistan continues to suffer under a Khaki-Kleptocratic regime, one example of whose many cruelties is the inhumane imprisonment of the deposed Prime Minister Imran Khan.

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The Green Transition and the Politics of Lithium Extraction

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Lithium is necessary for the green transition but its mining comes with significant environmental and social harms. This is the conundrum at the core of decarbonisation, which host Licia Cianetti discusses with Thea Riofrancos. They talk about how Riofrancos’s book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (published by W.W. Norton in 2025) helps us understand the local and global politics of lithium extraction and the lessons it holds for a more just green transition.

Transcript here

Thea Riofrancos is Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. She researches the politics of climate change and of resource extraction and is also the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019)

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

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Thorsten Gromes, "Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases" (Springer, 2026)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases (Springer, 2026) examines one of the most important questions in peace research: What leads to enduring peace after civil wars, and what leads to the resurgence of violence? For decades, intrastate conflicts have been the predominant form of armed conflict, and most recent civil wars were conflicts that recurred. The research presented in this book focuses on influenceable factors, first and foremost on the type of civil war termination and on the post-civil war order that is shaped by the distribution of military power between the former warring parties and the scale of political compromise. Moreover, it shows that the peacekeeping environment has a major influence on whether peace endures.The insights provided in this book are relevant for the academic community, and for decision-makers and practitioners involved in civilian or military efforts to establish and preserve peace.

Thorsten Gromes is a Project Leader and Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt's (PRIF) Research Department Intrastate Conflicts. His research focuses on post-civil war societies and so-called humanitarian military interventions.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recommendations:

Sixteen Million One: Understanding Civil War by Patrick M. Regan
How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara Walter
Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Christopher Blattman

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Andrew Thomas Park, "Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War (Cambridge UP, 2026) Dr. Andrew Park tells the story of the rise and fall of the plebiscite, once seen as a promising democratic solution to international conflict which – more than once – became embroiled in controversy and war in the first half of the twentieth century. The book's central figure is the brilliant but largely forgotten American scholar Sarah Wambaugh, the leading expert on the plebiscite technique whose dramatic career took her to many of the world's political hotspots. The norms she developed for the technique continue to shape how self-determination and popular suffrage in international affairs are thought about and conducted today. In a world where borders are again being redrawn by force and democracy everywhere appears under strain, this book is a timely and compelling reminder that such events are not new.

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Ho-fung Hung, "The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

"The contempt and naive idealization of China are two sides of the same coin. The latter cannot be an antidote to the former."

So argues Ho-Fung Hung in the conclusion of The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2026). For centuries, Western scholars portrayed China either as a land of superior morality, economy, and governance or as a formidable country of pagans that posed a global threat to Western values. Idealized images of China were used to shame rulers for their incompetence, while China was demonized as an external threat to cover up domestic political failures. In the twentieth century, the geopolitics of global capitalism have facilitated more nuanced perspectives, but the diversifying of knowledge about China is far from complete. In this thought-provoking study, Ho-fung Hung finds that both Western elites and China's authoritarian regime today continue to promote many Orientalist stereotypes to advance their economic interests and political projects. He shows how big-picture historical, social, and economic changes are inextricably linked to fluctuations in the realm of ideas. Only open debate can overcome extremes of fantasy and fear.

Ho-Fung Hung is Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Colombian village of Briceño might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely on small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed hydroelectric dam threatens traditional livelihoods. Yet after decades where Briceño suffered from a bloody conflict, the village has more recently become central to the nation’s hopes for peace. In Governing the Excluded, sociologist Alex Diamond shares a closer look at Briceño and offers unique insight not only into the contemporary Colombian state but to how people across the Global South are struggling to maintain rural livelihoods amid economic dispossession.
Governing the Excluded describes a landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the radical FARC guerrillas from the perspective of Colombian farmers, drawing links between economic transformation, drug economies, and armed conflict. Exclusion from global markets for traditional crops like coffee first pushed farmers to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. This ushered in an era of violent conflict for control of the illicit economy, while farmers continued to be priced out of legal markets. In exchange for peace and state protection, farmers ultimately agreed to sacrifice profitable coca. But with its disappearance, they now find themselves dependent on the state: for machinery to maintain the roads they need to get legal harvests to market, municipal jobs that are the only decent work available, and for public resources to subsidize food crops with razor-thin profit margins. Ongoing economic struggles in the legal sector make the state’s newfound authority tenuous, as some villagers replant coca, abandon the village for uncertain urban futures, or join a rearmed guerrilla group.
Informed by deep ethnographic research and firsthand stories from Briceño residents, Governing the Excluded shows that when it comes to the forces driving dispossession—be they international corporate megaprojects, global food prices, or national initiatives to replace coca cultivation—state authority goes only so far as its ability to sustain local livelihoods.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Stephen Onyango Ouma, "Africa Unbound: Decolonial Pathways to Sovereignty and Liberation" (Brill, 2026)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

I had a substantive conversation with Dr. Stephen Onyango Ouma, author of Africa Unbound: Decolonial Pathways to Sovereignty and Liberation (Brill, 2026). He explained that, despite achieving political independence, African countries still experience significant colonial and neo-colonial influences in their economies, education systems, cultures, and political structures.

The book argues that genuine liberation must include economic independence, epistemic freedom, cultural reclamation, and Pan-African unity. Dr Ouma highlights the importance of revitalising indigenous knowledge systems, strengthening regional cooperation, and addressing dependencies that limit Africa's ability to determine its own path.

We discussed topics ranging from the lasting mental effects of colonialism to the potential of the AfCFTA, the rise of youth activism, and the key role African women play in liberation movements. It was a thoughtful look at what decolonisation should mean today.

For those interested in African philosophy, global politics, or contemporary decolonial thought, this book and the accompanying interview offer valuable insights.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Hilary Matfess, "After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

War offers opportunities for women to liberate their communities and build a better life for themselves. When women join rebel groups, they often take on new roles, cultivate new social networks, and develop new skills. These rebel women often gain the respect of rebel leaders, their comrades-in-arms, and the communities they're fighting for. When the guns are silenced, however, women have struggled to maintain the progress and prestige that they gained during war. Hilary Matfess investigates the gendered legacies of conflict and considers why it is so difficult for female veterans to defend the gains they made during war.

After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions (Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Hilary Matfess explores how both individual female veterans and former-rebel political parties balance the incentives to continue their wartime activities or moderate them to succeed in the postwar period. The particular balance struck—by party elites and by female veterans—shapes women's rights and representation after war. Drawing on cross-national statistics and in-depth qualitative case studies of rebel groups—from Ethiopia, Namibia, El Salvador, and Nepal—Dr. Matfess advances a theory to explain the postwar legacies of women's participation in rebellion at both the individual and the organizational levels. This book helps us understand why women that were once lauded as the backbone of the revolution are so frequently relegated to the backburner after war.

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Marta Lorimer, "Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.
Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.
Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation.

Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

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The Gen Z Revolution in Bangladesh and Its Fallout

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What role did Gen Z play in the popular uprising that led to the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime in the summer of 2024? And what marks have the uprising left on democratic politics in Bangladesh? We discuss these questions with Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan, and Ishrat Hossain whose work on the 2024 July Revolution appeared in a special issue of Journal of Bangladesh Studies in early 2026. We also discuss what the Gen Z Revolution can tell us more generally about processes of autocratization, resistance and mass protests in the contemporary world, and about the conditions under which popular mobilization can succeed in dislodging autocratic governments.

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway

Mubashar Hasan is Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Australia

Ishrat Hossain is an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway

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Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington

This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's ideas and those of a neglected 'post-modern' stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic 'scientism' and 'expert rule'; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of 'self-creation' in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power.
Part two combines the tools of Foucault's critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping 'bio-political' or 'pastoral' dispositifs in contemporary liberal societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the post-modern liberal approaches suggest that freedom requires a cultural and economic 'creative destruction' that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to 'monitor and correct' multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom.
Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition, and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a reconstituted or post-modern liberalism

Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, since 2012, and is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. Prior to King's he taught for twelve years in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.

On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible.

In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of public controversies featuring Allan Bloom, Oprah Winfrey, Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Betsy DeVos, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others. Beginning in the 1970s, Hlavacik shows, efforts at innovation in schooling have increasingly been met by attempts to discredit them through exposé. As the culture wars have accelerated and exploded, this cycle of innovation and exposé has embroiled public schools in increasingly heated debates. He explains the dynamics that make curriculum controversies so intractable and confronts the delicate question of whether raucous public arguments are bad for education. With clarity and insight, Hlavacik reveals why bitter contests between educational ideologies not only add another burden for the schools, but also for the people—the willing warriors—who devote their lives to fighting for their betterment.

Mark Hlavacik is assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform.

Laura Beth Kelly is an associate professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta eds., "Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Time spent and words spent—what does each signal?

Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign’ its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight), or to hide behind or besmirch the reputation of the model group (‘false-flag’ operations).

Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a theory and game-theoretic model of mimicry, an overview of its use through history, and a deep empirical exploration of its modern manifestations through several case studies by leading social scientists. The chapters cover mimicry in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, terrorism campaigns in 1970s Italy, the height of the Iraq insurgency, the Rwandan genocide, the Naxalite rebellion in India, and jihadi discussion forums on the Internet.

Thomas Hegghammer is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Sarah James, "The Politics of Failed Policies" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Politics of Failed Policies (Oxford UP, 2025) examines how the interplay of politics and data affects when failed policies get recognized. It shows how compelling data and analysis is an important political tool for highlighting failure. Importantly, the research demonstrates how data and analysis themselves are the products of political processes and reflections of those in power. Using case studies from education and juvenile criminal justice and tax policy, the book makes a theoretical contribution to the study of policymaking, state politics, and the role of knowledge and information in contemporary American politics.

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Maya L. Kornberg, "Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress" (JHU Press, 2026)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—and what that reveals about American democracy. Congress, the central democratic institution in the United States, is hanging on by a thread. On January 6, 2021, a violent attack on the Capitol Building left five people dead, and threats and attacks against politicians are on the rise. In Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress (JHU Press, 2026), Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change. The "Watergate babies" of 1974, the Contract with America conservatives of 1994, and the historic 2018 class fueled by backlash to Donald Trump all represent younger, more diverse, and less entrenched members who arrived in Washington energized and idealistic. Kornberg reveals the ways Congress has become increasingly inhospitable to change. Political violence, astronomical campaign costs, relentless fundraising demands, shrinking staff, and centralized party leadership all constrain the ability of new members to legislate and represent their constituents. Social media, while offering new platforms for political expression, has also heightened harassment and fed a performative culture that rewards spectacle over substance. Bolstered by dozens of interviews, congressional records, and the voices of lawmakers past and present—including Henry Waxman, Toby Moffett, Phil English, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lauren Underwood—Stuck offers a sobering portrait of a legislative body paralyzed by its own internal dynamics. Kornberg outlines tangible reforms that could restore Congress's capacity to function and amplify the power of its newest members. At a time when Americans are losing faith in democracy's most representative institution, Stuck makes the case for how it could be saved.

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Maya Kornberg is Senior Fellow and Manager in the Elections and Government program at the NYU Brennan Center for Justice. Her first book Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2025 WJM Mackenzie Book Prize.

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Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day and provide a sweeping view of his era.
Henry Kissinger is unquestionably one of the most consequential foreign policy makers in American history. A remarkably influential academic during his long tenure at Harvard, Kissinger became Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973.
Like Nixon, Kissinger left a trail of secretly recorded evidence in his wake. Kissinger began taping in 1969, two years before Nixon did in 1971, and he continued taping for over three years after Nixon's recording system was dismantled in 1973. In The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026), Tom Wells draws on his expertise in the Nixon era to provide carefully selected, edited, and annotated transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations, which chronologically highlight the most momentous crises and controversies of the era. They not only provide context and many revelations on Kissinger's role in numerous events but also throw his personality, character, and checkered record into sharp relief.
The conversations cover a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the India-Pakistan conflict, the opening to China, the Middle East, the Greek coup in Cyprus, the Nixon administration's illegal wiretapping, and the Watergate scandal. The transcripts reveal Kissinger's opinions and attitudes on important policy matters and his complex relationship with President Nixon, as well as the many battles he fought with other administration officials and his subtle manipulations of well-known journalists.
A richly detailed collection of Kissinger's transcripts and commentary, this book provides a novel window into the Nixon administration and offers a genuinely unique perspective on one of the most important figures in modern American history.

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How Authoritarians Exploit Gender

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Gender is becoming a central battleground in contemporary authoritarian politics, but how do autocrats manipulate these debates to their own advantage? Some regimes now pursue a double strategy of simultaneous “gender bashing” and “gender washing”: mobilising anti-gender rhetoric and “traditional values” to attack feminists and roll back equality, while at the same time promoting loyal women into prominent roles to project an image of modernity, reform, and inclusion at home and abroad. By combining repression with reputation laundering, they mask authoritarian practices and complicate the struggle for genuine gender equality. Join the People, Power, Politics podcast as we talk to Elin Bjarnegård and Pär Zetterberg about their latest Journal of Democracy article and explore how this mix of gender bashing and gender washing is reshaping the fight for equal rights and democratic politics.

Guest:

Elin Bjarnegård is a Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University specialising in gender and politics, political violence, and authoritarianism. Her research explores how gender norms shape political institutions and how formal and informal rules affect women’s political representation. She has written extensively on gendered power structures, clientelism, and the strategic manipulation of equality reforms. A leading scholar in the field, Bjarnegård’s work has been published in major academic journals and contributes to our understanding of how gender dynamics intersect with democratic decline and political reform.

Pär Zetterberg is a Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University specialising in elections, political representation, and democratic institutions. His research examines gender quotas, electoral systems, and the conditions under which institutional reforms strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. He has published widely on women’s political representation and the effects of electoral rules on inclusion and governance. Through his academic and policy engagement, Zetterberg has advanced debates on how representation can both support and be instrumentalised within contemporary political systems.

Presenter:

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

Transcript here.

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On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals’ a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. In our conversation, we discuss this proposition—including the forces that brought Trump to this role and the bleak destiny that typically greets “world-historical individuals.” Judis is the author of a number of books, including The Populist Explosion (Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

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Lucia Motolinia, "Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lucia Motolinia sheds light on these questions and more by explaining how parties can use personal vote-seeking incentives in order to decrease intra-party dissent. Studying a unique electoral reform in Mexico, the book provides a detailed description of how institutional incentives can conflict. It draws on a variety of rich, original data sources on legislative behavior and organization in 20 Mexican states to develop a novel explanation of how electoral reforms can amplify competing institutional incentives. In settings where legislative rules and candidate selection procedures favor parties, legislators may lack the resources necessary to build voter support. If this is the case, party leaders can condition access to these resources on loyalty to the party's political agenda.

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A Year of Autocratization: Steep Declines in Democracy Registered in 2025 V-Dem Report

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl speaks with Kenneth Roberts and Paul Friesen, democracy experts at Cornell University, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released V-Dem 2025 Report “ 25 Years of Autocratization.” Drawing on the survey’s global measure of changes in regime status across the world, we discuss the dramatic decline of democracy in the United States, and what dimensions are driving that erosion. We also discuss other big moves, from declines in India and Indonesia, to improvements in Poland and Guatemala. We conclude with an analysis of some signs of hope and what to anticipate in the year ahead for ongoing contestation in the US around democratic rights and institutional sites of contention.

Links:

V-Dem Democracy Report 2025: here

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Stephen G. Brooks, "The Political Economy of Security" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how various economic variables affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined.

Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoretical foundation for guiding future research on the economics-security interaction.

Drawing on Adam Smith, he provides a more complete range of answers to the three key conceptual questions analysts must consider: how economic goals relate to security goals; what economic factors to focus on; and how economic actors influence security policies.
Combining an innovative theoretical understanding with empirical rigor, Brooks’s account will reshape our understanding of the political economy of security.

Our guest is Professor Stephen Brooks, a Professor of Government at Dartmouth.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Sidra Hamidi, "After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Sidra Hamidi reveals how states contest their nuclear status in the atomic age. By examining the legal structure of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, technical ambiguities surrounding nuclear testing, and debates over rights and responsibilities in the global nuclear regime, Dr. Hamidi argues that a state's nuclear status is not simply a function of technical capability. Instead, states actively contest the way they want their nuclear status to be presented to the world, and powerful states like the US, either recognize or reject these formulations.

By analysing key diplomatic junctures in Indian, Israeli, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear history, this book presents a theory of when and how states contest their nuclear status which has key policy implications for negotiating with ostensible “rogues” such as Iran and North Korea.

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Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.

Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.

Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Piergiorgio Di Giminiani et al. eds., "The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multiple futures. In representing the experiences and hopes of those affected by political violence in El Salvador and Argentina, environmental harm in Guatemala and Peru, and colonial dispossession in Chile and Bolivia, reparations are built upon conflictive forms of future imagination, translation of harm and new forms of belonging to and beyond the nation state, which reifies as much as challenges state authority over the promises of actual repair. In today’s Latin American political debate, hopes for justice and democracy remain anchored to the question of the kinds of future that can be imagined through and after reparation. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Helene Risør, and Karine Vanthuyne discuss their edited volume, The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and co-editor of Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America.

Helene Risør is a teaching associate professor in anthropology and visiting research fellow at Copenhagen University. Professor Risør is also a senior researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research on Violence and Democracy based in Chile.

Professor Karine Vanthuyne is professor in Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. Professor Vanthuyne is the author of La presence d’un passé de violences: mémoires et identités autochtones dans le Guatemala postgénocide, as well as co-editor of Power through Testimony: Residential schools in the age of reconciliation in Canada.

Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Her research explores demands for reparations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Website here

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Our Age of War: A Discussion with Author Robert Pape

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has been writing about war for decades, including in his book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell University Press, 1996). In our conversation, we step back from the immediate conflict in Iran to reflect on what can be called our Age of War. We are in an era of chronic political violence, including in the United States, Pape notes—what he views as a Hobbesian period in global history. And there is not necessarily, he says, an end in sight.

Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs.

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

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Alex Powell, "Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration" (Bristol UP, 2026)

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Utilizing critical legal methodologies, Alex Powell's Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration (Bristol UP, 2026) gives a vital and needed analysis of migration and queer life. With deep consideration to the role of systemic disbelief, experiences of dispersal away from urban areas, contemporary shifts in liberal human rights regimes, and even the impact on legal practitioners in the system, Queering UK Refugee Law offers insight into both refugee policy and practice.

Through interviews, analyses of case law, and a rigorous application of queer theory, Powell gives readers an understanding of not just UK asylum law, but the bureaucracies, policies, and assumptions that shape it. From narratives to state understandings of 'credibility,' Powell demonstrates not just barriers to asylum claims on the basis of sexuality, but broader concerns around normative state conceptions of identity. Queering UK Refugee Law is a timely and critical work on sexuality, migration, and its intersections.

Alex Powell is an Associate Professor in Law at Warwick Law School. His research focuses on law, gender, sexuality and migration, particularly in the UK.

Rine Vieth is an FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. They are currently studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations in the UK and Canada.

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Lauren M. MacLean, "Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly changing climate, many nations face recurring droughts, which hinder electricity production just when demand is on the rise. This situation has led to challenges like load shedding and unplanned power outages, which have strained the bond between citizens and the government.

Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026) aims to unravel the puzzling reality that, despite enduring increasing difficulties from these electricity shortages, the Ghanaian citizens who suffer most harshly are also the least likely to demand political accountability from the state. Drawing on archival evidence, focus groups, qualitative interviews, survey data, and contemporary art and music, author Lauren M. MacLean explains how this disparity in experience—fueled by differences in income and geographical location—has led lower- and higher-income Ghanaians to form contrasting perspectives on their social rights regarding public services and to adopt varying approaches to political involvement. Rather than relying on a predetermined social contract, citizens in Ghana develop a more fluid relationship with the state, shaped by their histories, identities, and personal experiences. This reciprocity highlights their awareness of how climate change and the global shift toward green energy can significantly impact their lives while also underscoring the necessity for the government to take the lead and engage with Ghanaians to promote climate justice.

Lauren M. MacLean is the Thomas P. O’Neill Chair of Public Life and Department Chair of Political Science at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the politics of electricity access and the everyday practice of citizenship in Africa. She conducts fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya, collecting survey data from individuals, conducting focus group discussions, doing archival work, and carrying out qualitative interviews with politicians, policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary people.

MacLean has published award-winning books and articles, including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa (Cambridge, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell, 2014), co-edited with Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge, 2015), coauthored with Kapiszewski and Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including NSF, SSRC, RWJ, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.

You can learn more about her work here.

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown, "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice.

Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality.

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Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee, "Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Giant companies, launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But they are also seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and violating privacy. Big banks, reeling since the financial crisis of 2008, continue to be racked with major scandals. Drawing on examples such as the VW scandal in Germany, Cambridge Analytica and Samsung the authors of Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2026) show that these scandals are opportunities for real political change.

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Wendy Brown, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2025) explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments. In a new preface, Brown places States of Injury in political and intellectual context, including the rise of neoliberalism, and addresses the book’s renewed relevance in today’s political landscape.

Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Katelyn E. Stauffer, "The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Katelyn Stauffer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, has an excellent new book focusing on how voters and citizens perceive the legitimacy and functionality of political institutions, especially when they think there are women elected to those institutions. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States (Oxford UP, 2025) weaves together a number of different threads to reach some interesting conclusions about women in elected office and the trust that voters have in those elected offices and institutions. Stauffer starts the research trajectory with a framing around representation, and how the different kinds of representation within elected bodies connects to how voters think about those bodies themselves and whether they trust them and think they are effective. This opens the path to bring in the question of gender, and how voters’ or citizens’ perceptions of how many women are in legislative bodies also connects with how much trust those same citizens have in those representative bodies.

The Politics of Perception explores both accurate perceptions as well as misperceptions about governmental institutions, and this is also where the research is truly fascinating. Part of what the research indicates is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the American public does not actually know a lot about politics or about how political institutions operate. At the same time, many citizens hold strong opinions or thoughts about politics, which generally are at odds with the lack of knowledge. This is also bound up with stereotypes that voters consider in terms of male and female elected officials and how they work within institutions. The Politics of Perception interrogates all of these misperceptions, unpacking the truth or reality versus the ideas that individuals hold about office holders and the political institutions in which those office holders work. Stauffer also discussed how she was able to build on a comparative politics approach, since parliamentary systems are, by their nature, collective institutions, and this approach helped to provide another theoretical framework for the analysis.

The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. is an important and useful book for many different scholars: those who study American government and politics; scholars of gender and politics, especially in the United States; comparative political scientists; and political theorists exploring issues of representation and democracy.

We discussed the Ghost Bookstore in Athens, Georgia as a bookseller that can order The Politics of Perception for readers in Georgia or elsewhere.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Sari Hanafi, "Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In an era of deepening polarization, Sari Hanafi examines how social scientists often reproduce the very injustices they seek to challenge, taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative perspectives.

He introduces the concept of symbolic liberalism - a contradiction in which individuals espouse classical liberal principles, yet act in politically illiberal ways. This, he argues, has exacerbated the pathologies of late modernity: authoritarianism, economic precarity, and environmental destruction, now all unfolding in a climate where reasonable debate seems increasingly impossible.

Examining key flashpoints of contemporary polarization, Hanafi critiques how symbolic liberalism inflates the universality of rights while simultaneously narrowing the space for dialogue. Rather than this rigid ideological stance, he calls for a dialogical turn, a renewed public sphere where diverse conceptions of the ‘common good’ engage in genuine conversation.

Blending political and moral philosophy with sociological critique, Hanafi offers a path forward in an age when intellectual exchange is more necessary, yet also more imperilled, than ever. Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology (Liverpool UP, 2025) is not just a critique of polarization but a critical and impassioned call to reclaim meaningful intellectual discourse.

Sari Hanafi is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He served as President of the International Sociological Association (2018–23) and Vice President of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2015–16). An International Fellow of the British Academy, he was also the Editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology (2007–22). His contributions to the field have been recognized with some of the Arab world’s most prestigious academic awards, including the Abdelhamid Shouman Award (2014) and the Kuwait Award for Social Science (2015). In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of San Marcos, Peru.

YouTube Channel: here

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Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—what does that reveal about American democracy? In Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change.

Dr. Kornberg reveals how political violence, astronomical campaign costs, relentless fundraising demands, shrinking staff, and centralized party leadership all constrain the ability of new members to legislate and represent their constituents. Social media, while offering new platforms for political expression, has also heightened harassment and fed a performative culture that rewards spectacle over substance. Bolstered by dozens of interviews, congressional records, and the voices of lawmakers past and present—including Henry Waxman, Toby Moffett, Phil English, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lauren Underwood—Stuck offers a sobering portrait of a legislative body paralyzed by its own internal dynamics.

Dr. Kornberg outlines tangible reforms that could restore Congress's capacity to function and amplify the power of its newest members. At a time when Americans are losing faith in democracy's most representative institution, Stuck makes the case for how it could be saved.

A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life

Our guest is: Dr. Maya Kornberg, who is a senior research fellow and manager in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. She’s taught political science at NYU, Georgetown and American University, worked on democratic governance issues at numerous institutions, and led research for a UNDP and IPU project examining civic engagement in the work of over 80 parliaments around the world. She is the author of Stuck.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Bears and Ballots

House of Diggs

The Fight To Save The Town

The End of White Politics

Understanding Disinformation

You Are Not American

The Vice-President's Black Wife

You Have More Influence Than You Think

We Refuse

Dear Miss Perkins

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Populism, Polarization and Politics: Hungary on the Eve of Elections

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How and why do leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban not only come to power, but remain in power for so long (in Orban’s case 16 years)? And why does the impending election provide a serious challenge to Orban and his party Fidesz? Join Tim Haughton and guests Emilia Palonen and Zsolt Enyedi for a discussion that examines contemporary Hungary on the eve of parliamentary elections and places the country’s recent experience in historical and comparative perspective.

Emilia Palonen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki and the author of The Birth and Death of Liberal Democracy in Hungary: the Populist Logic of Polarisation as Hegemony which was published last year by Helsinki University Press.

Zsolt Enyedi is Professor of Political Science at the Central European University. He is the co-author of the acclaimed Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives and Democracy in Europe published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Moreover, he led a three year Horizon Project, AuthLIB looking at neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response which has just concluded.

Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a Deputy Director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham.

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Sean Parson, "Punk Anarchism: An Anti-Politics of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Punk Anarchism: An Anti-Politics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a radical critique of contemporary politics, offering an alternative framework rooted in anarchism, punk rock, dadaism, situationism and political nihilism.

Arguing that traditional approaches to political change are ineffective in the face of the climate crisis and the failures of liberal institutions, the book advocates for rejecting the possibility of meaningful political change within the existing political system.

Drawing on historical cultural movements like the Russian and Japanese nihilists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sean Parson calls for a politics of pure negation, centered on the destruction of the current social order, rather than its reform – advocating for a revolutionary politics that embraces resentment against the wealthy and rejects hierarchical power dynamics. Punk Anarchism asks: what if resistance were motivated by a sense of playfulness and enjoyment, rather than hope for a better future? Ultimately, Parson proposes an anti-theory of negation as a way to imagine political agency beyond traditional frameworks.

Sean Parson is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, USA. They are the author of Cooking Up a Revolution: Resistance to Gentrification (2019) and the co-editor of four edited books includingRepresentations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction (2020).

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The Cave and the Coalition: Philosophy, Populism, and the MAGA New Right

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny sits down with political theorist Laura Field to trace the intellectual currents shaping today’s right — from Straussian thought at the Claremont Institute to Catholic integralism, the manosphere, and Trump-era populism. Using Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a touchstone, they interrogate how philosophical radicalism becomes political strategy, why some thinkers return to the “cave” with prudence while others return with authoritarian blueprints, and what these debates mean for American democracy. Tune in for a lively, theory-steeped conversation that bridges political philosophy and contemporary conservative politics.

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Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Our guest today is Elizabeth Suhay, the author of Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics. Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Dr. Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans’ belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality.

Elizabeth (Liz) Suhay is an associate professor of government in the School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. She specializes in the study of U.S. public opinion and political psychology and is a Sine Civic Life Faculty Fellow and Vice Director of the Science & Policy certificate program. She has also co-edited three volumes including The Politics of Truth in Polarized America, with David Barker, The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, with Bernard Grofman and Alex Trechsel, and "The Politics of Science" with James Druckman. She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Psychology and Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Political Psychology series.

This is episode is co-produced by Nora Kalaj, a student in the Master of Arts in Communication at Oakland University.

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Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, "Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power.

Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Claire Provost & Matt Kennard is the result of two investigative journalist's reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides an explosive guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how territories are governed, and how justice is defined.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark, "Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Populist leaders around the world increasingly reject international organizations, decrying them as constraints on state power and rallying followers against the “global elite” who run them. These institutions—painstakingly built through decades of negotiation and multilateral cooperation—are often seen as passive bystanders, unable or unwilling to push back. In Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave (Princeton UP, 2026) Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark challenge this view, arguing that international organizations are, in fact, strategic agents with the tools to resist populist pressures. Offering fresh theoretical insights and original empirical analysis, they investigate how these institutions fight back and how their defensive strategies are reshaping global governance.
Using a multimethod approach that draws on novel data and qualitative evidence, Carnegie and Clark identify four key strategies that international organizations employ to both appease and sideline populists and their constituents. They find that while these strategies help fortify global governance against populist opposition, they may also produce unintended consequences, potentially eroding institutional legitimacy and fueling further resistance. A timely and compelling account, the book provides a crucial roadmap for understanding—and safeguarding—the global order.

Our guests are Professor Allison Carnegie, a professor of political science at Columbia University. and Professor Richard Clark, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong.

On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large.

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Why Senegal’s Democracy Survived

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In 2024, Senegal faced a severe constitutional and electoral crisis. The presidential vote was postponed, tensions escalated, and fears of democratic breakdown intensified. Yet democracy held. Why?

In this episode of People Power Politics, Temitayo Odeyemi speaks with Catherine Lena Kelly and Ibrahima Fall and about their Journal of Democracy article, “Why Senegal’s Democracy Survived.” They examine how the Constitutional Council asserted its independence under executive pressure, how civil society mobilised to defend constitutional norms, and how what they call democratic “muscle memory” shaped citizen response.

The discussion situates Senegal’s experience within a wider regional context of coups and democratic regression. What explains Senegal’s divergence? Are its institutional safeguards transferable, or deeply context-specific? And what lessons does this case hold for democracies worldwide facing executive overreach?

Catherine Lena Kelly is Director of Engagement at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies and author of Party Proliferation and Political Contestation in Africa: Senegal in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Ibrahima Fall is Director of Studies at the School of International Commerce, Communications, and Business Techniques (ETICCA) in Dakar and a leading analyst of Senegalese governance and constitutional politics.

Temitayo Isaac Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). His research examines institutions, actors, and democratic engagement in Africa.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Election, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the forces that promote and undermine democratic government around the world. Transcript here.

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Thailand’s February 2026 Snap Election: A Conversation with Prof Duncan McCargo

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

This episode unpacks the 8 February 2026 snap election and constitutional referendum in Thailand. The results paint a mixed picture: a decisive win for the country’s conservative forces alongside signals of progressive change, particularly regarding the drafting of a new constitution.

Dialogues on Southeast Asia sits down with Prof Duncan McCargo, President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a world-leading specialist on Thai politics, to make sense of what the results mean.

Prof McCargo focuses on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. He is the author of a dozen books, including Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell, 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (NIAS Press, 2020).

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Thomas Zeitzoff, "No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis.

After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged?

In No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2026), Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them?

Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet.

Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Joanna Lillis, "Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In September 2016, Islam Karimov–the first president of a post-Soviet Uzbekistan–died, at age 78. His death ended an oppressive dictatorship that had governed the Central Asian country for decades, which led to corruption, environmental damage, and political repression. Karimov was replaced with Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who instituted a tentative program of reforms.

These years are the subject of Joanna Lillis’s book, Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan (Bloomsbury, 2025). Lillis tells the stories of both the Karimov and Mirziryoyev regimes, based on many conversations with activists, journalists, and other opposition leaders in the country.

Joanna Lillis is a Kazakhstan-based journalist and author writing about Central Asia who has lived and worked in the region since 2001, in Uzbekistan (2001-2005) and Kazakhstan (since 2005). Her reporting has featured in outlets including The Economist, the Guardian, the Independent, the Eurasianet website and Foreign Policy and POLITICO magazines. Prior to moving to Central Asia, she lived in Russia and worked for BBC Monitoring, the BBC World Service’s global media tracking service. She is also the author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (Bloomsbury: 2019).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk Mirage. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Kenneth Lowande, "False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age

The University of Chicago Press, 2024

Kenneth Lowande

Political Scientist Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan) has a new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, examining the ways in which presidents seem to be using their extraordinary powers (of the office itself) but are often holding back so as to avoid the full implementation of policies and ideas. This is an interesting thesis, since it takes apart the ways in which presidents operate, getting at not only the presentation of presidential power and the rhetoric used by presidents to illuminate their powers, but also where the full capacity of the Executive branch may not be put into action around issues, policies, or ideas. Lowande is assessing what is essentially symbolic, especially for the president, but is not substantive, even if it may seem that way.

This concept, this “false front”, comes out of the polarization within the American political system, and the difficulty that presidents also have in trying to accomplish policy shifts and changes. This is also in context of a Congress that has ceded significant power to the Executive and is generally less productive in terms of passing and implementing policy than it was in the past. This is then combined with the adjustments that presidents and presidential candidates have made in the way they approach the campaign and then their work while in office, since they are compelled to construct their own “brand” as a means to getting elected. Once in office, presidents then need to perform in some way that convinces the public that they are trying to execute what they promised while on the campaign trail. But the political climate makes those outcomes extraordinarily difficult. So, presidents have constructed this path where they publicly lean into policy areas, making public statements, having ceremonies and press releases, taking executive actions, or signing Executive Orders to illustrate their commitment and their activity, but when these policy areas are examined in some depth, it turns out that not much happened after all of this attention and apparent action.

Lowande notes, in our conversation, how once he had zeroed in on this presidential mode of operating it is very difficult not to see it. This becomes a kind of model of presidential behavior and strategic approaches. False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age essentially interrogates the founding basis for the American presidency, where Alexander Hamilton argued that the president is to be held accountable and responsible for the actions taken in the office itself. The media plays a role in this as well, since they report on the actions taken by the president—at least in terms of rhetoric, press releases, signing ceremonies, and executive actions—but there is no follow on analysis, for the most part, of the actual implementation of the policies and the plans. If there is no measurable outcome to distinguish how the policy solved the problem, or satisfied the demand for the policy, then the presidential action or rhetoric is disconnected from any particular policy or public good. This is also at odds with the reason for a democratic republic—where the demands of the voters are to be translated into real outcomes, not imaginary ones.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Trump, the UN Charter, and the Strange Politics of International Law

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

International law scholars are often among the sharpest critics of the Trump administration—but what if the usual story misses something essential? In this episode, RBI interim director Eli Karetny speaks with NYU international law professor Robert Howse about Trump’s complicated relationship with the UN Charter system, from Gaza to Venezuela and Iran. The conversation also turns to political theory: Leo Strauss’s reputation as a neoconservative godfather, the shadow of Carl Schmitt, and how today’s MAGA New Right recycles older anxieties about liberalism, virtue, and masculinity.

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Lisa Björkman, "Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Lisa Björkman invites our attention to political form and how they allow us to appreciate the various mediums through which representation is negotiated.

Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai closely following the movements of corporation election candidates, protesting crowds, political rally organisers, and social workers, the book maps the linguistic, visual, sonic, and semiotic tools used to construct the spectacle of democracy. It asks: how does the figure of the crowd subvert what euromodern conceptions of political representation? How do films and their constructions of the public, the organising of rallies, election season cash flows, garlanding, placards and slogans in protests inform new meanings of representation? Through this richly engaging and genre-breaking work, Bjorkman offers new ways – originating from Mumbai – to explain the reorganisation of political authority around the world.

Lisa Björkman is an Associate Professor in Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville. She is the author of Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai, Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories, and Bombay Brokers. Lisa is also a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.

Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:rv13@soas.ac.uk

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How Corporate Lobbyists are Capturing EU Institutions

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Brussels is full of lobbyists. Over decades, big companies have been using their financial might not only to influence EU policies but even to shape how EU institutions are designed and what their key goals are. Host Licia Cianetti talks to Kenneth Haar, who for almost two decades has been conducting research on corporate lobbying in the EU for Corporate Europe Observatory. Kenneth explains how corporate lobbying works, what lobbyists want, and how a sketchily defined “competitiveness” agenda is driving a far-reaching deregulation drive by the European Commission, which endangers hard fought for environmental, social, health, and labour protections.

Guest: Kenneth Haar is a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). His freely downloadable book, A Europe of Capital, details how corporate lobbyists got to the core of the European project. Corporate Europe Observatory is an advocacy and investigative research group. Their many reports, articles, and infographics on corporate lobbying in the EU are available on the CEO website. You can download their alternative tourist guide to Bussels here: “Lobby Planet – Brussels”. CEO’s podcast EU Watchdog Radio is also highly recommended!

Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

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Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states.

For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text.

The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states.

Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them.

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Himanshu Prabha Ray ed., "Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections" (Routledge, 2026)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections (Routledge, 2026) assesses the impact of European colonization in the late 19th and early 20th century in ‘restructuring’ the shared past of India and Southeast Asia. It provides case studies that transcend colonial constructs and adopt newer approaches to understanding the shared past. The authors explore these developments through the lens of political figures like Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and re-examine themes such as the Greater India Society (1926–1959) established in Calcutta, and the role of Buddhism in post-World War II connections, as the repatriation of the mortal remains of Japanese soldiers killed in Burma (Myanmar) acquired urgency.

Drawing on a diverse range of sources including archaeology, Buddhist texts, the afterlives of the Hindu temples, maritime networks, and inscriptions from Vietnam and central India, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Buddhism, archaeology, heritage studies, cultural studies, and political history as well as South and Southeast Asian history.

Guest: Himanshu Prabha Ray

Interviewer: Natali Pearson

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India’s Democratic Republic in Flux

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Democracy Dialogues, co-host Maya Tudor speaks with Yogendra Yadav – political thinker, activist, and one of India’s most prominent voices on democratic reform. A former academic and party leader, Yadav has led influential research initiatives, built new political movements, and worked at the intersection of grassroots activism and national politics.

Their conversation explores the forces shaping India’s current democratic crossroads. Yadav reflects on global perceptions of India’s democratic decline, the meaning of its 2024 election results, and the interplay between national and state-level politics. He addresses the erosion of institutional independence – from the electoral commission to the media – and the growing impact of religious polarization on governance.

Drawing on decades of experience in social movements, Yadav considers what drives political mobilization, the role nationalism plays in supporting or undermining democracy, and the strategies citizens can use to protect democratic values in turbulent times.

From the “thousand small cuts” undermining India’s democracy to the enduring potential of grassroots activism, this episode offers both a candid diagnosis of India’s political challenges and a call to action for anyone committed to safeguarding democratic principles.

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Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982.

In 1982, resistance to South Africa’s apartheid was growing increasingly militant, and the state’s brutal repression heightened this tension.

In her lecture, Gordimer speaks directly to this political landscape, describing the period as an “interregnum." She discusses the crisis of white identity in South Africa, the relationship between art and politics, the urgency for an alternative political left working toward what she calls a democracy without economic and military terror.

This lecture was the basis of Gordimer’s essay “Living in the Interregnum,” published in the New York Review of Books in January of 1983.

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She authored fifteen novels, including The Conversationalist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, over two hundred short stories, and several volumes of essays. She was awarded the Booker prize for the Conversationalist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She died in 2014 at the age of 90 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Competing Visions for International Order

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Matti Puranen (Finnish National Defense University and University of Helsinki), and Bart Gaens (Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the International Centre for Defense and Security) about the ambition of this new book and several key takeaways concerning particularly the US, China, and India from this book.

The book’s analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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Laura K. Field, "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to power and policy development, often from positions in the Ivory Tower. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is truly fascinating, since it is not simply about egg-headed academics writing up white papers or books, or simply about presidential advisors and the way they have worked to influence the president or put particular policies into place. Instead, Field interrogates the construction of the ideas that have come to dominate this New Right, seeking their genesis and how these ideas, which are divided into three distinct but overlapping intellectual camps, have made their way to the Trump Administration, through Trump himself, Vice President J.D. Vance, and so many of the advisors and cabinet members who surround Trump.

Field’s training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration’s rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them.

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Mark Stout, "World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I.

In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence (UP of Kansas, 2023), Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime. After a lengthy gestation that started in the late nineteenth century, and included important episode like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I. The War was foundational in the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention.

World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability. Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed.

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Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, "Governing Digital China" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Authors Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms, and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states.

Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School.

Ting Luo is an Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics.

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Caillan Davenport, "Behind Caesar's Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors" (Yale UP, 2026)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Behind Caesar's Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Caillan Davenport presents a thrilling exploration of what Romans thought about their emperors, and how rumors and gossip—ranging from new taxes to rulers’ sex lives—shaped leadership.

Traversing more than seven hundred years of Roman history, this book explores how everyday Romans swapped gossip, spread rumors, told jokes, and chanted protests about their emperors—activity that amounted to much more than idle chatter. Professor Davenport uses ancient evidence, including letters, graffiti, and songs, to reveal how Romans engaged in politics outside the senate house or imperial council. He argues that the idea of the Roman emperor was shaped not only by the political powers granted to him but also by the debate taking place in the streets, churches, taverns, and markets.

Professor Davenport reveals how Romans spoke about “the emperor” as a figure of stability, as an agent of justice and retribution, or as a fallible human. Although few would ever see an emperor, his face (and therefore his power) was everywhere: on coins, banners, standards, and even dessert molds, as well as in statuary and paintings. While most Romans did not question the transformation of their republic into a monarchical system of government, they were indeed invested in the empire and were in constant discussion about the type of ruler they had, wanted, and deserved.

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Peter S. Goodman, "Davos Man: How the Billionaire Class Devoured Democracy" (Custom House, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more in his book, Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (Custom House, 2022).

Peter S. Goodman is the global economic correspondent for The New York Times, based in New York.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Alex Prichard, "Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

If you asked a passerby on the street what anarchism is, they may answer that it is an ideology based on chaos, disorder, and violence. But is this true? What exactly is anarchism?

Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. Prichard describes anarchism as a lived set of practices, with a rich historical legacy, and shows how anarchists have inspired and criticised some of our most cherished values and concepts, from the ideals of freedom, participatory education, federalism, to important topics like climate change, and wider popular culture in science fiction. By locating the emergence and globalization of anarchist ideas in a history of colonialism and imperialism, the book links anarchism into struggles for freedom across the world and demonstrates that anarchism has much to offer anyone trying to envision a better future.

Alex Prichard is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research on anarchism has shed new light on old problems of constitutional politics, order and anarchy in world order, and the history of international thought. He is the co-founder of the Political Studies Association specialist group for the study of anarchism, the Manchester University Press monograph series, Contemporary Anarchist Studies, and a trained chef.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception (Cornell University Press 2025), Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context.

To make sense of this, Lindsay offers a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—that explains why spies and hackers alike depend on clandestine organizations and vulnerable institutions. Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponization of pagers by Israel in 2024, he traces both continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way, he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counter-deception.

Provocative and persuasive, Age of Deception offers crucial insights into the future of secret statecraft in cyberspace and beyond.

Our guest is Jon R. Lindsay, an Associate Professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson, "A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris" (UP of Mississippi)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for the office of president of the United States. In A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris(UP of Mississippi) author Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson uses womanist rhetorical criticism to analyze the presidential announcement speeches of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, and then-Senator Kamala Harris. In close readings of each candidate’s speeches, Watkins-Dickerson defines womanist rhetorical theory and its efficacy for researching Black female voices in the field of communication in general, and the presidential announcement speeches of Black women, specifically.

Beginning with Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1972 campaign as the first Black woman to run a viable campaign for the US presidency, the volume analyzes how Chisholm’s speech set a precedent for future generations of Black women in politics by boldly asserting her right to lead, despite the multiple barriers of race and gender. The study then moves to Carol Moseley Braun’s 2004 presidential announcement, exploring how Braun’s speech navigated the intersections of identity, representation, and political ambition during a time when Black women in the Senate were still a rarity. Finally, the analysis culminates with Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential bid, focusing on how her rhetoric blended elements of Black feminist resistance and national unity in an era of heightened political and racial division.

The volume highlights the ways in which Chisholm, Braun, and Harris drew upon their lived experiences and cultural legacies to construct powerful, transformative narratives and argues that their speeches not only expanded the boundaries of political discourse but also reimagined the possibilities for leadership in America. Ultimately, this study provides a rich, interdisciplinary framework for understanding how Black women have reshaped the political landscape through the power of their words.

You can find Dianna N. Watkins Dickerson at her website, and on social platforms @drdwd.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Ning Leng, "Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China" (Cambridge, 2025)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officials systematically treat formally private firms as political instruments, extracting services that advance careers and maintain social control—often at the expense of business interests, economic efficiency and sustainable development. Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco and is the Director of USF's Master's Program in International and Development Economics.

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Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left-right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people—age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.

This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.

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Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's,” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.

Alfred Marcus is the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, University of Minnesota.

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Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.

In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.

Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book.

Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century.

Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press.

Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.

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Nathan Munier, "Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What happens when states experience a rapid increase in resource wealth? This book examines the significant diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, possibly the largest in over 100 years, and its influence on the institutional trajectory of the country. In Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Nathan Munier examines how this rapid increase in resource production shaped the policies available to political actors, providing a fresh understanding of the perpetuation of ZANU-PF rule and the variation in the trajectory of institutions in Zimbabwe compared to other Southern African states. This study places Zimbabwe amongst the overall population of resource-wealthy countries such as Angola, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, especially those that experience a significant increase in production. In doing so, Dr. Munier contributes to the understanding of resource politics, political economy, and comparative African politics.

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Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th century. Greenwich House, the community center Simkhovitch founded in 1902 in Greenwich Village, then a destination point for new immigrants to New York, quickly gained a reputation equal to that of Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, providing services in health, recreation, education, and the arts (which Greenwich House continues to do to this day). Simkhovitch became a tireless advocate of public housing and has been called by some "the mother of public housing." She played a central role in designing and administering the first public housing projects in America during the New Deal, in which she was an integral figure. The National Housing Conference, which she founded in 1931, continues to operate in our current "housing crisis" as among the most prominent advocates for safe, affordable housing. She co-wrote the National House Act of 1937, the first piece of legislation to establish the federal government's responsibility to help provide low-income families with housing.

A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Caroli, best-known for her work on presidential First Ladies, which has gone through multiple editions, will become the standard account of a truly remarkable life. Born in New England and educated in Boston and at the University of Berlin, Simkhovitch married a Russian intellectual seven years her junior who spoke no English and had no job prospects. Raising a family while working for her rapidly expanding set of causes, Simkhovitch was portrayed in a DC Comics series (also featuring Diana Prince) in the early 1940s as a "Wonder Woman of History" for her seeming ability to do it all: take on the full spectrum of urban ills while also raising and supporting her family. Her husband eventually joined the Columbia faculty and became a noted art collector, advising collectors such as J. P. Morgan, while she exposed the squalor of Downtown slums. The stress of trying to do it all took a heavy toll on Simkhovitch, but her lifelong, passionate advocacy of and contributions to housing reform continued unabated and remains both inspiring and relevant.

Betty Boyd Caroli is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MA in Mass Communication from Annenberg School of University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. She studied at the Università Per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, and the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. A Fulbright in Italy led her to teach at the British College in Palermo, the English School in Rome, and two branches of City University of New York (Queens College and Kingsborough Community College).

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, "How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers" (Edward Elgar, 2025)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What happens when an academic supervisor and their former student get together to write and edit a book on researching our social world? In How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers (Edward Elgar, 2025) readers have an answer to this question from two writers working by interpretivist lights: one, Colette Einfeld, an emerging new talent; the other, Helen Sullivan, a renowned public policy professor. On this the 26th episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, they discuss the motivations for the book, the various meanings of interpretive research for them and their contributors, messiness and emotions in social and political scientific work, how they identified their authors, and what they learned from one another while writing and editing together.

Like this episode? You might also be interested in others in the series with co-authors talking about their work, including John Boswell and Jack Corbett, Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely, and way back at the start of the series, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow.

Looking for something else to read? Helen recommends Hossein Asgari’s novel, Desolation.

This interview summary was not extruded by a machine. Unlike the makers and owners of those, the author accepts responsibility for its contents.

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Democracy and Its Inter-Connections

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla joins us for a conversation on global democratic backsliding, the role of the international community, and youth civic engagement. As a distinguished leader with experience at the highest level of national and global political affairs, President Chinchilla brings distinctive viewpoints to our conversation to foster democracy through democratic practices, public policy, and civil discourse. She currently serves as co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank, the newly inducted president of Club de Madrid, an independent, non-partisan organization created to promote democracy, and member of international initiatives like the United Nations Human Development Report and the International Olympic Committee.

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Yunus Emre Ozigci, "NATO’s Meaning and Existence: Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity" (Vernon Press, 2026)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

NATO’s Meaning and Existence: Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity (Vernon Press, 2026) a forthcoming 2026 book by Yunus Emre Ozigci, offers a deep analysis of NATO's identity and role, suggesting it's stuck in bureaucratic inertia despite modern crises, aiming to redefine its purpose through exploring shared identity and transformation, particularly in the context of Russia's actions. This scholarly work uses intersubjectivity to understand how NATO's internal dynamics and external relations, especially concerning the Ukraine conflict, shape its meaning beyond mere military power, potentially moving beyond traditional IR theories to explore collective identity and systemic challenges.

In NATO’s Meaning and Existence: Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity (2026), Ozigci treats NATO as an intersubjective phenomenon rather than an objective entity. To him, NATO “does not exist objectively” but rather appears “meaningfully through intersubjective recognition.” His skillful integration of philosophical innovations from such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre supports his deep insights into Kenneth Waltz's structural interpretations of the balance of power, John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, and Robert Keohane's complex interdependence and invites readers to reconsider how alliances exist beyond the surface of policy and power. This work reminds us that NATO’s real strength does not necessarily come from being the most efficient military structure in the world, promoting those who excel at following orders, but rather from its ingenuity, resourcefulness, and unity of purpose. His study provides a rare synthesis of diplomatic experience and philosophical depth, inviting readers to reconsider how alliances exist beyond the surface of policy and power. This is an original, meticulously argued, and intellectually stimulating contribution to both NATO studies and the philosophy of international relations.

Piotr Pietrzak, Ph.D. -- In Statu Nascendi Think Tank

Yunus Emre Ozigci holds a PhD degree in Political Sciences from the Université catholique de Louvain. He graduated from the Galatasaray University (International relations) and completed his MA studies at the University of Ankara (International relations). His research interests and publications cover the IR theory and phenomenology. Since 2000, he has been working as a diplomat in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served, besides various departments of the Ministry, in Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland and Russia. Currently, he is the First Counsellor of the Turkish Embassy in Nairobi and Deputy Permanent Representative to UNON (UNEP and UN-Habitat). ORCID: 0000-0003-3388-7149

Please note: This publication is a personal work. It does not reflect the official views of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Duncan Kelly is a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politics and economics that were made, and remade, through wartime and revolution, by political and economic thinkers working across the globe, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Spanning continents, connecting networks of people, power, and possibilities, in new and often experimental ways, the worlds of wartime saw histories of modern politics and economics revised and updated, used as well as abused, in myriad attempts to interpret, explain, understand, explore, and indeed to win, the war. This book takes the measure of a great many of these overlapping visions, and it does so by trying to learn some of the lessons that literary and artistic modernism can teach us about the complexities of political and economic ideas, their contingency and uncertainty, and how they are fixed into focus only at very particular moments. Moving from the stylised narratives of European and American political theory and intellectual history, through to the futurist politics of revolutionaries in Ireland, India, Ottoman-Turkey, and Russia, this book also tracks arguments and strategies for Pan-African diasporic federation, alongside German and American debates about federal pasts and federal futures. From the invention of the world economy, to the reality of multiple war economies, from revolutionary conjunctures to ideas of democracy and climate catastrophe in the Anthropocene today, Worlds of Wartime tells the story of just how strongly modern politics in general, and modern ideas about political and economic possibility, were fixed by the intellectual turbulence wrought during the First World War.

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A. Mechele Dickerson, "The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream" (U California Press, 2026)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost? Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (U California Press, 2026) breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.

A. Mechele Dickerson is the Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches Remedies and Federal Civil Procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross-listed interdisciplinary graduate-level courses on the American middle-class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership and America's Financial Underclass: Flawed Premises, Broken Promises, New Prescriptions.

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Michael J. Illuzzi, "Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Michael Illuzzi has a fascinating new book on peoplehood in the United States, focusing on different political actors at different crucial points in American history, and how the “story” of American peoplehood has been told. This idea of “peoplehood” is not necessarily new, since it brings with it a connection to the country where one is a citizen. But for the United States, this concept has been defined and redefined over more than 250 years and often connects back to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, where the commitment to equality was articulated, but has never been fully recognized or achieved. Part of what Illuzzi is doing in Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is explaining, through a number of case studies, the difference between what are called “mending stories” and “bleaching stories”—those narratives that design a country that is more inclusive, that explain the past but also work towards mending earlier injustices, in contrast to those narratives that choose to erase historical injustices and inequalities and, in the process, also define the American fabric as exclusionary. This framework, drawing out these different approaches to narratives about American peoplehood, is vitally important as we find ourselves at this particular inflection point, with daily debates and armed conflicts over who is and isn’t allowed to be considered an American.

The case studies at the heart of Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age include the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, Mayor Samual Jones (of Toledo) and the integration of immigrants at the turn of the century, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Martin Luther King Jr’s coalition building beyond the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition in Chicago in the 1960s, and finally the Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber II. In each case, Illuzzi examines different kinds of opposition to more authoritarian, more divisive, or more oppressive approaches, in the speeches and in the coalitions that are being built by those leading towards mending narratives. Part of the analysis is also about how political coalitions are expanded—especially in ways that may be unexpected, when common issues (like poverty, or police brutality, or healthcare access) transcend ethnic, racial, or even political boundaries and groupings.

This is a beautifully written discussion of the idea of the United States, and the ways in which politics, race, ethnicity, and class are all woven together within the broader fabric of a country “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Mending A Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is particularly important in helping us to think about and possibly act on “from many, one” in the age of divisive populism and discrimination.

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Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, "P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance" (Duke UP, 2026)

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke UP, 2026) explores the work of Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bunny (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), focusing on his cultural and political significance.Global superstar Bad Bunny, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.

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Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights the tension between ordinary people's efforts to secure personal independence and the ambitious attempts of thinkers and activists to embed notions of freedom in political and cultural agendas. The quest to be a free individual was multi-faceted; no single concept predominated. Men and women articulated and pursued it against the backdrop of two world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of working life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and uncertain futures of colonial rule. But although claims to individual freedom could be steered and stymied, they could not, ultimately, be suppressed.

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He is particularly interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and in concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe.

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Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.
Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country’s commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.
American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

Keidrick Roy is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.

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Amitav Acharya, "The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West" (Hachette UK, 2025)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.
Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Eve Warburton, "Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, nickel, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. Resource Nationalism in Indonesia explains these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. Warburton shows how the centrality of patronage to Indonesia's democratic political economy, and the growing importance of mining and palm oil as a drivers of export earnings, enhanced both the instrumental and structural power of major domestic companies, giving them new influence over the direction of nationalist change.

Eve Warburton is Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and a Research Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University.

Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses" (Georgetown UP, 2022)

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Human trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women in that state. While combatting human trafficking is a multiscalar problem with a host of conflating variables, this book shows that a common theme in the effectiveness of state response is the degree to which women and girls are perceived as, and actually are, full citizens. By analyzing human trafficking cases in India, Thailand, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil, they shed light on the factors that make some women and girls more susceptible to traffickers than others.

Heather Smith-Cannoy (PhD, UC San Diego, 2007) is a Professor of Political Science/Social Justice and Human Rights at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. She is currently serving as the Interim Director of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her work explores when and under what conditions international law impacts the human rights of the most marginalized populations, focusing on both the opportunities and the challenges associated with this body of law. She has also focused on the role that international law can play in advancing the legal rights of sex trafficking victims. She has published 4 books and more than 15 articles and book chapters.

Patricia C. Rodda is the Assistant Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. She teaches international relations, comparative politics, international law, conflict and security and political theory. Her research often focuses on vulnerable populations and the challenges they face seeking human rights protections. She is currently working on a new book project that investigates the institutions and interests that facilitate or obstruct the adoption of women’s rights in Muslim-majority states.

Charles “Tony” Smith is a Professor in Political Science and Law at the University of California-Irvine (PhD UCSD 2004; JD UF 1987). His research concerns how institutions and the strategic interactions of political actors relate to the contestation over rights, law, and democracy. He has authored or co-authored eight books including Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses (Georgetown University Press 2022) and The Politics of Perverts: The Political Attitudes and Actions of Non-Traditional Sexual Minorities (NYU Press 2024) and published over 40 articles and chapters. He is currently the Editor in Chief of Political Research Quarterly.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

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David Broder, "Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy" (Pluto Press, 2023)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The fastest-rising force in Italian politics is Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia - a party with a direct genealogy from Mussolini's regime. Surging to prominence in recent years, it has waged a fierce culture war against the Left, polarised political debate around World War II, and even secured the largest vote share in Italy's 2022 general election. Eighty years after the fall of Mussolini, his heirs, and admirers are again on the brink of taking power. So how exactly has this situation come about?

Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, 2023) delves into Italy's self-styled 'post-fascist' movements - rooted in historical fascism yet claiming to have 'transcended' it. David Broder highlights the reinventions of far-right politics since the Second World War and examines the interplay between a parliamentary face aimed at integrating fascists into the mainstream and militant fringe groups which, despite their extremism, play an important role in nurturing the broader far right.

Fratelli d'Italia has retained its hegemony over fascist subcultures whilst embracing a raft of more pragmatic policy positions, fusing harsh Islamophobia and anti-communism with support for the European Union and NATO. As countervailing anti-fascist forces in Italian society wane, the far-right party's mission to redeem historical fascism, legitimize its political heirs, and shift the terrain of mainstream politics is proving alarmingly successful.

David Broder is a historian of the Italian far-right. He is a regular contributor to the New Statesman and Internazionale, writing about Italian politics, as well as Europe editor for Jacobin. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Left Review and Tribune. He is the author of The Rebirth of Italian Communism: Dissident Communists in Rome, 1943-44 and First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy.

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Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:02:00 -0000

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century
A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.

Thomas Albert Howard is professor of humanities and history and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is the author of many books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue.

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Mary E. Stuckey, "Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dives into the question of who we are as Americans, a theme that Stuckey has long researched and considered in much of her work (Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, University Press of Kansas, 2004; For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands, University Press of Kansas, 2023), but she traces this idea of American identity through Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States, key author of the Declaration of Independence, architect, and enslaver. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are is an exploration not so much of Thomas Jefferson the person, but Thomas Jefferson as he has become iconic within the American imagination and what that position explains about not only Jefferson himself, but also what it says about the United States at any particular period in the course of American history.

Stuckey traces the symbolic and iconic Jefferson in a number of distinct areas, each of which communicate different presentations or representations of Jefferson himself but also how we, as citizens, consume the idea of Jefferson. All of these are avenues to understand American national identity. As a scholar of presidential rhetoric, Stuckey begins the research by exploring how other presidents have used Jefferson in their speeches and their rhetoric, finding that the vast majority of presidents have referenced Jefferson in some form or in some way to legitimize their own policies. Many presidents have integrated Jefferson’s own words (and he wrote many, many words over a long life, especially for the time) as a way to authorize what they were doing while in office. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are then traces the many memorials and monuments that integrate Jefferson in some capacity. But this section is split into two pieces, one that specifically focuses on the Jefferson-centric presentations, and the other part that integrates Jefferson with other Founders or other presidents (like Mt. Rushmore). Stuckey makes clear the key dimension around the building of these kinds of memorials and monuments: they are as much about the people choosing to build them and how they are to look and exist as they are about the individual, in this case Jefferson, being honored within them. The next section of Remembering Jefferson examines Jefferson in popular culture, particularly in televisual and cinematic popular culture. And while Jefferson is, again, in many places, he comes across in fascinating ways in these renderings, since his relationship to slavery—that he had over 500 enslaved individuals over his lifetime, that a number of those who were enslaved were also his children—is often portrayed as incidental and as a kind of footnote. Jefferson is often hazy and romantic in these narratives. The final section of the book assesses Jefferson within children’s literature, since this is also a realm where Jefferson is taking on a civic teaching, and the presentation is about communicating a kind of citizenship to young people.

Mary Stuckey has produced an important reading of the United States by reading Thomas Jefferson in all the places and spaces where he turns up. Remembering Jefferson: Who He was, Who We Are is a delight to read, and discusses the complex ideas of national identity, enslavement, race, power, citizenship, and civic virtue.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Charles G. Thomas, "Ujamaa's Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964-1979" (Ohio UP, 2024)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent Cold War caught up the still-fragile independent states in a global ideological struggle between superpowers. While the political story of these states has been written in detail, the story of their militaries has been largely inaccessible, leaving only sketches of the coups, mutinies, and overall failures of security that outside observers could chronicle.
Ujamaa’s Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964–1979 (Ohio University Press, 2024) by Dr. Charles G. Thomas traces the evolution of the Tanzania People’s Defence Force from its inception in 1964 following the broader East African uprisings to its fully realized form on the eve of Tanzania’s 1978 conflict with Uganda. The book gathers primary interviews with key military actors within Tanzania and interweaves their narratives with archival sources to produce a detailed history of the culmination of President Julius Nyerere’s ideological project and the military leadership’s vision of a professional and effective force for guarding the nation and supporting liberation struggles across Southern Africa.

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Dylan Loh, "China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains the rise of “wolf warrior” practices, and how should we interpret Beijing’s evolving diplomatic identity?

In this episode, Duncan McCargo speaks with Dylan Loh, an Associate Professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University (Dr. Dylan M.H. Loh - Associate Professor | International Relations Scholar | Chinese Foreign Policy), about his award-winning new book China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dylan Loh unpacks how Chinese diplomats craft narratives and balance assertiveness with professionalism, touching on institutional habitus, ritualised loyalty, and China’s bid for discourse power on platforms like X. This conversation offers timely insights for anyone interested in Chinese foreign policy, diplomacy, and the future of great-power relations.

Host: Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Podcast Editing: Ishaan Krishnan

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Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as the political tides have changed, and what this has meant for energy policy in Japan in the past dozen years. Koppenborg’s history of nuclear power regulation in Japan also seriously considers the implications of this dramatic break for regimes in other countries. This case study provides a complex and thought-provoking contribution to discussions of the role of nuclear power and independent regulation in global efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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What happens when liberalism stops feeling like a victory and starts feeling like an exhaustion?

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director (acting) Eli Karetny speaks with philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre about liberalism not merely as a political doctrine, but as a lived way of life.

Against the backdrop of rising populism, nationalism, and post-liberal regimes, Lefebvre revisits the liberal tradition—from Locke and Mill to Rawls and Berlin—to argue that liberalism has always contained a moral and existential core. Drawing on John Rawls’s early work and Pierre Hadot’s idea of philosophy as spiritual exercise, the conversation explores freedom and generosity as liberal virtues, the tension between neutrality and perfectionism, and why liberal societies struggle to defend themselves against more overt visions of the good life.

Moving between political theory, international order, nationalism, and spirituality, Karetny and Lefebvre ask whether liberalism can still offer meaning without becoming imperial, moralistic, or coercive—and what liberals stand to lose if they fail to recognize the depth of their own commitments.

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James Greenwood-Reeves, "Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States" (Routledge, 2023)

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Was the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil campaigners? Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States (Routledge, 2023) addresses these issues head on, to make a radical, but compelling argument in favour of the legitimate use of violence in protest in liberal democracies. Grounded in theories of constitutional morality, the book makes the case that when states make illogical or unjust laws, citizens have morally justifiable reasons to disobey. Violence can act as moral dialogue - both expressively and directly - to denounce unjust laws, particularly in cases where civil disobedience does not go far enough. This book considers recent protest movements, of which the use of violent protest has been central to citizens demands. It examines the activism of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter movement, and other contemporary international movements.

This book could not be more timely. In a world where citizens' rights to protest are being increasingly curtailed, and climate destruction is becoming an increasing matter of urgency, Greenwood-Reeves addresses the legitimacy of violent protest and ultimate importance in upholding liberal democracy.

Dr James Greenwood-Reeves is a Lecturer in Law at The University of Leeds. One of his current projects @lawsadrag

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved?

In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms.

Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Bernard Forjwuor is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a scholar of black political thought, and his research focuses on the philosophical, critical, and theoretical claims advanced by global black political thinkers. His recent work challenges the ways the colonial and the racial are routinely affirmed as extinguished in the liberal democratic affirmation of sovereignty.

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Philip A. Wallach, "Why Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a process of conflict and accommodation. Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023) demonstrates the value of this activity by showing the legislature's distinctive contributions in two crucial moments in the mid-twentieth century: during World War II, when congressional deliberation contributed to national cohesion by balancing interests and ensuring fairness, and during the push to end racial segregation, when a prolonged debate in Congress focused the nation's attention and delivered a decisive victory for the broad coalition united around civil rights.

The second part of the book traces the evolution of Congress, which first experimented with radical decentralization in the 1970s and then, beginning in the 1980s, embraced powerful leadership and ideological caucuses that prioritized partisan unity and electoral confrontation. This transformed institution has been unable to work through the country's deep divisions on contemporary issues like immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary policymaking often circumvents Congress entirely. In other instances, Congress is engaged, but it proceeds without any bipartisan cooperation or through leader-broken compromises generated by crises. Each of these patterns creates serious difficulties for legitimating American policy. The book concludes with three scenarios for Congress's future. Without significant change, the institution will sink into decrepitude. But it could still be transformed, either by progressive constitutional reform empowering the president at the legislature's expense, or by a revival of meaningful deliberation and debate facilitated by the renewal of the committee system.

Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies America's separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of democracy and justice, also works on democratic reform and renovation at Partners in Democracy. Thus, Dr. Allen integrates both scholarship and democratic activism into her work as an academic and as an activist. Justice by Means of Democracy examines these different threads as well; what is justice, and how does democracy work towards achieving justice? And what is the role of the citizen in these pursuits?

Allen opens up her discussion weaving together a number of threads, since politics, economics, civic engagement, and citizenship are all part of the whole when we consider both justice and democracy. Growing out of the ideal that democracy is a very good system for individuals to move forward together, and to achieve their full flourishing, complexities arise from issues like inequality, inequity, and how liberty is structured within the governmental system. Part of Allen’s framing comes from John Rawl’s Theory of Justice and his connection of justice and democracy—but she is pushing further in terms of the role of power and thinking about power and power sharing within democracies and democratic institutions. Justice by Means of Democracy also wrestles with the abstract ideas of negative and positive liberty, and what this actually means in practice, particularly in the United States. In fact, the book thinks about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and what that requires from each individual. Allen explained in our conversation that while we often discuss “work/life balance” in terms of our personal and professional lives, what we should be discussing and focusing on is our “work-life civic balance” – since being civically involved takes time, takes effort, but is required for democracy to function and to remain intact. We are living through some of the breakages within our democratic systems of government, not just in the United States, but in other democracies as well. And part of the reason for these breakages is the failure of democratic practice by the people themselves. Allen’s own activism is focused on restoring and reinvigorating democratic practice, so that citizens become more used to the “habit” of democracy and civic engagement.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book,Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

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Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What went wrong with Burma’s democratic experiment? How are we to understand the country’s turbulent politics in the wake of the 2021 coup?

In this conversation with Duncan McCargo, Amitav Acharya talks about his new book on Burma, which draws extensively on communications with young activists he refers to as “thought warriors”. He also discusses the challenges of researching a closed country, and why he decided to write a crossover book that he hopes will reach beyond the usual academic audiences.

A decade ago, Burma was full of light and hope. Today, it has descended into darkness and despair. The once promising political and opening up of the country has been set back, possibly for a long time. How did this happen? Why? Many outside observers were surprised by the latest developments, but in some ways they were rather predictable. For those watching Burma the February 2021 coup was in the making for some time.

Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed (Penguin Random House, 2023) provides a timely and insightful account of the political situation in Burma, assessing why the country experienced the coup, what are the implications for the people of Burma and the Southeast Asian region, and what role the international community can play to prevent Burma becoming a failed state.

Amitav Acharya is a distinguished professor and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. His writings on Southeast Asia include Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Cornell, 2009).

Duncan McCargo is director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.

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Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.
Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Jonathan Sumption, "The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law" (Profile Books, 2026)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal norms.

But how did this happen, and where might we go from here?

Jonathan Sumption cuts through the political noise with acute analysis of the state of democracy today - from the vulnerabilities of international law to the deepening suppression of democracy activism in Hong Kong, and from the complexities of human rights legislation to the defence of freedom of speech.

Timely, incisive and wholly original, Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law (Profile Books, 2026) applies the brilliance of 'the cleverest man in Britain' to the most urgent and far-reaching political issue of our day.

Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice for six years. He is the author of the Sunday Times Bestseller Trials of the State, Law in a Time of Crisis, and Divided Houses, which won the 2009 Wolfson History Prize.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Paul Kelly, "Against Postliberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left" (Polity, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Post-liberalism is all the rage on the American right, finding a common cause between legal theorists like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and rising political stars like J.D. Vance, the serving vice president.

In the UK, on the other hand, the movement has been pioneered by left-wing thinkers seeking to return lost working-class voters to the Labour Party and return the party itself to its non-urban, communitarian and patriotic roots.

In Against Post-Liberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left (Polity, 2025), Paul Kelly explores this post-liberal strain and concludes that it offers "capitalism without social mobility".

"Liberalism is not everything but it’s not supposed to be," he writes. "It doesn't give an account of the meaning of life or the point of the universe. What it does offer is a way of negotiating social change and, hopefully, of ensuring that the burdens of that change fall reasonably equitably on everyone across generations. It looks to the future. It does not lock us into some nostalgia for a world gone by or frustrate our engagement with a future of necessary change".

Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news.

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Weila Gong, "Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This episode explores what China’s subnational climate experiments tell us about the possibilities and limits of climate leadership in an era of intensified geopolitics. We discuss how China’s domestic governance dynamics matter for international climate cooperation and competition, especially as Chinese actors become central in the global low-carbon transition. Thus, we turn our attention away from headline-grabbing climate summits and national pledges to examine the less visible, but often decisive, actors shaping China’s low-carbon transition. Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities (Oxford University Press, 2025), a new book by Weila Gong, opens the black box of subnational climate governance in China and asks: who actually makes low-carbon policy work on the ground?

Our guest, Weila Gong, is a visiting scholar at UC Davis’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and a nonresident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. She has held fellowships at Georgetown, Harvard, and UC Berkeley School of Law, and brings more than a decade of experience studying the politics and policies of low-carbon energy transitions in China. Her work is timely. Despite being the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, commitments that place it at the center of global climate cooperation and competition.

We’re recording this episode in November 2025 as COP30 unfolds in Brazil, and at a moment when China is stepping into a more assertive role as a climate-technology power. Chinese officials and firms increasingly frame the country’s dominance in renewables, electric vehicles, and clean-energy supply chains as central to the global transition. Yet, as Gong’s book shows, climate leadership is not only forged through clean technologies or in international negotiating rooms and national policy announcements. It is also built, often unevenly, across hundreds of cities and counties within China.

At the heart of this variation, Gong identifies a pivotal group of actors: mid-level local bureaucrats. These officials function as “bridge leaders,” translating national directives into locally workable policies, mediating between political leadership changes, and sustaining experimentation over time. In doing so, they challenge top-down views of China’s climate governance and reveal how bottom-up dynamics shape both domestic outcomes and China’s role as a global climate leader.

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Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head.
That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is "typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world." Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as "an epic twentieth-century story," The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him "one of the greatest political leaders of our century"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.
Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.
In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.

Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

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Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (U Texas Press, 2025). Tracing the roots of the state's conservative movement back to the giant cattle ranches and tycoons of the nineteenth century, Roche argues that you cannot separate the local and historical conditions in the West (and in West Texas specifically) from the "cowboy conservatism" of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Full of fascinating characters and the kind of tall tales you only find in the Lone Star State, The Conservative Frontier makes a compelling case for Texas politics eventually becoming national politics by the mid to late 20th century. No matter where you are in the United States today, the political weight of Texas creates a gravity that has proven impossible for American politics to emerge from.

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Celina Su, "Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.
Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.
Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.

Celina Su is the inaugural Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies (with an appointment in Critical Social & Environmental Psychology) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. Her interests lie in civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is especially interested in how everyday citizens engage in policy-making—via deliberative democracy when inclusive institutions exist, and via protest and social movements when they do not. Celina received a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT and a B.A. Honors from Wesleyan University.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Mirya Holman, "The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy" (Temple UP, 2025)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Mirya Holman explicates the purpose, role, and consequences of appointed boards in U.S. cities. Dr. Holman finds cities create strong boards that generate policy, consolidate power, and defend the interests of businesses and wealthy and white residents. In contrast, weak boards pacify agitation from marginalized groups to give the appearance of inclusivity, democratic deliberation, and redistributional policymaking. Cities preserve this strong board/weak board dichotomy through policymaking power, institutional design, and by controlling who serves on the boards.

The Hidden Face of Local Power examines the role of boards in the development of urban political institutions, the allocation of power in local politics, and the persistence of inequality. Holman enhances our understanding of how political institutions have contributed to racism and their impact on how people use and live in urban spaces. In her shrewd analysis of the creation and use of boards as political institutions, Dr. Holman proves that neither weak or strong boards achieves the goal they are advertised to achieve. In doing so, she provides a new view of the failures of local democracy along with ideas for improvement.

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Matt Sleat, "Post-Liberalism" (Polity, 2025)

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors can agree what it is. Political sophisticates ask whether it is classical-, social-, ordo- or neo-liberal while American main street associates it with socialism.

Yet a new generation of "post-liberal" thinkers know liberalism well enough to want to give it upi or, in most cases, go back to a time - real or imagined - before it took hold.
In the US, these political philosophers are mostly Catholic conservatives. In the UK, with one prominent exception, they are largely left-wing Anglicans. In both countries, they tend to be religious and yearn for pre-globalisation communitarian, familial and patriotic certainties.

"Where liberals believe political authority is derived from individuals consenting to be ruled, for post-liberals it comes from serving the common good," writes Matt Sleat in Post-Liberalism (Polity, 2025). His book explores the ideas of the likes of Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari and post-liberalism's two standout thinkers: Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.
Matt Sleat is Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield.
*The author's book recommendations were Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty First Century by Edward Hall (OUP Oxford, 2025) and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022). Click here to see the full reading list.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news.

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Stephen Skowronek, "The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a complex and important analysis of the American constitutional system, of the U.S. Constitution itself, and the way that pressures on that system have pushed and pulled on the institutions of government, federalism, and ultimately democracy. Stephen Skowronek, the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University, continues his work and exploration of the viability of the constitutional system in the United States in this new book, following on the 2022 book: Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic (with John Dearborn and Desmond King, Oxford University Press, 2022). Skowronek traces the shifts and adaptations of the constitutional system as it contended with waves of democratization, with the anti-bellum expansion of voting rights for all white men, to the post-Civil War period and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, through the advocacy at the turn of the 19th century for labor and gender reforms, and then the advent of the Administrative state in the middle of the 20th century, and finally through the Civil Rights/Women’s Rights/Sexual Revolution/Disability Rights period of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the argument is that the system itself adapted, becoming more democratic and inclusive with regard to particular groups while at the same time loosening up the constitutional system as a whole. Even with these democratic advances over the course of 250 years, each iterative cycle also tended to exclude other groups of citizens.

This tension—with the extension of rights to groups who had been excluded, only to have other groups excluded to keep this ballast of the system—goes to the heart of the promise of democracy within this constitutional system. And we find ourselves with the Constitution under significant stress, with the growth and implementation of substantial presidentialism and an undue dependence on judicial supremacy, leaving the structures of the system potentially unmoored from the very document and ideas that created the system itself. This also gets at the apparent loss of consensus around the idea of the United States, the lack of a common vision of a great commercial republic, which was at the heart of the American Founding. Skowronek also notes that the U.S. Constitution is particularly inept at pursuing social justice, especially within the context of the common vision of a great commercial republic.

The Adaptability Paradox is a vitally important book examining the current constitutional dismay in which we find ourselves and provides the historical and political paths that brought us here. We learn a great deal about the tensions between democracy and the American constitutional system—which have been at the heart of the U.S. system since the early days of the republic, but have become much more attenuated of late, with a general lack of consensus around the purpose of constitutional system itself.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation of international norms by examining how and why two post-conflict states in Africa, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, have differed in their responses to rape and domestic violence. Specifically, she looks at the roles of the United Nations and women's movements in the establishment of specialized criminal justice sector agencies, and the referral of cases for prosecution. She argues that variation in implementation in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire can be explained by the levels of international and domestic pressures that states face and by the favorability of domestic political and institutional conditions. Medie's study is based on interviews with over 300 policymakers, bureaucrats, staff at the UN and NGOs, police officers, and survivors of domestic violence and rape — an unprecedented depth of research into women's rights and gender violence norm implementation in post-conflict countries. Furthermore, through her interviews with survivors of violence, Medie explains not only how states implement anti-rape and anti-domestic violence norms, but also how women experience and are affected by these norms. She draws on this research to recommend that states adopt a holistic approach to addressing violence against women.

Peace A. Medie is an award-winning scholar and a writer. She is associate professor in politics at the University of Bristol. She studies state and non-state actors’ responses to gender-based violence and other forms of insecurity in countries in Africa. She is author of ‘Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa’ (OUP 2020). Her debut novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. Her second novel, Nightbloom, will be published in June 2023.

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The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This week on Democracy Dialogues, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey speak with Susan C. Stokes, Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.

Drawing from her book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2022), Stokes examines why elected leaders sometimes choose to erode the democratic institutions that brought them to power. She explores the structural, economic, and political incentives that drive these choices—and how citizens, parties, and institutions can push back.

The conversation ranges across global cases—from Latin America and Eastern Europe to the United States—revealing the common “playbook” used by backsliding leaders and the conditions that make resistance possible. The episode also considers the difficult choices facing pro-democracy actors: Should they always follow the highest democratic standards, or sometimes play hardball to defend democracy itself?

This is a crucial conversation for understanding why backsliding happens, how it can be resisted, and what practical lessons democratic leaders and citizens can draw as new elections approach in the U.S. and around the world.

Books, Links, & Articles

Susan C. Stokes, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Chicago Center on Democracy – here

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Mark Griffiths, "Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land and life. An apparatus of turnstiles, overcrowded corridors, and invasive inspections, the checkpoint regulates the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, granting access to some while excluding most. Offering a nuanced exploration of space in Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Mark Griffiths reveals Checkpoint 300 as a stark symbol of Israeli colonialism that embodies larger systems of control and violence.

Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade.

Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control.

Mark Griffiths is reader in political geography at Newcastle University. He is coeditor of Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence.

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Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make American independence a reality.

Americans are surprisingly more familiar with his famous signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock's life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions--a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence. About two-fifths of the American population held neutral or ambivalent views about the Revolution, and Hancock spoke for them and to them, bringing them along.

Orphaned young, Hancock was raised by his merchant uncle, whose business and vast wealth he inherited--including household slaves, whom Hancock later freed. By his early thirties, he was one of New England's most prominent politicians, earning a place on Britain's most-wanted list and the derisive nickname King Hancock. While he eventually joined the revolution against England, his ever moderate--and moderating--disposition would prove an asset after 1776. Barbier shows Hancock appealing to southerners and northerners, Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He was a famously steadying force as president of the fractious Second Continental Congress. He parlayed with French military officials, strengthening a key alliance with his hospitable diplomacy. As governor of Massachusetts, Hancock convinced its delegates to vote for the federal Constitution and calmed the fallout from the shocking Shays's Rebellion.

An insightful study of leadership in the revolutionary era, King Hancock traces a moment when passion was on the side of compromise and accommodation proved the basis of profound social and political change.

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Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has.

Robert Macfarlane's best-selling books include Is a River Alive? and Underland. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has won many prizes around the world. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Darius Cuplinskas is director at The Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundations. He is based in London.

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Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people.

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Yoram Hazony, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" (Regnery Publishing, 2022)

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Conservatism needs to be rediscovered. That is, it needs to be differentiated from the post WWII concept of liberal democracy and return to its traditional three pillars of religion, nationalism, and economic growth. And it needs to be thought of as Anglo-American conservatism, rooted in the tradition of the English Constitution going back to such thinkers as John Fortescue (c. 1394 –1479) and John Selden (1584 –1654). We need to be a God-fearing nation, with nation and religion at the center of our national belief system. We must live conservative lives.

These are some of the arguments made by the political theorist and public intellectual Yoram Hazony in his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Publishing, 2022).

It is a provocative book that even many conservatives may take issue with.

For example, Hazony puts a great deal of emphasis on the importance of hierarchy both within the family and in society at large. Given that a good deal of the rationale of right-wing thinking in recent years has been predicated on the necessity for non-violent rebellion against the establishment in the Republican party and the left-wing dominance of academia, Hazony’s arguments may not be embraced by large swaths of the right. But to get conservatives and those on the right who do not identify as such thinking about what they stand for, what they want and how to get it is one of the goals of the book. It succeeds.

To those who might blanch at the embrace of religion in the public sphere, Hazony argues that for all intents and purposes the increasingly powerful political philosophy woke neo-Marxism is itself a religion. Hazony criticizes the right for acquiescing in the relegation of traditional religion to the private sphere. He argues robustly for religion, particularly Christianity, to serve as a countervailing force to wokeism. In the face of a progressive order that leaves people in the position of being unable to distinguish between a man and a woman, Hazony advocates for such measures as ending the ban on the Bible and God in the public school classroom.

This is a full-throated defense of conservatism and is, therefore, must reading for those on all sides of the political spectrum. Hazony addresses the need for the idea of a nation, its cohesion, and its inherited traditions. For that, he says, you need conservatism. And by conservatism, he means a public conservatism, a public traditionalism in those places where there is a majority that will support it. Hazony maintains that our culture must support parents and congregations in the work of the transmission of values that ensure respect for tradition, nation and hierarchy.

This book is a substantive intellectual history of conservative thought and profiles significant figures in the conservative movement (e.g., William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk). It is also a clarion call for those who claim to be conservatives to live genuinely conservative lives. Hazony urges conservatives to stand up for principles like the public acknowledgment of God and such core values as the honor due parents by their adult children, loyalty within marriage, and observance of the sabbath. In the Hazony version of conservatism, all ten of the Ten Commandments ought to be the basis for our country’s social and political life.

He includes in his book a memoir of his days at Princeton University in the 1980s, where a campus culture of loose living and rampant drinking led him to seek out a life of faith and family. College students of today and their parents would do well to read this moving chronicle of a young person surrounded by decadence who escapes its ravages via a solid marriage and a return to traditional religion.

Let’s hear from Mr. Hazony about his book and the path forward for conservatives and America itself.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Philip Rocco, "Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census" (UP Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Marquette University Political Scientist Phil Rocco has a new book focusing on the 2020 U.S. Census and how the states, localities, and federal government all worked – at times well, at times not quite as well – to conduct the census. This is a fascinating exploration of federalism at work in the American system, with some states putting in place extensive mechanisms to help with the census, which is a national responsibility. Other states did far less; and the national government, which is constitutionally required to execute a census every ten years, approached the census with some controversial requirements, with the federal courts having to make decisions as to the constitutional validity of some of those requirements. Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census (UP Kansas, 2025) explores this particular census as a kind of case study. The 2020 census was tricky on a number of fronts, not the least because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and because of the Trump Administration’s approach to the census itself. Rocco goes through the various approaches to the census as a national undertaking, searching for understandings of how the process actually worked and where there were positive and negative engagements with the process.

As a scholar of federalism, data science, and public policy, Rocco was intrigued by what he found in terms of cooperation on the state level, especially in places like California. The research also highlights various levels of mistrust of government entities and institutions, which makes the census process more difficult and potentially inaccurate because individuals are skeptical about completing the census forms. Because the census is required by law and regulation, it has a number of statutory deadlines, and in 2020, the Covid pandemic shattered the expected and legally compelled timeline for the reporting of results. This is another important aspect of this particular census that Rocco examines in order to assess how states and the national government tried to manage a rather unique process in 2020.

Counting Like A State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census examines not only the 2020 census but also sketches out the history of the census process in the United States so as to provide context for the most recent census and the processes that were implemented across the board. This is a very interesting exploration of how the federal government works, especially in context of federalism and unanticipated constraints.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Joe Greenwood-Hau," Capital, Privilege and Political Participation" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Who gets involved in politics? In Capital, Privilege and Political Participation (Liverpool UP, 2025) Joe Greenwood-Hau a Lecturer in the John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow, examines the dynamics of who participates, who is excluded and the reasons why. Drawing on a broad approach to political participation, the analysis connects levels of social, economic and cultural capital and resources to the question of political engagement. The book also thinks through how people understand both social inequalities and their own sense of self and social positioning, connecting quantitative perspectives to rich qualitative narratives. Connecting politics and sociology, and speaking to one of the most crucial issues in contemporary democracy. The book is available open access here

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Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) to local military, police, and paramilitary forces. Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Nina Wilen critically examines the rationale, implementation, and consequences of these efforts (2012-2024). With unique access to both military operations and strategy-making in European capitals, the author provides an innovative methodological approach, exclusive material, and a comprehensive perspective. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including participant observation of military operations and over 100 interviews with policymakers, military personnel, and security practitioners across the Sahel and Europe,this book offers an unprecedented analysis of how SFA has shaped local security dynamics and broader geopolitical competition.

The book argues that SFA in the Sahel is driven not just by regional security threats, such as insurgency, violent extremism, and transnational crime, but also by external actors' strategic interests. Through a comparative analysis of bilateral (France, U.S.) and multilateral (EU, UN) initiatives, it demonstrates how SFA has been framed as the primary policy tool to manage instability. Securitizing the Sahel offers both theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding SFA in fragile states. It challenges prevailing frameworks, provides critical insights for policymakers, and highlights the unintended consequences of militarized external assistance in the Sahel and beyond.

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Democracy and Freedom: The Role of Philanthropy and Education

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This week, we feature an episode with Dr. Alvaro Salas-Castro, President and CEO of the Reynolds Foundation, and Founder and Chairman of the Democracy Lab Foundation, which fosters civic innovation. We discuss the current state of the freedom and democracy movement, how philanthropic partnerships and democracy defenders are responding to authoritarianism, and how we create new transnational narratives and collaborative practices to support the movement for freedom and rights. We also dive into innovative projects in civic education and their potential to foster democratic renewal and commitments from the ground up.

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Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule?

Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, in Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power.

Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though Dr. Clarke also identifies a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. By preserving their elite coalitions and broad popular support, these movements can return to mass mobilization to thwart counterrevolutionary threats. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, Return of Tyranny sheds light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics.

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Emily Callaci, "Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor" (Seal Press, 2025)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.

In Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise (Penguin/Seal Press 2025), historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators – Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod - tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades. Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

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160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics ” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.

Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!

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Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Transcript of the interview

Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects.

She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing also appears in numerous anthologies and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism.

Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and The Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale, and Singularity University at NASA.

Salami was the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which won the Silver Award for Public Service and Activism at the 2024 Lovie Awards.

From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed Activate, an intersectional feminist movement that supported minoritised women in politics and community organising through visibility campaigns, mentoring, and fundraising. The initiative played a key role in shifting narratives and resources toward a more inclusive political landscape in the UK.

She has also worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, advised governments on gender equality, developed national school curricula, and curated cultural events at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Her blog, MsAfropolitan, launched in 2010, has reached over a million readers and remains a platform for exploring feminist and African-centred approaches to contemporary life.

Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University and Public Humanities at Cambridge University Press, as well as the council of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Links to References:
Apart Together – essay on Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire’s radical vision for the world

Africa’s Populist Trap for The Ideas Letter

The Niger River and the Dearth of History: Deconstructing the Myths of Mungo Park by Ezenwa E. Olumba

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Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history--and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of "freedom now," insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people--regardless of race--were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of "extremism in defense of liberty," advocating radical individualism. In One Man's Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King's dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man's Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater's landslide defeat in the presidential election and King's Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want--the one defined by Goldwater or by King?

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Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today.

Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The political and economic elite’s toolkit includes the art of bullshit—the persuasive use of language without regard for truth. Whether meritocratic or populist, elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority.

To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I’m pleased to welcome Hélène Landemore.

Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a global emergency creating irrevocable losses for the planet. Yet, each country experiences these losses differently, and reaching even inadequate political agreements is fraught with contestation. Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage (U Chicago Press, 2025) untangles the complex relationship between deteriorating environmental conditions, high politics, and everyday diplomatic practices, focusing on the United Nations’ agreement to address “loss and damage” and subsequent battles over implementation.

Lisa Vanhala looks at the differing assumptions and strategic framings that poor and rich countries bring to bear and asks why some norms emerge and diffuse while others fail to do so. Governing the End is based on ethnographic observation of eight years of UN meetings and negotiations and more than one hundred and fifty interviews with diplomats, policymakers, UN secretariat staff, experts, and activists. It explores explicit political contestation, as well as the more clandestine politics that have stymied implementation and substantially reduced the scope of compensation to poor countries. In doing so, Governing the End elucidates the successes and failures of international climate governance, revealing the importance of how ideas are constructed and then institutionally embodied.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press).

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Two Decades On: The African Union, Power, and Africa’s Democratic Future

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

When the African Union was founded in 2002, it promised to deliver a more united, prosperous, and people-centred continent. Two decades later, Africa’s political landscape tells a more complex story: one of ambition and frustration, democratic progress and reversal, renewed activism, and enduring inequality. How far has the AU come in shaping “The Africa We Want”, and what does its evolving role reveal about power, governance, and the continent’s place in a rapidly changing world?

In this episode, CEDAR host Temitayo Odeyemi talks to Dr Adeoye Akinola about his new co-edited volume African Union and Agenda 2063: The Past, Present, and Future (UJ Press, 2025) to unpack what over two decades of continental politics teach us about Africa’s democratic future, regional integration, and global voice.

Adeoye O. Akinola is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, where he leads the African Union Studies Unit. His research spans African political economy, governance, peace and security, and regional integration. His other publications include The Resurgence of Military Coups and Democratic Relapse in Africa (Palgrave 2024) and The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa (Springer 2018).

Temitayo Isaac Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). His research examines institutions, actors, and democratic engagement in Africa.

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Wolfgang Wagner, "The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e. party-political divisions are overcome-and should be overcome-for the sake of a common national interest. This book shows that this is not the case. Examining votes in the US Congress and several European parliaments, the book demonstrates that contestation over foreign affairs is barely different from contestation over domestic politics. Analyses of a new collection of deployment votes, of party manifestos, and of expert survey data show that political parties differ systematically over foreign policy and military interventions in particular. The left/right divide is the best guide to the pattern of party-political contestation: support is weakest at the far left of the spectrum and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to green, social democratic, liberal and conservative parties; amongst parties of the far right, support is again weaker than amongst parties of the centre. An analysis of parliamentary debates in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom about the interventions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Iraq and Syria shows that political parties also differ systematically in how they frame the use of force abroad. For example, parties on the right tend to frame their country's participation in the US-led missions in terms of national security and national interests whereas parties on the left tend to engage in 'spiral model thinking', i.e. they critically reflect on the unintended consequences of the use of force in fuelling the conflicts with the Taliban and Daesh.

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Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions of the people he meets, like tourists, local public historians, and teachers, illuminating how these sites and all of us participate in remembering enslavement in contemporary America.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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E. Alaverdov and M. W. Bari, "Cultural Heritage Protection and Restoration in Conflict and Post-Conflict Zones" (IGI Global, 2025)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The protection and restoration of cultural heritage is essential, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones. Armed conflicts frequently result in the destruction or collateral damage of cultural landmarks, artifacts, and traditions. In post-conflict recovery, preserving cultural heritage is not only a matter of historical conservation but helps heal society and national rebuilding. This complex process demands interdisciplinary collaboration, sensitive policy frameworks, and sustainable strategies to safeguard heritage under threat and to foster resilience in communities emerging from crisis.

Cultural Heritage Protection and Restoration in Conflict and Post-Conflict Zones explores the need for cultural heritage protection. This book speaks out against the damage to cultural heritage during conflicts, because the damage caused to the cultural heritage of each nation is damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, and each nation has its contribution to world culture. Covering topics such as heritage, culture, and restoration, this book is an excellent resource for scholars, professors, students and stakeholders.

Emilia Alaverdov , Ph.D. in Political Science, professor, Faculty of Law and International Relations since 2011.

Prof. Muhammad Waseem Bari , Educator, trainer, consultant, and researcher who prioritizes public education, scientific advancement, and students’ engagement.

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Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), Ihnji Jon's Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics (Pluto Press, 2021) tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics. National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of 'nature' in the everyday functioning of our urban life.

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What Democracy Does… and Does Not Do

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 23:09:00 -0000

This week on Democratic Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl welcomes Maya Tudor, Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

In her recent article, “What Democracy Does and Does Not Do,” published in the Journal of Democracy, Tudor examines one of the most urgent questions of our time: Does democracy deliver? As authoritarian models gain visibility and confidence around the world, citizens and policymakers alike are questioning whether democratic systems can still provide stability, growth, and fairness.

Tudor’s research draws on cross-national data and historical evidence to show what democracies have achieved — and where their performance has fallen short. In this episode, she discusses how democracy shapes economic outcomes, social inclusion, and governance quality, and what these patterns mean for democratic legitimacy today.

The conversation also looks ahead: how well equipped are democracies to handle future global challenges like climate change, inequality, and technological disruption? And what can leaders and citizens do to ensure that democracy not only survives but thrives in meeting the expectations of its people?

This is an essential episode for anyone grappling with the question of whether democracy still delivers — and what it must do next.

Books, Links, & Articles

Maya Tudor, “What Democracy Does and Does Not Do,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2024)

Maya Tudor, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Harris Mylonas and Maya Tudor, Varieties of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press Elements 2023).

Listen on YouTube, NBN, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s.

Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Dr. Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Dr. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs’s better-known Black contemporaries. Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.

Our guest is: Dr. Marion Orr, who is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who produces the Academic Life podcast. She is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers. She writes the Academic Life Newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com.

Playlist for listeners:

The End of White Politics

The Vice-President's Black Wife

No Common Ground

The Social Constructions of Race

Smithsonian American Women

The First and Last King of Haiti

Of Bears and Ballots

Never Caught

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And get free bonus content HERE.

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Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. Congress has tried to design Executive positions with an eye towards making real this dimension of presidential norms. The concept of presidential self-restraint is a component of how the president uses his/her executive powers: that the president has a certain expanse of power and chooses, based on a variety of reasons or outcomes, to husband some of that power, or restrain its use. Because presidential self-restraint is particularly hard to divine, especially in how presidents think about the execution of their powers, Greenberg and Dearborn turned to congressional considerations that essentially take into account this idea. Congress has spent quite a lot of time over the past fifty years (since Watergate) in designing appointed positions within the Executive branch in such a way as to flesh out a kind of restraint on the president’s part. In so doing, Congress has attempted different means to insulate individuals/positions from potential abuse by a president.

Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint integrates a number of case studies of congressional action on presidential appointments to examine this push and pull between the legislative and executive branches. As the issue of self-restraint has become more pressing, Greenberg and Dearborn sketch out three foundational shifts that provides the framework for the way that Congress has tried to insulate executive positions, and the ways in which Congress has acknowledged the tension around depending on presidential self-restraint. The issues of political polarization, especially as demonstrated by congressional co-partisans with the president, the Supreme Court’s growing commitment to constitutional formalism and unilateralism in the Executive, and Congress’s unwillingness to defend its own powers and assert those powers all contribute to this conundrum of a reliance on presidential self-restraint that is often caught up in an expansion of the use of executive powers. The case studies provided demonstrate this conundrum and help us to see just how Congress tried to structure self-restraint into a number of different appointments and how presidents have tried to work around those constraints, some more successfully than others.

This is a brief but complex analysis of the current dynamic between the president and Article II powers, the U.S. Congress’s evaporating powers, and the Supreme Court’s complicit role in fortifying an expansive understanding of presidential power.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Rachel Myrick, "Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Polarization is a defining feature of politics in the United States and many other democracies. Yet although there is much research focusing on the effects of polarization on domestic politics, little is known about how polarization influences international cooperation and conflict. Democracies are thought to have advantages over nondemocratic nations in international relations, including the ability to keep foreign policy stable across time, credibly signal information to adversaries, and maintain commitments to allies. Does domestic polarization affect these “democratic advantages”? These are the questions that Rachel Myrick tackles in her new book, “Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability” (Princeton UP, 2025)

In this timely book, Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs. Drawing on a range of evidence, including cross-national analyses, observational and experimental public opinion research, descriptive data on the behavior of politicians, and interviews with policymakers, Myrick develops metrics that explain the effect of extreme polarization on international politics and traces the pathways by which polarization undermines each of the democratic advantages.

Turning to the case of contemporary US foreign policy, Myrick shows that as its political leaders become less responsive to the public and less accountable to political opposition, the United States loses both reliability as an ally and credibility as an adversary. Myrick’s account links the effects of polarization on democratic governance to theories of international relations, integrating work across the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics to explore how patterns of domestic polarization shape the international system.

Our guest is Rachel Myrick, the Douglas & Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Natasha Piano, "Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of Elitism, comprising Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, voiced this very concern. They feared that defining democracy exclusively through representative practices creates unrealistic expectations of what elections can achieve, generating mass demoralization and disillusionment with popular government.

The Italian School’s concern has gone unheeded, even as their elite theory has been foundational for political science in the United States. Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (Harvard UP, 2025) argues that scholars have misinterpreted the Italians as conservative, antidemocratic figures who championed the equation of democracy with representative practices to restrain popular participation in politics. Natasha Piano contends not only that the Italian School’s thought has been distorted but also that theorists have ignored its main objective: to contain demagogues and plutocrats who prey on the cynicism of the masses. We ought to view these thinkers not as elite theorists of democracy but as democratic theorists of elitism.

The Italian School’s original writings do not reject electoral politics; they emphasize the power and promise of democracy beyond the ballot. Elections undoubtedly are an essential component of functioning democracies, but in order to preserve their legitimacy we must understand their true capacities and limitations. It is past time to dispel the delusion that we need only elections to solve political crises, or else mass publics, dissatisfied with the status quo, will fall deeper into the arms of authoritarians who capture and pervert formal democratic institutions to serve their own ends.

Natasha Piano is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She specializes in democratic theory and the history of political thought, focusing on the realist and empirical traditions in political science and Italian political theory

YouTube Channel: here

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Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people’s daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti-globalization movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes.

Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020) explores how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it. Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalization process in Juaìrez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – this book provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth).

This book touches on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It offers an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars in political science, economics, sociology, geography, gender studies, critical race studies, environmental studies, and all those interested in the critique of mainstream economics and neoliberal logic.

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Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.
Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Dr. Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.
Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism.

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Elif Kalaycioglu, "The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What does it take to construct humanity's cultural history and what do these efforts produce in the world? In The Politics of World Heritage (Oxford UP, 2025), Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO's flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural history of humanity, attached to "outstanding universal value" and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu's analysis tracks that construction across fifty years of the regime and maps it onto three distinct visions: humanity as a rarified transhistorical subject, humanity as a diverse subject, and humanity as a subject that is adequately represented by the community of nation states. In each of these constructions, experts and states take up the cultural and historical resources that circulate within the regime to narrate a humanity into being, and position themselves as its adjudicators, contributors and custodians. Each construction comes with remainders, that is, parts of humanity excluded from this cultural history, and internal hierarchies between those at its center and others that remain on the margins.
These hierarchies challenge the aspiration to peace and solidarity. While these aspirations have changed across the three iterations of humanity, across the different forms, the regime's structures and participants have been ill-equipped and hesitant to engage with the underbellies of humanity towards robust visions of peace and solidarity. In contrast to this general tendency, Kalaycioglu excavates from select nomination files nested constructions of humanity that hold onto the globality and unevenness of its political conditions and presents the possibility of robust visions of peace and solidarity, and humanity's different futures.

Elif Kalaycioglu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The University of Alabama.

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Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy

About the Podcast

Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy, Democratic Dialogues bridges academic research with real-world debates — from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence to civic resistance, renewal, and reform. We look at new books, groundbreaking articles, and the ideas reshaping how we understand and practice democracy today.

Listen on YouTube, NBN, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 1

Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries

This week, we feature an episode with Kenneth Roberts, Jennifer McCoy, and Murat Somer, joining co-hosts Rachel Riedl and Esam Boraey to discuss their collaborative article, “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Together, they unpack how democracies don’t collapse overnight, but instead erode through different pathways — from executive aggrandizement to elite collusion — and how societies can resist or even partially recover. The conversation examines how these dynamics unfold in contexts as varied as Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, and the United States, and what practical lessons citizens and policymakers can draw today. This is an essential conversation for understanding how democracies falter, and how collective action, civic mobilization, and institutional renewal can push them back from the brink.

Books, Links, & Articles

“Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2025)
Jennifer McCoy & Murat Somer, Pernicious Polarization and Its Global Impact
Kenneth Roberts, Populism, Political Mobilization, and the Latin American Left
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Institutions in Africa

Upcoming Episodes

Our next episode features Susan C. Stokes (University of Chicago) discussing her book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. Stay tuned for an in-depth conversation on why democratic leaders sometimes turn against the institutions that empower them — and what can be done to safeguard democracy in an era of uncertainty.

Subscribe and follow us on YouTube and social media for new releases every month.

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Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for the emergence of new technologies.

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Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated environmentalists to ever live. Yet, he had a tragic view of the world that turned his green dream into a green nightmare.

This is the final episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS).

There were a number of works that we pulled from to help us understand this story. If you want to learn more about conservative ecological thought, the population panic, and related themes, we recommend that you read: by Richard Hames and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Eco-Fascism: Climate Change and the Far Right; from Jason Oakes, Garret Hardin’s Tragic Sense of Life, a short article on the the ecological models that influenced Hardin; and finally, Thomas Robertson’s excellent survey of the population panic of the mid-60s to late-70s, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism.

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Michael Lazarus, "Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx by Michael Lazarus

Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today.

Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx's work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx's value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement.

In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the "form of value," Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.

Michael Lazarus is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy. Before coming to King’s College London, he was Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute and a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Hindutva and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy.

M. Sudhir Selvaraj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford.

Kathinka Frøystad is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo.

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Taru Salmenkari, "Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society" (Edward Elgar, 2025)

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Exploring the boundaries, fringes, and inner workings of civil society, Taru Salmenkari investigates local forms of political agency in China in light of the globalization of political values, practices, and institutions in Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society (Edward Elgar, 2025). She provides a theoretical framework for globalization, examining new forms of governance emerging with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and how these have reconfigured social power in China.
This topical book outlines how civil society has been promoted globally since the 1980s, as NGOs advance development cooperation, democratization, and neoliberal third-sector service production. Salmenkari studies the outcomes of these processes in China, where civil society promotion met strong localizing forces rising from NGO activists'' own values, governmental regulation, and local society. Evaluating various forms of Chinese self-organizing, she discusses the social omissions of Chinese environmental NGO agendas, Confucian ties in global translations, gay self-organizing, and the idea and practice of Minjian. The book identifies complexities within Chinese civil society and how it navigates academia, global partnerships, social exclusions and alternative values, analyzing how these conflicting positions influence Chinese politics and society.

Taru Salmenkari is senior research at the University of Helsinki.

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Matthew D. Nelsen, "The Color of Civics: Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Matthew D. Nelsen, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, has a new book out that focuses on the content of civic education in the United States, and how we learn about the diverse and varied history of the United States. There is an ongoing and contemporary conversation about civic education in the United States, and what should and should not be taught in explaining the United States, how it works, who is part of it, and how it has evolved over four centuries. Nelsen’s work, The Color of Civics: Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), pays close attention to what happens in classrooms, particularly urban classrooms, when these lessons are taught, and how students respond to these curricula and experiences. What he finds should be of interest to all of us, since it gets to the very heart of civic education, which is how to teach young people about being citizens in a democracy. Nelsen poses these broader questions throughout the book: Who is learning what? What is the general social studies curriculum that discusses “how a bill becomes a law” and the basic information about separation of powers and checks and balances? How is this curriculum, which is both somewhat abstract and also an idealized version of the American political system, taught, and how is it engaged by students? Nelsen found a variety of answers, but what is of particular interest is that there are teachers and instructors who have taken this somewhat static curriculum, and integrated different dimensions to it, engaging students in understandings of social movements, highlighting activities by a number of different political leaders, from both mainstream and marginalized groups. When the education becomes more multifaceted, it pulls in more students, and allows them to see themselves in these activities, even in leadership roles. And it also is more encompassing for all of the students in the classroom, regardless of race or other identity groupings.

The Color of Civics pulls together a variety of forms and kinds of research methodology to understand what happens in classrooms and how students learn and see themselves within this fabric of American democracy. Using qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic approaches, Nelsen weaves together robust data to explore what makes diverse impacts within the classrooms, especially within a big, urban public school system. Part of what is teased out in this research is the potential longevity of political socialization that transpires at an early age among students—this is a key dimension of citizenship, creating in individuals an understanding of their role and capacities within a democracy. The ability to teach about social movements, and political movements, and the individuals who were involved in these movements expands the concept of citizen participation in American politics and thus expands the notion of citizenship in general. This approach also moves beyond the “great man” narrative of history and helps students to think about how various people engage in politics, not just by running for elected office. Nelsen’s work is important and useful as we continue to consider how citizens can and should participate in American politics and how the next generation is taught about citizenship, the American republic, and the idea of a complex democracy.

This book may be acquired at Books and Books in Miami, Florida, at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, IL, and at Women & Children First Bookstore in Chicago, IL.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University, and co-host of the New Books in Political Science. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Sage and Volume II: Into the Multiverse (UP Kansas, 2022 & 2025), as well as co-editor of Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (UP Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.
AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.
In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.
The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants’ ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.
Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don’t deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI’s broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.
Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory.

Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Yong-Shik Lee, "Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia" (Anthem Press, 2023)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the long run, countries in Northeast Asia will have to see the need for collective defense. Otherwise, you won’t be able to stop rivalry between powers like the U.S. and China. It sounds utopian now, but so did the idea of French and German soldiers serving under the same command a century ago.
– Y.S. Lee, NBN Interview (2025)

Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia (Anthem Press, 2023) examines the enduring political and military tensions in one of the world’s most dynamic yet unstable regions, from China and the Korean Peninsula to Japan, Mongolia, and Russia’s Far East. Despite its economic vitality, Northeast Asia remains fraught with persistent risks of conflict including North Korea’s nuclear program, and the unresolved disputes over territory, history, and power imbalances fueled in part by China’s rise.

Y.S. Lee traces the political, historical, military, and economic forces behind these tensions and their global implications. Offering a comparative, country-by-country analysis, he also explores the influence of external powers such as the United States and Russia. The book assesses the prospects and consequences of Korean reunification and provides a fresh look at Mongolia’s often-overlooked role in regional stability, suggesting how imagination and diplomacy together might begin to rebuild trust across the region.

In this NBN interview, Professor Lee discusses how history, ideology, and institutional design intersect across the region – from the entanglement of North Korea’s Juche ideology with its nuclear ambitions to Japan’s struggle for reconciliation, and South Korea’s evolving identity as a middle power. He argues that sustainable peace requires economic, political, and even eventual military cooperation akin to Europe’s postwar transformation, which was once unthinkable, but ultimately necessary.

Yong-Shik Lee is Director of the Law and Development Institute and a leading scholar of international economic law and institutional reform. His previous works include Law and Development: Theory and Practice (2011; 2nd ed. 2021), Reclaiming Development in the World Trading System (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2016), and Safeguard Measures in World Trade: The Legal Analysis (Edward Elgar, 3rd ed. 2014). His research bridges economic theory and policy design to advance inclusive development and peace.

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Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in the 1970s that set the foundation for drug violence over the longer term.

In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade.

Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations.

Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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José Marichal, "You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract" (Policy Press, 2025)

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the age of AI, where personal data fuels corporate profits and state surveillance, what are the implications for democracy?

This incisive book You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract (Policy Press, 2025) explores the unspoken agreement we have with tech companies. In exchange for reducing the anxiety of an increasingly complex online world, we submit to algorithmic classification and predictability. This reduces incentives for us to become “algorithmic problems” with dire consequences for liberal democracy. He calls for a movement to demand that algorithms promote play, creativity and potentiality rather than conformity.

This is a must-read for anyone navigating the intersection of technology, politics and identity in an increasingly data-driven world.

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Massimo Modonesi, "The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action" (Haymarket, 2019)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action (2019), published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it’s coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance.

Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society.

Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be taken nor granted, a sacred concept upon which the nation was established. The concept and actualization of freedom are also to be defended by the state. However, when such a concept has been arrogated, litigated, and delegitimized by a state that ignores its very definition, the concept of freedom comes under critical examination. Political theorist Elisabeth R. Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University, has a new book dissecting the core of this conception of freedom. Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022) explores who defined and continues to define freedom, she also examines freedom’s rhetorical capacity, and thus its potential for weaponization. Anker illuminates how the tainted gestation of freedom birthed a status quo based on the individualistic and conditional conception of ‘freedom’ that has long been tangoing with white supremacy, colonialism, climate destruction, capitalism, and exploitation. Such a dance is by design and has been constant throughout U.S. history.

Anker establishes that for democratic government to take hold in the United States, racial domination and violence transpired, limiting the freedoms of some individuals in order to establish a governmental system that is based, in theory, on protecting liberty and freedom. This is the kind of tension that Anker explains as “ugly freedom.” Thus, American freedom, our freedom, has embedded in it the role of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, and land theft. The shocking stains of slavery produced freedom of prosperity and leisure for white people through direct dehumanization of Black and Brown people—this is what Anker is talking about within the concept of ugly freedom. This has also been manifested through more contemporary rhetoric regarding imperial wars like those in the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, destroying infrastructure and lives in those countries for the capital prosperity of the imperial core. These ugly freedoms legitimize the economic exploitation of the masses in the name of individual success for the few. Thus, ugly freedom examines the acts of freedom that rely on violence and brutality—this challenges how we often imagine freedom to be. Ugly Freedom explores the connection between politics and aesthetics as well, taking up an array of historical events, political theories and concepts, different forms of art, televisual productions, poetry, music, and biology to illustrate the compounding violence of the few in the name of freedom. The cultural artifacts interrogated were controversial in their own right, and Anker explores them to help understand which kinds of freedom are worth fighting for and which kinds of freedom must be fought against. Through a critical lens, Anker shifts the perception of freedom to help restore justice to its foundational value—one that is less dependent on the individual or individual heroics, and more enveloping of the community and shared collaboration.

Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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David Stasavage, "The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020) draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer--democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished--and when and why they declined--can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.

Drawing from examples spanning several millennia, Stasavage first considers why states developed either democratic or autocratic styles of governance and argues that early democracy tended to develop in small places with a weak state and, counterintuitively, simple technologies. When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent--as in medieval Europe--rulers needed consent from their populace to govern. When central institutions were strong--as in China or the Middle East--consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely. He then explores the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then the United States, illustrating that modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory. Democracy has been an experiment that has unfolded over time and across the world--and its transformation is ongoing.

Amidst rising democratic anxieties, The Decline and Rise of Democracy widens the historical lens on the growth of political institutions and offers surprising lessons for all who care about governance.

David Stasavage is dean for the social sciences and Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University.

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Piotr Pietrzak, "Strengthening International Relations Through Transformative Theory and Practice" (Information Science Reference, 2025)

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As the world becomes more connected, strengthening international relations is essential for fostering global stability for economic and cultural growth. By integrating theory and practice applications, nations can move beyond traditional diplomatic approaches to embrace new strategies. By applying transformative theories, it allows for fresh perspectives to address global challenges and utilize practical applications. Further research may ensure these concepts translate into meaningful action.

Strengthening International Relations Through Transformative Theory and Practice (IGI Global, 2025) edited by Piotr Pietrzak explores the debate between international relations theory and global response.

It examines how integrations with theory and practices devise the most applicable solutions to ongoing confrontations and tensions between various countries and other non-state actors.

This book covers topics such as international relations, globalization, and global business and is a useful resource for government officials, business owners, academicians, researchers, and policymakers.
Piotr Pietrzak is a co-founder of In Statu Nascendi Think Tank a non-partisan, independent, and highly diversified network of scholars organized to study a contemporary conflict and political philosophy that provides advice and ideas on specific issues related to geoeconomic, political, or socio-economic problems. He immerses himself in geopolitics every day. As a political thinker, author, and trained ontologist, he takes pride in infusing a pragmatic perspective into IR theory, conflict management, and geopolitics.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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In Search of Green China: Ma Tianjie on Pan Yue and the CCP’s “Ecological Civilization"

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A former journalist and environmental campaigner named Pan Yue rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, championing the concept of “ecological civilization.” This green dream combines elements of traditional Chinese culture with eco-Marxism, suggesting a radical reorientation of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Is the idea a serious alternative to sustainable development, as the CCP claims? Or is it just a cynical cover for eco-authoritarianism? We speak with Beijing-based journalist and environmentalist Ma Tianjie, author of In Search of Green China (2025)

This is the fourth episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS).

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Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving.

In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.
Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.

Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

YouTube Channel: here

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Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to go on General History

The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. This book examines why the instrument has such a hold on leaders’ imaginations and rhetoric despite its patchy record in practice.

Examining detailed historical case studies from conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan/Darfur, Libya and Syria, The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument (Bristol University Press, 2025) by Dr. Gustav Meibauer shows how debates about, and actual use of, no-fly zones in US foreign policy have not been primarily about managing conflict or protecting civilians. Instead, the focus is often on navigating contradictory international and domestic political incentives and constraints, leading to US intervention in an ill-considered and incremental manner.

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Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and working-class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi focuses on worker voice and late-capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi’s research also examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi engages working-class history in urban settings, looking at low-wage service work, industrial employment, and workers in higher education.

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Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.
If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.
This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.
With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics.

Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.

China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and security relations between China and Africa. David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman not only explain the specific tactics and methods that Beijing uses to build its strategic relations with African political and military elites but also contextualize and interpret them within China’s larger geostrategy. They argue that the priorities of Chinese leaders―including the conflation of threats to the Communist Party with threats to the country, a growing emphasis on relations in the Global South, and a focus on countering U.S. hegemony―have combined to elevate Africa’s importance among policy makers in Beijing.

Ranging from diplomacy and propaganda to arms sales and space cooperation, from increasingly frequent People’s Liberation Army Navy port calls in Africa to the rising number of African students studying in China, this book marshals extensive and compelling qualitative and quantitative evidence of the deepening ties between China and Africa. Drawing on two decades of systematic data and hundreds of surveys and in-person interviews, Shinn and Eisenman shed new light on the state of China-Africa relations today and consider what the future may hold.

Byline

Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, Great power rivalry and IR theories.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

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Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why do states start conflicts that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge UP, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of bureaucratic information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Author Tyler Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security.

Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

Our guest is Tyler Jost, an assistant professor of political science and the Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies at Brown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:06:00 -0000

How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China’s Republican Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Professor Xiaobo Lü (UC Berkeley) adopts a new model for thinking about this question. Using new qualitative and quantitative evidence, Lü shows how CCP success was built on dominant leadership and its interaction with a strategy of mass-centric mobilization to harness resources. By contrast, the contested factional leadership of the KMT and its elite-centric mobilization held back the party’s power, particularly after it lost its geographical and fiscal base during China’s war with Japan.

In this interview, Professor Lü draws out the comparison between the two parties going back to the 1920s. He discusses how both parties adapted to the challenges of the Nanjing Decade and the 1937-45 wartime period – and how the legacies of party-building before 1949 still affect China today.

Domination and Mobilization is strongly recommended for anyone interested in modern Chinese history, comparative revolutions, and party mobilization in authoritarian systems.

Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

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Delivering for Democracy – Why results matter

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The global wave of democratic backsliding has undermined the ascendancy of democracy in the twenty-first century. So what do democracies need to do to insulate themselves against this trend? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s best-known political scientists, about why democracies need to show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability in order to restore and sustain citizen’s confidence. Drawing on his new article in the Journal of Democracy with Chris Dann and Beatriz Magaloni, he argues that delivery for citizens is crucial to rebuilding the social contract and hence support for democracy – and warns about the dire consequences of failing this challenge.

This episode is based on Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann and Beatriz Magaloni’s article “Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter” that was published in the April 2025 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and is part of an ongoing partnership between the Journal of Democracy and the People, Power, Politics podcast.

Guest: Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and professor (by courtesy) of political science at Stanford University. He is the author of some of the best-known book published on politics in the last thirty years, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Trust (1995), The Origins of Political Order (2011), Political Order and Political Decay (2014), and Identity (2018). His books have won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award, and the Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration (2024).

Presenter: Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

Transcript here

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Emma Ashford, "First Among Equals: U. S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A fresh, concise roadmap for U.S. grand strategy in a multipolar world For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape the world have defined U.S. foreign policy. But the failures of the global war on terror, the return of conflict to Europe, and growing tensions with China all suggest that this approach to the world is flawed. For the United States--the country that has ruled the international system largely alone since 1991--this moment is particularly perilous. Can policymakers adapt American foreign policy to better fit the twenty-first century, and in doing so avoid the pitfalls and excesses of the past three decades? In this book, Emma Ashford proposes a return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles, ones better suited for the emerging multipolar world, that would pursue narrower U.S. interests, cultivate the capabilities of friendly states, and emphasize room for maneuver over rigid alliances. In this she provides a valuable counterpoint to today's liberal internationalist consensus, as well as a road map for policymakers who seek to change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

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Madison Schramm, "Why Democracies Fight Dictators" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.

Why Democracies Fight Dictators (Oxford UP, 2025) takes up the question of why liberal democracies are so inclined to engage in conflict with personalist dictators. Building on research in political science, history, sociology, and psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analysis of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British perceptions during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies' understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Madison V. Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes. When conflicts of interest arise between the two types of states, Schramm argues, cognitive biases and social narratives predispose leaders in liberal democracies to perceive personalist dictators as particularly threatening and to respond with anger—an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. She also locates this tendency in the escalatory dynamics that precede open military conflict: coercion, covert action, and crisis bargaining. At all of these stages, the tendency toward anger and risk acceptance contributes to explosive outcomes between democratic and personalist regimes.

Madison Schramm, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

YouTube Channel: here

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Raymond J. McKoski, "David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One of Abraham Lincoln's staunchest and most effective allies, Judge David Davis masterminded the floor fight that gave Lincoln the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican National Convention. This history-changing event emerged from a long friendship between the two men. It also altered the course of Davis's career, as Lincoln named him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1862.

In David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Raymond J. McKoski offers a biography of Davis's public life, his impact on the presidency and judiciary, and his personal, professional, and political relationships with Lincoln. Davis lent his vast network of connections, organizational and leadership abilities, and personal persuasiveness to help Lincoln's political rise. When Davis became a judge, he honed an ability to hear each case with complete impartiality, a practice that endeared him to Lincoln but one day put him at odds with the president over important Civil War-era rulings. McKoski details these cases while providing an in-depth account of Davis's role in Lincoln's two unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. Senate and the fateful run for the presidency.

Raymond J. McKoski is a retired Illinois Circuit Judge and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

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Luis L. Schenoni, "Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge UP, 2025) provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book demonstrates that international wars in nineteenth-century Latin America triggered state-building, that the outcomes of those wars affected the legitimacy and continuity of such efforts, and that the relative capacity of states in this region today continues to reflect those distant processes. Combining comparative historical analysis with cutting edge social science methods, the book provides a comprehensive picture of state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America that is compelling for readers across disciplines, breathes new life into bellicist approaches to state formation, and offers a novel framework to explain variation in state capacity across Latin America and the world.

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Sasha Davis, "Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A practical call to action against oppression. Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or lobbied their representatives with the aim of creating lasting social change, overturning repressive laws, or limiting environmental destruction. Yet very little seems to improve for those affected by rapacious governments. Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail (U Minnesota Press, 2025) brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means. Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, focuses on the strategies of movements, many of them Indigenous, that have occupied contested sites and demonstrated their effectiveness at managing or governing them. Including case studies of resistance to development on Indigenous lands in Hawai'i, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, he offers insight and direction for activists, students, academics, and others dedicated to protecting and improving the well-being of their communities and beyond. It would be easy to succumb to pessimism and political apathy in the face of governing institutions that are increasingly unresponsive to calls for change and repressive in response to protest, even as they violate human rights, ignore existential climate catastrophes, and concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Davis finds inspiration for genuine political change through social movements that are successfully "replacing the state" and taking over the day-to-day governance of threatened places. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these social movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care.

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Michael Rowe, "Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions" (Routledge, 2024)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Researching Street-level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions (Routledge, 2024) is the first among a number of new titles in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods that we’ll be featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. In it, Mike Rowe discusses the continued relevance of the idea of street level bureaucracy, and the merits of adopting interpretive methodologies for studying frontline discretionary workers. He reflects on his own ethnographic and interview-based research among social welfare officers and police culture in the United Kingdom, and comparatively, in places where bureaucracy may be noteworthy more for its absence than its presence.

Like this episode? You might also be interested in Sarah Ball talking about Behavioural Public Policy in Australia

Looking for something to read? Mike recommends In Praise of Floods by James C. Scott, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.

This interview summary was not synthesised by a machine. Unlike the makers and owners of those machines, the author accepts responsibility for its contents.

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Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:41:00 -0000

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of how conditions shape the trajectory of non-state armed groups, this book reshapes our understanding of why such organizations become more moderate over time.

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Nicholas Micinski, "Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU.

Nicholas R. Micinski is Libra Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Maine. His research focuses on global governance, particularly how states and international organizations respond to refugees, migration, climate change, and peacebuilding. Micinski is the author of two books: Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and UN Global Compacts: Governing Migrants and Refugees (Routledge, 2021). Previously, Micinski was postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval, ISA James N. Rosenau Postdoctoral Fellow, and visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Europe, Boston University. Before academia, he worked in the NGO sector in London for five years on refugee policy and service delivery. Micinski received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY).

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Carol Atack, "Plato: A Civic Life" (Reaktion, 2025)

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. In Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion, 2025), Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he developed the Socratic dialogue into a powerful philosophical tool, and how he used the institutions of Athenian society to create a compelling imaginative world. Accessibly written, this book shows how Plato made Athens the place where diverse ideas were integrated into a new way of approaching the big questions about our lives, then and now.

Carol Atack teaches classical Greek and ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is the author and coauthor of two books, most recently Anachronism and Antiquity.

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Timothy Williams, "Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape" (Bristol UP, 2025)

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (Bristol UP, 2025) explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book demonstrates in what way power is derived from how roles are assigned, exploring who is deemed a perpetrator, victim or hero, as well as ambivalences in this memory.

In the book, Williams interrogates the ways in which these roles are attributed and ambivalences created in each society’s political discourses, transitional justice processes and cultural heritage. The comparative empirical analysis illustrates the importance of memory for political power and legitimacy today.

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Gen Z Uprising: Youth, Protest and Political Change in Nepal

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In early September 2025, Nepal witnessed an extraordinary week of upheaval that many now refer to as the ‘five-day revolution’. Within the span of a single week, youth-led ‘Gen Z’ protests spread across Kathmandu and other major cities, the prime minister and his government resigned, the army intervened, parliament was dissolved, and Nepal’s new (and first female) interim prime minister was sworn in. The events revealed deep frustrations among young Nepalis with corruption, socioeconomic exclusion, and a lack of political accountability.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Jeevan Baniya joins host Hanna Geschewski to explore the deeper forces behind this moment. They discuss the grievances that brought young Nepalis to the streets, why these long-standing frustrations erupted now, and how the ‘Gen Z’ protests should be understood in relation to questions of representation and political change. The conversation also considers the diversity within Nepal’s youth movement and the pathways through which young people may shape politics in the aftermath of the uprising.

Jeevan Baniya is a political scientist and Deputy Director of the research institute Social Science Baha in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Hanna Geschewski is a PhD researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen in Norway. Her work focuses on migration, displacement and socio-environmental change in the Himalayan region and South Asia.

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Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019) demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gramsci as a theorist of race within a broader context of social struggle, Carley connects Gramsci's insights into the political mobilizations of racialized subaltern groups to contemporary critical race theory and cultural studies of racialization and racism. Speaking across disciplines and drawing on a number of empirical examples, Carley offers a battery of original concepts to assist scholars and activists in analyzing the tactical practices of protests in which race is a central factor.

Author info - Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Host info – Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, whose work focuses on racial politics, media, and democracy. He recently published the book Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing and an essay in Time on the importance of cross-racial coalitions in social movements.

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Nicholas Bromell, "The Time is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2013)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Nick Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the Sixties, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His articles and essays on African American literature and political thought have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Political Theory, Raritan, and The Sewanee Review. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he blogs at thetimeisalwaysnow.org.

Nick Bromell’s book is a work of intellectual history and political theory that places Black thinkers—writers, activists, and artists—at the center of American democratic thought. He argues that African American intellectual traditions have continually reshaped the meaning of democracy in the U.S., offering critiques and visions that go beyond the frameworks typically emphasized in mainstream political philosophy. The title, taken from James Baldwin’s writings, reflects
the idea that democracy is never finished—it is always urgent and ongoing.
The Time is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (Oxford UP, 2013) posits that Black thought epitomizes the crucible of American Democratic theory Bromell contends that African American thinkers are not simply responding to oppression but actively producing political theory—ideas
about freedom, justice, equality, and collective life. Their insights emerge from lived experiences of slavery, segregation,
and racial inequality, which provide a unique vantage point for critiquing American democracy.
Secondly, Democracy is an ongoing and incomplete project of reconstruction, renewal, and revival. Building on Baldwin’s phrase “the time is always now,” Bromell argues that democracy must be constantly reimagined and fought for. Black intellectual traditions highlight democracy’s fragility and incompleteness, challenging myths of American exceptionalism.
Third, American Democracy exists beyond what are known to be traditional American institutions. While mainstream American political theory often places focus on constitutions, governments, or laws, Black thinkers and citizens emphasize affective, relational, and cultural dimensions of democracy—dimensions that exhibit and feature American virtues and values of community, solidarity, and recognition.
Fourth, Professor Bromell calls for a vibrant relational empathy and mutual recognition. In this sense, Bromell highlights Black thought’s insistence on recognition of shared humanity and mutual vulnerability as the foundation for democratic
practice. Thinkers as varied as James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison stress the necessity of empathy as a civic virtue. Bromell reframes African American intellectual history as political
theory, not just cultural or social commentary. He challenges readers to recognize that the deepest resources for
democratic renewal in America come from traditions forged under conditions of racial oppression.

Ultimately The Time is Always Now insists that democracy is less about stable American institutions and more about the practice of bettering and refining incipient features of American institutions-facing each other honestly, acknowledging and shouldering of collective pain, and being committed to a shared mutual recognition of the totality of our collective experience.

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Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.
Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, author Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies.

This episode includes a reference to the book Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell (Random House, 2025). Listen to Mitchell discuss her book at New Books in African American Studies, hosted by N’Kosi Oates.

Dr. Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College: A Campus History (Arcadia Publishing, 2023). You can find Dr. McCray at her website, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dr. McCray continued their conversation.

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Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations.

Now, Tim Weiner has published a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. His new book is called The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, 2025). It is a gripping and revelatory history of the from the late 1990s to the present. It ranges from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today's battles with Russia and China--and with the President of the United States.

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets--Moscow, Beijing, Tehran--while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.

The book reveals how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The key message of the book is that the CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. This is made even more difficult by the attacks on the intelligence community deployed by the second Trump presidency, from unqualified senior officials to loyalty tests. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.

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Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism (UP of Kansas, 2025), focusing on the idea of presidentialism, which is a way to think of political systems that include a dominant president or executive. In the United States, with the original constitutional system of separate co-equal branches of government, presidentialism disrupts the structure that was initially constructed under the U.S. Constitution. Over the course of more than two centuries, the United States has contended with the waxing and waning of presidential power within the multi-branch system. But Jacobs and Milkis maintain that since the 1990s we have seen an expansion of presidentialism, with a collective tendency to invest greater responsibilities and power in the presidential office itself as well as in the person who is serving in that capacity. Part of this thesis is also about how different, competing forces and ideologies have pushed for the use of presidential power to solve cultural struggles, which are not necessarily the institutional or structural role of the presidency. While the growth of American presidentialism may be more contemporary, it has origins in the struggles and ruptures of the 1960s and the 1970s—which were never fully resolved, especially in regard to who belongs within the American community. Subverting The Republic spends time examining this historical framework to help us think about the current structural, political, and cultural contexts, and especially the place of President Donald J. Trump within our understanding of presidentialism.

This book is a careful and deeply researched historical and political analysis of the shifts and changes in how the American presidency has operated over the past 75 years, and grounds many of the actions we have seen within both Trump Administrations, as well as much of the pushback against some of these actions and assertions of power. In weaving together the historical background with the structural form of the presidency and the various tools that a president has at his command, Jacobs and Milkis lay out both the precedents relied upon by presidents of the 21st century, especially Donald Trump, but also the anomalies of the Trump Administration and actions. While Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism went to press before President Trump was re-elected in 2024 (and there is a brief postscript that is included, noting the results and considering what the second Trump Administration might look like), the authors noted in our conversation that much of what they discuss about the first Trump Administration in the book has only grown and expanded in the second Trump Administration. This is an important analysis of the office of the American presidency and how that office, as conceived of by the Founders and situated within a constitutional system that includes other centers of power and responsibility, has evolved rather dramatically from that initial form and structure.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami, "Causal Inquiry in International Relations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Causal Inquiry in International Relations (Oxford UP, 2024) by Adam R. C. Humphreys and Hidemi Suganami defends a new, philosophically informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the ‘culture of generalization’ which predominates in contemporary social science, all causal knowledge ultimately depends on the provision of empirical support for concrete claims about specific events, located in space and time.

Causal Inquiry in International Relations not only explores existing philosophical debates around causation; it also provides a detailed study of some of the most fundamental methodological questions which arise in the course of causal inquiry. Using examples drawn from philosophy and from the study of international relations, it demonstrates what is problematic about established ways of thinking, brings new clarity to both philosophical and methodological questions, and seeks to enhance collective understanding of the contribution that causal inquiry can make to empirically rich and critically aware scholarship about world politics. It concludes by situating ‘causal inquiry’ in relation to other forms of inquiry employed in the study of world politics, emphasizing especially the often unnoticed dependence of causal inquiry on precisely the kind of knowledge of specific events which historians are well placed to provide.

Adam Humphreys is Associate Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading. He joined the University of Reading in 2013, having previously been a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (2007-10) and Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, Oxford (2010-13). His principal research interests are in International Relations theory and meta-theory, especially causation and causal explanation, realism and neo-realism, the English School, and the relationship between theory and history. He also has research interests in British foreign and defence policy, strategy, and the ethics of war.
Hidemi Suganami studied International Relations at Tokyo, Aberystwyth, and London Universities. His first academic appointment was at Keele in 1975, where he later became Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations. In 2004, he moved to Aberystwyth, where currently he is Emeritus Professor of International Politics. His publications include: The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (1989); On the Causes of War (1996); and, with Andrew Linklater, The English School of International Relations (2006). Over a number of years, he has been studying philosophical issues surrounding causation and explanation in International Relations.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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Our Common Future: The Birth of Liberal Environmentalism

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is the second episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS).

An Albertan oil man and a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan banded together to think up “eco-development,” a precursor to today’s sustainable development. This unlikely duo forged a global consensus at the United Nations, effectively codifying the reigning orthodoxy of liberal environmental governance. They told us that capitalism and sustainability are indeed compatible. Might that be the most utopian of all green dreams?

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Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths, "Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s international system is made up of states: Territorial entities with defined borders, with exclusive control within those borders, diplomatic recognition by other states outside of them and usually (though not always) tied to some idea of the “nation.”

But how many states have existed throughout history, such as during the nineteenth century? Some early counts put the number at just a few dozen–a measure that international relations professors Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths thought was far too low, missing polities throughout the non-Western world. Together, they put together their own count of independent states in the nineteenth century, as published in their latest work Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia UP, 2025).

Charles joins us today to talk about his work. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the legacies of historical states and state systems, democratization, and civil resistance.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Before Colonization. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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George Papaconstantinou and Jean Pisani-Ferry, "New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries" (Agenda, 2024)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today's pressing global policy challenge.
In New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries (Agenda, 2024), two of Europe's most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn't, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today's global crises urgently demand.

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When Should the Majority Rule – and is it time to resign democracy?

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When do limits on majorities enhance democratic rule, and when do they undermine it? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, well-known as authors of the best-selling book How Democracies Die, about their new framework for understanding when the best way to protect democracy is to constrain the wishes of the majority, and when we need to empower them. Lumping all majoritarian measures into the same category, they argue, can lead us to preserve and prescribe outdated and undemocratic institutions that distort political competition and may undermine democratic legitimacy. So does saving democracy actually depend on the recognition that while special protections for powerful minorities may have helped to secure the historical passage to democracy, today the healthiest democracies empower majorities?

This episode is based on Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s article “When Should the Majority Rule?” that was published in the January 2025 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and is part of an ongoing partnership between the Journal of Democracy and the People, Power, Politics podcast. A transcript is available for download here.

Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University and the co-author of How Democracies Die (2018), which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award. A leading scholar of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, his earlier works include Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (2010). Levitsky directs Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and served as Vice Provost for International Affairs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Karl Deutsch Award for his contributions to comparative politics. His research spans Latin American politics, party systems, and informal institutions, influencing both academic debate and public discourse on democracy’s challenges.

Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die (2018), which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award. His book Conservative Advantage (2017) received the Luebbert Prize for the Best Book on Comparative Politics. Ziblatt’s research explores democratic durability and party systems, especially in Europe. He serves as Co-Director of Harvard’s Center for European Studies and holds a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has significantly influenced understandings of conservative parties’ roles in sustaining democracy and the threats posed by their erosion.

Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to build and is still largely with us today even as the US's relative power within it has diminished.

In Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2025), Michael Poznansky explores how the LIO has influenced US foreign policy from its founding to the present. Proponents argue that its impact has been profound, producing a system that has been more rule-bound and beneficial than any previous order. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the US itself from consistently violating rules and norms. Poznansky contends that the answer lies in between. While rule-breaking has been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations varies in surprising and poorly understood ways. America's approach to compliance with the LIO, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two primary factors: the intensity of competition over international order, and the burden of complying with the liberal order's core tenets in a given case.

Drawing on nine case studies, including the Korean War and Iraq War, Great Power, Great Responsibility sheds important light on the future of US foreign policy in an era where American unipolarity has ended and great power rivalry has returned.

Our guest is Michael Poznansky, an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracuse, on the eastern shores of Sicily. Syracuse was ruled by a tyrant, Dionysius, who on death was followed by his son, also a tyrant. Over the course of his three separate visits to Syracuse over the years, encountering both father and son, Plato arrived at the model for tyranny laid out in The Republic. That’s the argument of James Romm’s splendid book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, 2025). In our conversation, Romm renders, not the familiar “marble Plato” of his God-like dialogues, but an altogether human figure grappling with his own personal vulnerabilities. We discuss, too, the parallels to today’s times, in which tyrants and would-be tyrants continue to plague the world. The tyrant, as Romm ably shows, is an archetype for all time.

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press.

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Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025)

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.

– Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025

After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian futures. Yet these fears extended beyond the canonical texts of dystopian fiction into post-war discourses on totalitarianism, mass society, and technology, as well as subsequent political theories of freedom and domination. Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century (U of Michigan Press, 2025) demonstrates the centrality of dystopian thinking to twentieth century political thought, showing the pervasiveness of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. Offering a novel reading of major themes and thinkers, Fear the Future explores visions of the future from literary figures such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell; political theorists such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault; and mid-century social scientists such as Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, David Reisman, C. Wright Mills, and Jacques Ellul. It offers a comparative analysis of distinct intellectual and literary traditions, including modern utopianism and anti-utopianism, mid-century social science, Frankfurt School critical theory, and continental political philosophy. With detailed case studies of key thinkers from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century, the book synthesizes secondary literature and research from a range of disciplinary areas, including in political theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and utopian studies. This wide-ranging reconstruction shows that while dystopian thinking has illustrated the dangers of domination and dehumanization, it has also illuminated new possibilities for freedom.

Professor Cole published his book with the University of Michigan Press as Open Access: find the detailed insights and arguments that Matthew discusses in our interview here as an online publication with downloadable options.

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Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization on its formation, something which has been largely overlooked. This approach sheds new light on the Russian case, revealing a dynamic Russian identity that is developing along the lines of other countries exposed to globalization. Vera Michlin-Shapir shows how along with the freedoms afforded when Russia joined the globalizing world in the 1990s came globalization's disruptions.

Michlin-Shapir describes Putin's rise to power and his project to reaffirm a stronger identity not as a uniquely Russian diversion from liberal democracy, but as part of a broader phenomenon of challenges to globalization. She underlines the limits of Putin's regime to shape Russian politics and society, which is still very much impacted by global trends. As well, Michlin-Shapir questions a prevalent approach in Russia studies that views Russia's experience with national identity as abnormal or defective, either being too weak or too aggressive.

What is offered is a novel explanation for the so-called Russian identity crisis. As the liberal postwar order faces growing challenges, Russia's experience can be an instructive example of how these processes unfold. This study ties Russia's authoritarian politics and nationalist rallying to the shortcomings of globalization and neoliberal economics, potentially making Russia "patient zero" of the anti-globalist populist wave and rise of neo-authoritarian regimes. In this way, Fluid Russia contributes to the broader understanding of national identity in the current age and the complexities of identity formation in the global world.

Guest: Vera Michlin-Shapir (she/her), is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's Russia Institute, King's College London.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke here

Linktree here

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Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice

Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay more. But the specific tax policies that most favor are more regressive than progressive. What is behind such a disconnect? In Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton UP, 2025), Andrea Louise Campbell examines public opinion on taxation, exploring why what Americans favor in principle differs from what they accept in practice. Campbell shows that since the federal income tax began a century ago, the rich have fought for lower taxes through reduced rates and a complicated system of tax breaks. The resulting complexity leaves the public confused about who benefits from the convoluted tax code, and leads to tax preferences that are driven by factors other than principles or interests.

Campbell argues that tax attitudes vary little by income, or by party, as some Democrats, more Republicans, and even more independents want most taxes decreased. Instead, white opinion on nearly every tax is racialized. Many do not realize the rich benefit the most from tax breaks, attitudes toward which are racialized, too. And among Black and Hispanic Americans, long subject to government coercion, greater support for government spending is not matched by greater support for taxation. Everyone has a reason to dislike taxes, which helps antitax Republicans win votes--and helps the rich in their long campaign to get their own taxes reduced and undermine progressivity.

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Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States get Russia right.

As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of Cold-War antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today?

With a practitioner's eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023) identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached by email here or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Ariel Colonomos, "Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political; in fact, as in Plato or Hobbes, and in the Weberian ethics of responsibility, measurement is considered to be one of its central features. Ariel Colonomos argues that this measure relies primarily on human lives and interests, and that the material equivalence to lives is twofold. The equivalence is a double equation, as we pay for lives and we pay with lives. This double equation constitutes the measurement upon which the political equilibrium of a society depends and is thus a key constitutive part of the political. The book adopts two approaches, both with an interdisciplinary perspective: one explanatory and the other normative. First, it explains the nexus between existential goods and material goods, drawing on a detailed analysis of several case studies from contemporary politics, both domestic and international. Second, it discusses normatively the material valuation of human lives and the human value of material goods. Value attribution and the question of the material equivalent to lives are of relevance not only for political theory and philosophy, but also for sociology, history, international relations, and legal studies.

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Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump’s movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America’s role in the world. They explore whether U.S. influence has shifted from leading a global order after World War II to carving out its own “sphere of influence” alongside other major powers. The discussion looks at attacks on government expertise, the idea of “restraint” in foreign policy, and how fringe thinkers on the right are shaping real political choices. What happens when leaders value absolute freedom of action over laws, expertise, or alliances? Tune in for a clear look at the ideas driving today’s high-stakes political battles.

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Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions?

It was, write Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley in Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2025), an experiment in "how much illiberalism the electorate would bear".

With Kaczyński and PiS now in opposition but threatening a return in 2027, Donald Tusk's liberal administration is road-testing how effectively illiberalism can be unpicked without antagonising the voters it needs to stay in office.

Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Ben Stanley is an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.

Tim Gwynn Jones is policy analyst at Medley Advisors and a writer/podcaster at 242.news.

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Sarah McLaughlin, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating American academia. In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin exposes how higher education institutions, long considered bastions of free thought, are compromising their values for financial gain and global partnerships.

This groundbreaking investigation reveals the subtle yet sweeping influence of authoritarian governments. University leaders are allowing censorship to flourish on campus, putting pressure on faculty, and silencing international student voices, all in the name of appeasing foreign powers. McLaughlin exposes the troubling reality where university leaders prioritize expansion and profit over the principles of free expression. The book describes incidents in classrooms where professors hesitate to discuss controversial topics and in boardrooms where administrators weigh the costs of offending oppressive regimes. McLaughlin offers a sobering look at how the compromises made in American academia reflect broader societal patterns seen in industries like tech, sports, and entertainment.

Meticulously researched and unapologetically candid, Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) is an essential read for anyone who believes in the transformative power of education and the necessity of safeguarding it from the creeping tide of authoritarianism.

Sarah McLaughlin is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here?
In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)
Context (Random House, 2025), historian Molly Worthen argues that we will understand our present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma, Worthen argues, stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama where hopes are fulfilled and grievances are put right—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.
The story of charisma in America reveals that when traditional religious institutions fail to deliver on their promise of a meaningful life, people will get their spiritual needs met in a warped cultural and political landscape dominated by those who appear to have the power to bring order and meaning out of chaos. Charismatic leaders address spiritual needs, offering an alternate reality where people have knowledge, power, and heroic status, whether as divinely chosen instruments of God or those who will restore national glory.
Through Worthen’s centuries-spanning historical research, Spellbound places a crucial religious lens on the cultural, economic, and political upheavals facing Americans today.

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist.

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Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing.

Lyndsey and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lyndsey, not attentively enough.

Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion.

Mentioned in the episode:

Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt’s lifetime.
Lyndsey praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns’s marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman.
Hannah Pitkin’s wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt’s idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound.
Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".”

Various books by Hannah Arendt come up:

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (1963).
Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.”
Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996).
Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic.
James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power.

Recallable Books

Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity.
John recalls E. M Forster, Howard’s End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain.

Read transcript here.

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Matthew Bowser, "Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Matthew Bowser examines British imperialism in late colonial Burma (from roughly 1929 to 1948) to study how imperialists attempted to protect their strategic and economic interests after decolonization: they did so by supporting ethnonationalism. This process resembles the Cold War tactic of “containment,” and the book makes a crucial contribution to the study of modern imperialism by demonstrating the continuity between “containment’s” late- and “neo”-colonial manifestations. For Burma/Myanmar, it also explores the origin of the present-day military junta’s racial regime: it emphasizes the protection of the ethnoreligious majority from ethnic minority insurgency. The Rohingya people are currently suffering a genocide because of this racial regime. As the country endures civil war against the junta, this book highlights how ethnonationalists in the late colonial period first promoted this racial regime to seize power and prevent revolution, a process supported by British imperialists for their own ends.

Matthew Bowser is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Alabama A&M University.

Brad H. Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. PhD in Public History. Asst. Prof. of Latin American History at Alabama A&M University.

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Maddalena Cerrato, "Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes" (SUNY Press, 2025)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, in Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes (SUNY Press, 2025) Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the question of subjectivity.

Maddalena Cerrato is an assistant professor in the Department of International Affairs.

YouTube Channel here

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Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure.
Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women.

Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.

She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites.

Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public.

Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Syria After Assad

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What are the prospects for democracy in Syria? Is this the right question to ask? What do we need to better understand about Syria’s new leader, its civil society, and the challenges it faces in a new era for Syria? Join Rana Khoury, Daniel Neep, and Emily Scott for this special joint episode of the Localization in World Politics and People, Power, Politics podcasts.

Rana B. Khoury is assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work explores conflict processes, civil action, and humanitarianism, particularly in the Middle East and Syria. Her book, Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press and available for pre-order here.

Daniel Neep is nonresident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is interested in conflict and state-building, as well as processes of political, institutional, and social transformation in the Middle East, in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. His book A History of Modern Syria is forthcoming with Penguin Books and is available for pre-order here.

Check out their contributions to the Journal of Democracy Special Section, Syria After Assad, can be found here!

Emily K. M. Scott is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and co-host of the Localization in World Politics Podcast. Her most recent publication, “Negotiating for Autonomy: How Humanitarian INGOs Resisted Donors During the Syrian Refugee Response” can be found here.

Click here for a transcript of this episode

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Thane Gustafson, "Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them.

In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders.

A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them.

Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012).

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Lindsey N. Kingston, "Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford UP, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is applied and understood, and where there are clear gaps in that application. This is a wide-ranging, rigorously researched examination of citizenship, statelessness, and human movement. And it is vitally relevant to contemporary discussions of immigration, supranationalism, understandings of national borders, and concepts of belonging. Not only does Kingston delve into theoretical concepts of citizenship and statelessness, she also integrates analyses of various kinds of hierarchies of personhood in context of these broader issues. The research also includes explorations of nomadic people, indigenous nations, and "second class" citizens in the United States within this theoretical framework of citizenship and statelessness. This careful and broad analysis defines the novel idea of ‘functional citizenship’, which is both theoretical and practical in considering citizenship and statelessness in our modern world. Fully Human focuses on the promises and protections that are outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unpacking the protection gaps and difficulties that have become clearer and more acute in this era of globalization and security concerns, and highlighting some of the key problems with the current human rights regimes that are in place.

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Victoria Basualdo et al., "Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel, I spoke with Dr. Victoria Basualdo and Dr. Marcelo Bucheli about their new edited book. Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) is an edited volume that studies the relationship between big business and the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. The first section provides a general background about the contemporary history of business corporations and dictatorships in the twentieth century at the international level. The second section comprises chapters that analyze five national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru), as well as a comparative analysis of the banking sector in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The third section presents six case studies of large companies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Central America. This book is crucial reading because it provides the first comprehensive analysis of a key yet understudied topic in Cold War history in Latin America.

Victoria Basualdo is Researcher at the Argentine National Scientific Council (CONICET) and at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), and Professor in the Political Economy Master's Degree Program at FLACSO, Argentina. She specializes in contemporary economic and labor history, with special focus on structural changes and the transformations of trade-union organizations in Argentina and Latin America.

Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (2008-2015) and held various visiting positions at the Center of Advanced Study, Harvard Business School, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and the Henley Business School. He has worked on the history of consumption, business history, immigration history and the history of modern Germany.

Marcelo Bucheli is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research focuses on the political economy of multinational corporations in Latin America, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the relationship between firms and states in a historical perspective, and business groups.

Hosted by Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez, consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO.

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Mark L. Haas, "The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing economic growth and massive new public expenditures for elderly welfare. But aging has a major yet largely unrecognized international benefit: it significantly reduces the likelihood of international war. Although wars continue to rage in parts of the world, almost none involve aged countries. This book provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking argument why population aging will be a powerful force for peace.

Aging will significantly reduce states' military capabilities available for war while also boosting leaders’ and citizens' preferences for peaceful foreign policies. At the same time, the effects of aging will help prevent the emergence of a power transition between the United States and China, which would be a development that is particularly likely to devolve into armed hostilities. If an aged country does initiate war, the effects of aging will create major barriers to military success. The more aging reduces the probability of victory, the greater the disincentives to aggressing. Detailed case studies show how aging has affected the capabilities and preferences in Japan, China, the United States, and Russia.

Guest: Mark L. Haas is a Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War (Oxford University Press, 2025); Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022); The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Ideologies and International Relations (Routledge Press); The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Routledge, 2018, sixth edition) and The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings (Routledge, 2017).

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

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Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does.

The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths.

These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible.

The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries.

Donald G. Nieman is an authority on modern U.S. law and politics, and professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University – State University of New York.

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Gregory A. Daddis, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. A sweeping history, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force.

Gregory A. Daddis is Professor of History and holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. A retired US Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism.

Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

The previous book by both authors is Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent paper is “Can the Rebel Body Function without its Visible Heads? The Role of Mid-Level Commanders in Peacebuilding.”

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Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe Talbott, NATO, and Russia After the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews with former government officials, he sheds light on NATO’s opening, its missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other vexed issues. Kieninger argues that a careful look at Talbott’s statecraft rebuts Putin’s claims that the West exploited Russia’s weakness after the Cold War, demonstrating that the Clinton administration and its NATO allies sought to include Russia at every step. An illuminating and comprehensive account of US diplomacy during the Clinton years, Securing Peace in Europe provides vital insight into the complex relations between Russia and the West.

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Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone.
The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons.

Professor Davis’ research interests include most areas in public opinion and political behavior. A unifying theme running through much of his research is a concern for identifying the social psychological motivations underlying political attitudes and behavior. This approach has been applied to specific research areas, including political tolerance, implicit racial attitudes, the role of threat and anxiety in political behavior, public reactions to terrorism, social desirability, the measurement of political and social attitudes, racism and racial politics, and the political behavior of African Americans.
Professor Davis is co-author of a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Perseverance in the Parish? Religious Attitudes from a Black Catholic Perspective. Based on the first national survey of African American Catholics, this book explores the perceptions of racism and racial experiences in the Catholic Church. His other book, Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America, examines the role of threat perceptions on the tradeoffs between civil liberties and security, political tolerance, and ideas of citizenship.

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Citizenship Stripping: You Are Not American

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day.
The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (Beacon Press, 2021) grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.

Our guest is: Professor Amanda Frost, who writes and teaches in the fields of immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics. Her scholarship has been cited by dozens of state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has been invited to testify on the topics of her articles before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. You Are Not American was named a “New & Noteworthy” book by The New York Times Book Review, and shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize. She is writing a book on birthright citizenship, publishing in 2026.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor, dissertation and writing coach for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter with weekly bonus material on her Substack found here.

Playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Vinay Lal, "Gandhi, Truth, and Nonviolence: The Politics of Engagement in Post-Truth Times" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The anthology presents a diverse array of essays delving into Gandhi's political activities, ethical beliefs, and philosophical stance. Distinguished Gandhian scholars contribute to this collection, setting it apart from similar compilations by focusing not just on Gandhi's impact or the debate over his relevance, but on maintaining his bold ethical ideals and progressive views in an era of skepticism. The essays delve into Gandhi's comprehensive dissection of political logic, his concept of neighbourly political bonds, his fearlessness and adeptness as a yogi. The work also discusses the worldwide landscape of nonviolence, Gandhi's perspectives on Palestine, his legal work in South Africa, his dialogues with Tagore, the pursuit of his ethical goals, and the portrayal of his persona, as well as the ongoing relevance of his nonviolent resistance methods, as seen in India's anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. These pieces portray Gandhi as a perpetual participant in limitless endeavours, as described by philosopher James Carse. The book concludes with an interview with Rev. James Lawson, a pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement, which offers a fresh perspective. The Gandhi that emerges from these reflections and intellectual explorations has become all but a stranger to India, and especially to his native Gujarat.

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Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why do so many philosophers value anarchy but refuse to call themselves anarchists? Why don’t philosophers draw on the classical anarchist tradition? How can we think de facto anarchism as distinct from dawning anarchism? What is at stake in doing so? Does philosophy need anarchism? To answer these questions, in Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity Books, 2023), Catherine Malabou reads submerged counter-revolutionary themes in the texts of several key philosophical thinkers. By doing so, Malabou helps us understand the ways in which philosophy has left anarchy unthought, while also stealing from it, and disavowing it. What emerges in her analysis is the importance of the non-governable, not just as a problem for philosophy, but as what opens towards other ways of sharing, acting, and thinking.

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Reid B. C. Pauly, "The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Dr. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey. The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Reid B. C. Pauly presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics.

Dr. Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do.

Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.

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Steve L. Monroe, "Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World (Cornell UP, 2025), Steve L. Monroe argues that geopolitics and social connections between state and capital underpin the Arab world's uneven trade policies. Despite decades of international pressure, neoliberal trade policy reform in the Arab world has been varied, selective, and often ineffective. Neoliberal trade policies have not deepened international trade in many of the region's markets. This book explains why.

When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they have weak social connections to their regime and their regime has low support from global powers. They are more likely to defend existing protectionist policies under these conditions, resulting in less trade policy reform.

Drawing on interviews, firm- and industry-level data, and evidence from Jordan to Morocco, Mirages of Reform reveals how international and domestic factors interact to shape the Arab world's rugged trade policy terrain. Insightful and well researched, this book imparts important lessons and warnings about the repercussions of economic reform in the region.

Steve L. Monroe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. Monroe's scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

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Rob Goodman, "Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why is political rhetoric broken – and how can it be fixed? Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) returns to the origins of rhetoric to recover the central place of eloquence in political thought. Eloquence, for the orators of classical antiquity, emerged from rhetorical relationships that exposed both speaker and audience to risk. Through close readings of Cicero – and his predecessors, rivals, and successors – political theorist and former speechwriter Rob Goodman tracks the development of this ideal, in which speech is both spontaneous and stylized, and in which the pursuit of eloquence mitigates political inequalities. He goes on to trace the fierce disputes over Ciceronian speech in the modern world through the work of such figures as Burke, Macaulay, Tocqueville, and Schmitt, explaining how rhetorical risk-sharing has broken down. Words on Fire offers a powerful critique of today's political language – and shows how the struggle over the meaning of eloquence has shaped our world.

The book was the finalist for the C.B. Macpherson Prize from the Canadian Political Science Association.

Rob Goodman is an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and a Core Curriculum instructor at Columbia University. Before starting his doctoral research, he worked as a speechwriter for U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Honer and Senator Chris Dodd. Goodman has published widely in leading academic journals. He has also co-edited ‘Populism, Demagoguery, and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective’ published by Oxford University Press, 2024. Goodman is also the author of ‘Not Here’ (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2023), a book on democratic erosion in Canada and the United States, which was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing from the Writers' Trust of Canada.

Ayushi Singh is a graduate student at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India.

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Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guides its readers through the labyrinthine developments that provide a wide spectrum of views and approaches that help receive a better understanding of the contemporary history of Ukraine. While detailing how independent Ukraine was taking shape locally, the editors and contributors of the volume simultaneously position Ukraine in the international environment that arouse after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is thus inscribed into the international political map, which further complicates and advances the surveys presented in the volume. After the collapse of the USSR, the country faced a number of challenges: in addition to learning how to construct and narrate its own history, the new independent state also had to find a way to present itself to the global community. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine outlines trajectories that illustrate a gradual process of the country’s political awareness, ambitions, and maturity. Thirty years may seem like an inconsiderable amount of time for a new independent state. The material presented in the book proves otherwise. In a concise and yet acute way, the contributors touch upon the most challenging and sensitive issues which have shaped the recent history of Ukraine: ranging from the enthusiastic support of independence to the current Russian-Ukrainian war, the volume constructs a multilayered historical scene which at the same time invites further surveys and elaborations.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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What Makes for Successful Civil Resistance?

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As authoritarian leaders attack democracy from all sides, and the rights of women, ethnic minorities and the LGTBQI+ community are increasingly threatened, civil resistance is more important than ever. But what forms of resistance are most effective, and how can we build movements so that they have the greatest chance of success? Join the People, Power, Politics podcast as we talk to Erica Chenoweth, author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, to discuss these issues and so much more!

Guest:

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. They are widely known as one of the most important and influential voices on civil resistance and what makes for successful popular mobilization, and have authored a number of path-breaking books including Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2021) and On Revolutions (2022).

Presenter:

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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Enrique Dussel, "The Theological Metaphors of Marx" (Duke UP, 2024)–A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Theological Metaphors of Marx (Duke UP, 2024) by Enrique Dussel – A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx’s early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx’s philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights in relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx’s underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx’s thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel’s historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx’s critiques of political economy and politics.

Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) was Emeritus Professor, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, and the author of many books, including Twenty Theses on Politics and Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, both also published by Duke University Press.
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is coauthor of Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America.
Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

YouTube Channel here

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Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond.

Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad.

Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2022) is aimed at a general audience, synthesizing a vast amount of qualitative and quantitative research by the authors and many other scholars. The book is highly readable, with a great mix of anecdotes and examples along with plain-English explanations of academic research findings. However, it also provides an excellent overview of contemporary global authoritarianism for academics. Almost every claim in the book has an endnote reference to the original research for those who want to follow up. The endnotes mean that despite its moderately intimidating 340-page heft, the main text is a very approachable 219 pages.

Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.

In 2021-22, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and he was recently named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A graduate of Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and numerous articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has been a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics

Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focuses on the political economy and governance of China.

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Kevin P. Donovan, "Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an analysis of how postcolonial states tried to remake economic temporalities, space, and standards and how citizens pursued alternatives that subverted economic sovereignty. This is a story of central banking, national currencies, and coffee smuggling, as well as rites of initiation and econometric modelling. An article from the project -- on coffee smuggling, kinship relations, and measurement devices -- was published in Cultural Anthropology, and one on economic crimes, scarcity, and accusation was published in Journal of African History.

Kevin Donovan is an anthropologist and historian of East Africa. He works in the fields of economic and political anthropology, African history, and science & technology studies at the University of Edinburgh as a Senior Lecturer.

Sara Katz has a Ph.D. in African History from the University of Michigan, and is currently a Project Manager in the Office of Global Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle.

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Federico Marcon, "Fascism: The History of a Word" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word (The University of Chicago Press, 2025) takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.

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Jacob F. H. Smith, "Waves of Discontent: Electoral Volatility, Public Policymaking, and the Health of American Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

After a period of relative calm in congressional elections prior to 2006, America has experienced a series of highly competitive, volatile national elections. Since then, at least one of the US House, US Senate, and presidency has flipped party control--often with a large House or Senate seat swing--with the exception of the 2012 election. In Waves of Discontent, Jacob F. H. Smith argues that a pervasive feeling of displeasure in the American public has caused this increase in electoral volatility. Examining the consequences of volatility in congressional elections reveals that political amateurs are more likely to win in wave years than in normal years. Based on this data, Smith presents a new theory about the policy process--the policy doom loop--in which frustration among voters at both the inability of Congress to pass policy and anger at policies that actually do pass results in even more churn in congressional elections. Waves of Discontent offers some suggestions to promote constructive policymaking efforts in Washington to reduce frustration in the electorate.

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Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa, "Africa's New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations" (Lynne Rienner, 2022)

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The African Union's threat to lead African states' mass withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2008 marked just one of many encounters that demonstrate African leaders' growing confidence and activism in international relations. Rita Kiki Edozie and Moses Khisa explore the myriad ways in which the continent’s diplomatic engagement and influence in the global arena has been expanding in recent decades.

Focusing in particular on collective action through the institutional platform of the AU―while acknowledging the internal challenges involved―the authors show how Africa's role as a dynamic world region is both shaping and being shaped by current trends in global development and geopolitics.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

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Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, "African Peacekeeping" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Fisher and Dr. Nina Wilén explore the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping. This concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeeping by Africans. The book argues that “African peacekeeping should be understood not as simply an adjunct, technical activity but as a complex set of practices deeply embedded within - and entangled with - Africa’s contemporary political economy.”

Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén demonstrate how peacekeeping is – and has been – weaved into Africa's national, regional and international politics more broadly, as well as what implications this has for how we should understand the continent, its history and its politics. In doing so, and drawing on fieldwork undertaken in every region of the continent, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Wilén explain how profoundly this involvement in peacekeeping has shaped contemporary Africa.

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Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the most written-about figures in American history. But not all aspects of Douglass’ thought have received their due. One such blank spot in what might be called “Douglass Studies” concerns his political philosophy. Williams College scholar Dr. Neil Roberts’ new edited volume, A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), helps to fill this lacuna in Douglass scholarship.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Timothy W. Kneeland, "Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA" (Syracuse UP, 2021)

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications.

Hear from the author himself as he reflects on the historical roots of disaster policy, the political forces that shape emergency response, and the enduring implications for governance today.

Timothy W. Kneeland is a Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at Nazareth University. He writes on American politics and disaster policy, American science, and psychiatry.

ABOUT THE BOOK: On Friday, January 28, 1977, it began to snow in Buffalo. The second largest city in New York State, located directly in line with the Great Lakes’ snowbelt, was no stranger to this kind of winter weather. With their city averaging ninety-four inches of snow per year, the citizens of Buffalo knew how to survive a snowstorm. But the blizzard that engulfed the city for the next four days was about to make history. Between the subzero wind chill and whiteout conditions, hundreds of people were trapped when the snow began to fall. Twenty- to thirty-foot-high snow drifts isolated residents in their offices and homes, and even in their cars on the highway. With a dependency on rubber-tire vehicles, which lost all traction in the heavily blanketed urban streets, they were cut off from food, fuel, and even electricity. This one unexpected snow disaster stranded tens of thousands of people, froze public utilities and transportation, and cost Buffalo hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses and property damages. The destruction wrought by this snowstorm, like the destruction brought on by other natural disasters, was from a combination of weather-related hazards and the public policies meant to mitigate them. Buffalo’s 1977 blizzard, the first snowstorm to be declared a disaster in US history, came after a century of automobility, suburbanization, and snow removal guidelines like the bare-pavement policy. Kneeland offers a compelling examination of whether the 1977 storm was an anomaly or the inevitable outcome of years of city planning. From the local to the state and federal levels, Kneeland discusses governmental response and disaster relief, showing how this regional event had national implications for environmental policy and how its effects have resounded through the complexities of disaster politics long after the snow fell.

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Jean-Marc Coicaud, "The Law and Politics of International Legitimacy" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Law and Politics of International Legitimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines the significance of the issue of political legitimacy at the international level, focusing on international law. It adopts a descriptive, critical, and reconstructive approach. In order to do so, the book clarifies what political legitimacy is in general and in the context of international law. The book analyzes how international law contributes to a sense of legitimacy through notions such as international membership, international rights holding, fundamental principles and hierarchy of rights holding, rightful conduct, and international authority. In addition, the book stresses the severe limitations of the legitimacy of international law and of the current international order that it contributes to regulate and manage. This leads the book to identify the conditions under which international order and international law could overcome their problems of legitimacy and become more legitimate. The book is interdisciplinary in nature, mobilizing international law, political and legal theory, philosophy, history, and political science.

Jean-Marc Coicaud is Distinguished Professor of Law and Global Affairs, Rutgers School of Law, New Jersey, USA and Fellow, Academia Europaea. He is also Fudan Distinguished Chair Professor at Fudan Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (Shanghai, China).

Leo Bader is a senior at Wesleyan University studying political theory and history.

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Benjamin Francis-Fallon, "The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latinos were imagined into a national electoral constituency in his new book The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Francis-Fallon, Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University, examines the rhetorical construction of a national voting bloc by politicians, parties, and a national network of Latino political elites. This interview explores some of the major themes in the book, including the essential role of Latino congressmen, the ideological struggles between Latino elected officials and radical activists, and the ongoing appeals to a panethnic Latino voting bloc from presidential campaigns. Of course Democratic Party politics is only half of the story, with the efforts of the Republican Party featuring prominently in the text as well. By discussing the parallel Latino engagement strategies of both parties, Francis-Fallon underscores the fact that the “rise of the Latino vote was a multiparty phenomenon.” Building upon existing studies that detail how panethnic Latinidad was constructed in the twentieth-century United States, Francis-Fallon adds national and presidential politics to the list of forces that continue to define what it means to be Latino.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, including the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reiter provides new perspectives on the causes of wars, the role of international alliances, foreign troop deployments, leader madness, and the impact of AI on international relations. With critical insights into contemporary foreign policy challenges, such as America’s role in NATO, the risks of war with China, containing a resurgent Russia, and the dangers of nuclear war, Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how states can effectively manage international crises while avoiding the wrong wars.

Dan Reiter is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University.

Leo Bader is a senior at Wesleyan University studying political theory and history.

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Philip Cunliffe, "The National Interest: Politics After Globalization" (Polity Press, 2025)

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference?

The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (Polity Press, 2025) answers these questions. It explains how and why globalist political leaders and bureaucrats abandoned the national interest over the past thirty years. Even today, many of our elites still sneer at the concept as an anachronism in an age of global environmental collapse and 'polycrisis'. But without it, there can be no political representation, and without representation there can be no democratic accountability. The national interest can be revived as part of a strategy of nation-building and national rebirth. This book makes the case for such a revival, heralding a new era of democratic renewal and international cooperation.

Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Suruchi Mazumdar, "Divided Media: Politics and Mediated Movements in India" (Routledge, 2025)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Suruchi Mazumdar’s book addresses the complex relationship between India’s evolving, emerging media landscape, the political and economic interests of diverse media actors, and movements opposing contentious issues such as market-based economic reforms and religious nationalism. In the mid-2000s, Singur and Nandigram, nondescript semi-urban and rural areas in the east Indian state of West Bengal, suddenly became the center of national and international media attention and debates on state-led neoliberal agenda. The point of controversy were local agitations provoked by the then state government’s plans to acquire agricultural land for large scale corporate industrial projects. The movements by farmers to protect their agricultural land were described variously as challenges to neoliberal initiatives and widespread social tension that put a temporary brake to state-led market reforms. In traditional liberal narratives, the triumph of economic reforms was expected to replace value-based ideology with global economic principles, perceived as objective and neutral.

But the forces of neoliberalism became strongly entrenched in India alongside religious nationalism. Such political economic developments paralleled with the simultaneous expansion of India’s digital and traditional media sectors, consolidation of market forces, the co-option of both old and new media by powerful actors, and opportunities of mediated democratization and activism. While narratives of economic liberalization and global trends of commercialized journalism have been amply documented, this book addresses the tension between mainstream media’s political and commercial logic, movements and citizen-led activisms questioning dominant development and religious nationalist agenda, and the possibilities of political diversity and democratic participation in the Indian city of Kolkata. By focusing on the hybridities, commonalities, differences, and complexities in Kolkata’s mainstream news media and emerging digital space, this book captures the regional and linguistic variations in the studies of media, movements, and politics in India.

Dr Suruchi Mazumdar is an Associate Professor at Jindal School of Journalism and Communication, O.P. Jindal Global University in India.

Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin.

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How Late-Stage Neoliberal Capitalism is Breaking Democracy

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For a long time many (although by no means all) scholars saw the relationship between capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing: economic competition and growth were expected to sustain democratic competition and improve governance and public good delivery for citizens, in turn creating a better environment for capitalist competition to flourish. But as capitalism has changed and has in many respects freed itself from the constraints of the state and of democratic processes, it has unleashed a new era of extreme wealth accumulation, deregulated markets, weak states, unresponsive political elites, and choiceless democracies. In this episode, CEDAR host Licia Cianetti talks to Rachel Riedl about her recent essay on “Neoliberalism and the Third Wave” to better understand why and how this happened and what we can do about it. This episode is part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy.

Rachel Beatty Riedl is Professor of public policy and government at Cornell University and the Peggy J. Koenig '78 Director of the Brooks Center on Global Democracy. Her latest co-edited book is entitled Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience (CUP 2025).

Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. Her latest publication is “What is a “regime”? Three definitions and their implications for the future of regime studies” (Democratization, 2025).

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Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace.

War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Hanno Sauer, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality " (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose -- and why we need them.

We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too.

With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life.

Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He teaches ethics, metaethics and political philosophy.

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Teo Ballvé, "The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder.

Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, Ballvé argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state-building projects. Indeed, these projects have thrust together an unlikely gathering of guerilla groups, drug-trafficking paramilitaries, military strategists, technocratic planners, local politicians, and development experts each seeking to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of "the state" in a space in which it supposedly does not exist. By untangling this odd mix, Ballvé reveals how Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient, if not at all benevolent, regimes of rule.

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Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China.

Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

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Luke A. Nichter, "The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election Of 1968" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president’s shadow, and a Republican nominee trying to make a political comeback amidst accusations of collusion – welcome to the 2024 1968 presidential election. What we think we know about the election has been challenged, however, by a new book by Luke A. Nichter, a professor of history and presidential studies at Chapman University. In The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale UP, 2024) Nichter reexamines the campaign and shows how the ‘68 election foreshadowed our current political landscape.

The 1968 presidential race was a contentious battle between vice president Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and former Alabama governor George Wallace. The United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy and was bitterly divided on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, including civil rights and rising crime. Drawing on previously unexamined archives and numerous interviews, Luke A. Nichter upends the conventional understanding of the campaign.

Nichter chronicles how the evangelist Billy Graham met with Johnson after the president’s attempt to reenter the race was stymied by his own party, and offered him a deal: Nixon, if elected, would continue Johnson’s Vietnam War policy and also not oppose his Great Society, if Johnson would soften his support for Humphrey. Johnson agreed.

Nichter also shows that Johnson was far more active in the campaign than has previously been described; that Humphrey’s resurgence in October had nothing to do with his changing his position on the war; that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has been misunderstood, since he hardly even campaigned there; and that Wallace’s appeal went far beyond the South and anticipated today’s Republican populism. This eye-opening account of the political calculations and maneuvering that decided this fiercely fought election reshapes our understanding of a key moment in twentieth-century American history.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Ketian Zhang, "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0000

Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

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Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today.” Among the respected members who once walked the Senate floor, admired for their expertise and with a stature that went beyond party, Milbank counted Sam Nunn (D-GA).

Nunn served in the Senate for four terms beginning in 1972, at a moment when domestic politics and foreign policy were undergoing far-reaching changes. As a member and then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had a vital impact on most of the crucial national security and defense issues of the Cold War era and the “new world order” that followed—issues that included the revitalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military capability, US-Soviet relations, national defense reorganization and reform, the Persian Gulf conflict, and nuclear arms control. In this first full account of Nunn’s senatorial career, Frank Leith Jones reveals how, as a congressional leader and “shadow secretary of defense,” Nunn helped win the Cold War, constructing the foundation for the defense and foreign policies of the 1970s and 1980s that secured the United States and its allies from the Soviet threat.

At a time of bitter political polarization and partisanship, Nunn’s reputation remains that of a statesman with a record of bipartisanship and a dedication to US national interests above all. His career, as recounted in Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (University Press of Kansas, 2020), provides both a valuable lesson in the relationships among the US government, foreign powers, and societies and a welcome reminder of the capacity of Congress, even a lone senator, to promote and enact policies that can make the country, and the world, a better and safer place.

Frank Leith Jones is professor of security studies and the General C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work includes Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy.

Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter.

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Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, "American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship" (UP of Kansas, 2021)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

All nations make rules -- through their constitutions, legislatures, bureaucratic practices – about who counts as a citizen. American by Birth examines the role of the Supreme Court – particularly a ruling from 1898 that is still precedent today. Wong Kim Ark v. United States interpreted the language of the 14th Amendment to answer whether a man born in the United States was a citizen. The Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark and held that the 14th Amendment extends to children of immigrants who were born in the United States. Using the work of legal scholars, political scientists, and historians, Drs. Julie L. Novkov and Carol Nackenoff provide an extended biography of Wong Kim Ark and the historic 1898 landmark case – but also a biography of US Citizenship from the colonies to the present. American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship (UP of Kansas, 2021) concludes with an impressive chapter that contextualizes birthright citizenship globally and within the context of American politics and scholarly debates – with an emphasis on the vulnerability of birthright citizenship to indirect and direct change.

Dr. Julie L. Novkov is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and interim dean of Rockefeller college at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954 (UMichigan, 2008).

Dr. Carol Nackenoff is Richter Professor emeritus of Political Science at Swarthmore College. She is the author of The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (Oxford, 1994).

They are also co-editors of Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2020) and Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Two resources mentioned in the podcast: Tian Atlas Xu’s “Immigration Attorneys and Chinese Exclusion Law Enforcement: The Case of San Francisco, 1882–1930” and

the symposium on American by Birth.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the U.S. Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press, 2022). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems.

Dr. Bowen Matthew describes her personal relationship with the concepts of structural inequality and racism in the public health system, opening with a heart-wrenching ode to her father’s experience with poverty and prejudice, which ultimately led to his premature death. Through her family’s story, she explains how structural inequality is perpetuated on a large-enough scale and with a powerful-enough scope so as to virtually guarantee social outcomes that reflect predetermined hierarchies based on race and/or class, hierarchies that remain consistent across generations. These disproportionate outcomes are often dismissed as due to comorbidities without the attention paid to social factors are the primary cause of comorbidities, because oppression in its many forms blocks equitable access to the social determinants of health. These social determinants include, but are not limited to, clean and safe housing, adequate education, nutritious food and fresh water, access to recreational spaces, and mental health services. Individuals who lack these, through no fault of their own, are then obligated to accept disproportionate care, illness, and disturbingly shorter life spans then are the norm for many Americans and are much closer to life spans in impoverished countries. Dr. Bowen Matthew presents evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, detailing how law has played a central role in erecting disproportionate access to the social determinants of health, and therefore is a requisite tool for dismantling it. She provides a clear path to undoing structural racism and providing an equitable society to all, encouraging health providers, law makers, and citizens all to fight to dismantle the hurdles that many patients face because of the zip code in which they live.

Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.

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David E. Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht, "See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Notre Dame University Political Scientists Dave Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht have a new book that focuses on the impression that female candidates make on young people, specifically on young people in the United States. This is a fascinating analysis since it fleshes out, with a sizeable study, the idea that candidates running for office, particularly female candidates, leave a lasting impact on younger people, even if they do not win. Studying role models has not been a focus in political science per se, but Campbell and Wolbrecht have brought together work from social psychology, democratic theory, political science, and gender studies to craft an understanding of role models within the context of campaigns and elections.See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People⁠ (U of Chicago Press, 2025) is an important exploration of the connection between those who run for office, particularly those who may look different than the expected “norm”, and how that very action has long-term impacts on younger voters, particularly adolescents and teenagers.

One of the unique perspectives of the research in See Jane Run is the focus on younger people and their engagement with politics. As the authors note, there is not that much political science research that explores the interactions between young people and politics—especially before those young people can vote. The authors also explain that teenagers generally identify with a partisan affiliation, which means that Campbell and Wolbrecht were able to sort the individuals into partisan groups and track the impact of women candidates within these partisan contexts. They found that female candidates clearly influenced two distinct groups within the study: Democratic young women and Republican young men. Young women saw these female candidates (both Republican and Democratic) as reflecting a more inclusive political environment, and the analysis suggests that this has a long-term impact, making these young women more engaged with the political process and democracy over time. The Republican young men responded as well, seeing female candidates as pursuing something—political activity—that they determined they were also qualified to pursue. The outcomes of the research in See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People also had racial dimensions, including exploring the impact on young Black men, who became less engaged in politics when a woman of color was running for office.

See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People explores what has been essentially folklore about the impact of political role models on young people by pulling together data and research to flesh out an understanding of these notions that we all have about candidates for political office, role models, and the impacts on younger people.

Please check out Brain Lair Books (in South Bend, Indiana or online) to purchase a copy of See Jane Run.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou’s investigation into civilian victims during the conflicts that followed the US-led coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq provides important new perspectives on the human cost of the War on Terror. From early fighting to the withdrawal and return of coalition troops, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, the book explores the scale and causes of deaths and places them in the contexts of power struggles, US foreign policy and radicalisation. Casting fresh light on not just the conflict but international geopolitics and the history of Iraq, it constructs a unique and insightful human security approach to war.

Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths.

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Simon Butt, "Judicial Dysfunction in Indonesia" (Melbourne UP, 2023)

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Indonesia's judicial system has long been described as dysfunctional. Many of its problems developed out of decades of authoritarian rule, which began in the last few years of the reign of Indonesia's first president, Soekarno. By the time President Soeharto's regime fell in 1998, the judiciary had virtually collapsed. Judicial dependence on government, inefficiency and corruption were commonly seen as the main indicators of poor performance, resulting in very low levels of public trust in the courts. To address these problems, reformists focused on improving judicial independence. Yet while independence is a basic prerequisite for adequate judicial performance, much depends on how this independence is exercised. Judicial Dysfunction in Indonesia (Melbourne UP, 2023) demonstrates that Indonesian courts have tended to act without accountability and offers detailed analysis of highly controversial decisions by Indonesian courts, many of which have been of major political significance, both domestically and internationally. It sets out in concrete terms, for the first time, how bribes are negotiated and paid to judges and demonstrates that judges have issued poor decisions and engaged in corruption and other misconduct, largely without fear of retribution. Further, it explores unsafe convictions and public pressure as a threat to judicial independence. Judicial Dysfunction in Indonesia shines a sorely needed empirical light on the Indonesian judicial system, and is an essential resource for readers, scholars and students of Indonesian law and society.

Simon Butt is Professor of Indonesian Law and Director of the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law at the University of Sydney.

Professor Michele Ford is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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Kampung Activism in Indonesia

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

My village, my kampung. The term kampung is a Malay word, referring to a "village hamlet" or "urban informal settlement." As rapid urbanization takes place both regionally and globally, the designation of kampung accrued a negative connotation associated with impoverishment and obsolescence. However, commencing in the mid-2010s, a countermovement aimed at the revitalization of kampung emerged in Indonesia, involving locals, activists, and scholars.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Melani Budianta from the Cultural Commission of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences about the practice of cultural studies within the Asian context, with a specific emphasis on her native Indonesia, where her dual role as an academic and activist in Kampung “commoning” has constituted a significant odyssey in the construction of knowledge. The term “commoning” refers to a collective reservoir of resources intended for community sharing in the kampung context. Professor Budianta has shared her experiences in her works titled Smart Kampung: Doing Cultural Studies in the Global South and Lumbung Commoning: Reflections on Kampung Network Research/Activism.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

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Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today.

Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.
A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past—but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy.

Elizabeth Popp Berman is Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton).

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Aggie Hirst, "Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A wargaming renaissance has been underway in the US military. Having proven to be the most effective recruitment tool of the 21st century, games have proliferated across all levels of the military's strategic, operational, training, and rehabilitation architecture. From board games to high-tech digital and virtual reality platforms, wargames enable milarites to learn lessons from the past, play out possible responses to current crises, and explore the effectiveness of future operations and strategies. From the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Covid 19 pandemic, today wargames are a key means by which the US military--and many other militaries--make plans and fight wars.

Politics of Play is the first academic book dedicated to the US military wargaming renaissance. Grounded in 100 hours of interviews undertaken by the author during fieldwork with US military wargamers, it explores how games intervene in players' cognitive and affective registers using immersion and the drive to win. In addition, Politics of Play develops a new theory of play grounded in the thought of Jacques Derrida which seeks to expose and disrupt the politics and power relations at work in the use of games to produce warfighters in the digital age.

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Ignacio G. Galán, "Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Along with the rise of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the interwar years in Italy also saw the widespread development of its modernist interior design and furnishing practices. While the regime’s politics were overtly manifest in monumental government architecture, Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Ignacio G. Galán examines the subtler yet effective role of household goods and decor in the cultivation of Italy’s exclusionary sense of national identity.

Presenting a fresh look at the work of various architects and designers, including iconic figures such as Gio Ponti and Carlo Enrico Rava, Dr. Galán explores how seemingly neutral products of everyday life contributed to the propagation of fascist ideology. Through extensive promotion in popular magazines and department stores, on the film sets of Cinecittà Studios, and throughout the country’s colonial territories, Italy’s modernist design practices were part of a larger political project that aimed to produce a totalizing image of cultural hegemony.

Interweaving design theory, architectural history, and media scholarship, Furnishing Fascism reexamines the period’s so-called minor arts to reveal the political entanglement of modernism in early twentieth-century Italy and offers valuable insight into the complications of cultural production under the auspices of authoritarian power.

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On Bullshit in Politics

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today we’re continuing our series on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. Our guest is Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Michael is the author of the recently published book, On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (Princeton University Press, 2025). The topic of our discussion today will be on bullshit in politics, and how we might think about ways to combat it.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Noëlle McAfee, "Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy.

Democracy, as you may dimly recall, demands the capacity to bear difference, tolerate loss, and to speak into the unknown. Meanwhile we have come to live in a world where, if my clinical practice and personal life are any indication, people often prefer writing to speaking. Patients who want to make a schedule change--never a neutral event in psychoanalysis—write me. I say, addressing the resistance, “This is a talking cure. Get your money’s worth. Speak!” Among intimates, bad news is something I too often read about. I surmise that in speaking desire or conveying pain, a fantasized recipient is sought, an ideal listener, who, like a blow up doll lover can be invoked, controlled and then deflated at will.

Circling back to difference and loss, ideas that do not mirror our already existing thoughts find themselves batted out of the park to an elsewhere not worth enunciating. Cultivating a protective bubble—such a heartbreak right? It seems there is something about democracy that frightens the shit out of us.

Deploying the work of Winnicott, Klein, Green and Kristeva, Mcafee reminds us of our original loss—what she calls “plenum”. That loss, to the degree it is recognized, initiates our undoing. Mother’s other—be it her lover, her piano lessons, a visit to the dentist for a cavity—tears a hole in our emotional shield. In her wake, we cling to seemingly strong leaders, a father, or failing that potent ideologies reeking of misogyny, all the while hoping for compensation for an unfathomable loss.

Embedded within democracy lies the demand that we see other than ourselves. This demand challenges the thin-skinned among us. And all of us are thin-skinned from time to time. How to manage?

Mcafee adds her voice to the popular chorus of those practicing applied psychoanalysis and suggests we embrace mourning. It is an inarguable position yet also nice work if you can get it! Of course, with the original disaster elided, like sleepwalkers in our night fog, we will helplessly seek it out; worse, we will make it manifest, with a vengeance. What is not remembered gets repeated. Trapped in America, as I am, one wonders about democracy. What might lure us to revisit the sight of the disaster, “the thing itself’,” to quote Adrienne Rich, “and not the myth?”

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Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser, "Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.
This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all―human as well as nonhuman―earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life (Columbia UP, 2024) provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

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Siri Schwabe, "Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Two juxtaposed years frame the subject matter of Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. In one, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet’s troops stormed Chile’s presidential palace. In the other, 1948, Zionist militias expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. That 1973 should move memories in Chile is obvious. That 1948 does is because Chile is home to the largest number of Palestinians outside the Middle East. Yet, while most are descended from people who migrated prior to the expulsion, 1948 and its consequences are what move Chilean Palestinians to act together politically, whereas 1973 divides them. In this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, Siri Shwabe discusses how her ethnographic research in Santiago explored the paradoxical relationship between the movement of two collective memories of violence and dispossession: an ambivalent one in the recent lived past, and the other residing in a distant land and the struggle for survival of an expelled and relentlessly attacked people whose trauma the diaspora adopts and differently experiences.

Like this episode? Why not check out others on the New Books Network, including Kevin Funk talking about Rooted Globalism: Arab–Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries, or Tahrir Hamdi on Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity.

Looking for something to read? Siri recommendsVibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett.

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Genocide Studies International Partners with New Books Network

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with Genocide Studies International. GSI is one of the preeminent journals in the field of Genocide Studies. Published by the University of Toronto Press and housed in the Zoryan Institute, GSI is dedicated to “to raising knowledge and awareness among scholars, policy makers, and civil society actors by providing a forum for the critical analysis of genocide, human rights, crimes against humanity, and related mass atrocities.”

With this new partnership, I’ll be bringing you interviews with the editors and authors of cutting-edge articles and special editions on the journal. This isn’t new—we’ve done this with several other journals before. But by formalizing our partnership, we hope you’ll have more access to the best recent research and analysis on the causes, course and consequences of mass atrocity violence. It’s a partnership that enriches both organizations.

In a few weeks, you’ll hear from Alex Alvarez, the editor of a new special issue on genocide education. But first I got a chance to talk with Henry Thierault, one of the editors of the journal, and Megan Reid, Deputy Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute. We discuss the editorial vision of the journal, the Zoryan Institute’s role in genocide education and prevention, and the reasons we’re so excited about the partnership. I hope you enjoy our discussion.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Chinese Conceptualisation of the Rule of Law – a Conversation with Dr. Martin Lavicka

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What does the 'rule of law' really mean in China? How does it shape the country’s politics, both at home and on the world stage? And why should it matter to the rest of us when universal norms are being challenged?

Dr. Tabita Rosendal from the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, talks to Dr. Martin Lavicka, a scholar of Chinese studies, about his latest project on the rule of law in the Chinese context.

Dr. Martin Lavicka is a visiting research fellow at the Department of History and the Centre of East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. Martin is the PI of the project CLAW: Chinese Conceptualisation of the Rule of Law: Challenges for the International Legal Order. Martin’s research has been supported by the OP JAC Project “MSCA Fellowships at Palacký University II.” CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0006945 at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Episode producer: Julia Olsson

Links:

ResearchGate profile

AcademiaEdu profile

Martin’s latest article “Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics: A Contested Landscape”

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners:

Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia)
Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland)
Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania)
Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden)
Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland)
Norwegian Network for Asian Studies

This podcast was recorded in May 2025 in the wonderful podcast studio at Altitude, Collab Arena in The Loop.

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Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast I sat down with Dr Doina Anca Cretu to talk about her first book, Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal, published by Stanford University Press. In the podcast we talk about Anca’s academic background, how she came to research foreign aid in Romania, any surprises she encountered during her research, the nature of foreign aid in interwar Romania, and how to approach publishing a first monograph.

The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We bring the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions.

At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate.

Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews.

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Didi Kuo, "The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As the crisis of democratic capitalism sweeps the globe, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes the controversial argument that what democracies require most are stronger political parties that serve as intermediaries between citizens and governments.

Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. Parties now rank among the most unpopular institutions in society--less trusted than business, the police, and the media. Identification with parties has plummeted, and even those who are loyal to a party report feeling that parties care more about special interests than about regular citizens. What does a "good" political party look like? Why do we urgently need them? And how do we get them?

The Great Retreat explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on mass parties, and the ways they served as intermediaries that fostered ties between citizens and governments. While parties have become professionalized and nationalized, they have lost the robust organizational density that made them effective representatives. After the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus, changes to campaign finance, and shifting party priorities weakened the party systems of Western democracies. As Didi Kuo argues, this erosion of political parties has contributed to the recent crisis of democratic capitalism, as weak parties have ceded governance to the private sector.

For democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, Kuo makes the case that we need strong intermediaries like mass parties--socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens. Parties are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth, while the breakdown of party systems, on the other hand, has historically led to democratic collapse. As trust in political parties has plummeted, The Great Retreat provides a powerful defense of political parties--for without parties, democratic representation is impossible.

Didi Kuo is Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox ed., "Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline" (SUNY Press, 2025)

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and their experiences in the discipline itself and in studying topics that include race and gender. Political Science, as a discipline, is a bit more than 100 years old, and studies politics, power, institutions, policy, methodology, and theory. These are the over-arching umbrellas within the discipline and many of the specific areas within political science take up questions that are connected to these broad concepts. As with many dimensions of our society, race and gender play a role in the discipline itself and in what we study as political scientists. But race and gender have also been considered tertiary issues within the discipline in terms of research.

Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline (SUNY Press, 2025) is both autobiographical for some of the contributors as well as a rigorous interrogation of political science as a discipline. Lewis-Maddox has assembled a group of scholars across rank and position, region and geography, kinds of institutions, and scholarly emphasis. This diverse assembly of contributors have reflected on their particular experience within political science and have written about that experience from a variety of perspectives and approaches. This is a rich and deep study of those who have found themselves to be “space invaders”—black women in spaces and places that are not designed for them. These women all bring the experience of interposing themselves in a place or in places where they are not accepted. And yet they have also persevered in these spaces, in institutions, and within the discipline, and they have considered how they operate professionally and personally in “hostile” territory. Part of the thrust of Disrupting Political Science is to encourage the reimagining of political science as a discipline, to challenge the norms and expectations that have remained in place for over a century.

Angela K. Lewis-Maddox and her assembly of contributing authors have done a great service to the discipline of Political Science in publishing these analyses and considerations. Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline is shining a light on those who have often been obscured within the boundaries of the academic discipline—either because of who they are or because of what they study. Political Science is truly an expansive discipline, and to understand the world in which we live, individuals or groups should not be marginalized or erased, but re-centered and engaged. This book goes far in helping to refocus and consider otherwise obscured dimensions of political science and political scientists.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, "Why America Didn't Become Great Again" (Routledge, 2025)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become Great Again (Routledge, 2025) identifies those organizations, institutions, politicians and prominent characters in the forefront of the economic and social policies - ultimately asking who is responsible. While the period from the late 1970s to 2020s became the best of times for America's corporate class, as profits grew along with the wealth and income that they delivered for their stockholders and management, their goal was to set new rules for the rest of us to live by, not as special interests but with a clear class agenda - for which institutions have been organized, government policies reoriented, economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted. And so it has not been the best of times for working families as inequality, stagnant wages, debt, and ever longer working hours became their fate. This book critically analyses those who very deliberately set out to implement policies enacted at the state and federal level in order to redistribute wealth and income upwards and change the balance of power in the United States in response to the class, gender and racial challenges that resulted in compressed income and wealth differentials. An essential book on contemporary inequality in America, Why America Didn't Become Great Again surveys the past near half century that have resulted in American economic instability and inequality, environmental crisis, a crumbling physical and harmful social infrastructure, among the very worst health outcomes, child poverty, food insecurity and social mobility of the industrialized countries culminating in a Trump regime and the road to further ruin.

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Timothy Stacey, "Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation" (Bristol UP, 2022)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation Bristol UP, 2022) By Timothy Stacey

In the wake of populism, Timothy Stacey’s book critically reflects on what is missing from the liberal project with the aim of saving liberalism.

It explains that populists have harnessed myth, ritual, magic and tradition to advance their ambitions, and why opponents need to embrace rather than eschew them. Using examples of liberally oriented activists in Vancouver, it presents an accessible theorization of these quasi-religious concepts in secular life.

The result is to provide both a new theoretical understanding of why liberalism fails to engage people, and a toolkit for campaigners, policymakers and academics seeking to bridge the gap between liberal aspirations and lived experiences, in order to promote political engagement and to create unity out of division.

Timothy Stacey is Researcher in the Urban Future Studio at Utrecht University.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Minxin Pei, "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Rising prosperity was supposed to bring democracy to China, yet the Communist Party’s political monopoly endures. How? Minxin Pei looks to the surveillance state. Though renowned for high-tech repression, China’s surveillance system is above all a labor-intensive project. Pei delves into the human sources of coercion at the foundation of CCP power, examining the historical development of China's surveillance state, its relationship to economic modernization and political liberalization, and what might destabilize it in the future.

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Jack Snyder, "Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Human rights are among our most pressing issues today. But rights promoters have reached an impasse in their effort to achieve rights for all. Human Rights for Pragmatists (Princeton University Press, 2022) explains why: activists prioritize universal legal and moral norms, backed by the public shaming of violators, but in fact, rights prevail only when they serve the interests of powerful local constituencies. Jack Snyder demonstrates that where local power and politics lead, rights follow. He presents an innovative roadmap for addressing a broad agenda of human rights concerns: impunity for atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, entrenched abuses of women’s rights, and more.
Exploring the historical development of human rights around the globe, Snyder shows that liberal rights–based states have experienced a competitive edge over authoritarian regimes in the modern era. He focuses on the role of power, the interests of individuals and the groups they form, and the dynamics of bargaining and coalitions among those groups. The path to human rights entails transitioning from a social order grounded in patronage and favoritism to one dedicated to equal treatment under impersonal rules. Rights flourish when they benefit dominant local actors with the clout to persuade ambivalent peers. Activists, policymakers, and others attempting to advance rights should embrace a tailored strategy, one that acknowledges local power structures and cultural practices.
Constructively turning the mainstream framework of human rights advocacy on its head, Human Rights for Pragmatists offers tangible steps that all advocates can take to move the rights project forward.

Our guest is Jack Snyder, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Amogh Dhar Sharma, "The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

About the Book

Over the last decade, election campaigns in India have undergone a dramatic shift. Political parties increasingly rely on political consulting firms, social media volunteers, pollsters, data-driven insights, and hashtag wars to mobilize voters. What is driving these changes in the landscape of electioneering? The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them (Cambridge UP, 2024) takes readers to the hidden arena of strategizing and deliberations that takes place between politicians and a new cabal of political professionals as they organize election campaigns in India. The book argues that this change is not reducible to a story of technological innovations alone. Rather, it is indicative of a new political culture where ideas of political expertise, the distribution of power within parties, and citizens' attitudes towards political participation have undergone a profound change. Marshalling an eclectic range of data sources, the book breaks new ground on how we understand the workings of India's electoral and party politics.

About the Author

Amogh Dhar Sharma is Departmental Lecturer in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. After receiving his PhD from the University of Oxford, he was awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellowship. His research explores the interface between politics and technology, political communication and histories of science and technology.

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Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement.

Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state.

Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party.

Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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How do Small States Navigate and Shape the Liberal World Order? A conversation with Dylan Loh

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Globally, the liberal international order has been under pressure for quite some time, but we often tend to discuss this in relation to big international players such as the United States and China. But how do small states like Singapore navigate and shape this increasingly contested space? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Dylan Loh about Singapore’s understanding of the liberal international order, its position on liberal democratic values and human rights, its relations with big international players, and the ways in which this small city state seeks to uphold and modify the liberal international order, so it better aligns with its own interests.

Read Dylan’s article ‘Singapore's conception of the liberal international order as a small state’ in International Affairs.

*** This episode was originally recorded in November 2024. ***

Dylan Loh is an Assistant Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He studies China’s foreign policy, international diplomacy, and ASEAN regionalism. He is the author of a recently published book ‘China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy’ which was published by Stanford University Press (2024).

Petra Alderman is a researcher, CEDAR affiliate, and a manager of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.

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Yaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries.

Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation.

Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

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The May 2025 Mid-Term Elections in the Philippines

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s episode focuses on the mid-term elections in the Philippines which were held in May of this year, including all local elected positions, all seats in the House of Representatives, and twelve of the twenty-four seats in the Senate. The elections have been viewed as a reflection on the administration of President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr. and as especially consequential for the future of Vice-President Sara Duterte. She was impeached by the House of Representatives in February 2025, setting the stage for a trial by the Senate, but with her continuing popularity making her a serious contender for the presidency in 2028.

To interpret the mid-term elections, Dialogues on Southeast Asia has turned to Dr. Sharmila Parmanand, an Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and also an Associate and member of the Management Committee of the LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Dr. Parmanand’s research focuses on the intersection of gender and politics in the Philippines, ranging from sex work and migration policies to the connections between gender, nationalism, and democracy. She is currently working on her first book, titled Saving Our Sisters: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and Sex Work in the Philippines, but she is also busy conducting research, writing, and publishing on other fronts, including a new collaborative project on queer activism across Southeast Asia.

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Nicole Watts, "Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan" (NYU Press, 2025)

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Nicole F. Watts's Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan (NYU Press, 2025) is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives.Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa’s story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide.
Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland.

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The Truth About Bullshit: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary Edition of On Bullshit with Pamela Hieronymi

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit.

At just 80 pages, On Bullshit became a favorite of readers, selling over 1 million copies and spending 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a work of philosophy breaks through to the mainstream, but readers of On Bullshit quickly discover why. Harry’s meditation on the meaning of bullshit can be read in one sitting, but the ideas have staying power. After you read Harry’s book, you start to see bullshit everywhere and recognize it’s uniquely pernicious effects on whatever’s left of the public square. Harry wrote his book long before modern social media and AI-generated slop. He was unbelievably prescient, making On Bullshit required reading for today. Harry sadly passed in 2023 at 94 years old, but his ideas live on. In this series, we’ll speak with scholars whose lives and work have been influenced by Harry and his seminal book.

To kick things off, I’ll be speaking with Pamela Hieronymi, one of Harry’s former students. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA and a leading scholar in the field of moral philosophy. Like Harry, her work has resonated outside the academy. She served as an advisor on the sitcom, The Good Place, which brought philosophical concepts like the trolley problem to a mainstream audience. For the first episode in the series, Pamela will introduce readers to both the book and the man who wrote it. In subsequent episodes, I’ll speak with other scholars who explore Harry’s notion of bullshit in politics, science, and more. If you haven’t read On Bullshit, you should preorder the anniversary edition, which is set to release on August 5th. Now, let’s have ourselves a bull session.

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Watch her lecture on the blame game.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre Kashmir Crisis: The India-Pakistan Blame Game?

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features Nitasha Kaul, Professor of Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), University of Westminster, London, UK.

The episode focuses on the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. The discussion shows how the issue is shaped more by political narratives than by verified facts. Militant attacks, such as the one in Pahalgam, raise questions about accountability, but the governments of both countries often avoid proper investigation and turn instead to blame games and international lobbying.

The episode also explores political shifts in India since 2014. It highlights the decline of democratic freedoms, the rise of Islamophobia, and increasing control over dissent. It points out how narratives about women’s empowerment are often used for political purposes rather than real change. The conversation underlines the human cost of the conflict, including displacement, violence, and deepening religious divides. Also, about the potential role of international actors, including European and Nordic countries, in supporting human rights and democratic values. It suggests that greater attention to the situation in Kashmir, and the broader democratic developments in the region, could help encourage more inclusive and constructive approaches to long-standing conflicts.

Kikee Doma Bhutia is a Research Fellow and India Coordinator at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her current research combines folkloristics, international relations and Asian studies, focusing on the role of religion and culture in times of crisis, national and regional identities, and geopolitics conflict between India and China

Nitasha Kaul is a Professor of Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster, London. With a background that spans economics, philosophy, creative writing, and international relations, her work explores the intersections of politics, identity, gender, and global justice

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Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024)

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Dr. Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors.

Dr. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human trafficking. Detailing the protocols that have been put in place and evaluating their enactment, Dr. Faier reveals how the continued failure of humanitarian institutions to address structural inequities and colonial history ultimately reinforces the violent status quo they claim to be working to change.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Claire Pierson, "Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland" (Manchester University Press, 2025)

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Claire Pierson sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement.

Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Dr. Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms.

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Emmanuel Akyeampong, "Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (Indiana UP, 2023)explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations.

Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania, Independent Africa engages four major themes: what does it mean to construct an African nation-state and what should an African nation-state look like; how does one grow a tropical economy emerging from European colonialism; how to explore an indigenous model of economic development, a "third way," in the context of a Cold War that had divided the world into two camps; and how to leverage internal resources and external opportunities to diversify agricultural economies and industrialize.

Combining aspects of history, economics, and political science, Independent Africa examines the important connections between the first generation of African leaders and the shared ideas that informed their endeavors at nation-building and worldmaking.

Professor Akyeampong is the former Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies and the Ellen Gurney Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and his bachelor's degree in History and Religions from the University of Ghana at Legon in 1984. Professor Akyeampong is currently the Ellen Gurney Professor of

Professor Akyeampong's publications include Themes in West Africa's History (2005), which he edited; Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (2023); Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, 1850 to Recent Times (2001); and Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Present Times (1996). He was a co-chief editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for the Dictionary of African Biography, 6 Vols. (2012).

Professor Akyeampong has been awarded several research fellowships, and from 1993 to 1994, he was the Zora Neale Hurston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University. He was named a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2002, and was nominated to be a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Ghana. At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is a faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the executive committee of the Hutchins Center. As a former chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Gates, in creating the Department of African and African American Studies and formerly served as the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Center for African Studies.

You can learn more about Professor Akyeampong’s work here

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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Ioana Emy Matesan, "The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Research shows that repression can lead to both radicalization and deradicalization. When does it drive groups to pick up arms, and under what conditions does it foster disengagement from violence? To answer these questions, it is important to trace tactical changes over time, and to parse the factors that push groups toward or away from violence. Through an examination of four case studies—the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya'a in Egypt, and Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyaa in Indonesia—Ioana Emy Matesan establishes a framework for understanding what leads groups to escalate towards violence, or to renounce it. Matesan breaks down how escalation occurs into ideological, organizational, and behavorial escalation, giving us a nuanced and systematic approach to examining the complex nature of Islamist groups and providing a structure for analyzing other social groups that engage in violent tactics.

The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020).

Ioana Emy Matesan is Assistant Professor of Government and Tutor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

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Marlene Laruelle, "Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime's ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it.

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Ethnic minorities are good for democracy – Here is why

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Democracy scholars often assume that ethnic homogeneity is good for democracy. Politically mobilised ethnic minorities, the assumption goes, stoke divisions and can destabilise democracy. In his latest book Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy: Circumstantial Liberals (Oxford UP 2024), Jan Rovny turns this assumption on its head and argues that not only minorities are not bad for democracy but in fact they can help strengthen and protect it. In this episode, he talks with host Licia Cianetti about why this is the case, under what circumstances, and how the book’s lessons from minorities in Central and Eastern Europe can travel well beyond the region and might even provide insights to interpret recent voting patterns in the US.

Jan Rovny is Professor of Political Science at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, Paris.

Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. Her book on these themes is The Quality of Divided Democracies: Minority Inclusion, Exclusion and Representation in the New Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

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Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public.
Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars.
Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power.

Our guest is Elizabeth N. Saunders, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Ulf Laessing, "Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi" (Hurst, 2020)

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why has Libya fallen apart since 2011? The world has largely given up trying to understand how the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi has left the country a failed state and a major security headache for Europe. Gaddafi's police state has been replaced by yet another dictatorship, amidst a complex conflict of myriad armed groups, Islamists, tribes, towns and secularists. What happened? One of few foreign journalists to have lived in post-revolution Tripoli, Ulf Laessing has unique insight into the violent nature of post-Gaddafi politics. Confronting threats from media-hostile militias and jihadi kidnappings, in a world where diplomats retreat to their compounds and guns are drawn at government press conferences, Laessing has kept his ear to the ground and won the trust of many key players. Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi is an original blend of personal anecdote and nuanced Libyan history. It offers a much-needed diagnosis of why war has erupted over a desert nation of just 6 million, and of how the country blessed with Africa's greatest energy reserves has been reduced to state collapse.

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NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of Burden-Sharing: A Conversation with Brian Blankenship

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell University Press, 2023), might be able to tell us about the quickly changing nature of US military alliances across the globe. We discuss the implications of Europe's burgeoning rearmament, the prospect of a collective defense pact in the Indo-Pacific, and how changing technologies and threats might affect burden-sharing in future alliances.

Brian D. Blankenship is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.

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James Graham Wilson, "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In America's Cold Warrior, James Graham Wilson traces Paul Nitze's career path in national security after World War II, a time when many of his mentors and peers returned to civilian life. Serving in eight presidential administrations, Nitze commanded White House attention even when he was out of government, especially with his withering criticism of Jimmy Carter during Carter's presidency. While Nitze is perhaps best known for leading the formulation of NSC-68, which Harry Truman signed in 1950, Wilson contends that Nitze's most significant contribution to American peace and security came in the painstaking work done in the 1980s to negotiate successful treaties with the Soviets to reduce nuclear weapons while simultaneously deflecting skeptics surrounding Ronald Reagan. America's Cold Warrior connects Nitze's career and concerns about strategic vulnerability to the post-9/11 era and the challenges of the 2020s, where the United States finds itself locked in geopolitical competition with the People's Republic of China and Russia.

Short Bio:

James Graham Wilson is a Supervisory Historian in the Office of the Historian at the Department of State.

He has compiled 11 volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, including the sequence of National Security Policy volumes covering 1977–1992.

He is the author of America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Cornell Press, 2024) and The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Cornell Press, 2014).

He received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2011, where he studied with Melvyn Leffler.

Mentioned:

Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (2022).

Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days (1969).

Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove (2010).

Also mentioned:

Foreign Relations of the United States Volumes, here.

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, here.

Luca Trenta is an Associate Professor in International Relations at Swansea University, in Wales (UK).

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre China's Psychological Power

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an analyst at the University of Tartu Asia Centre and a researcher at the ICDS. His academic work deals with political psychology, collective identity, and history narratives in China, but this episode focuses on his upcoming article on the psychological function of coping in Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to legitimise its rule.

Starting from the very general question of what the century of humiliation is, who are the main historical culprits in humiliating China, and to what extent is Russia different from other colonial powers, we delve into more specific aspects of humiliation as a psychological phenomenon. Hõbepappel explains why we must pay attention to the psychological aspect of coping to understand how humiliation legitimises CCP’s hold on power - by reminding its people of past humiliation(s), the CCP effectively generates unease and anxiety among its populace that needs to be mitigated to have a normal life. The CCP has so far been able to administer just the right amount of poison (the national humiliation narrative) not to kill the patient and provided just the right amount of medicine (politically correct coping mechanisms) to keep its hold on power stable.

In addition, as Hõbepappel argues, the psychology of humiliation in China is understudied and surrounded by several misconceptions. For example, in the study of Chinese nationalism, humiliation is often equated to other affective states like shame, anger, sense of inferiority and insecurity. While these emotions are indeed often associated with the nationalist sentiments in China, they are psychologically distinct and should also be analysed as such.

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Sarah Nagaty, "The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling that runs deep through experiences of socially transformative moments. Sarah Nagaty has extensively studied the structure of feelings that encompasses the experiences not only of activist minorities but the broader mass of revolutionary movements. In certain historical moments, hopes and aspirations bind together millions of people from all walks of life: students, workers, farmers, and middle-class professionals. Nagaty calls this phenomenon the “collective dream”, something which has been carried through generations of Egyptians.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Sarah Nagaty to discuss the conceptual roots of the collective dream and the overlooked histories of Nubian displacement during the construction of the High Dam. They also explored how thinkers like Raymond Williams and Lauren Berlant shaped Nagaty’s method of reading revolutionary time and cultural memory, as well as how vernacular poetry, reportage, and graffiti served as vital archival traces of collective feeling.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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Jeremy Morris, "Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else? A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, regional cities, as well as rural areas to bring perspectives on Russian everyday lives that are now entirely inaccessible to the West. Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) uses the lens of micropolitics, defined not as politics in miniature but instead as taking seriously the political content of people's normal lives revealed in their practices, interactions and discussions. Based on decades-long interactions with people from a diverse cross-section of society in Russia – from security service officers to factory workers, from unemployed young men to citizen journalists and activists, this is the most comprehensive insight to date into the complexity of Russian attitudes toward war, their government and the post-1991 political trajectory.

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Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What part should politics play in our everyday lives? In How to Think About Politics: A Guide in Five Parts (Oxford University Press, 2025) Peter Allen, a professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, explores this question across a range of practical and philosophical examples. The book directly challenges the conventional academic understanding of politics, showing how politics is much more than election polls or parliamentary behaviours. This broader view of the politic allows the book to offer insights as to what needs to change in political systems, as well as more generally in societies. A much needed and urgent intervention on the current state of our world, the book should be widely read by any readers interested in politics today.

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How Do Autocrats Stay in Power: A Discussion with Johannes Gerschewski

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode Licia Cianetti talks to Johannes Gerschewski about his book The Two Logics of Autocratic Rule (Cambridge UP, 2023). We discuss how autocrats try to either hyper-politicise or de-politicise their rule in order to stay in power, whether the word “fascist” is useful today, and what the two logics identified in the book might tell us about politics in contemporary autocratising democracies. As we recorded during Johannes’s stay at Thomas Mann House in LA, soon after the US 2024 elections, a lot of this had unavoidably to do with Trump. *This episode was recorded soon after the US elections, before the LA fires and Trump's second inauguration*

Johannes Gerschewski is research fellow at the WZB and academic coordinator of the Theory Network at the Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS. In his research, he works both theoretically and empirically on questions of legitimacy, stability, and crisis proneness of democratic and autocratic regimes.

Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. Her most recent work on these themes is “What is a “regime”? Three definitions and their implications for the future of regime studies” (with Gianni Del Panta and Catherine Owen) published in Democratization in 2025.

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Katarina Kušic, "Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia" (University of Michigan Press, 2025)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Katarina Kušic takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts. In particular, the book offers a detailed engagement with ethnographic fieldwork in two policy areas in Serbia—agricultural policy and non-formal youth education.

By engaging with subjects, the book not only enhances our understanding of intervention, but also uncovers the limitations of the concept. Dr. Kušić argues that the concept limits what we can observe and theorize, and it prevents researchers from engaging with the people living in spaces of intervention as coeval political subjects. As an alternative, she proposes to foreground improvement over “intervention.” This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy, expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves, and seriously considers the contradictions at the heart of liberalism.

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Jeanne Sheehan, "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) analyzes the roots of widespread disenchantment with American government. While blame often falls on the individuals in office, they are not operating in isolation. Rather they are working within a system designed by the Framers with one goal in mind, protectionism. Although the Framers got much right, their commitment to protection of liberty led them to design a system replete with divisions of power. Whatever its merits at the founding, the government today is frequently described as dysfunctional and far too often unresponsive to the majority, unaccountable, and unable to deliver for its people.

For those disillusioned with the current state of government and committed to effectuating meaningful change, this book advocates in favor of a fundamental reassessment of the system's primary objectives, followed by deliberation as to how it should be restructured accordingly. It not only presents specific reform proposals, but it ends with a stark warning: until and unless we embrace reasoned structural reform, we cannot be surprised if at some point the people become so frustrated that they either disengage, fight back, or seek solace in autocratic alternatives.

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Jaime Lee Kucinskas, "The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy (Columbia University Press, 2025) explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties amid the chaos of the first Trump administration, drawing on in-depth interviews with senior officials in the most contested agencies over the course of a tumultuous term. A revealing investigation that is now more relevant than ever.

Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College.

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Erica D. Lonergan and Shawn W. Lonergan, "Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 31 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

To what extent do cyberspace operations increase the risks of escalation between nation-state rivals? Scholars and practitioners have been concerned about cyber escalation for decades, but the question remains hotly debated. The issue is increasingly important for international politics as more states develop and employ offensive cyber capabilities, and as the international system is increasingly characterized by emergent multipolarity.
In Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace, Erica D. Lonergan and Shawn W. Lonergan tackle this question head-on, presenting a comprehensive theory that explains the conditions under which cyber operations may lead to escalation. In doing so, they challenge long-held assumptions about strategic interactions in cyberspace, arguing that cyberspace is not as dangerous as the conventional wisdom might suggest. In some cases, cyber operations could even facilitate the de-escalation of international crises. To support their claims, Lonergan and Lonergan test their theory against a range of in-depth case studies, including strategic interactions between the United States and key rivals; a series of case studies of the role of cyber operations in international crises; and plausible future scenarios involving cyber operations during conflict.

The authors then apply their analytical insights to policymaking, making the case that skepticism is warranted about the overall efficacy of employing cyber power for strategic ends. By exploring the role of cyber operations in routine competition, crises, and warfighting, Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace presents nuanced insights about how cyberspace affects international politics

Our guest is Erica D. Lonergan, an Assistant Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)

Fri, 30 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.

None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out.

It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence.

Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news on Substack.

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Book Talk 66: Political Hope, with Loren Goldman

Fri, 30 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naïve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will save us in the end. Goldman, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Principle of Political Hope (Oxford University Press, 2023), where he reveals hope to be an indispensable aspect of much continental and American political thought, especially in the works of Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty, and others. Our conversation on Goldman’s study of hope ends with three concrete lessons to counter hopelessness, cynicism, and despair.

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Amit Ron and Abraham A. Singer, "Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 29 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Amit Ron and Abraham Singer, both political theorists, examine the concept of the responsibilities that private companies and corporations have in a democracy. This new book, Everyone’s Business: What Companies Owe Society, weaves together democratic theory, business ethics, and the relationship between the citizen and the for-profit entity. The emphasis here may be of interest to a variety of different audiences, since the aim is to consider the role of the business or corporation with a democratic framework, where part of the structure of this kind of framework is the expectation of reflection and deliberation. Ron and Singer argue that businesses should take on this role within society, they should reflect on their position within a democratic society and consider what they contribute to the society itself but also to the functioning of the government within society.

Democratic theory includes a number of dimensions, including equality, participation, the rule of law, and limits on power. Citizenship is a core idea of democratic theory, and businesses and companies act in some manner as kinds of citizens within the society itself. Thus, they inhabit spaces that have certain responsibilities given their status within the society. Each chapter in Everyone’s Business gets at a part of democratic theory, posing questions about the responsibilities that businesses have to follow laws, to participate in protecting democracy, to understand the impact of their advertising and marketing, to consider their role in politics, and more. All of these chapters focus on the different ways in which businesses and corporations act, and urges these private, for-profit entities to consider each dimension of their role within democratic society. Because we often focus on businesses as part of the economy and not necessarily part of the political structure of society, these roles and responsibilities go unnoticed or uninterrogated. Ron and Singer are emphasizing the importance of these roles, and advocating to companies to take these roles seriously, since they have both political and economic power within our society and in many other societies as well.

Everyone’s Business: What Companies Owe Society is not a discourse on business ethics, as is often the case in evaluating the role of private companies in society. Instead, it builds a structure within democratic political theory around the role and responsibility of the corporation and asks corporations and businesses to reflect on their place and power within society.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Amit Ron is associate professor of political science at Arizona State University.

Abraham Singer is assistant professor of business at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation.

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Samuel Western, "The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies" (UP of Kansas)

Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When did the West lose its way? In 1889, when the US government carved five states out of the spawling Dakota Territory, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and North and South Dakota, all created state constitutions that enshrined certain progressive values into their structre of government. These included the right for women to vote, the power to curtail monopolies, and the ban on child labor. They also maintained a community ethos, as represented by the state ownership of running water and state-owned banks. Yet, in the 2024 presidential electinon, all five states gave their electoral votes to the hyper-individualistic conservatism of Donald Trump's Republcian Party. In The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies (UP of Kansas, 2024), longtime western journalist and educator Samuel Western traces the roots of this shift, and charts a pathway into a new, community oriented, future. Rather than purely extractive industries, Western argues for a socially and ecologically sustainable stewardship agriculture, and points to several examples from across the contemporary West where this practice is already taking place. A fascinating look at our current political moment, The Spirit of 1889 is an example of how even the most entrenched political values can blow away when the cultural winds change.

Samuel Western's Substack: https://samuelwestern.substack...

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Ryan J. Vander Wielen et al., "The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 27 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News (Cambridge UP, 2024) carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news in the US affected the behavior of political elites during the rise and proliferation of Fox News across media markets between 1996 and 2010. Despite widespread concerns over the ills of partisan news, evidence provides a nuanced, albeit cautionary tale. On one hand, findings suggest that the rise of Fox indeed changed elite political behavior in recent decades. At the same time, the limited conditions under which Fox News' influence occurred suggests that concerns about the network's power may be overstated.

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Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics

Mon, 26 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and co-host of the great podcast, These Times, about her approach to geopolitical analysis and the centrality of energy geopolitics in that approach. The pair start by talking about Thompson’s book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2023), her background and training, and how she came to develop the distinctive style of geopolitical analysis she deploys, including on episodes of These Times. Vinsel and Thompson also discuss a number of topics, including military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the global energy geopolitics of Net Zero, as a way of exploring Thompson’s way of thinking.

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Quentin Skinner, "Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Sun, 25 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences?

Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.

Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place
Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty
Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty

Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong" (Brixton Ink, 2025)

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Given what has happened since – from a global pandemic to wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East – events in Hong Kong in 2019-20 can seem remote when seen from today’s perspective. But the momentous scale and significance of the protests there during those years, and the ensuing crackdown and increasing restrictions on Hong Kong’s distinctive politics and society, continue to resonate, not least for the tens of thousands who have left the territory recently. Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s Vigil – a brilliant encapsulation of the mood in Hong Kong in 2019 and its pre-history and precedents – was published soon after the protests that year reached their zenith. Six years on, this new release of the book includes a foreword by Guardian senior China correspondent Amy Hawkins as well as an Afterword by journalist Kris Cheng. This conversation with Amy Hawkins discusses the book and events since.

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Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges, I spoke with Dennis Ross, a senior US diplomat and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a revised toolkit for US foreign policy and global leadership.

The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.

The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the “forever wars.” But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft—diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education—to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.

In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft—German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8—and bad cases of statecraft—going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war.

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The Price of Free Speech: Politics and Power on Campus

Fri, 23 May 2025 04:00:00 -0000

Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore the mounting political and financial pressures confronting higher education on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., it unpacks the unprecedented clash between the Trump administration and Harvard, raising broader questions about academic freedom, ideological conformity, and the role of government oversight. In the U.K., the conversation turns to the sector’s growing reliance on international students and foreign funding—particularly from China—and the implications for institutional independence and research integrity. Together, the episodes chart the uneasy intersection of education, economics, and geopolitics in today’s universities.
Guests:
-Tyler Coward is the lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
-Rose Stephenson is Director of Policy and Advocacy at Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI)
Producer: Pearse Lynch
Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight

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Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left" (MIT Press, 2025)

Thu, 22 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”

In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of “hatred,” and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground.

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London.

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Executive Power and the President Who Would Not Be King: A Conversation with Michael McConnell

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, Michael McConnell examines the gap between the Founders’ vision of a limited presidency and today’s expansive executive power. Drawing on his book The President Who Would Not Be King (Princeton University Press, 2022), we discuss how the Constitution’s safeguards against monarchical authority have eroded over the past century—and what steps might restore balance to our system of government. From war powers to administrative overreach, the conversation tackles the urgent question: How did we get here, and what can be done?

Michael McConnell is a renowned constitutional scholar, Stanford Law professor, and former federal judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. A leading voice on originalism and separation of powers, his work bridges historical intent and modern legal debates, making him the perfect guide for this critical discussion.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Lori Jo Marso, "Feminism and the Cinema of Experience" (Duke UP, 2024)

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Political theorist Lori Marso has been intrigued by filmmaker Chantal Ackerman for many years and has integrated Ackerman’s work into her courses at Union College and into her writings and scholarship as well. So it is no surprise that Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (Duke UP, 2024) is both an academic and a personal journey into Ackerman’s work but also the ways in which Ackerman’s work and similar kinds of artistry have made their way into our imaginations and our cinematic spaces. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience Marso uses both Ackerman’s cinematic work and the written work of Simone de Beauvoir to frame a variety of approaches to thinking about feminism and contemporary film. As Marso explains, Ackerman’s work attends to and notices women’s experiences, often with the kinds of cinematography that are used to explore these experiences in ways that make audiences a bit uncomfortable. Part of the thrust of Marso’s analysis is interrogating what it means to “feel like a feminist.” This is an important component to the discussion in Feminism and the Cinema of Experience since this feeling may be a space where we are puzzled by what we actually do feel and we need to accept that we are alright sitting with that discomfort and with that inconclusive affect.

Feminism and the Cinema of Experience explores the ways that cinema and film shift our senses, through what we see, hear, and the focus of our thinking. Film is also a profoundly emotional experience, especially if we are in a theater with others or viewing it in a community. The discussions that we have with others about what we have seen and experienced are political—this is a form of political engagement and a kind of democratic engagement. Marso provides the reader with different genres and categories that help us think about films within the broader framework at hand. And within these sections, many more contemporary films are put into conversation with Ackerman’s work. Finally, Marso wrote an epilogue of a kind that brings Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie into the discussion as well.

This is an important and thoughtful examination of contemporary cinema—but it is also a valuable analysis of feminism and feminist thought as we see it all around us, but particularly in narrative form on the silver screen. Feminism and the Cinema of Experience is fascinating, engaging, and opens doors to new and different ways of thinking and seeing and experiencing.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Nicholas Barry et al., "Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices and Dynamics" (Routledge, 2025)

Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices and Dynamics (Routledge, 2025) is an excellent edited volume exploring the various ways in which governments and constitutional structures operate in the spaces that are not necessarily articulated in law, edict, or formal documents. This is not a text about the folks who gathered together in 1787 in Philadelphia, or even those who wrote new constitutional structures after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conventions means the rules that govern the interactions between political actors and the governments they inhabit. In many ways, this refers to the kinds of norms that have grown up around different parts of the systems of government. The strength and endurance of those rules or norms can change over time and in response to crises or dynamic changes. Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices, and Dynamics explores these thick and thin dimensions of the governing structures from a comparative perspective, taking up Anglo and American systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The book also examines the cases of Hungary and Czechia (the Czech Republic), two post-Cold War systems; and finally, also, China.

In considering these constitutional conventions, we can think of them as structures or engagement that is not enforced by the courts, since these are not, per se, written constitutional laws. In long standing liberal democracies, there is an inclination towards adhering to conventions. But when these conventions are under strain, how they work, or maintain “regular order” becomes a critical test within the established governmental systems. Constitutional Conventions provides another dimension of significant interest in the discussion of how China works within these kinds of conventions within the process in which political individuals come up through the governmental and party systems and move into leadership roles. The comparative case study of Hungary and Czechia indicates that even in somewhat similar structures, the conventions and norms are not always the same.

Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices, and Dynamics is an important analysis of the ways in which governmental structures work beyond what is written or built as the official system. The discussions cover theoretical, practical, and comparative dimensions of our understandings of the processes and functions of governments.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or send her missives at Bluesky @gorenlj.

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Postscript: Calibrating the Outrage-Democratic Erosion, Legality, and Politics

Mon, 19 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We’ve been focusing on the dynamics of democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond. In this episode of Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, Susan talks the co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, Dr. Robert Blair about how the Consortium offers FREE resources to teachers, students, journalists, policy makers, and any interested person – including shared syllabus, readings, assignments, YouTube virtual roundtables, and policy briefs. Rob defines democratic erosion and offers critical insights on the importance of interdisciplinarity, calibrating outrage, and distinguishing between policy disputes and the erosion of democracy. He offers a clear-headed analysis of what is legal v. what breaks down democracy that is not to be missed. We conclude with thoughts on what everyone can do protect democracy.

Dr. Robert Blair is Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium. He studies the consolidation of state authority after civil war, with an emphasis on rule of law and security institutions, as well as the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding. His book, Peacekeeping, Policing, and the Rule of Law after Civil War, was published in 2020 with Cambridge University Press and his articles appear in political science outlets such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and International Organization but also science journals such as Science, Nature Human Behaviour, or Current Opinion in Psychology.

Mentioned:

Inside Higher Ed piece on grants terminated by the Trump administration, including one that funded the Democratic Erosion Consortium
“An Events-Based Approach to Understanding Democratic Erosion,” P/S Political Science & Politics by Rob, Hannah Baron, Jessica Gottlieb, and Laura Paler summarizes their data collection efforts on democratic backsliding
A special issue of P/S Political Science & Politics on the study of democratic backsliding
An academic article on combatting misinformation from Current Opinion in Psychology by Rob, Jessica Gottlieb, Brendan Nyhan, Laura Paler, Pablo Argote, and Charlene J. Stainfield
Democratic Erosion Project website and data set
Chris Geidner, Law Dork: Supreme Court, Law, Politics, and More Substack
Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity Project coding authority characteristics of states in the world system
University of Notre Dame’s V-Dem Project measuring democracy
Rob mentioned Brazil as a fruitful comparison for the US. He is particularly focused on how the courts can defend democratic institutions and processes – and how hard it can be to know where to draw the line between courts protecting vs. assailing democracy, and to know when the line has been crossed. Two gift articles from The New York Times here and here.
Contact info for Rob: robert_blair@brown.edu
Follow Rob and Democratic Erosion Consortium on social media: @robert_a_blair on X, @DemErosionDEC on X, @robertblair.bsky.social on BlueSky, @demerosiondec.bsky.social on BlueSky

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Globalization's Backlash: Echoes of the Interwar Era in Today’s World

Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews historian Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (W.W. Norton, 2023). Zahra reflects on the historical parallels between the current backlash against globalization and the anti-globalist movements of the interwar period. She highlights how economic insecurity, the rise of mass politics, and anxieties over immigration and trade shaped political reactions in both eras, while noting key differences—such as the role of environmentalism today and the absence of a world war in recent memory. Zahra also discusses the collapse of the international economic system in the 1930s, the ideological diversity of anti-globalist movements, and the legacy of Bretton Woods. She proposes that revisiting elements of the post-WWII international order, including regional cooperation and economic stabilization, may offer insight into managing today’s fractured global landscape.

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Make Britain Great Again? The MAGA-Style Rise of Reform UK

Sat, 17 May 2025 04:00:00 -0000

Britain's Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history. Local elections in the UK have signalled that they are facing the prospect of being wiped out, imperilled by the rise of the right-wing Reform Party, headed by one of the most pervasive and divisive figures in British politics: Nigel Farage. Reform’s success is also coming at the expense of Labour, whose voters are underwhelmed and unconvinced by the performance so far of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.

Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore what makes Reform such a potent political threat that they could upend 100 years of Labour and Conservative rule, charting the party's rise from UKIP to Brexit to now.

They speak to Gawain Towler, former Reform spokesperson and close political confidant of Nigel Farage, and Ben Habib, formerly deputy leader of Reform two men who understand the soul of the movement and the man who leads and embodies the party: Nigel Farage.

Producer, Pearse Lynch

Executive Producer, Lucinda Knight

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Ruth Braunstein, "My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.

Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.”
Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane.

Interviewee: Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Lara Montesinos Coleman, "Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights" (Duke UP, 2023)

Thu, 15 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights (Duke University Press 2024), Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on her extensive involvement with grassroots social movements in Colombia, Coleman observes that mainstream expressions of human rights have become counterparts to capitalist violence, even as this discourse disavows capitalism’s deadly implications. She rejects claims that human rights are inherently tied to capitalism, liberalism, or colonialism, instead showing how human rights can be used to combat these forces. Coleman demonstrates that social justice struggles that are rooted in marginalized communities’ lived experiences can reframe human rights in order to challenge oppressive power structures and offer a blueprint for constructing alternative political economies. By examining the practice of redefining human rights away from abstract universals and contextualizing them within concrete struggles for justice, Coleman reveals the transformative potential of human rights and invites readers to question and reshape dominant legal and ethical narratives.

Lara Montesinos Coleman is Professor of International Law, Ethics and Political Economy at the University of Sussex, where she also teaches on the MA in Human Rights. She is author of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights, published by Duke University Press in 2024 and shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize, awarded for an outstanding book published in any field of International Studies.

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

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What is environmental authoritarianism and why we should be mindful of its allure

Wed, 14 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The argument that authoritarian governments are better at dealing with the climate emergency is gaining ground, fuelled by the idea that undemocratic states face fewer constraints and so can operate more efficiently and effectively. Some are even arguing that this isn’t just a necessary evil but a legitimate policy response to pending environmental catastrophe. Yet the data suggests that on average authoritarian governments do not perform better, and on many measures actually do worse than democracies. So why does this idea persist? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy Wallace about their new article on Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation. Why is democracy not delivering? Why is authoritarianism not the answer? And what new models exist that can be used to deliver a greener and more inclusive future?

This podcast is part of our regular collaboration with the Journal of Democracy.

Guest:

Nomi Claire Lazar is a Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Her work looks at crises from a range of perspectives, including emergency powers, constitutional legitimacy and climate politics. Author of the books States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge 2009) & Out of Joint: Power, Crisis and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale, 2019), Nomi currently co-leads the British Academy’s Global Convening Programme, “The Times of a Just Transition.” She served in 2022-23 on the Rouleau Commission investigating the Federal Government’s use of the Emergencies Act in the trucker convoy crisis, and in 2024 was appointed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue to Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission. She is at work on a book on apocalyptic politics, and is a frequent contributor of commentary to news outlets around the world.

Jeremy Wallace is the A. Doak Barnett Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He researches the political economy of China’s decarbonization, including the book Phenomenal World which investigated the carbon implications of its growth model for land, finance, and real estate. Jeremy has also written on a wide range of issues relating to cities, climate change, environmental information flows, and social media. He is also an editor at Good Authority and writes the China Lab newsletter, and his latest book is Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China.

Presenter:

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Katherine Stewart, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today, and for the past several years, many people both here and abroad have been trying to make sense of the radical right and its financial and ideological grip on the Republican party. Why is it that so many Americans have turned against democracy? What explains the authoritarian reaction of so many American citizens, even when that reaction works so directly against their basic interests? How is it that this anti-democratic trend has escaped the explanatory frameworks of pundits and scholars alike? Perhaps we need to re-frame the narrative about the MAGA movement and the various constituencies that have somehow conspired to undermine democratic values and replace them with radical libertarian principles joined by theocratic, White nationalist, and anti-intellectual ideals.

Addressing these concerns, Katherine Stewart has written Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).

Casting a light on the religious right’s “Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players,” Stewart recounts her effort “to record what I have seen and heard from the leaders and supporters of the antidemocratic movement in the auditoriums and breakout rooms at national conferences, around the table at informal gatherings of activists, in the living rooms of the rank and file, and in the pews of hard-line churches. The story features a rowdy mix of personalities: ‘apostles’ of Jesus, atheist billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of ‘the gynocracy,’ high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (White) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of ‘spirit warriors’ who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.” Over and against the idea that religion is a relatively insignificant factor in the rise of the radical political right, Stewart makes plain how Christian nationalism is “front and center” in the effort to solidify the power of the MAGA movement and Donald Trump’s presidency.

Richard B. Miller is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Chicago. He previously taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University where he also served as Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. The author of numerous articles and books, the most of which is Why Study Religion? (NY: Oxford University Press, 2021). Bluesky.

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Threats to Universities and What We Can Do: A Conversation with Brandice Canes Wrone

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Universities are under attack, but what exactly are the threats? How does free speech in the last 10 years compare to today? What do we stand to lose if higher education collapses?

In this episode, Brandice Canes-Wrone dives into the major threats facing universities—from defunding to restrictions on free expression—and what we can do to solve them. We explore the history of universities, from their religious roots to the transformative impact of the GI Bill, examine how America’s global leadership is tied to the strength of its higher education system, and discuss why universities must remain vital spaces for intellectual experimentation, free inquiry, and personal growth.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Constitutional Crisis or a Stalemate?

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

At the 100 day mark of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the political scientists at Bright Line Watch released their 25th report on the state of American democracy entitled “Threats to democracy and academic freedom after Trump’s second first 100 days.” Based on polling both experts (760 political scientists) and the public (representative sample of 2000 Americans), the Bright Line Watch researchers find that the Trump administration has challenged constitutional and democratic norms on a wide range of issues, including the scope of executive power and the authority of courts to check it, individual freedom of expression, due process and habeas corpus, immigration, and academic freedom. In this episode of POSTSCRIPT: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, two of Bright Line Watch’s co-directors analyze the latest report – and what it means for American democracy. Topics include democratic performance, threats to democracy and academic freedom and self-censorship.

Dr. John Carey (he/him) is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. He is the author of 6 books and dozens of articles on democratic institutions, representation, and political beliefs.

Dr. Gretchen Helmke is the Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Political Science and faculty director of the Democracy Center at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on democracy and the rule of law in Latin America and the United States. Her new co-authored article definition and measuring democratic norms is forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025.

Mentioned:

Bright Line Watch’s April 2025 report, Threats to Democracy and Academic Freedom after Trump's Second First 100 Days (based on parallel surveys of 760 political scientists and a representative sample of 2,000 Americans fielded in April).

Bright Line Watch homepage with data and past reports
John Carey on NPR’s All Things Considered, 4/22 discussing the latest report.
Adam Przeworski’s Substack Diary (free to subscribe and read)
Democratic Erosion Project (with dataset that Gretchen mentioned)
Susan’s New Books Network conversation with Dr. Sue Stokes on the importance of integrating comparative politics and American politics.

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Catching the China-Europe Express: Logistics, Local Agency & Eurasian Geopolitics in the Polish Borderlands

Sun, 11 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges. How are logistics nodes developed? Who lives in these nodes of connection, and how do they navigate the shifting tides of global ambition?

Our conversation spans local politics, logistics, labor, railway connectivity, and geopolitics, offering a multidimensional view of border hubs where the global meets the local. These sites are not only shaped by supply chain logics but also by mounting geopolitical rivalries, as powers compete for infrastructural influence across continents. Dr. Kębłowski paints a vivid picture of Małaszewicze, once a booming railway town employing over 10,000 people, now economically depressed but still strategically vital. While geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—have disrupted trade flows, they haven’t derailed Małaszewicze’s importance. The town’s traffic has rebounded, a testament to its logistical centrality. Dr. Kębłowski discussed the hopes of renewal spurred by the BRI and how local leaders have actively tried to position Małaszewicze on the global map—courting Chinese delegations, lobbying Warsaw, and crafting narratives of international relevance. He shares insights into how these symbolic and practical efforts illustrate both the ambitions and the limitations faced by peripheries striving to assert their place in global politics and connectivity networks.

GUEST BIO:

Wojciech Kębłowski is an urban researcher, photographer, and Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with affiliations at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He will begin a new professorship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in June 2025. His research sits at the intersection of urban, transport, and political geography, and draws on critical social and decolonial theory. It spans three main areas: the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport, the urban geography of Global China, and alternatives to capitalist urbanism, including circular economy and degrowth practices. Wojciech’s research is global in scope, with fieldwork and collaborations in diverse cities in Western Europe (Aubagne, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Madrid), Eastern Europe (Sopot, Wrocław, Tallinn), China (Chengdu) and Cuba (Santiago). He uses a range of qualitative methods and is interested in photography as a research tool and a creative practice. Wojciech is involved in several international research projects, including LiFT (on fare-related mobility transitions), CARIN-PT (on flexible and on-demand transport), and previously led PUTSPACE and CIRCITY, focused on public transport and circular economies, respectively.

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Alan Chong, "The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Sat, 10 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In an era of globalization, international communication constantly takes place across borders, defying sovereign control as it influences opinion. While diplomacy between states is the visible face of international relations, this “informal diplomacy” is usually less visible but no less powerful. Information politics can be found in propaganda, Internet politics, educational exchanges, tourism, and even popular film.

In The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Alan Chong examines this informational dimension of international politics, investigating how information is generated, conveyed through channels, and directed specifically at audiences. While citizens are often portrayed as faithfully loyal supporters and beneficiaries of the modern nation-state—a fiction supported by passports, identification papers, and other notarized credentials—they are subject to the pulls of loyalty from transnational tribal affiliations, mythological and historical narratives of ethnicity, as well as the transcendental claims of religion and philosophy. Increasingly, social media also enchants non-state individuals, providing new virtual communities as the center of loyalties rather than national affiliations. By reinterpreting taken-for-granted concepts in journalism, media, political economy, nationalism, development, and propaganda as information politics, this book prepares serious-minded scholars, citizens, politicians, and social activists everywhere to understand the power plays in international communication and use alternatives to begin transforming power relations.

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Democracy for Sale: Death by Dark Money

Fri, 09 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this edition of Ctrl Alt Deceit: Democracy in Danger, we are live at the Royal United Services Institute.

Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones are joined by a world-class panel to discuss the dangers posed by the waves of dark money threatening to overwhelm our democratic institutions.
Panelists:
--Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Finance and Security, RUSI
--Darren Hughes, Chief Executive, Electoral Reform Society
--Gina Neff, Executive Director, Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Responsible AI, Queen Mary University London

Producer: Pearse Lynch

Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight

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Diana Graizbord, "Indicators of Democracy: The Politics and Promise of Evaluation Expertise in Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Thu, 08 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth?

In Indicators of Democracy (Stanford UP, 2024), Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

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Martin Thomas, "The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration.

The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton UP, 2024) shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations.
Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

Martin Thomas is professor of imperial history and director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. A fellow of the Leverhulme Trust and the Independent Social Research Foundation, he is the author of Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940; Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire; and other books.

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Time to Rethink Democracy: Participatory and More-Than-Human Perspectives

Tue, 06 May 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This is a special episode that features a conversation between Sonia Bussu and Hans Asenbaum on democracy, capitalism, climate and the practices and prospects of participatory, deliberative and more-than-human democracy to transform their relationship. Can we rethink democracy beyond the liberal-democratic institutions that were created as part of the bargain for fossil-fuel-driven, Western-centric economic growth? What does and could democratic participation look like? What does it mean to include the non-human in our understanding of democracy?

Sonia Bussu is Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham. She researches participatory democracy and in her work she uses participatory and creative methods for research and public engagement. She has led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy, youth employment policies, as well as coproduction of research on health and social care integration, and leadership styles within collaborative governance. She is scientific coordinator of a Horizon Europe project on participatory policymaking, INSPIRE. She is co-editor of Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovation. Routledge.

Hans Asenbaum is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His research interests include radical democracy, queer and gender studies, digital politics, and participatory research methods. In 2022 he received the ECPR Rising Star Award. Hans is the author of The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (with Ercan, Curato and Mendonça, Oxford University Press, 2022). His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, New Media & Society, Politics & Gender, and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

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Stephen H. Legomsky, "Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mon, 05 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since American president Donald Trump was elected to a second term, it is common to hear citizens, journalists, and public officials distinguish between the laws and leaders of their states and the national government. Those who oppose Trump’s policies with regard to reproductive rights, gun violence, LGBTQ+, education, police, and voting often present state constitutions, courts, laws, culture, and leaders as a bulwark against Trump’s autocratic rule.

But Professor Stephen H. Legomsky sees it differently. His new book, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government (Cambridge University Press 2025) argues that – if we care about democracy – we should imagine an America without state government. No longer a union of arbitrarily constructed states, the country would become a union of one American people. Reimagining the American Union understands state government as the root cause of the gravest threats to American democracy. While some of those threats are baked into the Constitution, the book argues that others are the product of state legislatures abusing their powers through gerrymanders, voter suppression, and other less-publicized manipulations that often target African-Americans and other minority voters. Reimagining the American Union interrogates how having national, state and local legislative bodies, taxation, bureaucracy, and regulation wastes taxpayer money and burdens the citizenry. After assessing the supposed benefits of state government, Professor Legomsky argues for a new, unitary American republic with only national and local governments.

Stephen H. Legomsky is the John S. Lehmann University Professor Emeritus at the Washington University School of Law. Professor Legomsky has published scholarly books on immigration and refugee law, courts, and constitutional law. He served in the Obama Administration as Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and later as Senior Counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. He was a member of President-Elect Biden’s transition team, has testified often before Congress, and has worked with state, local, UN, and foreign governments.

Mentioned:

Cambridge University press is offering a 20% discount here (until October)
Susan’s NBN interview with Richard Kreitner on Break It Up: Secession, Division, and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union
Jonathan A. Rodden’s Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books 2019)
Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution (Yale)
Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court case that overturned the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s pre-clearance requirement for historically discriminating districts

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Jerome Powell: “We don't think you're a straight shooter"

Sun, 04 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

More than any one institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation.

This eighth and final episode covers the life and times of the current chair, Jerome ("Jay") Powell - the technocratic lawyer-turned-banker who managed the global economy through two unprecedented disasters: the Covid pandemic and Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policies. As the episodes about Martin, Burns, and Volcker all attest, Powell isn't the first chairman to face political blowback. But he is the first to be publicly denounced as “Mr Too Late” and a “major loser” by a president intent on removing him from office before his term ends in mid-2026.

To discuss Powell, Tim is joined by Nick Timiraos, author of Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic and Prevented Economic Disaster (Little, Brown, 2022).

“If people think you're not going to act in the country's best interest, that's bad for the Fed,” he says. “The next time the Fed decides it needs to do something that actually is ‘exigent and unusual’, people will say: ‘Well, wait a minute, the last time you did this, we thought you were a toady for the Democrats or a toady for the Republicans. We don't think you're a straight shooter. We're not going to let you raise interest rates by 25 basis points. We're not going to give you money to backstop your purchases of corporate credit’. Those are the kind of medium and long term risks from a fight with the White House. I think, for Powell, the worst outcome is that people don't think you have an independent central bank anymore. Your monetary policy won't be credible. Why not just roll that thing into the Treasury Department if that's what you're going to do?”

Since 2017, Nick Timiraos has been the chief economics correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and has developed an unrivalled reputation as the "Fed whisperer".

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Janet Yellen: “She had a view that the world was on fire”

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke’s successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022).

“Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”.

In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He’s still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm.

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Ben Bernanke: “Like being a paleontologist”

Fri, 02 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan’s big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010).

“It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”.

Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed.

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Alan Greenspan: “The man who knew”

Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first episode of the second series explores Alan Greenspan, the chairman who followed Paul Volcker and ran the Fed from 1987 until 2006. Once bestowed with “Maestro” status, Greenspan – who turns 100 in March 2026 – has seen his reputation deflate in the wake of the post-2008 financial crisis. To discuss the fallen Maestro, Tim is joined by Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (Bloomsbury, 2016).

“Greenspan was the man who knew,” says Mallaby. “He was the man who knew that bubbles were extremely destructive, and yet he was not the man who acted against those bubbles. So, whilst he was great on inflation and on stabilising the price of eggs, he was not good on asset-price inflation or stabilising the price of nest eggs”.

A former journalist at The Economist and the Washington Post, Mallaby is the prize-winning author of The World's Banker – a portrait of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn – and More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. He is now the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Nicholas D. Anderson, "Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Territorial expansion is typically understood as a centrally driven and often strategic activity. But Nicholas D. Anderson’s new book, Inadvertent Expansion (Cornell University Press, 2025), shows that nearly a quarter of great power coercive territorial acquisitions since the nineteenth century have in fact been instances of what the author calls “inadvertent expansion.”

A two-step process, inadvertent expansion first involves agents on the periphery of a state or empire acquiring territory without the authorization or knowledge of higher-ups. Leaders in the capital must then decide whether to accept or reject the already-acquired territory.

Through cases ranging from those of the United States in Florida and Texas to Japan in Manchuria and Germany in East Africa, Anderson shows that inadvertent expansion is rooted in a principal-agent problem. When leaders in the capital fail to exert or have limited control over their agents on the periphery, unauthorized efforts to take territory are more likely to occur. Yet it is only when the geopolitical risks associated with keeping the acquired territory are perceived to be low that leaders are more likely to accept such expansion.

Accentuating the influence of small, seemingly insignificant actors over the foreign policy behavior of powerful states, Inadvertent Expansion offers new insights into how the boundaries of states and empires came to be and captures timeless dynamics between state leaders and their peripheral agents.

Our guest is Nicholas D. Anderson, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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The Vote Gap: What’s Pulling Young Men and Women Apart?

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why are young men leaning right while young women shift left? Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones speak with NYU’s Scott Galloway, political analyst Sophie Stowers, and commentator Oliver Dean to explore the forces behind this growing divide.

Whether it’s a broken social contract where young people no longer believe they will lead better, more prosperous lives than their parents or the work of algorithms that feed off rage and division, the implications are profound.

This podcast was recorded live at NYU London, in front of an audience of students who are part of a generation searching for increasingly radical solutions to fix society.

Guests

Scott Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business where he teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBA students. He is also a Bestselling author, professor and entrepreneur.

Sophie Stowers - A Research Associate at UK in a Changing Europe. Her background is in British and European politics, and her research focuses on UK-EU relations, British politics and parties, and public opinion. She previously worked as a Parliamentary Assistant.

Oliver Dean a political commentator with Young Voices UK. He studies History and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he is the Treasurer of the LSE Hayek Society.

Producer: Pearse Lynch

Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight

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The Good Father Syndrome: Why Strongmen Still Seduce

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, co-authors of The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (Polity Press, 2024). In this conversation, they discuss how today’s right-wing movements, from the United States to Hungary, are waging a new form of politics that undermines the very foundations of the modern, rules-based state. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of “patrimonialism,” Hanson and Kopstein explore how these leaders erode public trust, demolish impersonal bureaucracies, and replace rational governance with personal loyalty and whim. Along the way, they examine the role of conspiracy theories, the rise of “deep state” narratives, and the uneasy alliances connecting libertarians, Christian nationalists, and advocates of an all-powerful executive.

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Caitlin Killian, "Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts: A Reader. I’m also pleased to host two of the chapter authors, Drs. Nancy Hiemstra and Jaya Keaney.

Using a reproductive justice framework, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts walks students through the social landscape around reproduction through the life course. Chapters by cutting-edge reproductive scholars, practitioners, and advocates address the social control of fertility and pregnancy, the promises and perils of assisted reproductive technologies, experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and birth, and how individuals make sense of and respond to the cultural, social, and political forces that condition their reproductive lives. The book takes an intersectional approach and considers how gender, sexuality, fatness, disability, class, race, and immigration status impact both an individual's health and the healthcare they receive. The reader includes timely topics such as increased legal limitations on abortion, transpeople and reproduction, and new developments in assisted reproduction and family formation. The book can support undergraduate and graduate courses on families, gender, public health, reproduction, and sexuality – and I’m pleased to have contributed a chapter.

Dr. Caitlin Killian is a Professor of Sociology at Drew University specializing in gender, families, reproduction, and immigration. We featured her book, Failing Moms: Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers (Polity 2023) previously on New Books Network. Her articles have appeared in Contexts magazine and The Conversation, as well as numerous academic journals, and she has done work for the United Nations on sexual and reproductive health and rights and on Syrian refugee women

Dr. Nancy Hiemstra is a political, cultural, and feminist geographer and Associate Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her scholarship focuses on how border and immigration policies shape patterns and consequences of human mobility. Her 2019 book Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime examined the U.S. detention and deportation system, and her forthcoming book (with Deirdre Conlon) Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants scrutinizes how profit making goals drive the expanding use of detention.

Dr Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of feminist technoscience, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies. Her research across these fields explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist practices of embodiment and inheritance. Jaya is the author of Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (Duke University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize. Her writing has also appeared in journals such as Body and Society, Science Technology & Human Values, and the Duke University Press edited collection Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment (2021).

Mentioned:

Susan’s interview with Caitlin on Failing Moms: The Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers (Polity, 2024).

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Ian Boyd, "Science and Politics" (Polity, 2024)

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply “stick to the facts” and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us?

Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the centre of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science and politics. He argues that the way politicians and scientists work together today results in a science that is on tap for ideological (mis)use, and governance that fails to serve humanity’s most fundamental needs. Justice is unlikely―perhaps impossible―while science is not a fully integrated part of the systems for collective decision-making across society.

In Science and Politics (Polity, 2024), Boyd presents an impassioned argument for a series of conceptual and structural innovations that could resolve this fundamental tension, revealing how a radical intermingling of these (apparently contradictory) professions might provide the world with better politics and better science.

Professor Sir Ian Boyd is currently a professor at the University of St Andrews and Chair of the UK Research Integrity Office. He was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government on Food and the Environment (2012-2019). He is a marine and polar scientist and previously served as the first Director of the Scottish Oceans Institute at St Andrews

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Russell Blackford, "How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over.

How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismissed as outdated or twisted to support conservative policies. Blackford traces the lineage of liberalism from problems of toleration that emerged when Christianity triumphed in the late centuries of classical antiquity, with comparison to non-Western civilizations. The political and philosophical story culminates in the recent development – over the past 30 to 50 years – of post-liberal ideologies in the West. At each stage, Blackford discusses arguments for and against liberal principles, identifying why no argument to date has been totally successful in convincing opponents, while maintaining that liberalism's ideas and language are still worth saving.

From campus wars over academic freedom to the Charlie Hebdo attack and the murder of Samuel Paty, this is an indispensable guide for anyone wanting to understand the why, what and how of the post-liberal world.

Russell Blackford is a philosopher, legal scholar, literary critic based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced (2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (2016), and Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination (2017). In 2014, he was inducted as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

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Randy Laist and Brian Dixon, "Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis" (Fourth Horseman, 2024)

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis takes on the idea and terminology of freedom, examining our understanding of this concept and our relationship to the word itself as well as what it means to society, culture, and politics. Randy Laist and Brian A. Dixon, two scholars who often explore popular culture to better understand the society and politics all around us, have brought their admirable skills to Figures of Freedom, where they have assembled a broad array of contributors exploring freedom in a host of different venues and artifacts. The thrust of the book is to examine representations of freedom in the early 21st century, and the authors look at this evolving nature of freedom in popular culture 21st century texts, where they trace this shifting discourse across time and geography.

Broad questions are at the heart of Figures of Freedom: who gets to be free? What is freedom? How does freedom work or play out in different situations and settings? Is freedom itself an archaic idea in the face of rising dictatorships and authoritarian governments, where voices of freedom are being silenced? Freedom is often a concept and term that one understands from an individualistic perspective—my freedom is constrained by governmental actions or limited by societal norms or protected by the Bill of Rights. Liberty, which is often connected to freedom, especially in American discourse, is considered by these authors as more communal, and as part of a delicate balance within the U.S. constitutional system, but the advocacy for individual freedom has eclipsed liberty in the 21st century. Laist and Dixon frame their book by examining some of the facets of freedom, which may be ugly (Elizabeth Anker’s conception in her 2022 book), or masculinized (Linda Zerilli’s idea in her 2005 book), or colonial (Mimi Thi Nguyen thoughts in her 2012 book), or otherwise characterized by some quality constraining some dimensions of freedom. The contributing authors take up many of these concepts and use them to explore these ideas within a variety of narrative popular culture artifacts from the first part of the 21st century. These include, but are not limited to, Matthew Weiner’s television series Mad Men, Don DeLillo’s Zero K, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Ta-Nehisi Coate’s Between the World and Me, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Pixar’s Toy Story films, Sam Esmail’s television series Mr. Robot, and many more.

Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time on Crisis wrestles with what it means to be free and how we, as citizens, consume this idea through many of our cultural artifacts. At times, we may feel free but are, in fact, limited by unseen or unknown political, cultural, or societal constraints. Laist and Dixon compel us to consider our own understanding of freedom, particular in context of the idea of liberty, and how these ideas are shaped and shifted by the world around us, especially in the ways we see freedom represented within film and literary narratives.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Email her at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky: @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Maurizio Ferrera, "Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.

Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.

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China’s Trade War Strategy: How Xi Jinping Uses Autocracy, Fear, and Innovation to Compete with the West

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones analyze the global fallout after Donald Trump plunged America and the world into a trade war with China. David Rennie, The Economist’s geopolitics editor and former Beijing and Washington D.C. bureau chief, joins the podcast to unpack how Xi Jinping is playing the long game and playing to win.

In this episode, we explore Xi’s high-stakes strategy in the global trade war.

From embracing economic pain to fostering innovation under autocracy, China is challenging Western dominance on every front. However, as the controversy over British Steel demonstrates, Beijing’s drive to exert control often at the expense of freedoms abroad—risks alienating future partners.

In the second half, activist Chloe Chung shares her personal story of falling afoul of the Chinese authorities. A pro-democracy campaigner, Chloe awoke in December to news that police in Hong Kong had issued a HK$1 million ($128,000; £102,000) bounty for information leading to her capture abroad.

With democracy under pressure, this is more than just a trade war—it’s a battle for the future of the global order.

Producer: Pearse Lynch

Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight

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Marcus Kreuzer, "The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023), political scientist Marcus Kreuzer synthesises the different strands and traditions of Comparative Historical Analysis to show how interpretive and positivist research designs might complement rather than compete with one another. Like the contents of the book, our discussion on this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science is wide-ranging and lively, addressing topics like the many types of time, the meaning of its “grammar”, the importance of context, debates over transparency and replicability, and why pedagogy matters. Whether you are persuaded by Kreuzer’s advocacy for CHA or not, you will surely appreciate his enthusiasm to communicate about it, his deep knowledge of methodology and respect for its various traditions, and his concern to build (rather than burn) methodological bridges.

Like this episode? Why not check out others in this special series on the political science channel of the New Books Network, including the previous episode, also from the Methods for Social Inquiry book series, with John Boswell and Jack Corbett talking about The Art and Craft of Comparison.

Looking for something to read? Marcus recommends Arlie Hochschild’s Stolen Pride, Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s Naming Nature, and How the Heartland Went Red, by Stephanie Ternullo, whom Miranda Melcher has interviewed for the American Studies channel of our Network.

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Postscript: Political Scientists Ring Alarm Bell Over Trump’s Second Administration

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

After being sworn in as the 47th president, President Donald Trump quickly altered American government – and political discourse. He issued a slew of executive orders that affected how American government functions and he spoke about officers of the government, federal agencies, executive power, the press, the Constitution, and the rule of law in ways that surprised citizens, journalists, and many scholars. Postscript has devoted three podcasts to how professional historians have assessed Trump’s actions. Today, we look at how political scientists understand the second Trump presidency and how they have organized to amplify their concerns. Over 1200 trained political scientists signed a statement that lays out alarming changes to American government – and today’s podcast features the incoming president of the American Political Science Association, Dr. Susan Stokes, to discuss the statement and what it means for so many political scientists to sign it. With her forthcoming book, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press), Sue Stokes is the perfect person to assess democratic erosion and autocracy. Our conversation provides insights into the state of American politics, resources for people who want to oppose democratic erosion, and particular suggestions for teachers – and sneak peak into her new book.

Dr. Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of political science and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at The University of Chicago. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is co-director of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor democratic practices, their resilience, and potential threats. Dr. Stokes has spent her career unpacking how democracy functions in developing societies, distributive politics, and comparative political behavior. Her books include Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (Cambridge, 2013), and Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests, co-authored with S. Erdem Aytaç (Cambridge, 2019).

Mentioned:

Statement signed by over 1200 political scientists (closed for signatures)
Bright Line Watch: political scientists monitor democratic practices, resilience, and potential threats
APSA “take action” suggestions (really helpful if you are calling or writing your leaders)
APSA public statements and letters
Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy (2016)
Timothy Snyder, On Freedom (2024) and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Force a Democracy for All (2024), New Books Interview with Levitsky and Ziblatt by Karyne Messina
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018), New Books Interview with Daniel Ziblatt by Jenna Spinelle
Brendan Nyhan’s work and commentary
Democratic Erosion Consortium (nonpartisan effort with resources)

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Fernanda Gallo, "Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo’s project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel’s thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers.

Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel’s ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel’s considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation.

Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state’s monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel’s concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social.

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Agnieszka Pasieka, "Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences.

In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.

Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time.

Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal.

* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.

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Political Mythmaking in Nepal

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How and why do local political processes in rural Nepal become an arena for political mythmaking? And, how do political myths obscure their own historical construction, thereby making hierarchical power structures appear inevitable? In this episode we discuss these questions with Ankita Shrestha whose ethnographic explorations into these issues foreground the persistent centrality of caste, gender and indigeneity to everyday forms of domination and hierarchy in contemporary rural Nepal.

Ankita Shrestha holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Oslo.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and the leader of the centre for South Asian Democracy.

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Is Democracy and Peace Possible in Myanmar? A Conversation with Claire Smith

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As the civil conflict in Myanmar passes its fourth anniversary, is this ethnically complex country any closer to a peaceful resolution of its internal conflict? Do opposition forces have a singular vision for what a post-conflict Myanmar might look like, or could the country simply break apart? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Claire Smith about the evolution of Myanmar’s ongoing conflict, the different domestic and international actors involved, potential pathways for peace, and the broader regional and geopolitical implications of intervention in Myanmar. *This episode was recorded prior to the March 2025 earthquake*

Project website (with links to conflict & peace backgrounder and poster)

*** This episode was originally recorded in early December 2024. ***

Claire Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York (UK). She works on the comparative politics of conflict management, intervention and peacebuilding in the context of political transition in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and Myanmar. Claire’s research has appeared in leading conflict and peace journals including Conflict, Security and Development, Third World Quarterly, Global Responsibility to Protect and Peacebuilding. Her research has been funded by the ESRC, GCRF, The Asia Foundation, the ISRF and The World Peace Foundation.

Claire Smith Transcript

Petra Alderman is a researcher, CEDAR affiliate, and a manager of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.

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Is Liberal Democracy Dying?

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:00:00 -0000

Live from the Frontline Club in London, Ctrl Alt Deceit is back for its second season.

Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones host a fascinating discussion on the myriad threats to democracy, particularly in light of Trump's re-election.

Joined by Gabriel Gatehouse is an award-winning BBC journalist and broadcaster, formerly International Editor of Newsnight and host of the award winning podcast The Coming Storm.

And

Connor Tomlinson is a commentator and writer, contributing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Courage Media and presenting the Deprogrammed podcast at the New Culture Forum. He previously hosted Tomlinson Talks on LotusEaters.com

In this provocative and timely discussion, big ideas collide as our panel tackles the fault lines shaking the foundations of the democratic world.

As power shifts, authoritarianism rises, and ideological battles intensify, is liberal democracy collapsing under its own contradictions—or is it still the best system we’ve got?

From Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian ambitions to the push for a return to a more rigidly defined Western identity, our panel will explore the competing visions for the future. Has democracy been hijacked by global institutions that sideline voters? Was the dream of a liberal world order always doomed to fail? And if democracy is in decline—what comes next?

Producer: Pearse Lynch

Exec Producer: Lucinda Knight

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Engage and Evade in 2025: Asad L. Asad on Latino Immigrants in America

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book.

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Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven, "Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research?

Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven and Dána-Ain Davis answers these questions. The book is at once a how-to manual for doing feminist ethnography and a compendium of contributions from influential feminist ethnographers. Designed for students, scholars, community activists, and anyone interested in social knowledge, the book is multi-vocal and interdisciplinary and promotes critical methodologies as sites for reflection, collaboration, and creativity. It is a particularly important work for this moment in which anti-DEI efforts aim to minimize the work and perspectives of minoritized groups.

Dr. Christa Craven (she/her/hers) is a Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster, and co-founder of the Global Queer Studies minor. She has published four books, including Feminist Ethnography. Her 2019 monograph, Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making was awarded the Council on Anthropology & Reproduction’s Book Prize in 2021, and selected by Women.com as a book that puts “the long, complicated history of reproductive rights into sharp focus.”

Dr. Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Davis is the author, co-author, or co-editor of five books including Feminist Ethnography. NYU Press published Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth in 2019 and the book received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology and The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology. Dr. Davis is also a doula.

Mentioned in the Podcast:

Feminist Activist Ethnography:Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America, edited by Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis
Jafari S. Allen’s The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious: Black Feminists, Black Queer Habits of Mind, and the ‘Object’ of Ethnography,” in Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures, edited by Margot Weiss
Wiki Education help for faculty. Sign up for their info sessions!
College of Wooster’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies’s oral histories

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David Wiles, "Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites - or actors.

Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutions – in Puritan England, republican France and liberal America – Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi (Cambridge UP, 2024) opens up larger questions about the nature of democracy. When in the classical past Plato condemned rhetoric, the only alternative he could offer was authoritarianism. Wiles' bold historical study has profound implications for our present: calls for personal authenticity, he suggests, are not an effective way to counter the rise of populism.

Brilliantly reveals the ways in which culture shapes politics, with apposite historical examples
Reframes politics as theatre, allowing politically-minded readers to reflect upon the way performance must always shape the democratic process and in turn allowing theatrically-oriented readers to look afresh at political processes
Proposes a novel and striking historical framing of contemporary issues – Brexit, Trump, political polarization – by using theatre as a tool to imaginatively unlock these issues
Deploys wide-ranging case studies to contrast the ancient Greek city-state with modern electoral democracy around the world

David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. A British theatre historian, he specialises in classical and early modern theatre and has spent his career in departments of drama, where his teaching has always engaged with practice. His research interests include performance space and time, mask, acting and citizenship.

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Pandemic Power: The Covid Response and the Erosion of Democracy - A Liberal Critique

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Muriel Blaive to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Pandemic Power: The Covid Response and the Erosion of Democracy - A Liberal Critique. In the podcast we talked about the (failure of the) pandemic response, the necessity of critique, being shadowbanned on Facebook, censorship, and about liberal intellectuals abandoning their core values.

Pandemic Power is available in Open Access, thanks to the support of the Austrian Science Fund. You can download a PDF copy here.

You can purchase a physical copy here.

During the podcast, we discussed the following article: Laura Spinney, “Five years on, the right’s Covid narrative has been turbo-charged into the mainstream”, The Observer, 9 March 2025.

Muriel frequently posts on X.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”

James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis (Yale UP, 2024) that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.

Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?

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Matthew D'Auria et al., "The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field.

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2024) also explores nationhood and nationalism's relationships with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions, in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. Its wide range of regional case studies brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions. Volume I tracks turning points in the history of nationhood and nationalism from ancient times to the twentieth century. Volume II theorizes the connections between nationhood/nationalism and ideology, religion and culture. Together, they enable readers to understand the roots of how nationhood and nationalism function in the present day.

Cathie Carmichael is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Matthew D'Auria is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia.

Aviel Roshwald is an American historian and Professor of history at Georgetown University.

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Benjamin M. Studebaker, "Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on the ballot, with both candidates suggesting the election might well be the last one ever.

The consensus underpinning the world’s most powerful democracies is, indeed, waning. The populaces have developed a deep dissatisfaction with their governments’ political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. In his latest book Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Benjamin Studebaker argues that the kinds of disagreements which historically led to political violence today instead just linger throughout the state and society. Without alternatives, liberal democracy’s legitimation crisis leads to neither reform nor revolution.

Studebaker depicts a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. As different factions try to ‘save’ democracy in their own ways, they appear authoritarian to one another. Efforts to build legitimacy thus only spark greater inequality, pluralism, and ever-tighter gridlock.

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He has written for Aeon, Sublation, Compact, Current Affairs, The Bellows, and Huffington Post, among others. He hosts Political Theory 101 and co-hosts the film podcast The Lack.

Benjamin is also the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy which we spoke about in 2023.

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Adam J. Berinsky, "Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Political rumors and misinformation pollute the political landscape. This is not a recent phenomenon; before the currently rampant and unfounded rumors about a stolen election and vote-rigging, there were other rumors that continued to spread even after they were thoroughly debunked, including doubts about 9/11 (an “inside job”) and the furor over President Obama’s birthplace and birth certificate. If misinformation crowds out the truth, how can Americans communicate with one another about important issues? In Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It (Princeton UP, 2023), Adam Berinsky examines why political rumors exist and persist despite their unsubstantiated and refuted claims, who is most likely to believe them, and how to combat them.

Drawing on original survey and experimental data, Berinsky shows that a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking and vehement partisan attachment fuel belief in rumors. Yet the reach of rumors is wide, and Berinsky argues that in fighting misinformation, it is as important to target the undecided and the uncertain as it is the true believers. We’re all vulnerable to misinformation, and public skepticism about the veracity of political facts is damaging to democracy. Moreover, in a world where most people simply don’t pay attention to politics, political leaders are often guilty of disseminating false information—and failing to correct it when it is proven wrong. Berinsky suggests that we should focus on the messenger as much as the message of rumors. Just as important as how misinformation is debunked is who does the debunking.

Adam J. Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab. A specialist in the fields of political behavior and public opinion, he is the author of Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America (Princeton) and In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq.

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Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely designed to end fighting. But as Dr. Eric Min argues in Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2025), that wartime negotiations are not just peacemaking tools. They are in fact a highly strategic activity that can also help states manage, fight, and potentially win wars.

To demonstrate that wartime talk does more than simply end hostilities, Dr. Min distinguishes between two kinds of negotiations: sincere and insincere. Whereas sincere negotiations are good faith honest attempts to reach peace, insincere negotiations exploit diplomacy for some other purpose, such as currying gaining political support or remobilizing forces. Two factors determine whether and how belligerents will negotiate: the amount of pressure that outside parties can place on belligerents them to engage in diplomacy, and information obtained from fighting on the battlefield.

Combining statistical and computational text analyses with qualitative case studies ranging from the War of the Roman Republic to the Korean War, Dr. Min shows that negotiations are more likely to occur with strong external pressures. A combination of such pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity, however, will most likely leads to insincere negotiations that may stoke fighting rather than end it. By revealing that diplomacy can sometimes be counterproductive to peace, Words of War compels us to rethink the assumption that it "cannot hurt" to promote diplomacy during war.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Frances Yaping Wang, "The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive policy measures?

The Art of State Persuasion (Oxford UP, 2024) delves into China's strategic use of state propaganda during crucial crisis events, particularly focusing on border disputes. Frances Wang aims to explain the diverse strategies employed in Chinese state media, analyzing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This variation, as proposed, is contingent on the degree of alignment between Chinese state policy and public opinion. When public sentiment is more moderate than the state's foreign policy objectives, the government initiates a "mobilization campaign." Conversely, if public opinion is more hawkish than state policy, the authorities deploy a "pacification campaign" to mollify public sentiment.

Through a comprehensive examination of medium-N and case-study analyses, Wang elucidates these arguments. The research incorporates extensive textual analyses of media reports, interviews with officials and journalists, and archival data. The book also illuminates the mechanics of mobilization and pacification media campaigns, enabling policy makers to distinguish varying state foreign policy intentions. This book not only acknowledges the significance of public opinion but also illustrates how fluctuating public sentiment is delicately managed by the state through diverse discursive tactics. By highlighting the existence and relevance of pacification campaigns, The Art of State Persuasion enhances our understanding of propaganda, and challenges the traditional view of China's propaganda as uniformly aggressive, bringing to light a more nuanced picture especially in the domain of foreign policy.

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Populism, Power, and the Crisis of Globalism: A Conversation with Wolfgang Streeck

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What explains the growing divide between elites and the broader public in democracies across Europe and the United States? In this episode of International Horizons, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck joins RBI director John Torpey to discuss the rise of populism, the limits of globalism, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism.

Drawing from his recent book, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024), Streeck examines how market forces, technocracy, and the erosion of national sovereignty have fueled discontent across the transatlantic world. He also reflects on the educational divide shaping political cleavages, the challenges posed by immigration, and the implications of U.S. foreign policy and security commitments in Europe and beyond. The conversation explores the shifting foundations of the postwar international order and the prospects for a more democratic and egalitarian global system.

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Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: A Discussion with Alexander Lee and Jack Paine

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The debate about the impact of colonialism on the prospects for democracy and development continues to rage. Was the legacy of colonialism equally destructive everywhere? Or were some forms of colonial rule more likely to give rise to stable and effective democracies? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Alexander Lee and Jack Paine about their important new book, The Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge UP, 2024), which makes a compelling new contribution to the debate. Find out why countries with lengthy exposure to competitive colonial institutions tended to consolidate democracies after independence, and how regime trajectories shaped by colonial rule persist to the present day.

Guest:

Alexander Lee is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. His work has made important contributions to a number of areas, including gender quotas, affirmative action, the political economy of South Asia and the legacy of colonialism. His most recent book, Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship has been highly praised and is out now with Cambridge University Press.

Jack Paine is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Emory University. He is known for influential research on a range of topics including democratic backsliding, authoritarian power sharing, conflict and the resource curse, and the legacy of colonialism. His most recent book, Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship has been highly praised and is out now with Oxford University Press.

Presenter:

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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We Have Never Been Woke: A Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sincerely committed to equality and “wokeness,” why do they simultaneously benefit from—and perpetuate—the very inequalities they denounce?

Join us as we dive into Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). We explore al-Gharbi’s central argument: the disconnect between the stated values of the "symbolic capital elite" and the real-world consequences of their actions, despite their genuine intentions. Al-Gharbi draws parallels to past "great awakenings"—periods of profound cultural upheaval and shifting attitudes toward civil rights. We also examine whether defining "wokeness" is essential to his thesis, and al-Gharbi clarifies some of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of his work.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. A columnist for The Guardian, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other major publications.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Postscript: Collective Action to Support Students at American Colleges and Universities

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A coalition of educators and allies has come together to push back against a variety of different kinds of attacks on higher education and students at colleges and universities, particularly in the United States. This group is driven by the belief that a democracy is only as strong as its commitments to academic freedom, intellectual integrity, human diversity, and individual dignity. The impetus among this particular group of academics and staff members is to make sure that students at all the campuses, in all the programs at those campuses across the United States are supported and free to engage in their chosen courses of study. The various ways in which this mission is being attacked or undermined, with the slashing of grants, attempts to control curriculum, freezing of campus free speech, snatching of students off the streets, and threats to the bottom line all contribute to destabilizing the educational paths of students, and the ability of the faculty and the staff to provide students with the education, research opportunities, and higher education experiences they are seeking at these institutions.

I am joined on this installment of PostScript by three members of an organic group of educators—across disciplines—who came together in the early days of the new Trump Administration to try to figure out how to best support students at different institutions. One of the results of this collaboration among academics and educators across disciplines, institutions, and parts of the country, was to craft a letter directed at university administrators, governmental entities, and the public, explaining the value and import of education, especially in a democracy, and the need for a diversity of voices and contributors to that enterprise. I discuss the origin of the group, the genesis of the letter (which is available to sign here), and the deep concerns among those who work in higher education in the United States with Alison Gash, Daniel Laurison, and Nathan Lents.

Alison Gash is Professor of Political Science and Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

Daniel Laurison is Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, the former Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sociology, and a 2021-2023 Carnegie Fellow.

Nathan Lents is Professor of Biology at John Jay College,

Links:

We are Higher Ed Letter: Speaking Out for Democracy and US Higher Education

We are Higher Ed Website: https://www.wearehighered.org/

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Political Entertainment in a Post-Authoritarian Democracy

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series, a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

Today, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez interviews Martín Echeverría about his book Political Entertainment in a Post Authoritarian Democracy: Humor in the Mexican Media (Routledge, 2024), co-written with Frida Rodelo.

In this episode you will hear about:

The affordances and limitations of YouTube for the political media ecosystem
The role of memes in generating political interest among politically disinterested groups
How people’s distrust of news organizations impact the communication environment for political news
How restrictions on political speech have shifted in Mexico in the last few decades

Guest Biography:

Martín Echeverría is the Head of the Center for Studies in Political Communication at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from the University of Seville, Spain, and serves as Co-Chair of the Political Communication Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). His research, which focuses on the mediatization of politics, media systems, and the reception and political effects of media, has been published in leading journals such as The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, and top Latin American outlets. He is the author and editor of several books, including Media and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Mexico: The Continuing Struggle for Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and Political Entertainment in a Post-Authoritarian Democracy (Routledge, 2023), the latter receiving the AEJMC 2024 Knudson Award for the best book on Latin American media in the United States.

Host Biography:

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is a researcher and educator interested in how media theories allow us to critically analyze social phenomena on a global scale. He works as assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and associate director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Y Tu Mamá También: A Queer Film Classic (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), and editor of Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025).

Credits

Interview by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Produced by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Edited by: Anna Gamarnik

Keywords: authoritarianism, memes, Mexico, political communication, political satire, YouTube

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Postscript: History, Narratives, and Political Power--An Emergency Oral History Project

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

President Donald Trump has threatened the federal funding and jobs of institutions and individuals that document, archive, and analyze historical materials. On March 27, 2025, Trump signed “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate "divisive race-centered ideology" from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo and to “restore” American history.

While Trump has framed these actions as “efficiency” measures or removing bias in favor of women and underrepresented minorities, they are better understood as removing professionals who preserve the images and documents that politicians and public officials use to create powerful narratives.

Today’s guests are two historians featured in a Washington Post article on the firing of federal historians and the new oral history project designed to capture the history of federal firings, layoffs, and the current work climate.

Dr. Jason Chernesky is a historian of medicine, public health, and environmental history whose research focuses on child health issues in the United States. Jason was the historian for the Food and Drug Administration until receiving a termination letter in February 2025. He is now on temporary administrative leave and the creator of the emergency oral history project.

Dr. Beth English is the Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. Her research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary labor movement, working-class issues, globalization, deindustrialization, and women in the workplace. She is the author of A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, and co-editor of Global Women’s Work: Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy. Beth has contributed to the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, Huffington Post, The New Republic, and other media outlets.

Mentioned in the podcast:

OAH’s Emergency Oral History Project for federal workers (fired, on leave, or currently working)
Gift link to the Washington Post article by Kyle Swenson about the oral history project
“Origins of the FDA History Office” on the FDA website
Organization of American Historians (OAH)’s Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative for individuals to report removed or changed material
Arlington National Cemetery website removes histories highlighting Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
Joint statement from the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians
Previous Postscripts with historian Dr. Wendy Rouse (Donald Trump is Erasing History – and what YOU can do about it) and executive directors of AHA and OAH, Drs. Jim Grossman and Beth English (Postscript: Not a Matter of Left or Right: Historians Fighting Censorship)
Donate to the Emergency Oral History Project

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Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, "Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (University of Arizona Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Canessa & Dr. Manuela Lavinas Picq takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced.

Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, this open-access book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies.

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Rhys Machold, "Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as "India's 9/11" or simply "26/11," the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt "modern" homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise.

Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford UP, 2024) traces 26/11's political and policy fallout, concentrating on the efforts of Israel's homeland security industry to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. Through a focus on the often unseen and overlooked political struggles at work in the making of homeland security, Rhys Machold details how homeland security is a universalizing project, which seeks to remake the world in its image, and tells the story of how claims to global authority are fabricated and put to work.

Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His work focuses on imperialism, colonialism, and empire, working from a transnational approach. He is an editor at Critical Studies on Security and an editorial board member at International Studies Review. He held research and teaching appointments at York University (Canada), the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

Deniz Yonucu is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, and racism. Her monograph Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize for the best book in urban anthropology, awarded by the Critical Urban Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association.

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Amy Adamczyk, "Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Most people think about abortion in the context of the country they live in. In the U.S., abortion fuels debate, elections, and legislation. In China, abortion is often treated as a settled issue. Why and how do abortion attitudes vary across the world?

In her new book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Amy Adamczyk examines the factors influencing cross-national abortion opinion, rates and individual abortion decisions. She investigates the relationship between attitudes and laws, and explores how personal and national characteristics shape views on abortion. Using large-scale public opinion surveys, interviews from two case study countries, and an analysis of newspaper articles from over 40 countries, she argues that cross-national differences in public opinion can largely be explained based on overall levels of religious belief, economic and educational development, type of government and government history, and gender inequality. The book distinguishes beliefs from behaviors and macro factors from personal characteristics to analyze the forces shaping cross-national abortion rates and personal abortion decisions.

Dr. Amy Adamczyk is a sociology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her work unravels the religious, cultural and social forces shaping public opinion on controversial issues like abortion, same-sex relations, premarital sex, and marijuana and terrorism. Her many earlier books include, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe (University of California Press 2017).

Mentioned:

World Values Study (free database)
Amy Adamczyk, Brittany Suh, and Lindsay Lerner, “Analysis of the Relationship between Religion, Abortion, and Assisted Reproductive Technology: Insights into Cross-National Public Opinion” (2024) (free access to article)
Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values” (2000) (free access to article)

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Human Rights in the Trump Era: A Conversation with Kenneth Roth

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Kenneth Roth, former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, joins RBI director John Torpey to discuss Roth’s recent book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abuse of Governments (Knopf, 2025), which reflects on strategies for defending civil, political, economic, and social rights in an increasingly complex international landscape. Roth explores the implications of Trump's dismantling of USAID, the evolving challenges posed by authoritarian regimes like China, and the critical role social media plays in both exposing and enabling human rights abuses globally. Tune in to hear how Roth maintains optimism about the human rights movement and its continued fight against human rights abuses.

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Madhavi Devasher, "Crossing Lines: Cross-Ethnic Coalitions in India and Prospects for Minority Representation" (Routledge, 2024)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Crossing Lines: Cross-Ethnic Coalitions in India and Prospects for Minority Representation (Routledge, 2024) explains why, how, and where ethnic political parties unexpectedly seek votes from non-coethnics and when voters support non-coethnic parties. It draws on case studies of three Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan) and of Indian national elections to demonstrate how differences in party systems impact political party strategies and voter choices. It shows that multipolar party systems encourage political parties to provide physical security, representation, and economic benefits for minorities, especially Muslims, in India and as a result, foster cross-ethnic links between parties and voters. However, as political arenas become dominated by two or even one party, advocacy for the interests of marginalized groups declines, weakening cross-ethnic linkages. The book thus explains why representation and advocacy for Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and at the national level has alternated dramatically in the 21st century.

Yash is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India.

Twitter

Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu

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Postscript: Not a Matter of Left or Right: Historians Fighting Censorship

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The executive directors of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians join the podcast to talk about the effects of historical censorship, data shredding, meaningful public education – and what everyone can do to fight back.

After being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders. The order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” declares that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality...” This order has swiftly affected what people may read on websites or museum panels that describe historical events and artifacts.

As a new joint statement from the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians recounts, “Some alterations, such as those related to topics like the Tuskegee Airmen and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been hurriedly reversed in response to public outcry. Others remain. The scrubbing of words and acronyms from the Stonewall National Monument webpage, for instance, distorts the site’s history by denying the roles of transgender and queer people in movements for rights and liberation. This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.”

Dr. Beth English is Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. Her research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary labor movement, working-class issues, globalization, deindustrialization, and women in the workplace. She is the author of A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, and co-editor of Global Women’s Work: Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy. She has contributed to the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, Huffington Post, The New Republic, and other media outlets.

Dr. James R. Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association. Previously, he was vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. Among his many publications are the award-winning books, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929. His articles and short essays have focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. His public facing scholarship includes work published in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, The Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education.

Grossman has consulted on history-related projects generated by the BBC, Smithsonian, and various theater companies, film makers, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on the governing boards of the National Humanities Alliance, American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, and Center for Research Libraries.

Mentioned:

OAH’s Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative for individuals to report removed or changed material
For federal workers who are interested in sharing their experiences, OAH’s Emergency Oral History Project
Arlington National Cemetery website removes histories highlighting Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
Removal of climate data from government websites
Contribute to AHA and OAH
5calls ap for connecting with federal senators and representatives
AHA Action Alert for Iowa residents (and AHA letter to Iowa Senate Education Committee)

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Gerald J. Postema, "Law's Rule: The Nature, Value, and Viability of the Rule of Law" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Rule of law faces serious threats to its viability in many countries. It has become a recurring topic in the media and is affecting our daily lives. To understand better the meaning of rule of law, the stakes, and how governments and citizens can respond to today’s challenges, we must return to first principles.

In Law’s Rule (Oxford U. Press, 2022), eminent philosopher of law Gerald Postema draws on a lifetime of research and thought to articulate and defend a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling conception of the rule of law and defend it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force. The rule of law's ambition, Postema argues, is to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power using the distinctive tools of the law. Law provides a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity and giving public expression to an ideal mode of association.

Two principles immediately follow from this core: sovereignty of law, demanding that those who exercise ruling power govern with law and that law governs them, and equality in the eyes of the law, demanding that law's protection extend to all bound by it. Animating law's rule, the ethos of fidelity commits all members of the political community, officials and lay members alike, to take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law.

Postema’s work is theoretically rigorous while addressing the myriad practical considerations in building and maintaining the rule of law.

Gerald Postema is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina had has widely published in legal and political philosophy and ethics. He earned a BA degree from Calvin College (1970) and PhD (1976) from Cornell University. He began his teaching career at Johns Hopkins University (1975-1980). From 1980 until his retirement in 2019, he taught philosophy and law at UNC-Chapel Hill, since 1996 as Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.

He is interviewed by Thomas McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack.

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Adam K. Webb, "The World's Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order" (Routledge, 2025)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“One thing I would note about the Trumpian populists and their counterparts elsewhere in the West today is that they're a very peculiarly tribal kind of post conservative right. It's almost a kind of reassertion of paganism and tribal boundaries and grievance. That is very different from a more traditional kind of conservatism, where the texture of society and the accumulated wisdom of the past and the cultivation of virtue loomed large – at least as ideals, as aspirations. In contrast to that, this kind of contemporary populism has very little texture or wisdom or virtue – its more like a resentful atomism that is invoking certain tribal markers of membership because it's politically convenient, as it were.”

– Adam Kempton Webb, NBN interview March 2025

In this expansive and thought-provoking interview, Adam K. Webb lays out a sweeping vision for a post-liberal, post-national world constitution, challenging the dominance of state sovereignty, corporate capitalism, and procedural liberalism. Drawing on over a quarter-century of scholarship culminating in his latest book The World’s Constitution (Routledge, 2025) Webb proposes a system of functional sphere pluralism, where governance is rooted in ethical traditions rather than ideology – where citizenship, law, and economic participation are no longer restricted by territorial nation-states.

Coming to terms with Webb’s interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective suggests an affinity with thinkers like the late James C. Scott, in his critique of centralized control, coupled with the sensibilities of Roger Scruton and Patrick Deneen, in their defense of ethical and cultural order. Yet Webb diverges from them all in his insistence on a global, meta-constitutional framework, which might place him closer to the likes of Robert D. Kaplan, as seen in his latest work on civilizational cycles and geopolitical evolution.

From his critique of elite legal capture (responding to a question on Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital) to his historical engagement with Confucian, Islamic, and European pluralist traditions, Webb offers a bold alternative to today’s stagnating governance models. Whether you are interested in constitutional theory, global governance, or the future of civilization itself, the professor’s insights in this interview offers an intellectually rich and thought provoking conversation that is well worth your time.

Below are links to Dr. Webb’s latest books – Taylor & Francis Open Access publications:

Deep Cosmopolis: Rethinking World Politics and Globalization (2015)

The World’s Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order (2025)

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Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.

Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story.

"When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".

Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.

*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

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In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us--A Conversation with Stephen Macedo (Part 2)

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This week on Madison’s Notes, we continue our discussion with Stephen Macedo, co-author of In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton UP, 2025). The book examines the institutional failures during the pandemic, including the politicization of science, inconsistent messaging, and the disproportionate impacts of policies.

We cover key questions: What did “following the science” mean before COVID-19? Macedo explains that science is inherently uncertain, but this nuance was often lost during the pandemic, leading to unrealistic expectations. He also highlights how poor communication about scientific uncertainty eroded public trust.

The conversation addresses contradictory messaging about the origins of COVID-19, with public statements often differing from internal expert discussions. Macedo notes how this disconnect fueled skepticism. He also raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest among health officials and the dangers of concentrating decision-making power in a few unchecked individuals.

Macedo discusses the politicization of masking, which overshadowed scientific evidence and deepened divisions. He advises individuals to seek reputable sources, embrace uncertainty, and remain critical of simplistic narratives. Finally, he stresses the importance of accountability, open debate, and a commitment to democratic values like tolerance and truth as essential for navigating future crises.

This episode offers a concise yet powerful reflection on the lessons of the pandemic and the need for stronger, more transparent governance. Tune in for the full conversation.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts, "Creolizing Hannah Arendt" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts have edited a new collection of essays, Creolizing Hannah Arendt. This edited volume dives into Hannah Arendt’s thinking while also pushing the understanding and ways that Arendt has influenced political theory, philosophy, and politics. The idea of “creolizing,” especially philosophic or theoretical work, is to explore a thinker’s work from more pluralistic perspectives, often pushing the ideas and their analysis beyond the northern and western position in which that work was generally created. Arendt’s work, which comes to us in a number of forms, was written in the context of the Holocaust and the world before and after that trauma. The contributing authors to Creolizing Hannah Arendt build on Arendt’s considerations and analysis, taking and applying her work to other situations, to determine what we can learn in a distinct situation or in context of other theoretical frameworks. Creolizing is an engagement where two or more elements come into discourse with each other, rethinking the ways those in western political thought are positioned, or see the world. This process questions, on some level, the entire notion of the “canon” and the design of borders that hem in thinking, or disciplinary lines.

Creolizing Hannah Arendt is a sophisticated collection of essays that brings forth Hannah Arendt’s thinking about freedom and individuals while also integrating other theorists who have interpreted Arendt’s work over the last century. Arendt focused some of her early work on the notion of being an outsider, of having a kind of double consciousness (for her, it was her Jewish identity in Europe during the Holocaust and afterwards in the United States.) But double consciousness was originally posited as an understanding and perspective by W.E.B. Dubois and Sylvia Wynter in their work, specifically the experience of African Americans, and that Paget Henry analyzes in the chapter “Sylvia Wynter, Political Philosophy, and the Creolization of Hannah Arendt.” Thus, putting these ideas in conversation with each other is an example of creolization, and an example of the kind of analysis in this edited volume.

This is a fascinating book, opening up spheres of thinking not just about Arendt, but about so many other important theorists. And putting these ideas into conversation with each other. Creolizing Hannah Arendt does not intend to proselytize on behalf of Hannah Arendt, as Nissim-Sabat and Roberts note in our conversation, but to truly interact act with Arendt’s thinking and her ideas about freedom and unfreedom, double consciousness, revolution, and the concept of humanity.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation.

Rao takes readers on a journey through South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, revealing how statue controversies have dramatically rearranged the canon of anticolonial political thought. By examining these debates through a personal and literary lens, Rao addresses the multifaceted issues of justice, cultural memory, and belonging.

The Psychic Lives of Statues (Pluto Press, 2025) examines both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of postcolonial ones, demonstrating that the statue form as a medium of representation and a bid for immortality is by no means obsolete. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activists, Rao provides fresh perspectives on how societies grapple with and reinterpret the past and present through iconography.

About the Author:

Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. He is the author of two books – Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010) and Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020), both published by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford.

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Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.’ Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free’ parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping).

This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education.

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge the image of the United States as a liberal democracy and the driving force behind a rules-based international order. In his new book, Luca Trenta documents how assassination and assassination attempts have been a persistent feature in US foreign policy. The US government has relied on a variety of direct methods as well as more indirectly laying the groundwork for local assassins.

Using primary documents and interviews, The President’s Kill List meticulously documents how policymakers decided on assassination and the level of Presidential control over these decisions. The book analyzes the evolution of assassination policies and reveals how successive administrations - through private justifications and public legitimations - ensured that assassination remained an available tool. The podcast includes insightful comments on assassination and the Trump administration. The paperback is coming out in May 2025.

Dr. Luca Trenta is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. His previous publications include an earlier book, Risk and Presidential Decision-making: The Emergence of Foreign Policy Crises (Routledge, 2016) and he hosts Out of the Shadows, interviewing authors and experts in intelligence and covert operations. In his public-facing scholarship, Dr. Trenta has appeared in a History Channel documentary called Secret Wars Uncovered (2020) and he regularly contributes to and collaborates with media outlets such as the BBC.

Mentioned:

Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (1976)
John Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Ford-Colby-Kissinger meeting is at page 35 here and Luca’s story about the meeting is here
“Family Jewels” document of CIA employee responses to James Schlesinger asking to report activities outside CIA charter (1973)
Rebecca Sanders, Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror (2018)
The Church Committee Report (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976)
Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008)
Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (2024)

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Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the spotlight on those who have the technology to build nuclear bombs but choose not to. These weapons-capable countries, such as Brazil, Germany, and Japan, have what is known as nuclear latency, and they shape world politics in important ways.

Matthew Fuhrmann navigates a critical yet poorly understood issue by offering a definitive account of nuclear latency. He identifies global trends, explains why countries obtain nuclear latency and analyzes its consequences for international security. Influence Without Arms presents new statistical and case evidence that nuclear latency enhances deterrence, provides greater influence, and triggers conflict and arms races. The book offers a framework to explain when nuclear latency increases security and, when it incites instability, generates far-reaching implications for deterrence, nuclear proliferation, arms races, preventive war, and disarmament.

Our guest is Matthew Fuhrmann, the Cullen-McFadden Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Martin Spychal, "Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act" (U London Press, 2024)

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The 1832 Reform Act was a landmark moment in the development of modern British politics. By overhauling the country’s ancient representative system, the legislation reshaped constitutional arrangements at Westminster, reinvigorated political relationships between the center and the provinces, and established the political structures and precedents that both shaped and hindered Britain’s slow lurch towards democracy by 1928.

Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (U London Press, 2024) leads to a fundamental rethinking of the 1832 Reform Act by demonstrating how boundary reform and the reconstruction of England’s electoral map by the little-known 1831–1832 boundary commission underpinned this turning point in the development of the British political nation. Eschewing traditional approaches to the 1832 Reform Act, it draws from a significant new archival discovery—the working papers of the boundary commission—and a range of innovative quantitative techniques to provide a major reassessment of why and how the 1832 Reform Act passed, its impact on reformed politics both at Westminster and in the constituencies, and its significance to the expansion of the modern British state.

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Postscript: Donald Trump is Erasing History – What YOU Can Do about it

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On January 20th, Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order announced that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality...”

The enforcement of this executive order has rippled through the United States – and has included removing words and images from websites and papering over interpretive panels in museums. For example, material related to the Enola Gay -- a WWII Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets – was removed because it contained the word “gay.” As a new joint statement from the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians recounts, “Some alterations, such as those related to topics like the Tuskegee Airmen and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been hurriedly reversed in response to public outcry. Others remain. The scrubbing of words and acronyms from the Stonewall National Monument webpage, for instance, distorts the site’s history by denying the roles of transgender and queer people in movements for rights and liberation. This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.”

To discuss how – and why – the Trump administration is censoring and removing historical materials, my guest is Dr. Wendy L. Rouse, Professor of History at San Jose State University where she is the program coordinator for the History/Social Science Teacher Preparation Program. Her research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the Progressive Era – and her publication for the National Park Service was changed after the executive order. She is the author of books and articles, including Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement published by NYU Press in 2022. Susan’s NBN conversation with Wendy about the book is here.

Mentioned in the Podcast:

Organization of American Historians (OAH)’s Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative for individuals to report removed or changed material
Reports by AP about scrubbing military websites and NPR on removal of photographs and mentions of trans and queer on National Park Service websites
LBGTQ Historian statements and articles including letter signed by 360 historians
Wendy’s blogposts on OutHistory and the NYU Press blog
5calls ap for connecting with senators and representatives
GLBT Historical Association
Multiple LGBTQ organizations, represented by Lambda Legal, have filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's executive orders attempting to erase transgender people and deny them access to services

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Postscript: How Trump’s Executive Order Contradicts Birthright Citizenship

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Birthright citizenship is established in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution – yet Donald Trump’s recent Executive Order 14160 denies some types of birthright citizenship. The Order contradicts over a century of American law, legal practice, and constitutional interpretation. Three groups have opposed the order as unconstitutional and challenged it in the courts: and cities, civil rights organizations, and labor organizations. In the podcast, three scholars to help Susan and Lilly interrogate the meaning of natural born citizenship, the political ramifications of Trump’s order, and the complicated history of natural born citizenship in the United States.

Dr. Anna O. Law is the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights and Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Julie Novkov is Dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University at Albany, SUNY.

Carol Nackenoff is the Emerita Richter Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

Mentioned:

Calvin’s Case (1608)
Donald Trump’s Executive order 14160
Julie and Carol’s 2021 book American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship and their NBN interview with Susan.
Anna’s 2025 FREE open-access article “The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments’ Effects on Citizenship and Migration”
Anna’s NBN conversation with Heath Brown on her 2017 book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
Lilly’s conversation with Martha Jones about her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America
Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from Revolution to Reconstruction (2021)
Lilly’s NBN conversation with Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh about their 2019 book Citizenship

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In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us: A Conversation with Frances Lee

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the first part of our two-part conversation on Madison’s Notes, we speak with Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, about her co-authored book In COVID’s Wake (Princeton UP, 2025). The book offers a comprehensive and candid political assessment of how institutions performed during the pandemic. It explores how governments, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, deviated from existing pandemic plans, leading to policies that often favored the “laptop class” while leaving essential workers vulnerable. Extended school closures disproportionately affected less-privileged families, and the politicization of science marginalized dissent. Lee and her co-author, Stephen Macedo, argue that future crises must uphold the values of liberal democracy: tolerance, respect for evidence, and a commitment to truth.

This discussion dives into key questions raised in the book, including the importance of conducting a post-mortem of the pandemic response. Lee highlighted how polarization in the two-party system complicates evaluations of what worked and what didn’t. We also explored the role of states as “laboratories” for different responses and whether meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. Lee reflected on why pre-existing pandemic plans were abandoned and how the pandemic strained the public’s trust in media, policy advisors, and academic institutions. The ambiguity of desired policy outcomes, she noted, often hindered rational cost-benefit analysis, further complicating the response.

Lee emphasized the value of embracing complexity and ambiguity in conversations about societal and political issues. By examining the pandemic’s lessons, “In COVID’s Wake” challenges readers to consider how we can better prepare for future crises while staying true to democratic principles.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the Soviet Union once showcased cotton production to visiting delegations—particularly from Muslim-majority countries—as evidence of its development model. Now, as global powers, including Russia, China, and the EU, vie for influence in the region, cotton has again become a strategic commodity—used to forge political ties, secure resources, and drive infrastructure projects. Hofman highlights local communities’ active role in shaping these developments, emphasizing that rural landscapes are not simply backdrops for a “New Great Game,” but sites where broader geopolitical forces and grassroots agency intersect. Through her long-term fieldwork, she illustrates how Tajik farmers navigate and negotiate these overlapping external interests, and in doing so, reframe Central Asia’s future amidst geopolitical tensions.

Dr. Hofman specializes in agrarian and social change in Central Asia, where she has worked since 2012. She completed post-doctoral research at Oxford's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as part of an ERC-funded project "China, law and development." In 2019, she obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands with a dissertation focused on the political economy of agrarian transformation in Tajikistan: "Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan." Her research interests span political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. In recent years, she has focused on rural labour, gender, and commodity politics. Dr. Hofman is completing a monograph based on her dissertation and post-doctoral research projects. Her research agenda for the coming years centers on the rural everyday of geopolitics, focusing on China's growing assertiveness in the global agrifood regime, shifting geographies of production, and rural labour.

Dr Irna Hofman | School of Geography and the Environment | University of Oxford

@irnahofman

Resources:

Hofman, I. (2024) Seeds of empire or seeds of friendship? The politics of the diffusion of Chinese crop seeds in Tajikistan. Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2): e12581.
Hofman, I. (2022) Tajikistan. The people's map of global China
Hofman, I. (2021) Migration, crop diversification, and adverse incorporation: Understanding the repertoire of contention in rural Tajikistan. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 42(4): 499-518.
Hofman, I. (2021). Chinese cotton diplomacy in Tajikistan: greasing the ties by reviving the cotton economy. Research Brief.
Hofman, I. (2018). Politics or profits along the “Silk Road”: What drives Chinese farms in Tajikistan and helps them thrive? In The Geoeconomics and Geopolitics of Chinese Development and Investment in Asia, pp. 183-208. Routledge.

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"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. Chryl has appeared on the NBN in the past, so while we will discuss the book, we will also discuss it in the context of today.

Chryl Laird is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Postscript: All talk and no action? How political scientists respond to racism and authoritarianism?

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

After the murder of George Floyd, the United States had the largest protests in the nation’s history. Other public and private responses included corporations, organizations, and communities making policies, issuing statements, and engaging in conversations. Some political science departments issued statements. My guests today are three political scientists who looked at the substance of those statements – and reflected on what it means about the discipline of political science. Their article “An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd” appeared in the prestigious APSR (American Political Science Review) published by Cambridge University Press. In the podcast, the authors analyze what political scientists did – and did not do – and what their statements might tell us about how political scientists understand race, racism, and power. We also reflect on how political scientists have reacted to the second Trump presidency in a joint statement.

Dr. Nadia E. Brown is Professor of Government and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown's research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women's studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity. She previously discussed in one of her books on the NBN: Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (co-authored with Danielle Casarez Lemi).

Dr. Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and Policy Lead for the Just Transition Alliance. Dr. Tormos-Aponte specializes in environmental and racial justice, intersectional solidarity, identity politics, social policy, and transnational politics. Dr. Tormos-Aponte’s research on social movements focuses on how social movements cope with internal divisions and gain political influence. Tormos-Aponte also investigates civil society claims about the uneven government response across communities. His work in this area examines the causes and consequences of government neglect of socially vulnerable communities during disaster recoveries.

Dr. Janelle Wong is Professor of Government and Politics and Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the Director of the Asian American Studies Program. Dr. Wong’s research focuses on race, immigration, and political mobilization. As a scholar and teacher, Wong has worked closely with social service, labor, civil rights, and media organizations that serve the Asian American population. She has talked about her book on the NBN Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change and also her work on The Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey as part of Heath Brown’s Co-Authored series.

Mentioned:

Brown, Tormos-Aponte, and Wong, “An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd” in APSR, Cambridge
APSA Letter with 1202 signatures from political science PhDs expressing urgent concern about threats to the basic design of American government and democracy. Add your name here.

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Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.

Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.

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Coup Attempts and Democratic Resistance: Lessons from Brazil

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As Brazil moves toward trying former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against democracy, the United States grapples with constitutional challenges from the new administration as well. Are these two cases of democratic backsliding comparable?

In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with José Maurício Domingues, Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, about the resilience of democratic institutions, the role of the judiciary, and the evolving strategies of authoritarian leaders. Domingues unpacks the historical and institutional factors that shaped Bolsonaro’s failed power grab and contrasts them with Trump’s approach to executive power. What can these cases tell us about the future of democracy in both countries? Tune in for a deep dive into the politics of resistance, accountability, and the shifting nature of authoritarianism in the 21st century.

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Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium.

The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.

Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

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Christian Gerlach, "Conditions of Violence" (de Gruyter, 2024)

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, Conditions of Violence (de Gruyter, 2024) presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history – examining the noises of mass violence and persecution – is particularly telling about such practices. This volume shows that violence can become socially hegemonic, and some people claim a freedom to kill as a political right. To scrutinize indirect violence, which is often imperialist in character and claims many victims, the book proposes the concept of conditions of violence. These conditions are produced by definable groups of actors and foreseeably harm definable groups (which differs from the anonymous and static ‘structural violence’). This is exemplified in a case study concerning famines in World War II and another on COVID-19 as mass violence. Less global in character, other case studies in this volume deal with Rwanda, Bangladesh/East Pakistan and the Soviet Union.

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Jeffrey A. Lenowitz, "Constitutional Ratification Without Reason" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Constitutional Ratification Without Reason (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on constitutional ratification, the procedure in which a draft constitution is submitted by its creators to the people or their representatives in an up or down vote determining implementation. Ratification is increasingly common and routinely recommended by experts. Nonetheless, it is neither neutral nor inevitable. Constitutions can be made without it and when it is used it has significant effects. This raises the central question of the book: should ratification be recommended? Put another way: is there a reason for treating the procedure as a default for the constitution-making process? Surprisingly, these questions are rarely asked. The procedure’s worth is assumed, not demonstrated, while ratification is generally overlooked in the literature. In fact, this is the first sustained study of ratification.

To address these oversights, this book defines ratification and its types, explains for the first time the procedure’s effects, conceptual origins, and history, and then concentrates on finding reasons for its use. Specifically, it builds up and analyzes the three most likely normative justifications. These urge the implementation of ratification because the procedure: enables the constituent power to make its constitution; fosters representation during constitution-making; or helps create a legitimate constitution. Ultimately, these justifications are found wanting, leading to the conclusion that ratification lacks a convincing, context-independent justification. Thus, experts should not recommend ratification as a matter of course, practitioners should not reach for it uncritically, and—more generally—one should avoid the blanket application of concepts from democratic theory to extraordinary contexts such as constitution-making.

Jeffrey Lenowitz is the Meyer and W. Walter Jaffe Associate Professor of Politics at Brandeis University, focusing on political theory. His research explores the the procedures uses to create new constitutions; constituent power and constitutional theory; the concept of legitimacy in the social sciences; voting ethics; and other aspects of democratic theory and institutional design.

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

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John Boswell et al., "The Art and Craft of Comparison" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

There are many books giving advice about research methods on the market, but The Art and Craft of Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2019) is the first monographic marriage of comparative and interpretive methods. In this episode of the special series New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, two of its authors, John Boswell and Jack Corbett, discuss their confessional tone in the book, the dilemmas of comparative-interpretive research, some of their rules of thumb for starting and finishing political research that aims for creative comparison, and why Chat GPT is no substitute for embodied, immersive interpretation. Embrace the grind!

Like this episode? You might also be interested in others in the series with co-authors talking about their work, including Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, and Aarie Glas and Jessica Soedirgo talking about Lee Ann Fujii’s Interviewing in Social Science Research.

Looking around for something to read? If so, then John recommends Personalizing the State by Insa Lee Koch, and State of Empowerment by Carolyn Barnes, while Jack recommends Stephanie Lawson’s Regional Politics in Oceania.

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Omar Dahbour, "Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis" (Routledge, 2024)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Part of what makes the challenges that collectively are called the “environmental crisis” so difficult is that the vocabulary we deploy in thinking and discussing the issues emerged under social conditions that are far removed from our present. The familiar idiom of nation states, borders, jurisdiction, and so on seems inadequate for addressing a crisis that concerns global conditions. It’s plausible to think that a cogent response to the environmental crisis will require a reconstruction of the conceptual tools of social and political theory.

In his new book, Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis (Routledge 2024), Omar Dahbour develops new understandings of the concepts of sovereignty, territory, peoplehood, and self-determination, all with a view toward building a case for the principle according to which peoples have a right to protect and maintain their natural environments.

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Noam Leshem, "Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land (U Chicago Press, 2025), the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality.

Based on nearly a decade of research in some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, Edges of Care offers a profound account of abandoned lives and lands, and how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes readers through a diverse series of abandoned places, including areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Sudan, and Cyprus. He shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power.

Weaver brings these clashes to the fore by showing how New York City politics has been shaped by these conflicting orders. He examines the transformation of the city's political economy in the aftermath of the 1975 fiscal crisis through neoliberal real estate development and privatization, the conservative rise of law-and-order politics in the 1970s to 1990s, and the efforts of the city's egalitarians to respond to each of these shifts through social movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City (Temple UP, 2025) belies glib assumptions about the city's liberal character. Weaver reveals the metropolis not as a homogenous political whole, but as a site in which the victories and defeats of rival political forces change the terms of local citizenship for the millions of residents who call the city home.

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Ian G. Baird, "Champassak Royalty and Sovereignty: Within and Between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2024)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Before the creation of the European colonial states in the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia had hundreds of royal families, large and small. Today, only a small number survive. In his book, Champassak Royalty and Sovereignty: Within and Between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia (U Wisconsin Press, 2024), Ian Baird uncovers the history of one of these royal lineages, the House of Champassak, located formerly in southern Laos. Dating back to the late seventeenth century, this royal lineage has survived enormous political changes in Laos and the surrounding region: including becoming a vassal of the Thai kingdom; French colonial rule; national independence; and the communist takeover of Laos in 1975. But despite not being a ‘national monarchy’, as Baird shows, for a long time the House of Champassak has exerted a special kind of sovereignty.

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Daniel Silverman, "Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Factual misinformation is spread in conflict zones around the world, often with dire consequences. But when is this misinformation actually believed, and when is it not?

Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Daniel Silverman examines the appeal and limits of dangerous misinformation in war, and is the go-to text for understanding false beliefs and their impact in modern armed conflict. Dr. Silverman extends the burgeoning study of factual misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news in social and political life into a crucial new domain, while providing a powerful new argument about the limits of misinformation in high-stakes situations. Rich evidence from the US drone campaign in Pakistan, the counterinsurgency against ISIL in Iraq, and the Syrian civil war provide the backdrop for practical lessons in promoting peace, fighting wars, managing conflict, and countering misinformation more effectively.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Raheel Dhattiwala, "Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In times of extreme violence, what explains peace in some places? This book investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, an event witnessed closely by the author. Dhattiwala compares peaceful and violent towns, villages, and neighborhoods to study how political violence spreads. A combination of statistical and ethnographic methods unpack the mechanisms of crowd behavior, intergroup relations, and political incentives. She analyzes macro-level risk factors to provide a close understanding of the behavior of people who participated in the violence, were targeted by it and, often, compelled to carry on living alongside their perpetrators. Keeping the Peace systematically demonstrates the implicit political logic of the violence. Most of all, by moving up close to the people caught in the middle of violence, the author highlights the interplay between politics, the spatial environment, and the cognitive decision-making processes of individuals.

Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent social scientist based in India (D.Phil. in Sociology; Oxford University) and honorary member of the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (formerly, Baden-Württemberg Fellow 2023-24).

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Philip A. Martin, "Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2025), Dr. Philip A. Martin investigates a fundamental political challenge faced by post-conflict states: how to create obedient national militaries from the remnants of insurgent forces.

When civil wars end, non-state armed groups often integrate into post-conflict militaries. Yet rebel-military integration does not always happen smoothly. In some cases, former rebels cooperate with new leaders, forming powerful national armies that underpin postwar stability. In others, they resist the authority of new leaders, maintaining clandestine armed networks that disrupt centralized state-building.

Dr. Martin argues that how field commanders of non-state armed groups governed during the war explains this variation. Rebel commanders who build accountable governance systems gain strong social support from rebel-ruled communities, becoming locally embedded. Thanks to these community ties, which persist after the war, these embedded commanders have the leverage to push the central government for concessions, resist directives to disarm fighters, or even orchestrate coup d'états. Conversely, rebel commanders who governed coercively are less likely to sustain community ties. Without the ability to mobilize collective action after the war, these non-embedded commanders have stronger incentives to cooperate with new regime leaders.

Wielding in-depth evidence from Côte d'Ivoire and cases of rebel-military integration elsewhere, Martin shows that good governance during wartime can—ironically—lead to poor postwar state consolidation. Rather than preparing insurgents to be successful state builders, effective rebel governance can hinder post-conflict state-building. As costly peace operations come under increasing scrutiny, Strong Commanders, Weak States offers fresh guidance on how transitions to peace can better succeed.

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The Internet, Power, and the Deep State: Zeynep Tufekci on Technology and Democracy Today

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As the second Trump administration reshapes the U.S. government and its role in the world, how do technology, media, and political power intersect? In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey speaks with Zeynep Tufekci—New York Times columnist, Princeton professor, and author of Twitter and Tear Gas—about the evolving relationship between social media platforms, political movements, and democracy. From the shifting role of the internet in global protests to Elon Musk’s interventions in European politics, Tufekci unpacks the historical patterns shaping today’s political landscape. The conversation also explores the erosion of public trust in institutions, the implications of a weakened federal government, and the risks of unchecked technological influence. Tune in for a deep dive into the forces reshaping democracy at home and abroad.

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Eeva Luhtakallio et al., "Youth Participation and Democracy: Cultures of Doing Society" (Bristol UP, 2024)

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How do young people participate in democratic societies? Youth Participation and Democracy: Cultures of Doing Society (Bristol UP, 2024) introduces the concept of ‘doing society’ as a new theory of political action. Focused on Finnish youth, it innovatively blends cutting-edge empirical research with agenda-setting theoretical development. Redefining political action, the authors expand beyond traditional public-sphere, scaling from formal to informal and unconventional modes of engaging. The book captures diverse engagement from memes to social movements, from participatory budgeting to street parties and from sleek politicians to detached people in the margins. In doing so, it provides a holistic view of the ways in which young people participate (or do not participate) in society, and their role in cultural change.

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Postscript: How to Fight Back: Charting Opposition to the Actions of the Trump Administration

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th American president, he issued 37 executive orders and, subsequently, the Trump administration has – through formal processes and also through extra-governmental extraordinary practices – triggered what many are calling a governmental and/or constitutional crisis. Dr. Christina Pagel has published two important Substack articles in which she groups the activities of the Trump administration into authoritarian and proto-authoritarian actions – and maps the opposition. Her unbelievable Venn diagram reveals which actions are being met with organized resistance – and which are being left unchallenged. She is a data hound – and her data not only clarifies what is happening in the United States but provides tools for those who wish to effectively oppose it in the U.S. and abroad.

Dr. Christina Pagel is Professor of Operational Research in Health Care, University College London. Operational Research is a pragmatic branch of mathematics to help people solve real-life problems. She is a member of Independent SAGE providing accessible updates on the national and international Covid-19 situation since May 2020. She has published in public-facing venues such as The Conversation and her free Substack, Diving into Data & Decision making. You can follow her on social media.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Christina’s 2/13/25 Substack, "So this is how liberty dies… " Making sense of Trump's first three weeks (categorizing 76 Trump administration actions and demonstrating how they align with authoritarianism).

Christina’s 2/17/25 Substack, How to fight back: charting opposition to the actions of the Trump administration (showing how Blue states, labor organizations, and civil rights groups are doing the most – and what can be learned from them).

The Just Security’s Litigation Tracker based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

Vox’s 2/12/25 Unexplainable podcast, “Is Science in Danger?” (20 minutes) Noam Hassenfeld interviewing Derek Dowe (chemist/science writer) Transcript or podcast.

Susan’s interview with Corey Brettschneider on his new Norton book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It

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Aure Schrock on Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about their book, Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (MIT Press, 2024)

Politics Recoded examines the history and culture of Code for America, an organization that, as one of its leaders put it, aimed “to promote ‘civic hacking,’ and to bring 21st century technology to government.” The book describes how the organization has changed over time from a “tech-forward” vision rooted in techno-libertarianism to an organization that provides something like digital consulting services to governments. The pair also talk about Aure’s writing and editing company, the Indelible Voice, and what it’s like helping scholars refine their vision and voice in academic writing.

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Ting Guo, "Religion, Secularism, and Love As a Political Discourse in Modern China" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What is the meaning of love in modern Chinese politics? Why has 愛 ai (love) been a crucial political discourse for secular nationalism for generations of political leaders as a powerful instrument to the present day? Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) offers the first systematic examination of the ways in which the notion of love has been introduced, adapted, and engineered as a political discourse for the building and rebuilding of a secular modern nation, all the while appropriating Confucianism, Christianity, popular religion, ghost stories, political religion, and their religious affects. The insights of this exploration expand not only the discussion of the role of emotions in the project of Chinese modernity, but also the study of affective governance and religious nationalisms around the world today.

Author Ting Guo is Assistant Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong and book reviewer editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She co-hosts a podcast called 時差 in-betweenness.

The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz.

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Marion Laurence, "Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Impartiality is a guiding principle in United Nations peace operations that has helped legitimize multilateral intervention in dozens of armed conflicts around the world. In practice, it has long been associated with passive monitoring of cease-fires and peace agreements. In the twenty-first century, however, its meaning has been stretched to allow for a range of forceful, intrusive, and ideologically prescriptive practices, all in the name of building durable peace.

In Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations (Oxford University Press, 2024), Dr. Marion Laurence explains how these new ways of being "impartial" emerge, how they spread within and across missions, and how they become institutionalized across UN peace operations. Dr. Laurence argues that new peacekeeping practices are not only products of top-down pressures from member states or instructions from the UN Secretariat; they often emerge from tacit knowledge and unconscious decisions about how to follow orders or comply with social rules. By foregrounding the creativity and agency of the field staff who are responsible for translating mandates into action, Dr. Laurence shows that new definitions and practices of impartiality are products of contestation, learning, and the interplay between top-down pressures and bottom-up drivers of change in UN peace operations.

Drawing on original data gathered through extensive fieldwork, Dr. Laurence uses evidence from UN missions in Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and from UN headquarters in New York, to provide an innovative framework for studying authority and change in global governance. In doing so, Intrusive Impartiality sheds light on controversial changes in peacekeeping practice and yields valuable insights about the practical and ethical dilemmas that confront UN peacekeepers.

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TrumpWorld: Canada, South Africa, Germany, and the Global Far-Right

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey talks with Heribert Adam, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, to unpack the global ripple effects of Donald Trump's return to power. From his startling proposal to make Canada the 51st state to his controversial foreign aid cuts targeting South Africa, Trump's policies are reshaping international dynamics. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have stirred political tensions in Germany by supporting the far-right AfD party. How are these developments impacting global democracy, migration, and racial politics? Adam, a distinguished expert on South Africa and race relations, provides historical context and critical analysis on these pressing issues. Tune in for a deep dive into the international consequences of Trump’s second term.

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Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK.

The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies.

The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK.

They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US.

Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities.

Mentioned in this episode:

Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180.
Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019
Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23.
Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus.
On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom
The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September.
Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016.
Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024.
Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993.

Listen and Read here.

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Patrick Riordan, "Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A deeply considered examination of the “common good” reconciling Catholic Social Thought with secular politics and philosophy.

The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary Catholic authors jeopardize this dialogue by polarizing liberalism and the common good, interpreting the commitment to individual liberty as incompatible with commitment to the common good.

Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good (Georgetown UP, 2023) clarifies the meaning of the common good through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth-century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. It makes the case that embracing the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The book argues that liberal political philosophy is not only compatible with Catholic Social Teaching but may also be the most appropriate framework for communicating the richness of the Church’s tradition today. Furthermore, accepting political liberalism can facilitate collaboration in political life between those who hold different worldviews and foster an enriched discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.

Students and scholars of Christian ethics and political philosophy will benefit from this response to the challenges of dialogue about the “common good” in the context of the resurgence of this topic.

Sam Young is a recent PhD graduate from Cardiff University, specialising in the theological history of European social Catholic movements active during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s.

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Peter Wien, "Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East" (Routledge, 2017)

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist.

Peter Wien’s Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2017) sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experienceable set of identity markers – in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory, and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Utilizing various case studies, the present work transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modeled on Western ideas and visions of modernity.

This book offers an entirely new portrayal of nationalism and a crucial update to the field, and as such, is indispensable reading for students, scholars and policymakers looking to gain a deeper understanding of nationalism in the Arab world.

Peter Wien is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.

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Aidan McGarry, "Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups (Oxford UP, 2024), Aidan McGarry examines the agency of marginalised people, emphasizing the processes through which different communities around the world articulate their political voices. McGarry develops an innovative concept of political voice around three elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. This conceptualization is illustrated through contemporary case studies of two persecuted and silenced groups: LGBTIQ activists in India and Roma mobilization in Europe.

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Ray Brescia, "The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions.

In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination”

The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn.

Mentioned:

Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism
Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, Amy Howe, SCOTUSBLOG
Kevin Peter He on “data voodoo dolls”

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Kenneth Roth, "Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments" (Knopf, 2025)

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For three decades, Kenneth Roth led Human Rights Watch, transforming it from a small advocacy group into one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world. In Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (Knopf, 2025), he offers a gripping inside account of the relentless fight against some of the world’s most abusive governments—from war crimes in Syria and Russia’s authoritarianism to China’s crackdown on dissent and the global erosion of democratic norms.

Part memoir, part strategic guide, and part call to action, Righting Wrongs reveals the behind-the-scenes battles to hold governments accountable, the difficult choices human rights activists must make, and the lessons learned from engaging with autocrats, diplomats, and international institutions. With keen insight, Roth shows how pressure and advocacy can curb abuses and spark change—even against the most powerful forces.

A must-read for anyone passionate about justice, democracy, and global affairs, Righting Wrongs is both an inspiring chronicle of courage and a crucial roadmap for the challenges ahead.

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Marie-France Fortin, "The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

'The king can do no wrong' remains one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood tenets of the common law tradition. Confusion over the phrase's historical origins and differing meanings has had serious consequences, making it easier for the state to escape liability for the harm caused to individuals by governmental officials or institutions.

In The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability (Oxford University Press, 2024), the first dedicated monograph on the topic, Dr. Marie-France Fortin traces the historical evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in constitutional and public law to shed new light on our current understanding of crown liability. The different meanings conveyed by the phrase in the common law world are clarified; the contradictions between them revealed. Adopting a historical constitutional approach, the book delves deep into traditional legal sources to develop an intellectual history of this key legal idea. It explains the mutation from 'the king can do no wrong' to 'the crown can do no wrong' at the end of the nineteenth century, analyzing the resulting departure from core tenets of the constitutional arrangement of the seventeenth century. The study of the evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in English legal thinking, mirrored in Canada, is complemented by a comparative analysis of the idea in Australia, Ireland, and the United States, where its relationship with the concept of sovereign immunity is scrutinized.

Retracing the evolution of the king can do no wrong in legal thinking, this book enhances academics', students', practitioners', and judges' understanding of the law of governmental liability in the common law world.

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Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, "Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment" (HarperCollins India, 2020)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From being a fringe political party in 2013 to sweeping nearly half of the state s forty-two Lok Sabha seats in 2019, the BJP has gained ground in West Bengal, aided partly by the RSS s exponential growth during Mamata Banerjee's chief ministerial tenure (2011 onwards). With a consistent and concerted criticism of the TMC, the saffron camp managed to create a strong wave of anti-incumbency. So much so that the BJP s prospects of forming the next government in Bengal in 2021 seemed to have brightened considerably, while the Left, which had ruled Bengal for over three decades, appears to have been reduced to a fringe political entity. However, the controversy over the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, combined with Banerjee s course-correction drive, designed by strategist Prashant Kishor, indicate that she might yet script a turnaround, with Bengal turning into the laboratory of a unique political experiment.

Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment (HarperCollins India, 2020) documents the BJP s extraordinary rise in the state and attempts to look at these developments in the historical context of Bengal from the rise of Hindu nationalism and Muslim separatism in the nineteenth century, the Partition and its fallout, the impact of developments in Bangladesh, the influence of leftist ideals on the psyche of the Bengali people, to the demographic changes in the state over the past few decades.

About the Author:

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based journalist who has reported for different national media houses including the Hindustan Times, The Wire and Outlook. He has been writing on politics, security, history, socio-economic and cultural affairs since 2005. His book Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement was published in 2016.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford.

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Allison Rank et al., "Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley have a new edited volume, Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book has four separate sections that guide the reader through different dimensions of teaching civic engagement and the many aspects of this important pedagogical capacity that often falls on the shoulders of political science faculty at universities and colleges in the United States. In our discussion we cover the idea of civic engagement itself as an approach that many of us integrate into our courses in a variety of ways. Civic Pedagogies focuses on this complex topic first through a number of chapters that dive into the theory behind civic engagement and how to think about this concept as a dimension of or the entirety of a college course. The next section of the book takes up a variety of different practical approaches to embedding civic learning into courses. The last two sections of the book explore the challenges and benefits of civically engaged pedagogies and, finally, assessment of civically engaged pedagogies.

This is a thorough and thoughtful book with an impressive array of contributing authors all thinking about not only the importance of civically engaged pedagogies, but also the unique dimensions of this kind of pedagogy. The three editors explain, in our conversation, different points of importances that were fleshed out by the many contributors and their thinking about how best to embed this vital component of education within a democracy. Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics has so many different perspectives that it provides a rich array of options for most educators who want or need to integrate civic pedagogies into their classrooms. In our discussion, we also explore the value of being able to engage on public topics and political questions in a civil manner—both in the classroom itself and then, as students move into their lives beyond college, as members of their communities.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance. This idea suggests routes to self-rule even when faced with implacable obstacles, and it defines righteous action amid the grime and grief of politics and war.

Surya Namaskar 1928 by Raja of Anundah.

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Patricia Owens, "Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Dr. Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Dr. Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal.

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Alpa Shah, "The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India" (OR Books, 2024)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (OR Books, 2024) pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) – professors, lawyers, journalists, poets – have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists.

Alpa Shah unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a year’s day commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against the Indian state, and plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities – Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims – and what the search for democracy entails for them.

Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the first time in the nation’s history there is a multi-pronged, coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of democracy. In so doing, Shah shows that democracy today must be not only about protecting freedom of expression and democratic institutions, but also about supporting and safeguarding the social movements that question our global inequalities.

About the Author:

Alpa Shah is the Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, with a Fellowship at All Souls College. She has written and presented for BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents and From Our Own Correspondent. She is a twice-finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her 2018 book Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas and her 2024 book The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford.

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William Sweet, "Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics" (Peeters, 2023)

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Recognized for his work on philosophy, religion and politics, Dr. Sweet talks at length about Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics (Peeters, 2023). This book provides essential context for understanding contemporary debates on religion and politics. The first theme examines the origins of liberal democracy in the western world and the role of religion in the development of democratic theory. The second theme deals with the place of religion and religious faith in contemporary democratic and post-democratic societies, but also with the situation of democracy and democratic values within religious traditions today. Before and After Democracy reviews the particular contributions of philosophy, social and political theory, theology and religious studies, and history to understanding their relation, and considers new directions in which reflection on this topic might be pursued. Listen to this podcast to find out more about this engaging book!

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Seungsook Moon, "Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Seungsook Moon’s Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism was published by Columbia University Press in July 2024. She provides in-depth qualitative studies of three different types of organizations to show how civic organizations that emerged from the democratization movement with a conscious emphasis on social change have sought to address socioeconomic and political problems caused or aggravated by South Korea’s neoliberal transformation. Examining how “citizens’ organizations” in South Korea negotiate with the market and neoliberal governance, Seungsook Moon offers new ways to understand the intricate relationship between democracy and neoliberalism as modes of ruling.

Dr. Moon is a professor of sociology at Vassar College in New York. She is political and cultural sociologist, scholar of gender studies, and East Asianist specializing in South Korea.

Leslie Hickman is a student at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.

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Michael Albertus, "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies" (Basic Books, 2025)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025), political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (Cornell UP, 2022) details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.

Experts anticipated that all technologically capable states would build these powerful devices in the early nuclear age. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Across decades, the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.

Why do most international states adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.

The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.

Our guest is Rebecca Gibbons, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the 2025 ISA-ISSS best book award.

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Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

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Richard Rorty, "What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Chris Voparil about What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics (Princeton UP, 2023), a book of Richard Rorty's writings he co-edited with W. P. Malecki.

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics (Princeton University Press, 2023) gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces. In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties. Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them.

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Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.

Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

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Zahi Zalloua, "The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause.

A public use of ressentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on ressentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Reframing ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist Left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation.

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).

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Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.

Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all.

Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life.

Mentioned in the Episode:

119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori
Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents.
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.
The Beinart Notebook podcast

Listen and Read Here.

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Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France" (Fordham UP, 2024)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability.

The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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We Are Free to Change the World: A Conversation on Hannah Arendt with Lyndsay Stonebridge

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Lindsay Stonebridge, author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Hogarth, 2024) to explore the enduring relevance of Hannah Arendt’s thought. Stonebridge dives into Arendt’s remarkable ability to teach students how to think, not just what to think, and reflects on Arendt’s own intellectual journey—a mind in constant dialogue with itself. We discuss how Arendt’s conception of thinking serves as a powerful resistance to totalitarian ideologies, emphasizing the importance of critical engagement with the world. Stonebridge also unpacks Arendt’s belief in the necessity of natality—the idea that cultures open to new beginnings and the emergence of free individuals are essential for societal evolution. Central to Arendt’s vision of political community are the concepts of promises and forgiveness, which Stonebridge argues are not mere sentimental ideals but profound, deeply rooted principles with origins in Christian thought. Together, we examine how these ideas form the basis of a political community grounded in plurality, offering a timely framework for understanding freedom, responsibility, and the possibility of change in our world today. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that bridges philosophy, history, and the urgent questions of our time.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Vittorio Bufacchi, "Why Cicero Matters" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why Cicero Matters (Bloomsbury, 2023) shows us how the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius, better known as Cicero, can help realize a new political world. His impact on humanitarianism, the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers of America is immense. Yet we give Julius Caesar all our attention. Why? What does this say about modern politics and political culture?

This book gives us Cicero as an antidote to the myth of the strong man of history. Reading Cicero's On Duties alongside two more introspective philosophical texts, On Friendship and On Old Age, we see how Cicero turned politics into a higher, intellectual form of art, believing in education, in culture and above all in the power of philosophy to instil morality. Cicero has reassuring words on the indispensable work philosophers make, and why the common good needs philosophy.

In an age when anti-intellectualism runs rampant, Why Cicero Matters introduces us to an ancient thinker who argues culture is, or ought to be, the foundation of any modern democracy, and books its building blocks.

Vittorio Bufacchi is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Cork, Ireland. He works in moral and political philosophy. He is the author of Violence and Social Justice (2007); Social Injustice (2012); and Everything Must Change: Philosophical Lessons From Lockdown (2021).

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Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment.

Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. The book is part memoir, part sociological case study, and part policy proposal because it provides a strong challenge to extant treatment and policy options. As she explores how a punitive system failed her son, Dr. Roos calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis.

Dr. PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. Among her many publications are the books Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (coauthored with Barbara Reskin) from Temple University Press and Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies from University of Albany Press. After her son's death, Dr. Roos realigned her research and advocacy interests to explore mental health and substance use disorders, turning her grief into activism.

Mentioned:

David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America from University of Chicago Press.
Pat Roos on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden addiction: Joe, Jill continue to show compassion

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Trump’s Second Term and Europe: Nationalism, NATO, and the Future of Transatlantic Relations

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, about the implications of Donald Trump’s second administration for Europe. The discussion explores how Trump’s approach to foreign policy—characterized by protectionism, nationalism, and disdain for multilateralism—affects European politics, particularly in relation to NATO, trade, and the far-right’s growing influence. Prof. Tocci highlights how Trump’s return emboldens nationalist movements across the continent, especially in countries like Italy, where leaders such as Giorgia Meloni now feel freer to express their ideological stances. The conversation also examines the evolving European response to Trump, from initial panic to a mix of wishful thinking and cautious strategizing, particularly regarding the future of NATO and the war in Ukraine.

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Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan, "Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice" (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025)

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.

If purchased from De Gruyter, you can get the book with a 30% discount for €41.96 / £38.15 / $46.19 by ordering with discount code DGBSS30

Moritz Mihatsch is Assistant Professor in World History at the University of Cambridge. Michael R. Mulligan is an Assistant Professor in Law at the Euro University of Bahrain. The book has a X/Twitter page, @ShiftingSovs.

Benjamin Goh (@BenGohsToSchool) is an independent scholar and humanities educator in Singapore. He holds a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History from Yale-NUS College. He is a historian of education, and has published on the history of sex education in Singapore.

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Adam Chapnick, "Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hostage diplomacy, and wartime strategy illustrate the breadth of issues that shape Canada's global realm. In this lively interview, Asa McKercher offers explains the structure of the book, its main take-way and how Canada has positioned itself in the world.

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Roland Erne et al., "Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture the EU formulation of prescriptions and their uneven deployment across member states (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), policy areas (employment relations, public services), and sectors (transport, water, and healthcare). The regime led to a much more vertical mode of EU integration, and its commodification agenda unleashed a plethora of union and social-movement protests, including transnationally. Listen to this engaging interview with the leading author, Prof. Roland Erne, to find out what inspired this book, how the team worked together, and which conclusions they arrived at.

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Philip Rathgeb, "How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism.

The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor.

Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation.

Philip Rathgeb is an associate professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018.

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Talking Thai Politics: Chanintorn Pensute, The Cost of Politics in Thailand

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How much does it cost to become an MP in Thailand? Is entering parliamentary politics prohibitively expensive for ordinary people? Has the rise of the Move Forward Party (now the People’s Party) changed the landscape as regards candidate selection and campaign finance? Or do well-connected members of local political dynasties still exert a dominant role in determining who enters parliament?

In this podcast, Chanintorn Pensute, an associate professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Chiang Mai University, talks about a fascinating report she recently co-authored (with Pailin Phujeenaphan, an associate professor and Dean at the same Faculty) for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, entitled The Cost of Politics in Thailand.

Chanintorn Pensute works mainly on electoral politics in Thailand, and gained her PhD from the University of Leeds. Her articles have appeared in Contemporary Southeast Asia and other journals.

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo.

Talking Thai Politics Website

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Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions.

What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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Shimon Shetreet, "Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy" (Brill Nijhoff, 2023)

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Shimon Shetreet, Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University and a former politician. We are discussing his recently published work, co-edited with Hiram Chodosh, titled Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy. Democracies around the world, from Israel and Mexico to Poland and Hungary, are grappling with challenges to judicial independence. Attacks on judicial independence often masquerade as attempts to strengthen democracy, despite the necessity of judicial independence to uphold constitutionality, hold no one above the law, and protect the most vulnerable people. This volume offers a truly comprehensive view of the global challenges facing judicial independence.

Shimon Shetreet is an Israeli former politician who held several ministerial portfolios between 1992 and 1996. He is currently the Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.

It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated environment in what Avinash Paliwal calls “India’s Near East”: India, Bangladesh (or East Pakistan before the 1970s), and Myanmar (or Burma before the 1980s). As Avinash explains his book India's Near East: A New History (Hurst: 2024), successive Indian leaders tried to get a handle on international tensions and ethnic conflict—and with a major external threat in China looming in the distance.

Avinash Paliwal is Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, specialising in South Asian strategic affairs. A former journalist and foreign affairs analyst, he is also the author of My Enemy's Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the U.S. Withdrawal (Hurst: 2017)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India’s Near East. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Truth Matters: A Conversation with Robert P. George and Cornel West

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we are privileged to join a profound conversation between Robert P. George and Cornel West, two towering figures in political philosophy and social thought. Their discussion, based on their collaborative work Truth Matters, models what robust intellectual engagement and civil discourse can look like, especially when addressing issues that divide Americans today.

In this thought-provoking episode, George and West explore the concept of truth and its centrality to our personal and collective lives. They tackle critical questions surrounding truth’s role in the public square, and how we, as a society, can navigate the growing challenges to free expression and intellectual inquiry.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Christina L. Davis, "Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton UP, 2023) shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals.

Where race or socioeconomic status may be a basis for discrimination by social clubs, geopolitical alignment determines who gets into the room to make the rules of global governance. Christina Davis brings together a wealth of data on membership provisions for more than three hundred organizations to reveal the prevalence of club-style selection on the world stage. States join organizations to deepen their association with a particular group of states—most often their allies—and for the gains from policy coordination. Even organizations that claim to be universal, to target narrow issues, or to cover geographic regions use club-style admission criteria. Davis demonstrates that when it comes to the most important decision of cooperation—who belongs to the club and who doesn’t—geopolitical alignment can matter more than the merits or policies of potential members.

With illuminating case studies ranging from nineteenth-century Japan to contemporary Palestine and Taiwan, Discriminatory Clubs sheds light on how, for global and regional organizations such as the WTO and the EU, alliance ties and shared foreign-policy positions form the basis of cooperation.

Christina L. Davis is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Why Adjudicate? and Food Fights over Free Trade (both Princeton).

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Congressional Deliberation: A Conversation with Kevin J. Burns and Jordan T. Cash

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we sit down with Professors Jordan T. Cash and Kevin J. Burns to discuss their recently published book, Congressional Deliberation: Major Debates, Speeches, and Writings, 1774–2023 (Hackett, 2024). Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, the book offers a deep dive into key historical debates and turning points in U.S. congressional history. We explored how the dynamics of deliberation in the House and Senate have shaped fundamental issues like war powers, impeachment, civil rights, and legislative leadership. With their expertise in American political thought, constitutionalism, and the history of political institutions, Professors Cash and Burns provide a rich, scholarly perspective on the role of Congress in the development of the American political system. Whether you’re a student of history or simply curious about the workings of the U.S. government, this conversation offers valuable insights into the continuing evolution of congressional deliberation.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Arthur Bradley, "Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024) explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Author Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power—its forms, dramas, and iconography—and examines sovereignty’s modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet.

Arthur Bradley is professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia, 2019).

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Bernard J. Dobski, "Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Dobski notes in his work and in our conversation, this is one of the more obscure texts by Twain, but Twain considered it his best work. Dobski’s book is a close reading of Twain’s Joan of Arc and an analysis of how this particular work, focusing on Joan of Arc’s life through the narration of Sieur Louis De Conte (Joan’s childhood friend and her secretary during her military undertakings), is part of Twain’s larger efforts to understand the turn towards modernity, and all that entails. Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity is part of series at Palgrave/MacMillan focusing on recovering political philosophy, and this book fits into that series particularly well.

Mark Twain had a lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc. Twain’s Joan serves, in the novel, as a kind of path out of the Middle Ages, and, in this way, is being positioned as a Machiavellian “princess”— embodying a political science more effectively than can the Church at the time. Dobski’s interpretation explores the ways in which Joan of Arc, according to Twain, refounded and reformed France, taking many of Machiavelli’s teachings into account. Another dimension of Twain’s Joan of Arc is seen in context of the “historical maid” Joan of Arc and how both renderings are positioning a woman serving in a man’s role. Dobski explains the controversy over Joan’s attire—wearing men’s clothing as a woman, which was one of the charges brought against her—and how these laws were designed to foreground the Church’s teaching on modesty and decency and a means to regulate sexual ethics. This also reflects the maleness of Christ, which is not incidental to preserving the moral teachings that are rooted in the distinction between the sexes. But Joan is very much a woman in a man’s world, and her success in the man’s world challenges the Church’s basis for these distinctions between female and male. Many of these entanglements are the focus of Twain’s novel, and thus of Dobski’s analysis of Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc.

Ultimately, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity digs into overarching and universal concerns, including the theological-philosophical conundrum, the claim of divine right by monarchs, and how to live a good life. B.J. Dobski skillfully follows Twain’s curvy path through Joan of Arc’s life and reputation to unpack Twain’s own thinking about these perennial questions.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Matthew McManus, "The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism" (Routledge, 2024)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge, 2024), McManus presents a comprehensive guide to the liberal socialist tradition, stretching from Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine through John Stuart Mill to Irving Howe, John Rawls, and Charles Mills.

Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of liberal socialism from a sympathetic but critical standpoint, McManus traces its core to the Revolutionary period that catalyzed major divisions in liberal political theory to the French Revolution that saw the emergence of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine who argued that liberal principles could only be inadequately instantiated in a society with high levels of material and social inequality to John Stuart Mill, the first major thinker who declared himself a liberal and a socialist and who made major contributions to both traditions through his efforts to synthesize and conciliate them. McManus argues for liberal socialism as a political theory which could truly secure equality and liberty for all.

An essential book on the tradition of liberal socialism for students, researchers, and scholars of political science and humanities.

Matthew McManus is a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality (Routledge) and A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights among other books.

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Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti, "Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This question has become particularly pressing after the recent successes of right-wing populist leaders and parties across Europe, in the US, and beyond. Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano develops a normative account of liberal democratic self-defence that denounces the failures of real-world societies without excusing those supporting illiberal and antidemocratic political actors. This account is innovative in focusing not only on the role of the state but also on the duties of nonstate actors including citizens, partisans, and municipalities. Consequently, it also addresses cases where the central government has at least been partly captured by illiberal and antidemocratic agents. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti's approach builds on John Rawls's treatment of political liberalism and his awareness of the need to 'contain' unreasonable views, that is, views denying that society should treat every person as free and equal through a mutually acceptable system of social cooperation where pluralism is to be expected. The authors offer original solutions to vexed problems within political liberalism by putting forward a new account of the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory, explaining why it is justifiable to exclude unreasonable persons from the constituency of public reason, and showing that the strictures of public reason do not apply to those suffering from severe injustice. In doing so, the book further politicizes political liberalism and turns it into a framework that can insightfully respond to the challenges of real politics.

Alasia Nuti is senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. Her work is situated at the intersection of analytical political theory, critical theory, gender studies and critical race theory

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David Lyon, "Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024) shows how surveillance makes people visible and affects their lives, considers the technologies involved and how it grew to its present size and prevalence, and explores the pressing ethical questions surrounding it.

David Lyon is former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Law, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Benjamin Meiches, "The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019),Benjamin Meiches takes a novel approach to the study of genocide by analyzing the ways in which ideas, concepts, and understandings about what genocide is and how it is to be prevented have become entrenched politically and intellectually. At the center of this analysis is what Meiches refers to throughout his text as the hegemonic understanding of genocide. Using what Michel Foucault describes as genealogy, Meiches set out to evaluate the process by which the concept of genocide has become intelligible. In doing so, Meiches offers significant evidence in support of many of the emerging critiques of the field of genocide studies. Meiches also inspires reflective and introspective thinking regarding the ways in which genocide scholarship contributes to the maintenance of a hegemonic understanding of genocide.

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Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, "Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. It demonstrates how congressional pressure led the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy centered on democracy promotion and anti-communism - a decision which would have profound implications for American attention to human rights. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard combines a comprehensive overview of human rights in American foreign relations with in-depth case studies of how human rights shaped US foreign policy toward Soviet Jewry, South African apartheid, and Nicaragua. Tracing the motivations behind human rights activism, this book demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas, ultimately contributing to the establishment of human rights as a core moral language in US foreign policy.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

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Todd McGowan, "Universality and Identity Politics" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe.

This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one—and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020) offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. He is also cohost of the Why Theory podcast, which brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena.

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Eric Storm, "Nationalism: A World History" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The current rise of nationalism across the globe is a reminder that we are not, after all, living in a borderless world of virtual connectivity. In Nationalism: A World History (Princeton UP, 2024), historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century through the revival of nationalist ideas in the present day. Storm traces the emergence of the unitary nation-state--which brought citizenship rights to some while excluding a multitude of "others"--and the pervasive spread of nationalist ideas through politics and culture.

Storm shows how nationalism influences the arts and humanities, mapping its dissemination through newspapers, television, and social media. Sports and tourism, too, have helped fashion a world of discrete nations, each with its own character, heroes, and highlights. Nationalism saturates the physical environment, not only in the form of national museums and patriotic statues but also in efforts to preserve cultural heritage, create national parks, invent ethnic dishes and beverages, promote traditional building practices, and cultivate native plants. Nationalism has even been used for selling cars, furniture, and fashion.

By tracing these tendencies across countries, Storm shows that nationalism's watershed moments were global. He argues that the rise of new nation-states was largely determined by shifts in the international context, that the relationships between nation-states and their citizens largely developed according to global patterns, and that worldwide intellectual trends influenced the nationalization of both culture and environment. Over the centuries, nationalism has transformed both geopolitics and the everyday life of ordinary people.

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Michael Fuerstein, "Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Various kind of philosophical considerations have been offered in favor of democracy. By some accounts, democracy realizes some intrinsic value, such as equality or collective autonomy. According to other views, democracy’s value is more instrumental: it tends to produce or promote certain social goods like stability, prosperity, and peace. However, a longstanding alternative tradition locates democracy’s value in its capacity to make social and moral progress. Here, the idea isn’t so much that democracy produces an already-identified social good, but rather that democracy fosters a kind of social and moral discovery.

In Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress (Oxford UP, 2024), Michael Fuerstein draws on normative and empirical considerations in proposing a systematic account of democracy’s capacity to foster progress.

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Mike Madrid, "The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest segment of the most important swing states in the US Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional assimilating immigrant group, Latinos are challenging both political parties' notions of race, religious beliefs, economic success, and the American dream. Given their exploding numbers—and their growing ability to determine the fate of local, state, and national elections—you’d think the two major political parties would understand Latino voters. After all, their emergence on the national scene is not a new phenomenon. But they still don’t.

Republicans, not because of their best efforts but rather despite them, are just beginning to see a movement of Latinos toward the GOP. Democrats, for the moment, still win a commanding share of the Latino vote, but that share is dwindling fast. Now, in The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy (Simon and Schuster, 2024), veteran political consultant Mike Madrid uses thirty years of research and campaign experience at some of the highest levels on both sides of the aisle to address what might be the most critical questions of our time: Will the rise of Latino voters continue to foment the hyper-partisan and explosive tribalism of our age or will they usher in a new pluralism that advances the arc of social progress? How and why are both political parties so uniquely unprepared for the coming wave of Latino votes? And what must each party do to win those votes?

By answering these questions, The Latino Century explores the true meaning of America at a time of rapid cultural change, the founding principles of self-government and individual responsibility, and one man’s journey through a political party that has turned itself inside out.

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Mukulika Banerjee, "Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how agrarian communities cultivate democratic values—solidarity, reciprocity, and ethical citizenship—through practices embedded in their daily lives. Dr. Banerjee challenges conventional notions of democracy as confined to elections and state institutions, instead presenting it as a process deeply rooted in cultural-social practices and values. She highlights how rural communities, through cooperation in agriculture, rituals, festivals, and even moments of conflict and repair, create and sustain the democratic spirit. In doing so, the book underscores the resilience of these practices, even as procedural democracy faces erosion under broader political and economic pressures. At its core, Cultivating Democracy compels us to reimagine democracy not as an abstract ideal but as a lived and ongoing project shaped by the rhythms of everyday life. Through its rich ethnographic detail and theoretical insight, the book offers profound lessons on the fragility and strength of democracy, making it both a deeply scholarly and urgently relevant work.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, linguistics, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's trails and petting the canines he meets along the way.

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China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment?

In this episode, Professor Marina Svensson talks to Professor Anne-Marie Brady about her research on China’s strategic thinking and economic and political influence in the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on the small island states. The need for collaboration among like-minded partners in the region and other actors such as the EU is also addressed. This episode was produced and edited by Lisa Sihvonen and Tabita Rosendal.

Anne-Marie Brady is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Professor Brady is a specialist on Chinese politics, polar politics, China-Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal. She has published ten books and over fifty academic papers and also written op eds for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, among others.

Further readings:

Anne-Marie Brady’s work on the indo-pacific:

This podcast was produced as part of EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners:

· Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia)
· Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland)
· Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania)
· Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden)
· Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland)
· Norwegian Network for Asian Studies

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Enze Han, "The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today.

In The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2024), Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China's influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people's perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state's intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia. Han proposes that to understand this increasingly globalized China, we need more conceptual flexibility regarding which Chinese actors are important to China's relations, and how they wield this influence, whether intentional or not.

The Ripple Effect makes the case that to understand China's relationship with Southeast Asia, it is necessary to move beyond a narrow fixation on the Chinese state by scrutinizing the ordinary manifestations of China's presence in the region and recognizing the multifaceted web of actors and their effects on the dynamics between the two regions.

Enze Han is an associate professor of politics at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the international relations of East Asia, Southeast Asian politics and China-Southeast Asia relations. This is his third single-authored book from Oxford University Press.

Enze is in conversation with Duncan McCargo, President's Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University and one of the hosts on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Duncan's recent co-authored article on the relationship between Thai politics and attitudes to China, mentioned during the podcast, may be found here.

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Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic.

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials.

In Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters (Princeton UP, 2024), Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.

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Amélie Barras, "Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amélie Barras explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. It argues that Christianity is deeply entangled in the texture of the United Nations and shapes the methods and areas of work of Christian NGOs.

To capture these entanglements, Dr. Barras analyzes—through interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysis—the everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN actors. Faith in Rights is a crucial new evaluation of how religion informs Christian nongovernmental organizations' understandings of human rights and their methods of work, as well as how being engaged in human rights work influences these organizations' own religious identity and practice.

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Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to landfill. His new book argues that sustainability is not a sacrifice but an upgrade that can bring joy and increased quality of life. The book traces his journey to live more sustainably in a Manhattan apartment but also offers an argument about politics. He asks what narratives are already available to frame environmental degradation deploying a wide range of sources from John Locke to indigenous thinkers. Spodek, doubtful about governments or corporations leading on the environment, favors bottom up change focused on the actions and leadership of individuals. Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems (Amplify, 2025) explores the importance of culture and habit. How did the United States and other nations adopt polluting and passive habits? What can be done to reverse these cultural norms? The solutions range from a WWII level mobilization to a Constitutional Amendment.

Dr. Josh Spodek earned a PhD in Physics and an MBA in entrepreneurial leadership from Columbia University. He is a four-time TEDx speaker author (Initiative and Leadership Step by Step), and leadership coach. He hosts the This Sustainable Life podcast. He has been an Adjunct Professor at New York University. A 2024 recent New York Times article highlights his life changes in Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan?

Mentioned:

NOAA’s interactive sea level rise map. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery (3rd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Works of Steven Pinker
Spodek Method
Susan’s research on Locke’s Enough and as Good from Perspectives on Politics

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Transatlantic Tensions: Trump’s Return and Europe’s Far-Right Resurgence

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews journalist Mattia Ferraresi about the implications of a potential second Trump presidency for European politics. Ferraresi discusses how Trump’s rhetoric and policies, including his stance on NATO and trade, might influence transatlantic relations. The conversation explores the rise of far-right nationalism in Europe, with a focus on Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s alignment with Trump and her emerging role as a key intermediary between the U.S. and the EU. Ferraresi also examines the growing power of far-right parties across Europe, their ideological networks, and their influence on EU policies. The episode concludes with an analysis of Trump’s trade policies and their potential impact on both Europe and his domestic base, raising critical questions about the direction of U.S.-EU relations in a shifting global landscape.

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Nick Couldry, "The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?" (Polity, 2024)

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Is human solidarity achievable in a world dominated by continuous digital connectivity and commercially managed platforms? And what if it’s not? Professor Nick Couldry explores these urgent questions in his latest book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (Polity, 2024), as discussed in a recent interview with the New Books Network.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Couldry reflects on how society has ceded critical decisions to Big Tech, enabling these companies to construct what he calls our "space of the world"—the artificial environment of social media platforms that now shapes much of our social existence. He argues this delegation of power was reckless, with far-reaching and damaging social consequences.

While the harmful effects on social life, youth mental health, and political solidarity are widely recognized, Couldry emphasizes a deeper issue that has been overlooked: humanity’s decision to allow businesses to define and exploit this shared digital space for profit. In doing so, we disregarded centuries of political thought on the conditions required for healthy and non-violent politics. This oversight has jeopardized a vital resource in the era of the climate crisis: solidarity.

In The Space of the World, the first book in his trilogy Humanising the Future, Couldry proposes a transformative vision for redesigning digital spaces to foster, rather than erode, solidarity and community. He stresses that caring for our shared digital space is no longer optional—it is an urgent task that must be tackled collectively.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics.

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Melissa Johnston, "Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building more stable societies and efficient economies. This goal has been manifested in a wide range of programs and projects-or "gender interventions"—including economic empowerment measures, gender quotas, gender-responsive budgeting, and legal reforms. Yet, the results have been uneven, provoking a sizable debate among scholars and practitioners seeking to explain the shortcomings and improve the outcomes.

In Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melissa Johnston explains why gender interventions often fail to help those who most need them, using the case of Timor-Leste, a country subjected to high levels of peacebuilding and gender interventions between 1999 and 2017. Looking at three types of gender interventions—gender-responsive budgeting, the law against domestic violence, and microfinance initiatives—Dr. Johnston argues that these reforms have produced mixed results because they reinscribe entrenched class and gender hierarchies in their implementation.

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Kevin D. Pham, "The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2024), Kevin D. Pham introduces Vietnamese political thought to debates in political theory, showing how Vietnamese thinkers challenge Western conventional wisdom. He traces an intergenerational debate among six influential figures in colonial Vietnam. These figures had competing visions for how the Vietnamese should respond to French colonial domination, what the Vietnamese should do with their traditions given the influx of political and social ideas from the West, and how they should harness feelings of national shame to construct national dignity. Their answers offer surprising lessons for how we in the West can enhance our understanding of decolonization, shame, dignity, and cross-cultural engagement.

Kevin D. Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He explores the history of political thought, particularly how thinkers outside "the West" have conceptualized democracy and anticolonialism, and how they challenge and enhance the field of political theory. He has special interests in Vietnam. His articles have been published in journals such as Theory & Event, Philosophy and Global Affairs, European Journal of Political Theory, The Review of Politics, Polity, New Political Science, The European Legacy, and Montaigne Studies. He is the author of The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024). He co-hosts a podcast about Vietnamese intellectual history called Nam Phong Dialogues. Kevin can be reached at k.d.pham@uva.nl. His website is here: www.kevindoanpham.com.

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. Her research explores modern Vietnamese literature, literary translation across French, Vietnamese, English, and Chinese, and the literary history of French Indochina. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu.

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Leila Ullrich, "Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Victim participation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has routinely been viewed as an empty promise of justice or mere spectacle for audiences in the Global North, providing little benefit for victims. Why, then, do people in Kenya and Uganda engage in justice processes that offer so little, so late? How and why do they become the court’s victims and intermediaries, and what impact do these labels have on them?

Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a response to these poignant questions, demonstrating that the notion of ‘justice for victims’ is not merely symbolic, expressive, or instrumental. On the contrary — as Leila Ullrich argues — the ICC’s methods of victim engagement are productive, reproducing the Court as a relevant institution and transforming victims in the Global South into highly gendered and racialized labouring subjects. Challenging the Court’s interplay with global capitalist relationships, the book makes visible the hidden labour of justice, and how it lures, disciplines, and blames both victims and victims’ advocates. Drawing on critical theory, criminological analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, Kenya, and Uganda, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court illuminates how the drive to include victims as participants in international criminal justice proceedings also creates and disciplines them as blameworthy capitalist subjects. Yet, as victim workers learn to ‘stop crying’, ‘be peaceful’, ‘get married’, ‘work hard’, and ‘repay debt’, they also begin to challenge the terms of global justice.

Dr. Leila Ullrich is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law. Her research lies at the intersection of international criminal justice, transitional justice, victimology, and border criminology. Her work focuses on how global justice institutions construct gendered and racialized subjects and how these groups engage with or resist these processes. Outside academia, Leila worked as social stability analyst on the Syrian refugee crisis at the United Nations Development Programme in Lebanon and she has also worked as an intern for the ICC. She has also worked for the German Bundestag and the BBC World Service.

Alex Batesmith is an Associate Professor in Legal Professions in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion.

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Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, "Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local.

In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design.

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Postscript: Violence, Consent, and Coercion in American Football

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Last week, the press focused on what the press repeatedly characterized as an “ugly” fight between American college football players that broke out after the University of Michigan beat The Ohio State. But another story received less attention. Medrick Burnett Jr., a 20 year old from Southern California was playing his first season as a linebacker with Alabama A&M University when he sustained a head injury during the annual Magic City Classic against in-state rivals Alabama State University on Oct. 26. A month later, Burnett died. Today’s Postscript features two prominent scholars of sports raising questions about the hypocrisy of blaming players for a fight yet downplaying the death caused by playing by the rules. This remarkable conversation includes an unpacking of the “consent” to physical, psychological, and economic impacts, insight into the Foucauldian elements of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, and concrete reform suggestions for all people who watch football and/or work at universities. This nuanced conversation is for those who love or loathe football as a college sport.

Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and Dr. Derek Silva (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game published by UNC Press in 2024 – and their public-facing scholarship appears in outlets such as The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. They are the co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.

Mentioned:

“The hypocrisy of shaming college football player brawls,” Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, LATimes
“A player’s foreseeable death raises existential questions for college football,”Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, The Guardian
“Alabama A&M football player dies a month after suffering a head injury in a game,” Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio
Paul Knepper’s New Books Network interview with Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva on their 2024 book, “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game”
Dr. Jill A. Fisher’s Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials (Rutgers University Press 2008)
Dr. Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020)

On the University of Missouri football team’s successful threat to strike if the university president didn't resign see

"The Power of a Football Boycott,” Jake New, Inside Higher Education,
The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports:
Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew? Ingfei Chen, The New Yorker

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Yaacov Yadgar, "To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism" (NYU Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In one of the first books to ask head-on what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state, Yaacov Yadgar delves into what the designation "Jewish" amounts to in the context of the sovereign nation-state, and what it means for the politics of the state to be identified as Jewish. The volume interrogates the tension between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state--one whose very character is informed by Judaism--and the notion of Israel as a "state of the Jews," with the sole criterion the maintenance of a demographically Jewish majority, whatever the character of that majority's Jewishness might or might not be.

The volume also examines Zionism's relationship to Judaism. It provocatively questions whether the Christian notion of supersessionism, the idea that the Christian Church has superseded the nation of Israel in God's eyes and that Christians are now the true People of God, may now be applied to Zionism, with Zionism understood by some to have taken over the place of traditional Judaism, rendering the actual Jewish religion superfluous.

To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism (NYU Press, 2024) deeply informs the democratic crisis in Israel, discussing whether Jewish laws put into effect by the state or political moves made to ensure a Jewish majority can be seen as undermining democracy. In our current era, with nationalism resurging, To Be a Jewish State urges a critical re-assessment of the very meaning of modern Jewish identity.

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Robert Danisch, "Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024)

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) offers an explanation and diagnosis of the current state of American democracy rooted in the American pragmatist tradition. Robert Danisch analyzes the characteristics of communication systems and communication practices that inhibit or enhance democratic life. In doing so, this book provides a detailed explanation of the ways in which the communication systems and practices that constitute democratic life are currently fostering polarization and how they might be made to foster cooperation. Scholars of communication, rhetorical studies, political science, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.

Robert Danisch is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo whose research interests include rhetorical theory, persuasion, and public communication in democratic societies. He is the author of Pragmatism, Democracy and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Building a Rhetorical Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism as well as journal articles and several co-authored books. He is also the host of the podcast Now We’re Talking that focuses on communication skills.

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Melissa B. Jacoby, "Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal" (New Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many--a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially. In this brilliant and paradigm-shifting book, legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America. When cities go bankrupt, for example, police unions enjoy added leverage while police brutality victims are denied a seat at the negotiating table; the system is more forgiving of civil rights abuses than of the parking tickets disproportionately distributed in African American neighborhoods. Across a broad range of crucial issues, Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (New Press, 2024) reveals the hidden mechanisms by which bankruptcy impacts everything from sexual harassment to health care, police violence to employment discrimination, and the opioid crisis to gun violence. In the tradition of Matthew Desmond's groundbreaking Evicted, Unjust Debts is a riveting and original work of accessible scholarship with huge implications for ordinary people and will set the terms of debate for this vital subject.

Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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How to Tackle Political Violence

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the United States, France, and Germany, political violence has been rising. This is particularly troubling as we lack compelling explanations for why this is happening, and effective responses to stop it. A powerful new argument from Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca suggests that the problem is not just emotive political polarization. Extreme political parties, irresponsible leaders and democratic disillusionment also play key roles, and are eating away at the heart of our political systems. Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Rachel Kleinfeld about the five strategies that can reduce political violence, the distinctive approach that has to be taken in polarised democracies, and why more aggressive forms of protest against populist and anti-system movements may only make matters worse.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Her influential work on troubled democracies facing problems such as polarized populations, violence, corruption, and poor governance bridges the United States and international cases. In addition to her research and analysis, Kleinfeld is known for in actively seeking practical solutions to today’s problems. To that end, she serves as a trustee of the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and States United for Democracy and on the advisory board of Protect Democracy. She is a senior advisor to the Democracy Funders Network and is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises.

This episode is based on Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca’s article titled “How to Prevent Political Violence” that was published in the October 2024 issues of the Journal of Democracy.

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Casey B. K. Dominguez, "Commander in Chief: Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers" (UP of Kansas, 2024)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The balance of power between the United States Congress and the president is particularly contested when it comes to war powers. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war but Article II Section 2 declares that "[t]he President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Today, presidents broadly define their constitutional authority as commander in chief. But in the nineteenth century, Congress claimed and defended expansive war powers authority. How did Congress define the boundaries between presidential and congressional war powers in the early republic? Did the definition of “commander in chief” change, and if so, when, how, and why did it do so?

Based on an original, comprehensive dataset of every congressional reference to the commander-in-chief clause from the ratification of the Constitution through 1917, Dr. Casey B.K. Dominguez analyzes the authority that members of Congress ascribed to the president as commander in chief and the boundaries they put around that authority.

In Commander in Chief: Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers (University Press of Kansas, 2024) Dominguez shows that for more than a century members of Congress defined the commander in chief's authority narrowly, similar to that of any high-ranking military officer. But in a wave of nationalism during the Spanish-American War, members of Congress began to argue that Congress owed deference to the commander in chief – as a national representative of the military, nation, and flag rather than a military officer. These debates were partisan with members of Congress arguing for broader presidential war powers when the president was from their own party. Scholars often assume that it is the Supreme Court that interprets the Constitution but Dominguez’s work shows how all the branches interpret the constitution. She offers particularly keen insights on the use of constitutional stories or scripts about the commander in chief clause. While scholars have assumed that the expansion of presidential war powers happened in the middle of the 20th century, Dominguez’s research shows that the dynamical expansion began 50 years earlier. Her work helps readers understand when – and how – the United States shifted many military decisions to the president.

Dr. Casey B. K. Dominguez is professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego. Her research focuses on the relationships between political parties and interest groups, and on the evolution of Constitutional war powers in the United States. I’m delighted to welcome her to New Books in Political Science.

Mentioned:

Victoria A. Farrar-Myers’s book on constitutional scripts, Scripted for Change

The Institutionalization of the American Presidency (Texas A&M Press, 2007)

Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758)

Mariah Zeisberg’s War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority (Princeton 2013)

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Nissim Mannathukkaren, "Hindu Nationalism in South India: The Rise of Saffron in Kerala" (Routledge, 2024)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Hindu Nationalism in South India: The Rise of Saffron in Kerala (Routledge, 2024) engages with a range of factors that shapes the trajectory of Hindu nationalism in Kerala, the southern state of India. Until recently, Kerala was considered a socio-political exception which had no room for Hindu nationalism. This book questions such Panglossian prognosis and shows the need to map the ideological and political growth of Hindu nationalism which has been downplayed in the academic discourse as temporary aberrations. The introduction to the book places Kerala in the context of South India. Arguing that Hindutva is a real force which needs to be contended within theoretical and empirical terms, the chapters in this book examine Hindu nationalism in Kerala in relation to themes such as history, caste, culture, post-truth, ideology, gender, politics, and the Indian national space. Considering the rise of Hindu nationalism in the recent years, this pioneering book will be of interest to a students and academics studying Politics, in particular Nationalism, Asian Politics and Religion and Politics and South Asian Studies.

Professor Mannathukkaren’s main research interests are focused on left/communist movements, development and democracy, modernity, the politics of popular culture (esp., the politics of mass cultural forms like the media, cinema and sport), and Marxist and postcolonial theories. The thrust of his research has been to develop a theoretical and empirical critique of postcolonial theory and postmodern thought. At the same time, he has argued for a dialogue with postmodern-inspired frameworks of knowledge and to creatively integrate them to overcome the serious deficiencies of many modernist understandings of human social reality (which have translated into arrogant and teleological assumptions).

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Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to work. When does nuclear latency--the technical capacity to build the bomb--enable states to pursue effective coercion?

In Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.

To test this argument, Volpe includes comparative case studies of four countries that leveraged latency against superpowers: Japan, West Germany, North Korea, and Iran.

Volpe identifies a generalizable mechanism--the threat-assurance trade-off--that explains why more power often makes compellence less likely to work.

Volpe proposes a framework that illuminates how technology shapes broader bargaining dynamics and helps to refine policy options for inhibiting the spread of nuclear weapons. As nuclear technology continues to cast a shadow over the global landscape, Leveraging Latency systematically assesses its coercive utility.

Our guest today is Tristan Volpe, an Assistant Professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, "Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America" (W. W. Norton, 2024)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins about the new, edited volume, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (W.W. Norton, 2024). Danny is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and the steward of a fantastic interview series in The Nation magazine. Did it Happen Here? presents a snapshot of the fascism debate being waged on American campuses, in magazines, and on social media. The most recent iteration of the fascism debate began, as with many debates about the state of American politics, with the election of Donald Trump. Since his first term in 2016, speculation about the true nature of Trumpism has generated countless think-pieces and books. Did It Happen Here? is the definitive summary of the major scholarly views on whether fascism has come to America. As Danny puts it, “the fascism debate is Rorschach test for understanding what is truly ailing American society.”

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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David Cowan, "Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2009" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The inter-war period (1918–1939) is still remembered as a period of mass deprivation – the 'hungry thirties'. But how did this impression emerge? Thousands of conversations about life in the inter-war period – between parents and children around the dinner table; among workmates at the pub – shaped these understandings. In turn, these fed into popular politics. Stories about the embryonic welfare system in the early-twentieth century informed how people felt towards the National Health Service; memories of the Great Depression shaped arguments about state intervention in the economy.

Challenging accounts of widespread political disengagement in the twentieth century, Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. David Cowan shows how re-telling family stories about the inter-war period offered ordinary people an accessible way of engaging in politics. Drawing on six local case studies across Scotland and England, this book explains how stories about the inter-war working-class experience in industrial areas came to appear commonplace nationwide.

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Talking Thai Politics: Pornchai Witayalerdpan – What’s Up with the Thai Senate?

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How exactly were Thailand’s new slate of 200 Senators selected? What is it like to be an independent member of the Senate, when the chamber is now dominated by members closely associated with one of the government parties? Now that the Thai senate plays no role in selecting the prime minister, is it anything more than a talking-shop? What is the atmosphere like inside Thailand’s contentious upper house?

In this episode, senator Pornchai Witayalerdpan discusses the extraordinary process by which he and the 199 other new senators were selected in July 2024. He also explains how a small group of independent-minded senators are trying to promote democratic agendas, despite being consistently outvoted by the conservative majority.

Here is a link to the BBC Thai article mentioned by Pornchai in the interview, which provides some critical analysis on how the majority ‘blue group’ of senators dominated key votes in their first parliamentary session: https://www.bbc.com/thai/articles/cy4nkvx99kro

Independent Thai senator Pornchai Wiyayalerdpan is a former simultaneous interpreter, who did graduate work in international relations and political science at Waseda University in Japan.

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Website: https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/podcasts/

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Larry Alan Busk, "The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course. The philosophical differences, however, may be more apparent than real.

The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues that dominant trends in critical and radical theory inadvertently reproduce the cardinal tenets of the twentieth century’s most influential right-wing philosophers. It finds the rejection of foundationalism, rationalism, economic planning, and vanguardism mirrored in the work of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Strauss. If it is to be more than merely an inverted image of the Right, critical theory must reevaluate its relationship to what Julius Nyerere once called “deliberate design” in politics. In the era of anthropogenic climate change, a substantial—not merely nominal—departure from right-wing talking points is all the more necessary and momentous.

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Stanislava P. Mladenova, "When Rambo Meets the Red Cross: Civil-Military Engagement in Fragile States" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Non-governmental organisations and militaries are notorious for their difficult relationship. The military is mostly understood through the prism of its lethality, and NGOs are perceived as idealistic do-gooders, ready to save the world. In When Rambo Meets the Red Cross: Civil Military Engagement in Fragile States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) Dr. Stanislava P. Mladenova traces the changing character of interaction between both of these entities. She argues that the boundaries which once separated their functions are fading.

Fragile, ungoverned, and insecure spaces need both of what these actors can provide. As a result, they have drawn closer together, and have everything at their disposal for a collaborative, efficient, and productive civil-military partnership, which is contrary to what many observers and leaders in the conflict and development space have long believed. Dr. Mladenova makes a convincing case that it is high time both sets of actors put aside their differences, bringing to light a fast-changing landscape of vicious poverty, insecurity, and climate change, where the conventional way of doing business will become the exception, not the rule.

Use the code RLFANDF30 for a 30% discount if you buy via the publisher!

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Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed?

Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender.

Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder, "The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.

In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.

Amy J. Binder is professor of sociology at John Hopkins University. She is the author of Contentious Curricula and coauthor of Becoming Right.

Jeffrey L. Kidder is professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Parkour and the City and Urban Flow

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Corey Brettschneider, "The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It" (W. W. Norton, 2024)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 2024, people around the world focus on an American president who calls for the imprisonment of critics, spreads the culture of white supremacy, and upends the law to commit crimes with impunity. Is Trump the first authoritarian to threaten American constitution democracy? Corey Brettschneider’s new book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (W.W. Norton, 2024) argues that the United States has had previous authoritarian presidents who similarly threatened core democratic and rule of law values – and each was challenged by non-elected leaders Brettschneider terms “democratic constitutional constituencies.” John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power.

Using an impressive combination of primary documents, secondary sources, and new interviews, Brettschneider highlights how freedom to dissent, equal citizenship, and rule of law are central to democratic norms and the role that citizens play in pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of "We the People." He documents how Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Sadie Alexander, Daniel Ellsberg, and others we cannot easily name fought back against presidential abuses of power.

Dr. Corey Brettschneider is professor of Political Science at Brown University. His researches and teaches at the intersection of constitutional law and politics. His scholarly works include The Oath of Office (W.W. Norton, 2018) and he writes for outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post. I’m delighted to welcome him to New Books in Political Science.

Mentioned:

Online access to the Nixon tapes from Nixon Library

Princeton Library archive on Woodrow Wilson lectures

Susan’s NBN interview with Judge Richard Gergel on Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge

Corey’s interview with Michael Kruse of Politico, “I’d Rather Have 10 Ken Starrs Than One Donald Trump”

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Samantha A. Vortherms, "Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into included and excluded groups, creating particularistic citizenship through granting some groups access to rights and redistribution while restricting or denying access to others. This book asks: why would a government with powerful tools of exclusion expand access to socioeconomic citizenship rights? And when autocratic systems expand redistribution, whom do they choose to include?

In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China (Stanford UP, 2024), Samantha A. Vortherms examines the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)—and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. Vortherms demonstrates how autocrats use differentiated citizenship to control degrees of access to rights and thus fulfill the authoritarian bargain and balance security and economic incentives. This book expands our understanding of individual-state relations in both autocratic contexts and across a variety of regime types.

Samantha Vortherms is an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine's Department of Political Science. She is a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; its Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics program; and is a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. The primary focus of her research is on how processes of economic development affect institutional change and the relationship between the individual and the state. Her research has been published in journals such as The China Quarterly, World Development, Review of International Political Economy, Business and Politics, and Urban Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago, her A.M. in Public Policy from University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, and her B.A. from the University of Richmond.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s economy and social control include Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, on governance and quantification, Outsourcing Repression, on the use of nonstate actors for coercion, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, on China’s marketization procession, Invisible China, on the urban-rural divide, and Welfare for Autocrats, on the strategic targeting of poverty assistance.

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How Are Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances Undermining the Region’s Prospects for Democracy?

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are they going to be tolerated? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Duncan McCargo and Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa about their recent Journal of Democracy article ‘Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances.’ They discuss the factors that underpin the rise of these toxic alliances among Southeast Asian elites, their characteristics, and their effects on democracy by focusing on three countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs at the Nanyang Technological University. He works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. His dozen books include the best-selling The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS Press 2005), and the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008); and more recently Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (co-authored, NIAS Press 2020).

Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa is a researcher at National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia. He earned his PhD from the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK (2022). His research focuses on Southeast Asian and Indonesian politics.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

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Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan: Can He Really Do It?

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kitty Calavita, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, discuss the historical context and implications of Operation Wetback, a 1954 U.S. mass deportation of Mexican immigrants, and its relevance to President-elect Donald Trump's proposed mass deportation plans. Calavita explains that Operation Wetback aimed to address the economic utility of undocumented workers and political backlash against them, particularly during a recession and Cold War rhetoric. She highlights the logistical challenges of such operations, including the integration of immigrants into various industries and the legal protections against random stops. Calavita suggests that while high-profile roundups may occur, a massive deportation campaign is unlikely due to economic and logistical obstacles.

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Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah, "Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States" (NYU Press, 2024)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Dan Mallinson and Lee Hannah, both experts on state-level politics and the policy making process, have a new book that focuses on the state-level process of legalization of medical cannabis across the United States. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (NYU Press, 2024) is a book that needed to be written, since it is an important exploration not only of the continuing policy conflicts and tensions around marijuana in the United States, but it specifically focuses on how states have taken up this issue and what they each did in moving towards medical marijuana’s accessibility. The marijuana question in in the United States remains a fascinating federalism dynamic, with national laws in conflict with state laws, and state laws operating in different ways, around both medical marijuana and legalized recreational use of cannabis.

Mallinson and Hannah provide the reader with an excellent overview of policymaking designs and theories since their analysis takes up so many different dimensions of the policy process in the United States. They then move into the history behind the criminalization of marijuana, and the way in which this policy has clearly racialized roots. Green Rush highlights the ways that some of the shifts and changes in state policies started to make their way through different states, via action by state legislatures and or through state-wide referenda. With particular attention to a number of states, like California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, Mallinson and Hannah chart the ways that different states have gone about legalizing the medical use of marijuana, which has also been part of the pathway for other states to move towards decriminalization and legalization of adult use recreational marijuana.

Green Rush is an accessible policy analysis and provides important insight into the path that medical marijuana took as it became legal in one state after another. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States charts the policy changes themselves, but also pays attention to changing public opinion around cannabis and shifts in the war on drugs as well.

(I found this book so useful that I have adopted it to use in my Public Policy class.)

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Nick Butler, "The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics" (Policy Press, 2023)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this podcast, Nick Butler explores humour's complex and often controversial role in shaping modern political discourse, examining how jokes can challenge and reinforce power structures. Whether you're interested in the intersection of humour and politics or curious about the cultural implications of what’s considered "offensive," this conversation promises to be both insightful and engaging.

Tune in to hear Nick’s thoughts on the dangers and potential of humour in a politically polarized world and much more! Don’t miss this fascinating dive into The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics (Policy Press, 2023)

There is an enjoyable piece in The Conversation about this book and the 2024 US elections here

Butler's blog on academic writing called First Draft here

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Sandipto Dasgupta, "Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century generated audacious ideas of freedom. Following decolonization, the challenge was to give an institutional form to those ideas. Through an original account of India's constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task.

In contrast to derived templates, Dasgupta theorizes the distinctively postcolonial constitution through an innovative synthesis of the history of decolonization and constitutional theory. Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the contentious transition from the tumult of popular anticolonial politics to the ordered calculus of postcolonial governance; and then explains how major institutions – parliament, judiciary, rights, property – were formed by that foundational tension. A major contribution to postcolonial political theory, the book excavates the unrealized futures of decolonization. At the same time, through a critical account of the making of the postcolonial constitutional order, it offers keys to understanding the present crisis of that order, including and especially in India.

Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. For the 2024-25 academic year, he will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. His research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents.

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

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Daniel S. Goldberg, "Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Football is the national game in the United States – and many families and friends bond over their love of the sport. While few people play professional football, many participate in tackle football as children and adolescents. In the last decades, more attention has been paid to the dangers of playing tackle football, including traumatic brain injury and the degenerative brain disease, CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). As more former players donated their brains, the rate of CTE surprised even those already concerned with traumatic brain injury. If the risks are so great, why do more than two million American children under the age of 18 continue to play tackle football? Is it the opportunity to contribute to a team? Overcome adversity? Test personal limits?

In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg asks readers to think about American tackle football as an industry – like the American tobacco industry – that sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it. Despite the clearly documented costs to society and individuals who play, the tackle football industry has successfully manufactured doubt about the health hazards. Goldberg argues that a basic familiarity with the history of regulated industries and their intersection with public health is needed both to understand the contemporary debates and to move forward with fair and equitable policy solutions. If the risks to people who play were better known to the public, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk.

Goldberg draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Goldberg recommends using public health laws to counter the manufacture of doubt – offering specific policy proposals to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football.

Daniel S. Goldberg, JD, PhD is an associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is the director of Education at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and director of the Public Health Ethics and Law Program.

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Infrastructure, Development, and Racialization

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

International development projects supported by governments of wealthy countries, international financial institutions, and influential NGOs like the Gates Foundation purport to uplift poor or disadvantaged populations through political, economic, and social interventions in these communities. However, practices, policies, and discourses of development also have a darker side: they are both premised on and perpetuate the translation of social difference into deficit, ranking groups according to their perceived ‘stage’ of historical development.

My guest today, the political theorist Begüm Adalet, has explored how discourses and practices of development have interacted with political processes of racialization. She also examines how anti-colonial movements can resist racialized development practices by envisioning alternative means of recrafting built environments and the creation of selves. Our interview today focuses on three recent articles that she has published in academic journals:

“Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 40, no. 6 (2022): 975-993
“Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon,” Political Theory vol. 50, no. 1 (2022): 5-31
“An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective,” American Political Science Review (2024)

Begüm Adalet is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The construction of modernization theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, 2018), which I interviewed her about for the New Books Network in 2020.

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Middle East on the Brink: Escalation, Diplomacy, and the Search for Stability

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Recent developments in the Middle East have raised concern about the potential for a wider regional war. What do escalating tensions in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond mean for the future? Join RBI Director John Torpey as he discusses the complexities of the contemporary Middle East with Win Dayton, a retired senior member of the U.S. Foreign Service and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Beirut. Mr. Dayton shares insights from his decades of diplomatic experience, exploring the shifting dynamics of U.S. foreign policy, the challenges of intervention, and the prospects for stability amid growing regional and global pressures.

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Public Healthcare Under Decentralized Governance in Indonesia and the Philippines

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s episode focuses on the policy challenges and politics of public healthcare in Southeast Asia, a topic which has become increasingly visible and important in Southeast Asia and in the study of the region over the past decades in the context of expanding public healthcare programs in many countries across the region and the recent experience of the global pandemic.

To discuss these issues, we are joined by Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, who has been conducting research on public healthcare in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past several years. Sarah Shair-Rosenfield is a Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York here in the UK. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and then taught at Arizona State University and the University of Essex before taking up a professorial chair at the University of York. She is the author of Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies: Lessons from the Indonesian Case (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and co-author of Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016), and she has published articles in leading political science and other specialist journals. She is a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Political Studies and a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network.

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Jennifer Denbow, "Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype" (Duke UP, 2024)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technoscientific innovation in contemporary American life often comes at the expense of the care work and reproductive labor that is necessary for society to function. Noting that the gutting of social welfare programs has shifted the burden of solving problems to individuals, Denbow argues that the aggrandizement of innovation and the degradation of reproductive labor are intertwined facets of neoliberalism. She shows that the construction of innovation as a panacea to social ills justifies the accumulation of wealth for corporate innovators and the impoverishment of those feminized and racialized people who do the bulk of reproductive labor. Moreover, even innovative technology aimed at reproduction—such as digital care work platforms and noninvasive prenatal testing—obscure structural injustices and further devalue reproductive labor.

By drawing connections between innovation discourse, the rise of neoliberalism, financialized capitalism, and the social and political degradation of reproductive labor, Denbow illustrates what needs to be done to destabilize the overvaluation of innovation and to offer collective support for reproduction.

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Talking Thai Politics: Why Thai Politics isn’t All About China

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How far does geopolitics relate to domestic political leanings? Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favour China? A recent article by Petra Alderman, Duncan McCargo, Alfred Gerstl and James Icovocci drawing on a 2022 survey finds some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, but also shows that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China. To view election outcomes in a country such as Thailand as “wins” for one or other great power would be highly misleading.

Article details: Petra Alderman, Duncan McCargo, Alfred Gerstl and James Icovocci, ‘All About China? (Mis)Reading Domestic Politics through a Great Power Lens’, Asian Survey, 2024, 64 (5): 877–911.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham, and a Research Fellow at Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR).

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

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Robert B. Talisse, "Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy?

In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

Drawing on extensive research about polarization and partisanship, Talisse argues that certain core democratic capacities can be cultivated only at a distance from the political fray. If we are to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, we must occasionally step away from our allies and opponents alike. We can perform this self-work only in secluded settings where we can engage in civic reflection that is not prepackaged in the idiom of our political divides, allowing us to contemplate political circumstances that are not our own.

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Erica Benner, "Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power" (Penguin, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Democracy is a living, breathing thing and Dr. Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about the role ordinary citizens play in keeping it alive: from her childhood in post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to working in post-communist Poland, with its sudden gaps of wealth and security. Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power (Penguin, 2024) draws on her experiences and the deep history of self-ruling peoples – going back to ancient Greece, the French revolution and Renaissance Florence – to rethink some of the toughest questions that we face today.

What do democratic ideals of equality mean in a world obsessed with competition, wealth, and greatness? How can we hold the powerful to account? Can we find enough common ground to keep sharing democratic power in the future? Challenging well-worn myths of heroic triumph over tyranny, Dr. Benner reveals the inescapable vulnerabilities of people power, inviting us to consider why democracy is worth fighting for and the role each of us must play.

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Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.”

China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China.

Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance.

Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. She was also listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD), Statistics (MS), and International Policy Studies (MA) from Stanford University and in International Relations (LLB) from Renmin University of China.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy.

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Samuel Fury Childs Daly, "Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire" (Duke UP, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire (Duke UP, 2024), Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators tried and failed to transform their societies into martial utopias. Across the continent, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and revolutions. The soldiers who led them had a vision. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, officers governed like they fought battles—to them, politics was war by other means. Civilians were subjected to military-style discipline, which was indistinguishable from tyranny. Soldiers promised law and order, and they saw judges as allies in their mission to make society more like an army. But law was not the disciplinary tool soldiers thought it was. Using legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Daly shows how law both enabled militarism and worked against it. For Daly, the law is a place to see decolonization’s tensions and ironies—independence did not always mean liberty, and freedom had a militaristic streak. In a moment when militarism is again on the rise in Africa, Daly describes not just where it came from but why it lasted so long.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War.

Elisa Prosperetti, Assistant Professor of History at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Public Education, Emancipation and its Limits in West Africa, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2025.

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Tom Theuns, "Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU" (Hurst, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The European Union has a big problem—a potentially fatal one. How should it deal with a member state or states that reject democracy and the rule of law?

So far, not even Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has turned full-blown authoritarian. However, his 14 unbroken years of “illiberal democracy”, his constitution rewriting, creeping media control, challenges to judicial independence, and calls for popular resistance against the EU are becoming less easy to ignore or accommodate.

Yet, the EU’s tools to address democratic backsliding are blunt and its institutions are reluctant to use them. Above all, while a member state can leave the union, the union itself has no power to expel a club member that breaks its core democratic rules.

In Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU (Hurst, 2024), Tom Theuns looks back at the history of this design fault and how to put it right. He writes: "EU member states cannot both permit a frankly autocratic state to continue to be a member state of the Union and at the same tie pretend to be committed to democracy"

Tom Theuns is a Senior Assistant Professor of Political Theory and European Politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po in Paris.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.

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How Can Going Inside the Political Mind Help Us to Better Understand Development?

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why do efforts to build effective states and deliver services to citizens so often go wrong? And how can understanding the inside of the political mind empower us to achieve better results? In this podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Greg Power about his important new book, based on the experience of working with hundreds of politicians in more than sixty countries. In Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development (Oxford UP, 2024), Greg explains why individual politicians and norms of behaviour and more powerful than formal rules and institutions, and why practical challenges so often encourage citizens and politicians to go around the state rather than working through it. This leads to a radical new way of thinking about state-building and development that works from the bottom-up on the basis of what leaders and their people want, rather than what the international community assumes they need.

Guest:

Greg Power is the founder and Board Chair of Global Partners Governance Practice (GPG), a social purpose company that provides support to politicians, ministers and officials to strengthen their systems of governance. He is well known for having worked in a remarkable variety of countries including many – such as Iraq – during periods in which political systems and state institutions were under the most intense strain. He was previously a special adviser to British ministers Rt Hon Robin Cook MP and Rt Hon Peter Hain MP, working on strategies for parliamentary reform, constitutional change and the wider democratic agenda in conjunction with the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Downing Street policy staff, and was awarded an OBE for services to parliamentary democracy and political reform in the January 2023 New Year’s Honours.

Presenter:

Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Postscript: Reflections on the 2024 American Presidential Election

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many pundits are rushing to judgement – claiming to identify the “one” reason that Donald Trump won or Kamala Harris lost the 2024 Presidential Election. Today’s Postscript offers a nuanced conversation among four political scientists to gather some key take-aways and interpretive tools for looking forward to the second Trump presidency, midterms, 2028 presidential election, and 2030 redistricting.

Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and a prolific media commentator on politics. Jonathan Bernstein is a political scientist who focuses on political parties, Congress, the presidency, elections, and democracy. Political Parties, Congress the Presid, Elections, and Democracy. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University..

Mentioned:

Julia Azari and Jennifer K. Smith on informal norms: “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies”
Julia Azari’s book on mandates: Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate
John Burn-Murdoch’s graph on incumbents losing globally in Financial Times
Gallup data on nostalgia for past presidents in Jeffrey M. Jones, Retrospective Approval of JFK Rises to 90%; Trump at 46%
Julia and Jonathan’s Good Politics/Bad Politics podcast

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Scott J. Weiner, "Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority?

Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, in Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Dr. Scott Weiner shows that variation in tribal access to limited resources before state building can account for these differences. Its conclusions are based on seven months of archival research and interviews in Arabic and English, and reveal new details about state formation on the Arabian Peninsula.

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Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime.

In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system.

Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality.

Mentioned:

Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989)

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Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time.

In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (MIT Press, 2024), Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. With a storyteller’s gift for character, suspense, and detail, Stern crafts a high-stakes narrative that illuminates the strategy, policy, politics, and diplomacy that made Paris possible. Introducing readers to a vivid cast of characters, including Xie Zenhua, Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Bo Lidegaard, chief strategist for Denmark’s Prime Minster, and Indian minister Jairam Ramesh, Stern, who worked alongside President Barack Obama and Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the shifting alliances, the last-minute maneuvering, and the ultimate historic success. The book concludes with a final chapter that describes key developments since 2015 and the author’s reflections on what needs to be done going forward to contain the climate threat. A unique peek behind the curtain of one of the most important international agreements of our time, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement is a vital and fascinating read for anyone who cares about the future of our one shared home.

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama's chief climate negotiator.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Talking Thai Politics: Tak Bai and Beyond, Thailand’s Southern Insurgency

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the twentieth anniversary of the dreadful Tak Bai massacre, what are the prospects for a resolution of the long-standing insurgency in Thailand Malay-Muslim majority southern border provinces? Why has the Paetongtarn Shinawatra government failed to support justice for the families of the 85 men who died in the incident? Why do absurd conspiracy theories often loom larger than evidence-based analyses of the root causes underling the violence? And why does the Thai state struggle to embrace narratives of local identity that offer space for diversity, disagreement and pluralism?

Don Pathan is a senior journalist and security analyst, well known for his expertise on the Southern insurgency.

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. He has published extensively on the southern conflict, including the award-winning book Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008).

Chayata Sripanich is a research associate with the Generation Thailand project.

Website: https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/podcasts/

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Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program for Global Infrastructure and Investment struggle to compete with the BRI. We discuss dynamics of public and private finance, the role of public-private partnerships, and the challenges private investors face. Importantly, this episode reveals the U.S. Development Finance Corporation’s increasing reliance on private capital, and the decline of the construction sector in the U.S. economy. This comprehensive view shows how different financing and development models shape the global infrastructure landscape, how infrastructure development has evolved into its current state, and novel fields of competition, such as undersea Internet cables.

Hameiri and Jones are co-authors of Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Dr. Hameiri is Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relation at The University of Queensland. A political economist with diverse research interests, traversing the fields of security, development and aid, governance, political geography and international relations, he is interested in understanding the evolving nature of statehood and political agency under conditions of globalisation. His books include International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University, 2017), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Regulating Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and he is a co-editor for the fourth edition of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Poliltics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). X: @ShaharHameiri.

Dr. Jones is Professor in International Politics at the Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China. Lee regularly advises the British and other governments and civil society organisations and has often appeared in the national and international media. A fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he also sits on the board of Palgrave’s series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, and the ESRC’s peer review college. For further information see www.leejones.tk.

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Andrew Stravers et al., "Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States stands at a crossroads in international security. The backbone of its international position for the last 70 years has been the massive network of overseas military deployments. However, the US now faces pressures to limit its overseas presence and spending.

In Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion (Oxford University Press, 2023), Michael Allen, Michael Flynn, Carla Martinez Machain, and Andrew Stravers argue that the US has entered into a "Domain of Competitive Consent" where the longevity of overseas deployments relies upon the buy-in from host-state populations and what other major powers offer in security guarantees.

Drawing from three years of surveys and interviews across fourteen countries, they demonstrate that a key component of building support for the US mission is the service members themselves as they interact with local community members.

Highlighting both the positive contact and economic benefits that flow from military deployments and the negative interactions like crime and anti-base protests, this book shows in the most rigorous and concrete way possible how US policy on the ground shapes its ability to advance its foreign policy goals.

Our guests today are Michael Allen, who is a Professor of International Relations in the School of Public Service at Boise State University; Michael Flynn, who is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at Kansas State University; and Carla Martinez Machain, who is a Professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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The Impeachment Power: A Conversation with Keith Whittington

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this week’s episode we step into conversation with Keith Whittington about his new book, The Impeachment Power: The Law, Politics, and Purpose of an Extraordinary Constitutional Tool (Princeton UP, 2024), we explored the historical and constitutional dimensions of impeachment in American politics. Whittington provided a detailed account of how the Founders intended impeachment to function as a safeguard against executive overreach. We discussed the evolution of impeachment cases, from Andrew Johnson to more recent examples, examining how political partisanship and public opinion have shaped its application over time. Whittington also reflected on the implications of impeachment for the health of democratic institutions and constitutional governance today. It was an enlightening discussion on one of the most important, yet often misunderstood, mechanisms in the U.S. Constitution.

Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. He is the author of You Can't Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (2024), Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (2019), and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018), as well as Constitutional Interpretation (1999), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (2007), and other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.

Whittington has spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics from 2006 to 2024. He has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas School of Law.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Melissa Teixeira, "A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and António de Oliveira Salazar in the Portuguese Empire seized upon corporatist ideas to jump-start state-led economic development. In A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Melissa Teixeira examines these pivotal but still understudied initiatives.

What distinguished Portuguese and Brazilian corporatism from other countries’ experiments with the mixed economy was how Vargas and Salazar dismantled liberal democratic institutions, celebrating their efforts to limit individual freedoms and property in pursuit of economic recovery and social peace. By tracing the movement of people and ideas across the South Atlantic, Teixeira vividly shows how two countries not often studied for their economic creativity became major centers for policy experimentation. Portuguese and Brazilian officials created laws and agencies to control pricing and production, which in turn generated new social frictions and economic problems, as individuals and firms tried to evade the rules. And yet, Teixeira argues, despite the failings and frustrations of Brazil’s and Portugal’s corporatist experiments, the ideas and institutions tested in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a new legal and technical tool kit for the rise of economic planning, shaping how governments regulate labor and market relations to the present day.

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Unpacking Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia with Dan Slater

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s episode focuses on a major issue of enduring importance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies: authoritarianism. Even today, various forms of dictatorship remain alive and well across Southeast Asia, raising questions about their origins, their endurance, and the prospects for their evolution. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dan Slater, one of the world’s leading specialists on authoritarianism in Southeast Asia and the author of important and influential works on this topic and more broadly on the politics of the region.

Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center of Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, where he’s been since 2017 after receiving his PhD from Emory University in 2005 and teaching at the University of Chicago. Dan is one of the most prolific and prominent scholars of Southeast Asian politics, publishing a raft of important and influential articles in leading Political Science and Southeast Asian Studies journals over the years as well as two major book-length studies, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and (with Joseph Wong) From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022).

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The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The essay "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7" (Mosaic Magazine) by Shany Mor, dated October 7, 2024, examines the intellectual and policy failures leading up to the October 7 attack on Israel. Mor critiques several conceptual frameworks that have guided Israeli and international policy, particularly in dealing with Gaza and Hamas. These failed ideas include:

1. Netanyahu’s Leadership - Mor argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-standing skepticism, indecision, and focus on messaging over strategic action contributed to the failure. His belief that Israel could contain Hamas while ignoring broader strategic decisions proved disastrous.

2. Religious Settler Ideology -The right-wing settler movement has, according to Mor, distorted Israeli policy for years. This ideological shift, prioritizing the West Bank settlement agenda over national security interests, has resulted in misguided policies that left Gaza's threat underestimated and unaddressed.

3. Peace Processors’ Delusion -The international peace processors, particularly in Western liberal circles, have perpetuated unrealistic frameworks for Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution. Mor critiques their belief that diplomacy and incremental concessions could resolve deep-seated ideological conflicts with groups like Hamas, which remain fundamentally opposed to Israel’s existence.

4. The Role of the International Community - Global organizations, including the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs, have indirectly supported the hostile status quo by empowering non-state actors like Hamas. Mor criticizes these bodies for exacerbating rather than mitigating conflict, enabling militias to exercise power without responsibility.

The essay argues that these failed concepts need to be dismantled for Israel and the international community to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the tragic events of October 7 and to establish a more secure and realistic policy moving forward.

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Graham Brady, "Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers" (Ithaka, 2024)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies, and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers (Ithaka, 2024) by Sir Graham Brady provides an insider’s look at the power struggles, leadership challenges, and inner workings of the UK’s Conservative Party, especially during the upheaval of Brexit. Brady, as Chairman of the influential 1922 Committee, reveals how the party’s leadership dynamics and strategic decisions have shaped British politics in recent years.

One of the central themes is leadership and power. Brady examines Conservative leaders like David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, exploring their unique approaches to leadership and the challenges each faced, particularly around Brexit. The book highlights the role of the 1922 Committee, which often acts as a gatekeeper in leadership transitions and plays a critical role in maintaining—or challenging—party unity.

Brexit is a major focus, illustrating how the referendum and subsequent negotiations divided the party and redefined its priorities. Brady provides an inside look at the differing strategies of May and Johnson, from May’s struggles to secure a deal to Johnson’s assertive push to “Get Brexit Done.”

The book also explores party unity and division, revealing how internal conflicts, factionalism, and ideological rifts tested the party’s cohesion, especially during Brexit. Brady explains how these tensions influenced not only party policies but also public perception.

Additionally, Brady shares personal reflections from his time in a key leadership position, offering readers a behind-the-scenes view of critical decisions and events. He also discusses the impact of media and public opinion, emphasizing how they shape the strategies and images of political leaders.

Overall, Kingmaker provides a comprehensive view of the Conservative Party’s recent history, giving readers a unique perspective on political leadership, the challenges of Brexit, and the often-hidden forces influencing British politics.

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Matthew Ferrence, "I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Matthew Ferrence about his book I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay (West Virginia UP, 2024).

When a progressive college professor runs for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in a deeply conservative rural district, he loses. That’s no surprise. But the story of how Ferrence loses and, more importantly, how American political narratives refuse to recognize the existence and value of nonconservative rural Americans offers insight into the political morass of our nation.

In essays focused on showing goats at the county fair, planting native grasses in the front lawn, the political power of poetry, and getting wiped out in an election, Ferrence offers a counter-narrative to stereotypes of monolithic rural American voters and emphasizes the way stories told about rural America are a source for the bitter divide between Red America and Blue America.

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Robert A. Schneider, "The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The term “resentment,” often casually paired with words like “hatred,” “rage,” and “fear,” has dominated US news analysis since November 2016. Despite its increased use, this word seems to defy easy categorization. Does “resentment” describe many interlocking sentiments, or is it just another way of saying “anger”? Does it suggest an irrational grievance, as opposed to a legitimate callout of injustice? Does it imply political leanings, or is it nonpartisan by nature?

In The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (U Chicago Press, 2023), Robert A. Schneider explores these questions and more, moving from eighteenth-century Britain to the aftermath of the French Revolution to social movements throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment felt by people and movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment’s modernity and its ambiguity—how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition. Schneider anatomizes the many ways resentment has been used to label present-day movements, from followers of Trump and supporters of Brexit to radical Islamicists and proponents of identity politics. Addressing our contemporary political situation in a novel way, The Return of Resentment challenges us to think critically about the roles different emotions play in politics.

Robert A. Schneider is professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of three books, including, most recently, Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu.

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From Rubinomics to Bidenomics: On the Democratic Party’s Shifting Trade & Industrial Policy

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

This episode looks at shifting landscape of economic thinking within the Democratic Party. First, historian Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, tells us the story of how the Democrats became captured by the Clintonian ‘Third Way.’ The Third Way argued that economic policy should move away from the sunset industries, like the unionized industrial labour that typically made the Democratic base, and move towards the sunrise industries of tech and finance.

Then, the Biden team came to see this thinking as precipitating the rise of Trumpism. So free-wheeling trade and industrial policy is out, and the Clinton-era neoliberal consensus just is not a consensus anymore–some even claim neoliberalism is dead. Bidenomics replaced it, whatever that is. Yet, Bidenomics was a political dud, and now it looks like it might be on the way out. Where is the US’ economic policy thinking going on November 5th, and beyond? We try to figure that out, with the help of political economist Mark Blyth, author of the forthcoming Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.

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Is Democracy Failing to Deliver?

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A common argument to explain the ongoing global democratic crisis is that democracy has failed to deliver safe and prosperous lives for its citizens and people are getting disenchanted with it. Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett talk with host Licia Cianetti about why this is in fact not the case. Democracies the world over, they argue, are not being undone by disenchanted citizens but by leaders with predatory political ambitions that use all opportunities to defy constraints to their power.

Thomas Carothers is the Harvey V. Fineberg Chair and director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His co-authored piece with Brendan Hartnett on “Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding” was published in the July 2024 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

Brendan Hartnett was Junior Fellow at the Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and is now a Research Associate at Longwell Partners.

Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. Her piece on “The End of the Backsliding Paradigm” (with Seán Hanley) was also published in the Journal of Democracy.

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Kirsten Widner and Anna Gunderson, "The Haves and Have-Nots in Supreme Court Representation and Participation, 2016 to 2021" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There has been a lot of commentary from scholars and journalists as to the meaning of Donald Trump’s three appointments to the United States Supreme Court – with regards to changes in jurisprudence, increased separation of the Court from political processes that legitimate it. Drs. Kirsten Widner and Anna Gunderson have done something a little different using tools from political science.

Their new book, The Haves and Have-Nots in Supreme Court Representation and Participation, 2016 to 2021 (Cambridge UP 2024), examines how the changing composition of the US Supreme Court affects who participates in advocacy before the Court. Who thinks to bring a case to the Supreme Court and has that changed since three new justices were appointed during the presidency of Donald Trump? Their book argues that Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett have changed the behavior of both litigants (people bringing cases) and amicus curiae (groups that write briefs in support of either side).

Their study demonstrates that the growing conservatism of the Court radically reshaped the incentives of interested parties and, as a result, their participation in litigation activity. These changes in incentives have both normative and substantive importance – decreasing the power of marginalized groups and increasing opportunities for people and groups with conservative interests. Their study shows how the makeup of the Supreme Court affects the issues heard and which voices are heard loudest in the documents.

Kirsten Widner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her JD from the University of San Diego School of Law and her PhD from Emory University. Her research focuses on the political representation of marginalized and unenfranchised groups.

Anna Gunderson is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and she received her PhD from Emory University. She studies American politics; the politics of punishment and policing; judicial politics; state politics; and public policy.

Mentioned:

Anna Gunderson, Kirsten Widner, and Maggie Macdonald, “Pursuing Change or Pursuing Credit? Litigation and Credit Claiming on Social Media,” Journal of Law and Courts 2024.
Rebecca Kreitzer and Candis Watts, “Reproducible and replicable: An empirical assessment of the social construction of politically relevant target groups.”
Ann Schneider and Helen Ingram, “Social construction of target populations: Implications for politics and policy” and Policy Design for Democracy.

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Anuradha Sajjanhar, "The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi's India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How are technocratic experts supporting populist politics? In The New Experts Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India (Cambridge UP, 2024), Anuradha Sajjanhar, a Lecturer in Politics & Public Policy at the University of East Anglia examines the recent history of Indian Politics and the rise and impact of Hindu Nationalism. Often seen as distinct from each other, the book shows how technocratic ideas and populist rhetoric have combined in the Hindu Nationalist project. This intersection of technocratic promises, devised by thinktanks and intellectual networks, and populist politics, has come to dominate not only contemporary India, but much of global politics too. In this context, of a rising tide of populism, the books examination of the roots and consequences of technocratic expertise intertwined with populist platforms is essential reading for anyone interested in politics and society today.

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Michael Hardt, "The Subversive Seventies" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism.

The 1970s was a decade of "subversives". Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order--politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals--saw subversives everywhere. From indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to anti-nuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged authority, laid siege to the established order, and undermined time-honored ways of life. Every corner of the left was fertile ground for subversive elements, which the forces of order had to root out and destroy--a project they pursued with zeal and brutality.

In The Subversive Seventies (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies--often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful--are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today. While many accounts of the 1970s have been written about the regimes of domination that emerged throughout the decade, Hardt approaches the subversive from the perspectives of those who sought to undermine the base of established authority and transform the fundamental structures of society. In so doing, he provides a novel account of the theoretical and practical projects of liberation that still speak to us today, too many of which have been all but forgotten.

Departing from popular and scholarly accounts that focus on the social movements of the 1960s, Hardt argues that the 1970s offers an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action. Although we can still learn much from the movements of the sixties, that decade's struggles for peace, justice, and freedom fundamentally marked the end of an era. The movements of the seventies, in contrast, responded directly to emerging neoliberal frameworks and other structures of power that continue to rule over us today. They identified and confronted political problems that remain central for us. The 1970s, in this sense, marks the beginning of our time. Looking at a wide range of movements around the globe, from the United States, to Guinea Bissau, South Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Italy, The Subversive Seventies provides a reassessment of the political action of the 1970s that sheds new light not only on our revolutionary past but also on what liberation can be and do today.

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is co-director with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab.

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Talking Thai Politics: Prajak Kongkirati, Thailand: Contestation, Polarization and Democratic Regression (Cambridge 2024)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why has Thailand’s politics been so contested and so intensely polarized in recent decades? How can we account for the persistent democratic regression of the past twenty years, despite the fact that the parallel vigour of progressive oppositional politics remains a source of hope for many?

In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, prominent Thai political scientist Prajak Kongkirati discusses his new book Thailand: Contestation, Polarization and Democratic Regression (Cambridge UP, 2024), with Duncan McCargo. Prajak is an associate professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, and is well known for his extensive writings on Thai politics, notably on elections and political violence. His new book is an invaluable introductory text that anyone teaching Southeast Asian politics is likely to assign to their students.

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

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Melissa Deckman, "The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

As the 2024 American presidential election approaches, it is common to hear scholars and journalists discuss the role of particular groups such as Latino men or suburban white women might play in a razor tight race. Less attention is paid to the nation’s youngest voters: Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, these voters have experienced a decade of upheaval including, the murder of George Floyd, changing political norms with the election of Donald Trump, an insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Gen Z voters have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, these voters are mobilizing -- and left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have the potential to move U.S. politics to the left.

Dr. Melissa Deckman uses original data – including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys – to highlight the increasing role of Zoomers. She argues that women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic "reverse gender gap." Dr. Deckman explores Gen Z’s activism using mixed methods data and compelling personal narratives of how Gen Z activists have mobilized to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office. A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy (Columbia UP, 2024) sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

Dr. Melissa Deckman is the CEO of PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute. She is a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on public opinion and political behavior. She was previously the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs at Washington College. Her previous books include the Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right (2016) which examines the role of women in conservative politics.

Melissa mentions Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings, 2024) and the New Books Network’s Dan Hill interviewed with Richard Reeves about the book.

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India Rising: Navigating the Second Cold War in South Asia from Nepal to the Maldives

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relations with India and China? How does connectivity and infrastructure become a tool for geopolitical competition in the region, from China’s BRI to India’s infrastructural collaboration, and the US’s Millennium Challenges Corporation? On this episode we sit down with Dr. Dinesh Paudel and Aaron Magunna to answer these questions and discuss how it unfolds through cases in the Maldives and Nepal. A wide-ranging conversation, we learn about a rising India, India-China tensions, and how local politics shape the regional SCW.

Dr. Dinesh Paudel is a Professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. His current research focuses on exploring the relationships and entanglements between the rising Asian economies, growing environmental degradations and rapidly expanding infrastructure in the Himalaya. He has written extensively on infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal.

Aaron Magunna is a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia. His research focuses primarily on how countries in Asia, particularly India and Japan, respond to China-US competition by adapting their security, trade, and technology policies.

Resources:

Paudel, Dinesh. 2021. Himalayan BRI: an infrastructural conjuncture and shifting development in Nepal. Area Development and Policy.
Paudel, D., & Rankin, K. (2022). Himalayan geopolitical competition and the agency of the infrastructure state in Nepal. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State (pp. 213-226). Bristol University Press.

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Arash Azizi, "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom" (Oneworld, 2024)

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later, workers down their tools and businesses close. The battle cry everywhere: Women, Life, Freedom. This isn’t a passing protest wave; something has changed irrevocably.

Arash Azizi guides us through Iran ablaze, history being made in real time. From an International Women’s Day celebrated inside Iran’s most notorious prison to mass strikes in Kurdistan, ordinary Iranians are taking risks to fight for a better future. Even as the regime spills blood in retaliation, Iranians have not given up. Today one thing’s clear: no Supreme Leader can turn the clock back. A different Iran is within sight; Azizi shows us what it might look like in What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom (ONEWorld Publications, 2024).

Arash Azizi is an historian, visiting fellow at Boston University, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Steven Levitsky, "Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Forge a Democracy for All" (Crown, 2024)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

In Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Forge a Democracy for All (Crown, 2024), Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all.

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Sarah Ball, "Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice" (Routledge, 2022)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Max Weber once remarked that bureaucracy’s power comes from its massing of expert and factual knowledges. It amasses this power, in part, by keeping much of its expertise and factual knowledge from public view. Only occasionally does someone with access reveal more of what’s going on behind the scenes, and how it might matter for our thinking about how facts are produced and contested, and what kinds of facts matter to policy makers and why. Sarah Ball is one such person.

In Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice (Routledge, 2024), the former public servant draws on interviews and ethnographic observation to chart the making of a behavioural public policy unit in the Australian public service, asking — and answering — questions about how the unit sought to make facts and establish expertise, and how the many meanings of behavioural insights were contested and accommodated along the way.

If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series on the interpretation of policy, like Sarah Wiebe talking about Everyday Exposure, and more recently, José Ciro Martínez on States of Subsistence.

Sarah recommends Informality in Policymaking by Lindsey Garner-Knapp and others.

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E. L. Gaston, "Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about international law and human rights, and their funding was cut when they crossed red lines. To what extent have such mechanisms curbed the dangers of proxy warfare, and what unforeseen consequences has this approach unleashed?

Drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders, in Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Erica L. Gaston unpacks the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. She demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces. Moreover, by shifting policy makers’ calculations, the use of proxy forces introduced additional moral hazards and may have enabled riskier decision making. Featuring substantial empirical detail and close analysis of key internal debates, Illusions of Control offers new perspectives on some of the most significant and controversial elements of recent U.S. security policy. In addition to nuanced insights about proxy relationships, this book provides a novel analytical toolkit for exploring transnational bargaining and foreign policy deliberations in hybrid political environments.

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Jennifer Chudy, "Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Jennifer Chudy is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Dr. Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Dr. Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Dr. Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

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Sarah M. Stitzlein, "Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Democracy is struggling in an age of populism and post-truth. In a world swirling with competing political groups stating conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. The role of honesty in civic life is in jeopardy. When we lose sight of the importance of honesty, it hampers our ability to solve pressing problems. Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens (Oxford University Press, 2024) asserts that to better enable young citizens to successfully engage in civic inquiry, the role of honesty must be foregrounded within education.

The book posits that honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy. Building upon this foundation, Sarah M. Stitzlein defines what honesty is, how it is connected to truth, and why both are important to and at risk in democracies today. Furthermore, the chapters offer guidance on how honesty and truth should be taught in schools. Situated within the philosophical perspective of pragmatism, the book examines the relationships between honesty, truth, trust, and healthy democratic living and provides recommendations for improving citizenship education and our ability to engage in civic reasoning.

Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era offers an improved path forward within our schools by detailing how to cultivate habits of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Such honesty will better enable citizens to navigate our difficult political moment and increase the likelihood that citizens can craft long-term solutions for democratic life together.

Sarah M. Stitzlein is Professor of Education and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. Her research explores issues of political agency, educating for democracy, youth civic engagement, and equity in schools. She is the author of Learning How to Hope and American Public Education and the Responsibility of its Citizens, and co-editor of the journal Democracy & Education.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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The Social Contract in the Ruins: A Conversation with Dr. Paul DeHart

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent (University of Missouri Press, 2024). In this illuminating discussion, Dr. DeHart challenges the prevailing belief that social contract theory and classical natural law are fundamentally incompatible. His book offers a bold argument: political authority and obligation cannot be grounded solely in human agreement but must rest on a deeper, antecedent moral foundation—one that is uncreated and independent of human or divine will. Without this objective moral good, even the widely accepted principle of government by consent loses its coherence.

Throughout the episode, Dr. DeHart explores key philosophical questions surrounding political legitimacy and the moral underpinnings of authority. We dive into why modern approaches to grounding political authority through consent alone are self-defeating and how classical natural law is essential to upholding the principles that guide just governance.

Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the intersection between political theory, philosophy, and morality, as well as the relevance of these ideas in today's political landscape. Whether you're a scholar of political philosophy or simply curious about the foundations of political authority, this episode is packed with rich insights and thoughtful discussion.

Dr. Dehart’s other works:

Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design

Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Tevi Troy, "The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry" (Regnery History, 2024)

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When U.S. presidents clash with corporate titans, what tips the balance of power?

In The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry (Regnery History, 2024), acclaimed presidential historian Tevi Troy takes readers on a riveting journey through the biggest battles between CEOs and the nation's commander in chief. He unearths the untold stories - both political and personal - that have shaped America.

Troy shows how the vast reach of the federal government become a critical fact of life for every business, entrepreneur, and innovator. Today, companies find themselves navigating a competitive landscape defined by stringent regulations, so top CEOs and key business leaders must influence the legislative and regulatory system. As public affairs teams and government relations experts put forward strategies to survive Washington, CEOs have become the most important warrior on the frontlines. The Power and the Money shows how some of the nation's most important CEOs forged (and fumbled) relationships with the president.

Troy also shows how the most powerful man in the world depends on CEOs. CEOs provide assistance in the form of personnel, policy insights, and campaign cash, but they also become essential foils for presidents, serving as both allies and convenient enemies.

The Power and the Money reveals an intricate web of power, where CEOs need presidents, and presidents need CEOs. Troy shows how each must step carefully - or risk unpredictable costs and collateral damage. From heavyweights John D. Rockefeller and Mark Zuckerberg to Katherine Graham, Elon Musk, and more, Troy takes readers inside the friendships and the conflicts that shook the American economy and re-shaped America.

Drawing on his experiences as bestselling historian and former senior White House aide, Troy offers unique insights and details that shed light on the growing, intertwining behemoths of government and big business - and what it means for the future of our nation.

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Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.

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Jamie Furlong and Will Jennings, "The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Furlong a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster and Will Jennings Associate Dean Research & Enterprise and Professor at the University of Southampton, analyse the continuities and changes in history of party support at general elections. The book uses a variety of methods- and a huge range of data- to critically interrogate the idea of ‘left behind’ places, as well as interrogating the long term social, economic, and cultural changes associated with those places and that idea. Rich in detail, including case studies of places that stand out within the overall trends, and accessibly written, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics.

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Jacques Bertrand, "Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities.

Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

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Chris Cutrone, "Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory 2006-2024" (Sublation Media, 2024)

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism's own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.

Chris Cutrone's Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory 2006-2024 (Sublation Media, 2024) span the time of the Millennial Left's abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone's participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large--but was abandoned. Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism's accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist "message in a bottle" cast adrift by hisotry yet be received?

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Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What skills and strategies enable civil society to be effective under authoritarian rule? Dr. Runya Qiaoan, assistant professor and senior researcher at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, explores this question in her book Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State (Routledge, 2021).

The book highlights the ways NGOs and activists navigate the constraints of China's authoritarian system through both cooperation and subtle resistance. Qiaoan emphasizes the concept "cultural resonance", showing how civil society aligns its goals with culturally accepted values to subtly advocate for social change.

The episode is hosted by Dr. Linas Didvalis, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University and its Centre for Asian Studies.

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Victor C. Shih, "Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao's Stratagem to the Rise of Xi" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Coalitions of the Weak (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi's rapid consolidation of power after 2012.

Victor Shih is Professor of Political Science, Director of the 21st Century China Center, and Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert on the politics of Chinese banking policies, fiscal policies, and exchange rate, as well as the elite politics of China. His first book was "Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation" also with Cambridge University Press, and he edited the collection "Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions," published by the University of Michigan Press. Shih also has published widely in a number of journals, including The American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, The China Quarterly, and Party Politics. In our discussion he also mentions his latest work on China’s local government debt crisis, available here.

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How have Bureaucratic Politics Undermined Pakistan’s Prospects for Democracy?

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For many years, explanations of Pakistan’s politics and its failed democratic transition have focused on the role of the military and politicians. But how have the country’s bureaucrats contributed to the failed democratic transition? And why do their interactions with politicians continue to perpetuate the country’s political instability? Listen as Petra Alderman talks to Sameen Ali about Pakistani bureaucrats, their appointments and interactions with politicians, and the ways in which these interactions have kept Pakistan in the grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism.

Sameen A. Mohsin Ali is an Assistant Professor of International Development at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham, where she works on the impact of bureaucratic politics on state capacity and service delivery. Her research on bureaucratic politics in Pakistan has been published in leading politics and development journals, including World Development, European Journal of Development Research, and Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

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S4E9 The Fragility of China: A Conversation with Dennis Unkovic

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Dennis Unkovic to discuss his latest book, The Fragility of China (Encounter Books, 2024). Unkovic delves into the complex forces shaping China's political, economic, and social landscape. From the country's rising internal challenges to its evolving role on the global stage, Unkovic offers a nuanced perspective on why China's future may be more uncertain than it appears. He unpacks the key themes of his book, including economic instability, demographic shifts, and geopolitical tensions, while offering insights into what these trends mean for the rest of the world.

Dennis Unkovic is an international attorney with decades of experience advising global businesses on trade, investment, and international relations. He is a prolific author and speaker, known for his expertise in U.S.-Asia relations. In addition to The Fragility of China, Unkovic has authored several books and articles on global trade and economic issues.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

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The UN and its Discreet Diplomacy in Peacemaking

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews Bertrand Ramcharan, former top UN diplomat and author of the recent book, The UN Security Council and Its Protective Function (Melrose Legal Publishers, 2024). Ramcharan describes the many instances in which the UN Secretaries-General worked discreetly to secure peace agreements in conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq war, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Russia-Georgia territorial dispute. He argues that these mediations followed three specific strategies: discreet diplomacy, patience, and waiting for the ripeness of conflicts, through which Secretaries-General have deployed their good offices. Ramcharan also proposes using previously successful approaches to address the current conflicts in Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan, which involve working with Great Powers instead of lecturing them and appointing envoys whose prestige may enhance the credibility of the UN and facilitate conflict resolution.

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Jonathan Turley, "The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

“It’s a free country.” Many of us recall saying that as children as we learned that we were American citizens who were endowed with certain rights—such as free speech. We would use those words when we wanted to assert our own rights when we were being bullied or chastised. We would use them to let others know that even if we did not agree with what they were saying or doing, they were within their rights to express certain opinions or to do certain things.

How many American adults feel as confident now about expressing our views in public settings as we did when we were children or young adults?

In his authoritative but general-reader-friendly new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage legal scholar and public intellectual Jonathan Turley argues that many Americans nowadays are “speech phobic” and employ terms such as “hate speech” to shut down legitimate discussion of such topics as immigration, government policies during the height of the Covid pandemic and transgenderism. He maintains that free expression is imperative for human flourishing and that stifling it can lead to a spiral of frustration boiling up to rage, which is then repressed by expressions of state rage such as the Palmer Raids and the excesses of McCarthyism.

Turley walks us through the history of free speech in America and across today’s minefields of topics that can get even average people cancelled—and what forms “canceling” can take.

In approachable, fairly short chapters Professor Turley reminds us of how quickly some of the heroes of the American Revolution and champions of liberty devolved into semi-tyrants. His treatment of John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts (the latter of which rendered it a crime to, “print, utter, or publish...any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government) is particularly eye-opening and provides crucial background as the reader proceeds through the book. The concept of sedition is a major focus of the book and alerts us as citizens that it is not a matter confined to centuries ago, but a matter very much in the forefront of the American legal and political landscape in the wake what happened in Washington DC in January 2021.

Indeed, what we should call what those events is another fascinating focus of the book. Turley argues forcefully and persuasively that January 6 was not an insurrection but a protest that became a riot. This was a brave stance to take given that, as he points out in the book, anyone who argued that January 6 was anything but an insurrection was in danger of being labeled a sympathizer or an apologist for the rioters.

Turley’s book has become even more of a crucial read in the wake of the anti-Israel protests on college campuses in the spring of 2024. Ditto some shockingly anti-free-speech comments recently by supposedly mainstream Democrats such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

We will touch on the status of free speech as an issue in the 2024 presidential election and how free speech has been impacted by the Biden-Harris administration. The topic of censorship came up, for example, in the 2024 vice-presidential debate and we will get Professor Turley’s take on that.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, "Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians" (NYU Press, 2024)

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What threatens American democracy and the rule of law? In her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians (NYU Press, 2024),

legal scholar and campaign spending expert Ciara Torres-Spelliscy argues that the USA’s privately-funded campaign finance system – combined with corporate greed and antidemocratic strains in the modern Republican Party – endangers American democracy. As she sees it, unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence our elections, while anti-democratic rhetoric threatens a tilt towards authoritarianism.

Drawing on key Supreme Court cases such as Citizens United, Professor Torres-Spelliscy explores how corporations have undermined democratic norms, practices, and laws. From bankrolling regressive politicians to funding ghost candidates with dark money, the book exposes how corporations subvert the will of the American people – yet courts struggle to hold corporate interests and corrupt politicians accountable. If American democracy is going to survive in the long term, then the deep pockets of the largest corporations cannot be allowed to join focus with the anti-democratic fringe. Professor Torres-Spelliscy fears a repeat of the January 6th insurrection – but with expansive corporate sponsorship.

Professor Torres Spelliscy outlines the ways in which Corporate forces might be held accountable by the courts, their shareholders, and citizens themselves. Along with other reforms, she proposes a democracy litmus test that requires loyalty to democracy in politics and the economy.

The end of the podcast features her insights on how oil interests crypto “techno bros” have invested in the outcome of the November 2024 election.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a Professor of Law at Stetson Law. She is also a Brennan Center Fellow at NYU Law School who has testified before Congress as an expert on campaign finance and has helped draft Supreme Court briefs. Previously, she authored Corporate Citizen (Carolina 2016) and Political Brands (Elgar 2019). She has recently written about public financing and the Eric Adams indictments and crypto spending in the 2024 election.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Judd Legum's work on corporate PACs in his Substack, Popular Information
Photo with Barack Obama for which Jho Low paid $20 million can be seen here
Example of 2022 media attempts to identify “sedition caucus” and election deniers for voters

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Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.

The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond.

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Megan Bradley et al., "IOM Unbound?: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It is an era of expansion for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an increasingly influential actor in the global governance of migration. Bringing together leading experts in international law and international relations, this collection examines the dynamics and implications of IOM's expansion in a new way.

Analyzing IOM as an international organization (IO), IOM Unbound?: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates the practices, obligations and accountability of this powerful but controversial actor, advancing understanding of IOM itself and broader struggles for IO accountability. The contributions explore key, yet often under-researched, IOM activities including its role in humanitarian emergencies, internal displacement, data collection, ethical labour recruitment, and migrant detention. Offering recommendations for reforms rooted in empirical evidence and careful normative analysis, this is a vital resource for all those interested in the obligations and accountability of international organizations, and in the field of migration. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriously

Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was.

Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024), many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values—our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.

A lively, engaging, and uplifting guide to living well, the liberal way, Liberalism as a Way of Life is filled with examples from television, movies, stand-up comedy, and social media—from Parks and Recreation and The Good Place to the Borat movies and Hannah Gadsby. Along the way, you’ll also learn about seventeen benefits of being a liberal—including generosity, humor, cheer, gratitude, tolerance, and peace of mind—and practical exercises to increase these rewards.

Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He teaches and researches in political theory, the history of political thought

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Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea" (Harvard UP, 2013)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.

A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world's sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.

Revealing how Pakistan's troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

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Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe.

In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing Communism's ascent from theory to practice, McMeekin ranges from Karl Marx's writings to the rise and fall of the USSR under Stalin to Mao's rise to power in China to the acceleration of Communist or Communist-inspired policies around the world in the twenty-first century. McMeekin argues, however, that despite the endurance of Communism, it remains deeply unpopular as a political form. Where it has arisen, it has always arisen by force.

Blending historical narrative with cutting-edge scholarship, To Overthrow the World revolutionizes our understanding of the evolution of Communism--an idea that seemingly cannot die.

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Jon Michaels and David Noll, "Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy" (Atria/One Signal, 2024)

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Law professors Jon Michaels and David Noll use their expertise to expose how state-supported forms of vigilantism are being deployed by MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy. Beyond identifying the dangers of vigilantism, Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy (Atria/One Signal, 2024) functions as a call to arms with a playbook for a democratic response.

Michaels and Noll look back in time to make sense of today's American politics. They demonstrate how Christian nationalists have previously used state-supported forms of vigilantism when their power and privilege have been challenged. The book examines the early republic, abolitionism, and Reconstruction.

Since the failed coup by supporters of Former president Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, Michaels and Noll document how overlapping networks of right-wing lawyers, politicians, plutocrats, and preachers have resurrected state-supported vigilantism – using wide ranging methods including book bans, anti-abortion bounties, and attacks on government proceedings, especially elections. Michaels and Noll see the US at a critical inflection point in which state-sponsored vigilantism is openly supported by GOP candidates for president and vice-president, Project 2025, and wider networks, Michaels and Noll move beyond analysis to action: 19 model laws to pass. The supporters of democratic equality are numerous and dexterous enough to create a plan to fight radicalism and vigilantism and secure the broad promises of the civil rights revolution.

Jon Michaels is a professor of law at UCLA Law, where he teaches and writes about constitutional law, public administration, and national security. He has written numerous articles in law reviews including Yale, University of Chicago, and Harvard and also public facing work in venues like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.

David Noll is a law professor at Rutgers Law School. He teaches and writes on courts, administrative law, and legal movements. He publishes scholarly work in law reviews such as California, Cornell, Michigan and NYU and translates for wider audiences in places like the New York Times, Politico, and Slate.

Mentioned in the podcast:

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (Norton) by Margaret A. Burnham
Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Liveright) by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
Hannah Nathanson at the Washington Post who was part of a team of journalists awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol
Previous interviews with scholars addressing the breakdown of American democracy: Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman) Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic (Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King); How Democracies Die (Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt); The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (David M. Driesen and A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People (Kevin J. McMahon)

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Prabowo Subianto and the Decline of Indonesian Democracy

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s episode focuses on Indonesia, the presidential election held in February 2024, and the impending inauguration of the winner of that election, former Army general and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, in a few weeks’ time. Prabowo’s victory in February, events over the past several months, and the imminent transition to a Prabowo presidency have heightened concerns about the state of democracy in Indonesia. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Ed Aspinall, one of the world’s leading specialists on Indonesian politics and someone who has been writing about worrying trends in Indonesian politics for many years.

Edward Aspinall is Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Corall Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). He is the author of Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2005), Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2009), (with Ward Berenschot) Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019), and (with Allen Hicken, Paul Hutchcroft, and Meredith Weiss) Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Networks in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University press, 2022). He is the co-editor of a book series with National University of Singapore Press and co-editor of the Southeast Asian Politics and Society Elements series published by Cambridge University Press.

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Jerome E. Copulsky, "American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A question has long hung over the the United States regarding the proper role of religion in public life. Those who long for a Christian America claim that the Founders intended a nation with political values and institutions shaped by Christianity. Secularists argue that those same Founders designed an enlightened republic where church and state should be kept separate.

American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale UP, 2024), Jerome E. Copulsky examines the Americans who rejected the secularism of American society, predicted the collapse of the nation, and hoped to develop a new and decidedly Christian commonwealth.

By reviewing extreme religious dissent from colonial times through the current age, Copulsky shows how these thinkers opposed the American orthodoxy of pluralist democracy on theological grounds. Their views are diametrically opposed to the idea of America as a place where multiple sects and creeds peacefully coexist. Each chapter explains a different strain of heresy, beginning with loyal Anglicans who opposed the American Revolution and ending with current National Conservatives who embrace illiberal populism in an effort to enact their vision of a Christian America.

Author recommended reading:

The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents.

Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And, moreover, the idea that modern elections reveal or express such a will remains dubious. Accordingly, a good deal of democratic theory aims to fill in the missing details regarding the collective will and its representation.

In The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford University Press 2024), Samuel Bagg takes a different tack by proposing a vision of democracy where the central aim is to protect public power from capture.

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Amos C. Fox, "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare" (Howgate, 2024)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare (Howgate Publishing, 2024) by Amos C. Fox is for you. It delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike. What’s more, just as attritional wars are becoming quite common, conflict elongation – wars of extended duration – are also becoming the norm. Through insightful analysis and a keen understanding of geopolitical intricacies, Amos Fox navigates the reader through the intricate interplay of these trends, shedding light on their profound implications for global security. This riveting work challenges conventional wisdom, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary nature of armed conflicts, ultimately urging a reconsideration of strategies and policies in the face of an ever-evolving battlefield.

Amos C. Fox, PhD, is a Fellow with Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative. Amos is also a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. He hosts the Revolution in Military Affairs, Soldier Pulse and WarCast podcasts, serves as an editorial board member with the Journal of Military Studies and is a senior editor with Small Wars Journal. Amos is also a retired US Army officer, where he served more than 24 years, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, "The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The image of the sheriff is deeply embedded in American culture – from pacifist Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again and gun averse Roy Scheider in Jaws to those more comfortable wielding power like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, and Gary Cooper in High Noon.

In the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the political and legal systems. Sheriffs oversee more than a third of law enforcement employees and control almost all local jails. They have the power to both set and administer policies, and sheriffs can imprison, harm, and even kill members of their communities. Although sheriffs are elected by voters, these elections are usually noncompetitive and low-visibility. Sheriffs enjoy a degree of autonomy not seen by other political officeholders.

In The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States (U Chicago Press, 2024), Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman draw on two original surveys of sheriffs taken nearly a decade apart, as well as election data, case studies, and administrative data to argue that the autonomy and authority granted to sheriffs in the United States create an environment where sheriffs rarely change; elections seldom create meaningful accountability; employees, budgets, and jails can be used for political gains; marginalized populations can be punished; and reforms fail.

Drs. Farris and Holman track the increasingly close linkages between sheriffs and right-wing radical groups and demonstrate how sheriffs holding negative views of marginalized groups leads to unequal policing and discriminatory policies that fail to protect marginalized groups – particularly in the areas of intimate partner violence, racial profiling in traffic enforcement, and immigration enforcement. If the sheriff does not like your group, he structures hiring, training, and policy in his office to punish you. Farris and Holman also interrogate the ways in which sheriffs extract resources to maintain and profit from the carceral state. The book contributes to scholarship on local politics, American political development, federalism, political behavior, sociology, criminal justice, public administration and policy, and political extremism.

Dr. Emily M. Farris is an associate professor in Political Science and core faculty in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on urban and racial and ethnic politics.

Dr. Mirya R. Holman is an associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She is an expert on gender and politics, urban politics, and political behavior and has published widely in these areas.

Both Emily and Mirya have been cited widely in outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other important public facing venues.

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Inés Valdez, "Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antitheses of imperialism, while histories of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe and its settler offshoots ignore the imperial setting of struggles for suffrage expansion and institutional change altogether.

Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2023) casts doubt on both of these tendencies. My guest, Ines Valdez, argues that popular sovereignty in the global North contains an affective attachment to wealth that is secured through collective agreements to dominate others, a phenomenon she calls “self-and-other determination.” The book details how social reproduction in the US and Western Europe is enabled by the exploitation of racialized others who sacrifice their families and communities to perform arduous and poorly-paid menial jobs, only to be derided and oppressed by the populations who depend on their labor. It also shows how the political alienation from nature it wealthy countries is mediated by technology and enabled by a joint devaluation of nature and manual labor performed by racialized others. The book concludes with a theorization of anti-imperial popular sovereignty grounded in transnational movements and political relations that encompass nature.

Ines Valdez is Associate Professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the author of Transnational Cosmopolitianism: Kant, Dubois, and Justice as a Political Craft (Cambridge, 2019).

Democracy and Empire is available open access here.

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Jack A. Goldstone, "Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and have at times won miraculous victories, though at other times suffered devastating defeat.

Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) illuminates the revolutionaries, their strategies, their successes and failures, and the ways in which revolutions continue to dominate world events and the popular imagination. Starting with the city-states of ancient Greece and Rome, Jack Goldstone traces the development of revolutions through the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment and liberal constitutional revolutions such as in America, and their opposite--the communist revolutions of the 20th century. He shows how revolutions overturned dictators in Nicaragua and Iran and brought the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and examines the new wave of non-violent "color" revolutions--the Philippines' Yellow Revolution, Ukraine's Orange Revolution--and the Arab Uprisings of 2011-12 that rocked the Middle East.

In this new edition, Goldstone also sheds light on the major theories of revolution, exploring the causes of revolutionary waves, the role of revolutionary leaders, the strategies and processes of revolutionary change, and the intersection between revolutions and shifting patterns of global power. Further, he explores the role social media and nonviolence play in modern revolutions. Finally, he examines the reasons for diverse revolutionary outcomes, from democracy to civil war and authoritarian rule, and the likely future of revolution in years to come.

Jack A. Goldstone is the Hazel Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy at George Mason University. He has previously held positions at the University of California, Northwestern University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.

Ian Williams, a long-standing reporter on China, has a new argument in Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024).

Rules and agreements mean little. Markets are distorted, statistics fabricated, foreign industrial secrets and technology systematically stolen. Companies and entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, are bullied – often with the collusion of the victims themselves. The Party is in every boardroom and lab, with businesses thriving or dying at its will.

All this is part of realising President Xi Jinping’s ambition of China becoming the world’s pre-eminent economic, technological and military power.

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David L. Swartz, "The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity" (Routledge, 2024)

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Remember the bleach drinking episode? Remember ‘alternative facts’? Remember ‘I have the best words’? These elements of the Trump presidency spoke to a fundamental part of his politics: truth and science were not prime among his considerations. Given this, one may assume that academics would have been especially unlikely to be drawn to the Trump presidency.

Yet, in his fascinating book The Academic Trumpists: Radicals against Liberal Democracy (Routledge, 2024), David Swartz outlines a group of public intellectuals who supported, and largely continue to support, Trump. These 109 Academic Trumpists are not marginal to American academia but rather can be found in middle to high-ranking schools and sometimes have backgrounds in elite institutions. Swartz demonstrates however how they cluster in particular disciplines and institutions and make use of a significant network of populist conservative thinktanks. By comparing these Trumpists with 89 conservative professors who are anti-Trump, Swartz is able to show the distinctive political positions the Trumpists adopt, especially concerning ‘liberal’ campus culture and the appeal of Trump as a ‘wrecking ball’. This populist politics and their distinct networks differ them from their conservative peers who see Trump as a threat and fundamentally not conservative.

In our conversation we discuss who these academic Trumpists are, the details of their positioning and why, despite everything, they continue to support Trump. We also consider what possibility there maybe for an allegiance between liberal and anti-Trump conservative professors in the US.

Your host Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology. He is the author of a number of books, including G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan)

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Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of inequitable and predatory tax laws in the United States. He examines the structural traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less despite being taxpayers with fewer resources compared to white taxpayers. Kahrl exposes these practices, From Reconstruction up to the present, Kahrl exposes these practices to describe how discrimination continues to take new forms, even as people continue to fight for their rights, their assets, and their power.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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David M. Driesen, "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Republic…if you can keep it.” In The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford UP, 2021), David M. Driesen argues that Donald Trump's presidency challenged Americans to consider whether the Madisonian system of checks and balances could robustly respond to a president claiming extensive executive power and disregarding traditional processes such as the peaceful transition of power. Driesen notes that Benjamin Franklin and many men in the “founding” generation observed tyrannical government in Europe – and they explicitly included safeguards in the U.S. Constitution to prevent extensive executive power in the United States.

In this tradition, Driesen analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. He argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to constitutional democracy. Driesen urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes of these failing democracies. Specifically, he sees the United States Supreme Court as enabling the expansion of executive power. Specter of Dictatorship highlights how the Supreme Court’s reliance on and expansion of the legal approach called unitary executive theory threatens the separation of powers in the U.S. Driesen recommends a less deferential approach in which the judiciary checks the executive. The Supreme Court has been acting a if policing presidential power is the threat to democracy – but the real danger for constitutional democracy lies in expansion of executive power. For Driesen, judges and justices should give substantial weight to concerns about democratic erosion. Because autocracy is spreading abroad and presidential power is expanding in the US, Benjamin Franklin’s concern about maintaining democracy is relevant in 2024.

Professor Driesen is the thirteenth University Professor at Syracuse University where he teaches constitutional and environmental law. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and has published several books and numerous articles with leading academic publishers and law reviews.

From the podcast:

David’s piece on major questions doctrine
David’s editorial on the POTUS debate, Victor Orban, and Haitian Immigrants

Correction from Susan – the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade were appointed by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The justices voting in favor of reproductive rights were 5 men appointed by Republican presidents (Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon) and 2 men appointed by Democratic presidents (Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson).

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The Far-Right Threat in German Politics: A Discussion with Marcus Böick

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The recent elections in eastern Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to win a parliamentary election at the state level in postwar Germany, raised significant concern internationally about what’s happening in Germany. Should we be concerned?

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey talks with Marcus Böick, assistant professor of history at the University of Cambridge, on the difficulties that have attended the process of unification in Germany since 1989 and their consequences for German politics. Böick addresses the reasons behind the AfD's success and how those in eastern Germany have experienced the process, their dissatisfaction with traditional parties and their migration policies, and their sense of being ignored by the country’s political elites. Böick delves into AfD's radicalization and the charisma of Björn Höcke as a factor in AfD's victory, and the prospects for the election in Brandenburg this weekend, which could further complicate Germany's political landscape at both the state and national levels.

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Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and international financial institutions have made headlines for their growing influence in the world economy. State-backed investment vehicles based in the Gulf states have made high-profile investments in global real estate markets and professional sports, while their state-owned firms have become world leaders in the logistics and natural resource sectors. Governments around the world – including in the heartlands of advanced capitalism – have promoted the interests of ‘national champion’ companies in strategic economic sectors, bailed out financial institutions by taking toxic assets off of their balance sheets, and implemented industrial policies with the aim of moving into the most profitable segments of global value chains.

What accounts for this renewed prominence of states in global capitalism? Does the increased activism of states mark the end of neoliberal hegemony? And how do contemporary state-led economic initiatives compare to the heyday of Keynesian and developmentalist policy agendas in the decades immediately following World War II?

The book that we are discussing today, The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2024) by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, marks the culmination of a highly productive research project that the authors have led on the compulsions and constraints that shape the ‘new’ state capitalism. The book aims to challenge narratives that pathologize state capitalism as an authoritarian deviation from the ‘normal’ course of free market capitalism while also showing how new forms of state activism depart from earlier models of state-led development.

Ilias Alami is a University assistant professor in the political economy of development at Cambrdige University. His previous book is Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets (2019). Adam Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Heriot Watt University’s Ediburgh Business School. He is the author of several books, most recently Sovereign Wealth Funds: Between States and Markets (2022).

This book is available open access here.

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Andreas E. Feldmann, "Repertoires of Terrorism: Organizational Identity and Violence in Colombia's Civil War" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Dr. Andreas E. Feldmann examines the disparate behaviour of actors including guerrilla groups, state security forces, and paramilitaries during Colombia’s long and bloody civil war. Analysing the varieties of violence in this conflict, he develops a new theory of the dynamics of terrorism in civil wars.

In Repertoires of Terrorism: Organizational Identity and Violence in Colombia's Civil War (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Feldmann argues that armed groups’ distinct uses—repertoires—of terrorism arise from their particular organisational identities, the central and enduring attributes that distinguish one faction from other warring parties. He investigates a range of groups that took part in the Colombian conflict over the course of its evolution from ideological to criminal warfare, demonstrating that organisational identity plays a critical role in producing and rationalising violence. Armed parties employ their unique repertoires as a means of communication to assert their relevance and territorial presence and to differentiate themselves from enemies and rivals. Repertoires of Terrorism is based on an extensive data set covering thousands of incidents, as well as interviews, archival research, and testimony. It sheds new light on both armed groups’ use of violence in Colombia’s civil war and the factors that shape terrorist activity in other conflicts.

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Joanna Allan, "Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019)

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men.

In Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (U Wisconsin Press, 2029), Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to a subject that has often been looked at through the lens of literary studies to examine how concerns for equality and women's rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects. She reveals how Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with Western states and corporations, conjure a mirage of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women's rights in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals, and other natural resources. This genderwashing, along with historical local, indigenous, and colonially imposed gender norms mixed with Western misconceptions about African and Arab gender roles, plays an integral role in determining the shape and composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.

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Why Almost Everything You Think about Protests in Africa is Wrong

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For decades, media and academic analysis of African politics has emphasised instability, political violence, and male dominance. Yet a brilliant new article by Zoe Marks for the Journal of Democracy entitled “African Popular Protest and Political Change” reveals that in fact Africa stands out as the region globally with the largest number of nonviolent campaigns both in the 1990s and since. What is more, these nonviolent movements have been more likely to include women than those in other parts of the world and are particularly youthful. Listen as Nic Cheeseman talks to Zoe Marks about her findings, and why non-violent protests with extensive women’s participation are more likely to succeed.

Dr Zoe Marks is lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies. She conducts pioneering research on a number of topics, including why autocrats fear women and gender dynamics in rebel groups. She is the coauthor (with Erica Chenoweth) of the forthcoming book Bread and Roses: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution, which explores the impact of women’s participation on mass movements.

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zionist movement. In 1932, a recommendation letter from the jurist and later Nazi party member Carl Schmitt enabled Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Strauss continued his work in France and England before settling in the United States in 1937, teaching at the New School and other colleges, and then becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago in 1949. It is in America that Strauss wrote his most famous works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing, On Tyranny, Natural Right and History, The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, and many other works. His work typically takes the form of interpretations of ancient authors, especially Plato.

Over the years, Strauss attracted many dedicated students, who became known as “Straussians,” spreading his influence not only within academia but eventually into the American government. Straussians would attain such prominence and eventually cause such controversy, that, decades after Strauss’ death, the field of political science was gripped by what would become known as “the Strauss wars.” Strauss wrote in a difficult, densely layered and evasive style that has led to long-lasting disputes about whether his apparent endorsement of liberal democracy was genuine, or whether his work contains an esoteric teaching about human hierarchies, one that might justify illiberal and anti-democratic Machiavellian coups. Heightening the urgency of figuring out what Strauss truly stood for is the widespread view that Straussians who worked in the State Department and Defense Department and who came to be called “Neoconservatives” were instrumental in launching the Iraq war in 2003, and are otherwise associated with hawkish, not to say hubristic and imperial U.S. foreign policy.

But, leaving the neocons aside; Leo Strauss, Jewish Nazi? Could such a charge possibly be fair? Who is the real Leo Strauss? These are the questions that bring us to this author and this book. William Henry Furness Altman is a retired public high school teacher and author of many articles and books on figures including Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and indeed, Leo Strauss.

The book we are discussing today is entitled The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2010). William Altman’s first published book is an extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted work substantiating his charge that Leo Strauss, the revered and influential Jewish emigre, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, did indeed harbor a lifelong commitment to the principles of Nazi ideology and that such indeed is Strauss’ secret teaching.

Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. His studies focus on ancient religion, philosophy, political theory, critical theory, and history. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com.

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Celebrating Constitution Day, Part. 2: A Conversation with Julia Mahoney

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this conversation, we dive into key issues shaping the legal landscape today: the complexities of constitutional interpretation, the evolving role and power of the judiciary, and how corruption can impact government systems. We also explored the critical role that civic education plays in maintaining a healthy democracy.

Julia D. Mahoney is the John S. Battle Professor of Law and the Joseph C. Carter, Jr. Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she teaches courses in Constitutional Law and Property Law. Her recent scholarship includes articles on government takings of property, the classical legal tradition in education, and feminism and common good constitutionalism. A graduate of the Yale Law School, she is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the Board of Advisors of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Show Notes:

A Common Good Constitutional Feminism, Julia Mahoney. Law and Liberty | August 2022

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Kevin J. McMahon, "A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpreting the Constitution or the justices conservative ideology, Dr. Kevin J. McMahon suggests that the key issue is democratic legitimacy. Historically, the Supreme Court has always had some “democracy gap” – democratically elected presidents appoint justices that serve for life. As presidents select justices, they attempt to move the Supreme Court in their desired ideological direction while “simultaneously advancing their electoral interests and managing their governing coalition.” Despite these forces, Dr. McMahon argues that past Supreme Courts were still closer to democratic principles. Today’s court is exceptional because the “democracy gap” is severe.

A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People (U Chicago Press, 2024) draws on historical and contemporary data to reveal how the long arc of court battles (from FDR to Donald Trump) created this democracy gap. McMahon highlights changes to the politics of nominating and confirming justices, the changes in who is even considered to be in the pool to be a Supreme Court justice, and the increased salience of the Court in elections.

Dr. Kevin J. McMahon (he/him) is the John R. Reitemeyer [RightMeyer]Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, and the author of two award-winning books, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race and Nixon’s Court, both published by The University of Chicago Press. Together with A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other, the three books form a trilogy that interrogates whether 100 years of presidential efforts to shape the high court affect the supreme court’s democratic legitimacy.

Dr. McMahon also writes public facing essays in outlets such as US News & World Report and The Conversation. For example, The Presidential Immunity Case & American Democracy, President Biden & the Courage it Takes to Call it Quits, Conservative Justices Polarized on the State of American Politics, and Calls for a Supreme Court Justice to Retire.

Susan mentioned a stark New York Times graphic of how 6 senators (CA, NY, TX) represent the same number of voters as 62 senators. 2022 data (but less dramatically presented) is here.

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Jennifer Redmond and Mary McAuliffe, "The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer in Gender Studies at UCD. Her latest publications include (is The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn co-authored with Harriet Wheelock) and Margaret Skinnider; a biography (UCD Press,2020). Throughout the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 she has been conducting extensive research on the experiences of women during the War of Independence and Civil War and is currently completing her book based on that research, OUTRAGE: Gendered and Sexual Violence in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923 (forthcoming 2025). Jennifer Redmond is Associate Professor in Twentieth Century Irish History in the Department of History at Maynooth University. She is the author of Moving Histories: Irish Women’s Emigration to Britain from Independence to Republic and the co-editor of Irish Women in the First World War Era. She also sits on the Editorial Board for the journal, Women's History Review and for the Documents in Irish Foreign Policy series, a joint initiative of the National Archives of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.

In this interview, they discuss their new edited collection The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2024) as well as their own intellectual backgrounds and views on Irish history-writing.

The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland is an edited collection of focused, cohesive and persuasive essays, based on the newest research on gender, sexuality and sexual politics. It offers historical reflections and contemporary analyses of issues related to the contested and often hidden histories of sexual politics and gender identities in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Including but going beyond the binary of male and female heterosexual experience, the book explores LGBTQI+ histories, the treatment of intersex persons, and the history of trans people and activism in Ireland. As an interdisciplinary work, this reader draws together scholars working in a range of fields on innovative, new research on this theme. The essays consider these histories as seen over two centuries and reflect on the societal shifts in modern Ireland as evidenced in two recent referenda and the responses to the scandals emerging from the state’s treatment of unmarried mothers.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University

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Meg Rithmire, "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation?

In Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford UP, 2023) (Oxford, 2023), Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia's state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation.

To understand these developments, Rithmire, a professor at Harvard Business School, presents two conceptual models of state-business relations that explain their genesis and why variation occurs over time. She shows that mutual alignment occurs when an authoritarian regime organizes its institutions, or even its informal practices, to induce capitalists to invest in growth and development. Mutual endangerment, on the other hand, obtains when economic and political elites are entangled in corrupt dealings and invested in perpetuating each other's dominance. The loss of power on one side would bring about the demise of the other. Rithmire contends that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are trust between business and political elites, determined during regime formation, and the dynamics of financial liberalization. Empirically rich and sweeping in scope, Precarious Ties offers lessons for all nations in which the state and the private sector are deeply entwined.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.

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Postscript: Harris, Trump, and the Politics of Presidential Debates

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In June, a presidential debated ended the candidacy of incumbent President Joe Biden. On September 10th, Vice President Kamala Harris and Former President Donald Trump debated in Philadelphia and two flash polls done by CNN and YouGov declared Harris the winner. Political scientists know that debate wins don’t necessarily translate into November victories. Barack Obama lost his first debate and Walter Monday won his. To unpack the impact of this usually September debate, we have two presidential politics scholars and friends of the podcast. The spirited conversation highlights baiting techniques used by Harris, the role of the moderators in fact checking, whether a hand shake shook up Trump, the meaning of “she put out,” and

Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Dr. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University.

We mentioned:

Trump speaking 43 minutes to Harris’s 37:41 from New York Times
Seth Masket’s “Baiting is the Hardest Part”
Trump’s belief that shaking hands is barbaric from Washington Post
Transcript of the September 10th POTUS debate from ABC News
Julia Azari’s Foreign Affairs article
Bret Stephen’s New York Times column

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Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny.

Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

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Jennifer L. Lambe, "The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba" (UNC Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNC Press, 2024) explores how knowledge about the 1959 Cuban Revolution was produced and how the Revolution in turn shaped new worldviews. Drawing on sources from over twenty archives as well as film, music, theater, and material culture, this book traces the consolidation of the Revolution over two decades in the interface between political and popular culture.

The "subject of Revolution," it proposes, should be understood as the evolving synthesis of the imaginaries constructed by its many "subjects," including revolutionary leaders, activists, academics, and ordinary people within and beyond the island's borders. The book reopens some of the questions that have long animated debates about Cuba, from the relationship between populace and leadership to the archive and its limits, while foregrounding the construction of popular understandings. It argues that the politicization of everyday life was an inescapable effect of the revolutionary process, as well as the catalyst for new ways of knowing and being.

Jennifer Lambe is Associate Professor of History at Brown University.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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The Political Evolution of Taylor Swift

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we offer a political science / popular culture studies view of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. We situate Swift’s endorsement within the wider moment of popular culture, and consider her long journey from a self-imposed moratorium on political speech to her current position as the most sought-after endorsement in the election cycle. What does the endorsement mean? Why did she do it? And why did she sign her endorsement as from a “childless cat lady”?

Our previous discussion of Taylor Swift and politics is here.

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Celebrating Constitution Day Pt. 1: A Conversation with Cass R. Sunstein

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Join us for an in-depth exploration of Professor Cass Sunstein's latest work, Campus Free Speech (Harvard University Press, September 2024).

Together, we'll examine the book’s intriguing take on free speech in academic spaces and the broader implications for constitutional interpretation. Professor Sunstein also delves into the exercise of administrative power, with timely discussions on COVID-era authority and the Supreme Court's decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Gain unique insights from Sunstein on how the Constitution remains a guiding force for the American public in navigating modern challenges.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Professor Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Culture?

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (Oxford University Press, 2024). Roy argues that neoliberal globalization is dissolving not just subordinate cultures but also dominant ones by undermining the tacit understanding that undergird cultures and demanding that those norms be made explicit.

Moreover, Roy discusses how identity politics has come to supplant the norms once implicit in a broader culture, undermining the possibility that people know how to live in society at all. These development reflect the decline of utopian dreams – for better or worse – and the difficulties involved in maintaining social bonds.

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Josh Cowen, "The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

School vouchers are often framed as a way to help students and families by providing choice, but evidence shows that vouchers have a negative impact on educational outcomes.

In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press, 2024), Josh Cowen describes voucher programs as the product of decades of work by influential conservatives and wealthy activists to support a vision of America where education is privatized and removed from the public sphere.

Far from realizing the purported goal of educational equity, Cowen cites multiple research studies that conclude that voucher programs return poor academic outcomes, including lower test scores on state exams, especially among students who are at greater academic risk because of their race, their religion, their gender identity, or their family's income.

The books traces the history of vouchers from it's initial proposal as part of conservative economic policy through its adoption as a method for families to resist school desegregation. Since then, the issue of education "freedom" has been a part of an ongoing culture war waged through policymaking, legislation, and litigation.

Cowen describes the advocacy network that funds research and promotion of vouchers as a way to attain ideological goals related to conservative social policy, not educational outcomes.

Kaitlin Sidorsky, "All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women" (UP Kansas, 2019)

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Kaitlin Sidorsky’s new book, All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women (University Press of Kansas, 2019), is an extremely well written and important analysis of women in public life and public service. This book combines qualitative and quantitative research to examine appointed and elected state positions, particularly in regard to gender, and concludes that there are quite a few women in appointed positions, an area not usually the focus of research and analysis of women and power. Sidorsky notes that women in appointed positions on boards and commissions at the state and local level see themselves not in political positions but instead working in capacities to accomplish goals, serve the public, and continue along their career paths. In the way many of these women conceptualize their work in these positions, this is not necessarily about political ambition, as Sidorsky’s research discovers, but because this public work is usually connected to the individual office holder’s personal or professional life. This research will be of particular interest to those who study women and politics, political representation, and questions of politics and power. This is an excellent study and analysis, enlightening in both the data compiled and the assessment of the data within our understanding of appointed and elected positions, politics, and power.

Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). You can follow her on twitter @gorenlj

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Anthony Michael Kreis, "Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development" (U California Press, 2024)

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words define the law and political scientists who dismiss all judicial arguments as smokescreens for partisan bias or wider political forces. Today’s guest has written a book that bridges that divide.

In Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development (U California Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Michael Kreis uses methods from history, law, and political science to theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Understanding American constitutional law means looking at the relationship among dominant political coalitions, social movements, and the evolution of constitutional law as prescribed by judges. For Kreis, constitutional doctrine does not exist in a philosophical vacuum – it is a “distillation of partisan politics.”

Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Kreis uses tools from law, history, and American political development to explain how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements. For Kreis, constitutional law is “best understood through the diachronic lens of American Political Development (APD) and the concept of political time. Kreis concludes that the courts have never been—and cannot be—institutions lying outside the currents of national politics.

Dr. Anthony Michael Kreis is assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law where he teaches constitutional law and works at the intersection of law and American Political Development. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington & Lee University, respectively, and his PhD from the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

Mentioned:

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s March 15, 1965 speech before Congress on voting rights
Keith E. Whittington’s Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy and other works
Gerald Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?

Correction: Justices Sotomayor and Kagan were nominated by President Obama and Justice Jackson was nominated by President Biden.

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Aditi Malik, "Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge UP, 2024) develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, it shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters' future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence. By centering political parties as key actors in the production of conflict, and bringing together evidence from both Africa and South Asia, Playing with Fire contributes new insights to the study of political violence.

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Oren Kroll-Zeldin, "Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine" (NYU Press, 2024)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine (NYU Press, 2024) digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement and challenge the staunch pro-Israel stance of mainstream Jewish American institutions. The book explores how these activists address Israeli government policies of occupation and apartheid, and seek to transform American Jewish institutional support for Israel.

Author Oren Kroll-Zeldin identifies three key social movement strategies employed by these activists: targeting mainstream Jewish American institutions, participating in co-resistance efforts in Palestine/Israel, and engaging in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. He argues that these young people perceive their commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid as a Jewish value, deeply rooted in the changing dynamics of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. By associating social justice activism with Jewish traditions and values, these activists establish a connection between their Jewishness and their pursuit of justice for Palestinians.

In a time of internal Jewish tensions and uncertainty about peace prospects between Palestine and Israel, the book provides hope that the efforts of these young Jews in the United States are pushing the political pendulum in a new direction, potentially leading to a more balanced and nuanced conversation.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes - from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation's political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war.

In a sequel to their award-winning collaboration Asymmetric Politics, Grossmann and Hopkins draw on an extensive variety of evidence to explore how these changes have affected both major parties. In Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics (Cambridge UP, 2024), they show that the Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations. The result of this new "diploma divide" between the parties is an increasingly complex world in which everything is about politics - and politics is about everything.

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E. J. Fagan, "The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist E.J. Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, once worked at a think tank, and has long been interested in the intersecting work of think tanks and politics. Thus, The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) is an outgrowth of Fagan’s academic research and experience. Think tanks, by their very nature, are generally creating information, knowledge, policy ideas, and the like, with the intention of influencing the policy that is made by elected officials. Those who work at think tanks are generally experts in particular policy areas, and they produce information. Think tanks are not academic institutions, and they are not part of political parties either. They are private organizations that can have policy influence on parties, candidates, and policy development. In The Thinkers, Fagan pays close attention to four think tanks that he explains are the most partisan among the hundreds of think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There are many other think tanks, and Fagan explains that these four have had the most direct engagement in developing policy that is then taken up by elected officials (members of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, the president and White House advisors, as well as governors and state-level elected officials.)

The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics assesses the role of think tanks within partisan politics and the connections between these organizations and the policy outcomes we often see in presidential administrations and in Congress. The book also highlights a significant finding, that the rise of think tanks has contributed to the polarization within American politics. Fagan has the data to support this finding, noting that the increased influence of the think tanks, the issue areas where they are directing their work and research, and the increased polarization over the past few decades. The Thinkers teases out the connection between lawmakers and neutral experts—who tend to be academics doing research at colleges and universities, and those working at think tanks, who have interpolated between these two groups. This is an important part of the research on think tanks and how they operate, especially the think tanks that are more partisan and working closely to influence policy outcomes. Given the current focus on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, we also discussed how this is an example of the way that the more partisan think tanks engage in the policy development process, and how they hope to influence politicians and elected officials. The Thinkers is a fascinating study of American think tanks and their role and place within our political system.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Daniel Laqua, "Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From the Occupy protests to climate change school strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 21st century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements have created alliances across borders and show that these issues are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that these global efforts are not just a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them.

Showing how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and exploring how national or ideological boundaries have impacted their efforts, Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces activists and movements from 1870 to the 21st century. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, it examines groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions and operated within imperial or post-colonial settings. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book offers a synthesis of transnational activism through four analytical lenses; connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalised at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts and offers an alternative history of the modern world through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns.

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Jonathan Gienapp, "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The legal theory of constitutional originalism has attracted increasing attention in recent years as the US Supreme Court has tilted with the weight of justices who self-describe as originalists.

In Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale UP, 2024), Jonathan Gienapp examines the theory and describes how it falls short of achieving the interpretive authority that it claims.

Gienapp asserts that we need to reconstruct 18th century legal arguments as they were originally understood before judging them, while originalists reject historical understanding in favor of a more pliable textualist approach that allows them to impose their modern legal perspectives onto the past.

This "have your cake and eat it too" methodology allows originalists to claim the authority of the Founders while simultaneously discounting anything that those same Founders may have said, done, or understood that doesn't appear among the approximately 7500 words of the Constitution itself.

This book speaks directly to originalists with a challenge to make a fundamental choice between recognizing how our modern constitutional practices distort the original constitution and embrace them for the modern fiction that they are, or recover the original Constitution that the Founders actually knew.

Author recommended reading:

The Interbellum Consitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale UP, 2024) by Alison L. LaCroix

Related resources:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
Edwin Meese speech to the American Bar Association in 1985
Constitutional Faith by Sanford Levinson

New Books Network interview with Jonathan Gienapp, when Derek Litvak spoke with him in 2019 about The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard UP 2018).

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David Lay Williams, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist David Lay Williams has a new book that traces the problem of economic inequality through the thought of many of the canonical thinkers in Western political theory. The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (Princeton UP, 2024) explores the thought of Socrates and Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. We often turn to these thinkers and their various works to consider how best to establish political regimes and understand political power. But it is quite difficult to separate economics from politics, since these are both key parts of all societies.

And this is the thrust of William’s work in The Greatest of All Plagues. We expect to find critiques of economics in Karl Marx or Adam Smith, given the focus of their political thought. But The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates how vital the economic questions are for all of these western thinkers, and how concerned they each were with the concentration of wealth among the few within a society. This is a key component of the analysis in the book and in our conversation: “economic inequality” is a broad term and encompasses many complexities, but the thrust of the book is that each thinker is particularly concerned about the wealthy and the poor, and the destabilizing impact of a very few having great wealth. This is not to exclude poverty from the analysis, but much attention is often paid to the poor and ways to solve poverty. Scant attention is generally paid to the problem posed by excessive wealth, and the imbalance between those possessing great wealth and the rest of the society, and how this is problematic for political regimes and societies.

The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx is an impressive exploration of not only the work of these political thinkers, but also of the many scholars who have studied these works and these thinkers. There is much depth to this study, and the reader learns a great deal about the works themselves, the theorist under consideration in each chapter, historical context, and the interrelationship between politics and inequality. Williams is clear that his focus is on economic inequality in political theory, and not other, equally important inequalities. During the course of our conversation, we only touch on the surface of this complex and deep work. It is a worthy subject for investigation and this well-written and accessible book provides the reader with a rich discourse on the reason why we should pay attention to wealth inequality and how it contributes to societal instability, the corruption of character and soul, and how it remains an ongoing threat to justice, democracy, freedom and faith.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Sanjay Lal, "Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy" (Lexington Books, 2019)

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is religion indispensable to public life? What can Gandhi’s thought contribute to the modern state? With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi's political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world.

In Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy (Lexington Books, 2019), Sanjay Lal makes the case that for Gandhi, in stark contrast to commonly accepted liberal orthodoxy, religion is indispensable to the public life, and indeed the official activity, of any genuinely liberal society. Gandhi scholars, political theorists, and activist members of a lay audience alike will all find much to digest, comment upon, and be motivated by in this work.

Sanjay Lal is senior lecturer of philosophy at Clayton State University.

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Wendy Salkin, "Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly, this is someone who has been selected by an official process to hold a political office where he or she is tasked with promoting, advocating, and speaking for a constituency. However, we are also familiar with informal representatives: those who speak for a constituency but are not appointed by formal processes. Once again, the idea of an informal political representative is probably familiar: rock stars and other celebrities commonly claim to “speak for” others with respect to distinctively political matters, and they are understood by the public to (informally) represent a constituency.

Of course, there are lots of ways in which informal political representation can go wrong. Surprisingly, the topic has not been thoroughly theorized. Until now. In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press 2024), Wendy Salkin develops an intricate framework for thinking about informal political representation.

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Manuela Moschella, "Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Manuela Moschella investigates the institutional transformation of central banks from the 1970s to the present.

Central banks are typically regarded as conservative, politically neutral institutions that uphold conventional macroeconomic wisdom. Yet in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, central banks have upended observer expectations by implementing largely unknown and unconventional monetary policies. Far from abiding by well-established policy playbooks, central banks now engage in practices such as providing liquidity support for a wide range of financial institutions and quantitative easing. They have even stretched the remit of monetary policy into issues such as inequality and climate change.

Dr. Moschella argues that the political nature of central banks lies at the heart of these transformations. While formally independent, central banks need political support to justify their policies and powers, and to obtain it, they carefully manage their reputation among their audience selected officials, market actors, and citizens. Challenged by reputational threats brought about by twenty-first-century recessionary and deflationary forces, central banks such as the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank strategically deviated from orthodox monetary policies to preempt or manage political backlash and to regain public trust. Central banks thus evolved into a new role only in coordination with fiscal authorities and on the back of public contestation.

Eye-opening and insightful, Unexpected Revolutionaries is necessary reading for discussions on the future of the neoliberal macroeconomic regime, the democratic oversight of monetary policymaking, and the role that central banks canor cannotplay in our domestic economies.

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What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episode, Milada Vachudova and Tim Haughton talk with host Licia Cianetti about how ethno-populist and illiberal politicians have been reshaping the region’s politics, how people have gone to the streets to protest against anti-democratic and corrupt governments, and the many ways in which post-communist Europe is actually not that different from democracies in the “West”.

Milada Anna Vachudova is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has recently co-edited a special section about “Civic Mobilization against Democratic Backsliding in Post-Communist Europe”.
Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. In the podcast he discusses hir recent articles on elections in Slovakia and Poland, and in Slovenia.
Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. She has recently co-authored a chapter on Central and Eastern Europe for the Routledge Handbook of Autocratization.

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Bhaskar Sunkara, "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality" (Basic Books, 2020)

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2020), Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

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Notes from the Field: A Personal View of the War on Gaza

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of the Ralph Bunche Institute who spent the last academic year in Israel with his family. The plan was to do research on the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev desert – until the Hamas attacks of October 7 upset those plans. Karetny begins by discussing the changing moods of the Israeli population and the fading of internal divisions after the October 7th attacks in the midst of evacuations and drills. Karetny describes a highly militarized society that more recently has been worried about the expected retaliation from Iran and the possibility of escalation of conflict in the region.

Finally, Karetny discusses the problematic situation of the Bedouins and how the hopes for reconciliation between the Bedouin and Israeli society have been diminished by the Jewish-Arab polarization during the Israeli-Hamas war.

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Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, "Understanding Maritime Security" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Whether it is pirates, smugglers, illicit fishing, or disputes in the South China Sea, the oceans are of increasing importance in international security.

In Understanding Maritime Security (Oxford UP, 2024), Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds provide a concise introduction to the history of security at sea and explain the core frameworks of analysis that professionals use to understand and tackle challenges to maritime order. They discuss key issues within the maritime security agenda, including inter-state disputes, terrorism, piracy, smuggling, trafficking, and illicit fishing, and examine how states have responded.

Bueger and Edmunds analyze future trends and show how maritime security is impacted by the critical infrastructure agenda, emerging technologies, cyber security, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the renaissance of geopolitics.

Comprehensive and incisive, this primer of maritime security is essential reading for maritime security professionals and students of this increasingly important issue.

Our guest today is Christian Bueger, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer people.

The legal and political success of LGBTQ+ advocates often depended upon presenting sexual and gender identities as innate – or “immutable” to fit legal categories. Conservatives who oppose LGBTQ+ equality often argue that sexual and gender identity is something that can be taught. They use the offensive language of “grooming” and contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children.

In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Joanna Wuest unpacks how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality– based on arguments from the “natural sciences and mental health professions” – became central to American LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her book is both a “celebratory and cautionary” story about the costs of relying on science to win impressive victories for queer rights. The book interrogates the “LGBTQ+ rights movement, the scientific study of human difference, and the biopolitical character of citizenship that formed at the nexus of the two.” As LGBTQ+ advocates brought “science to bear on civil rights struggles,” they transformed American politics and the epistemology of identity politics more broadly.”

Dr. Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a sociolegal scholar specializing in sexual and gender minority rights, health, and political economy. Her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science's 2024 Rachel Carson Prize and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Joanna’s article with Dr. Briana S. Last, “Agents of scientific uncertainty: Conflicts over evidence and expertise in gender-affirming care bans for minors” in Social Science & Medicine.

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Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political participation. This book not only sheds light on the ways in which new media use contributes to the nature of political participation in Kazakhstan and Russia, but also explains why citizens use these tools in their civic engagement. Dr. Sairambay sets his sights on what occurs downstream, i.e., not in the minds of political leaders and/or well known oppositionists, but on the ground in specific contexts such as cities, towns, and villages by young people.

For a similar interview in the Russian language, see Dr. Sairambay’s podcast episode with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies.

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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Marie-Eve Desrosiers, "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (Univ. of Ottawa) has written a wonderful book. Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 20203) challenges scholarly and policy assumptions about the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide. Desrosiers employs original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis, Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962- 1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multi-case comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts

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The Democrats Have a Party: DNC2024

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in Chicago. Lilly and Susan talk to two presidential politics scholars to unpack the political impact of the convention.

When the Republicans convened in Milwaukee, the presidential race was a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The four of us took stock of the race back in June and discussed calls for Biden to leave the race – but a shocking debate performance in late June rattled party faithful and donors. In June, few seemed enthusiastic about Vice President Harris as the person to take on Donald Trump. But on July 21st, President Joe Biden not only announced he was withdrawing. Biden endorsed Harris and she quickly and adroitly established herself as the only candidate. After a few weeks of strong campaigning with her VP Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris and the Democrats went into the 4-day convention. Meena, Dan, Susan, and Lilly have a spiritied discussion!

We mentioned

· former Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan endorsing Harris at the DNC

· Polling numbers from fivethirtyeight

· Research by Susanne Schwarz and Alexander Coppock in Journal of Politics, “What Have We Learned about Gender from Candidate Choice Experiments? A Meta-Analysis of Sixty-Seven Factorial Survey Experiments”

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Robert Vitalis, "Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We've heard and rehearsed the conventional wisdom about oil: that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia.

That common sense is wrong. The author of America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2007), Robert Vitalis returns to disenchant us once again—this time from "oilcraft," a line of magical thinking closer to witchcraft than statecraft. Contrary to the deeply-held beliefs of hawkish foreign policy experts and career academics alike, oil is a commodity like any other: bought, sold, and subject to market forces. The House of Saud does many things for U.S. investors, firms, and government agencies, but guaranteeing the flow of oil, making it cheap, or stabilizing the price isn't one of them. Nevertheless, persistent fears of oil scarcity and conflict continue to breed real consequences. Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy (Stanford UP, 2020) presses us to reconsider, among many things, the U.S.-Saudi special relationship, which confuses and traps many into unnecessarily accepting what we imagine is a devil's bargain. Along the way, Vitalis resurrects a forgotten school of critics of empire—a reprisal of his task in White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2017).

Freeing ourselves from the spell of oilcraft won't be easy. But the benefits of doing so, and the drawbacks of not, make it essential.

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Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?

In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.

He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.

Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Nazmul Sultan, "Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. The purported “backwardness” of Indians as a people led to a democratic legitimation of empire, justifying self-government at home and imperial rule in the colonies.

In response, Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of peoplehood. Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Harvard University Press, 2024) is the first account of Indian answers to the question of peoplehood in political theory. This new book by Nazmul Sultan shows how Indian political thinkers explored the fraught theoretical space between sovereignty and government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian political thinkers offered novel insights into the globalization of democracy, and ultimately drove India’s twentieth-century political transformation.

In this conversation, Sultan talks to host Yi Ning Chang about sovereignty and government, democracy and development, and the intellectual choices that laid the foundation of postcolonial democracy in the mid-twentieth century.

Yi Ning Chang is a PhD Candidate in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is writing a dissertation on the end of anticolonial politics. Through a study of 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, the project examines the relationship between critique and action, and the effects anticolonialism had on politics in the postcolony. She has wider interests in the history of twentieth-century political thought, the politics of resistance, and theory from the postcolonial world. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.

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Joachim C. Häberlen, "Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe" (Penguin, 2023)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history.

In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now.

Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Haberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way.

Joachim C. Häberlen is a historian of modern Europe. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and worked until 2022 at the University of Warwick; he now lives and works in Berlin.

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Lost in Ideology: A Conversation with Jason Blakely

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a representation of it, we get lost.

If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series, including Jason and Mark Bevir talking about their Interpretive Social Science, and James C. Scott, who passed away shortly before this episode was recorded, discussing his Against the Grain.

Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology.

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Peter Allen, “The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, explores the rise of a specific type of political leader and what this means for our politics. The book works through debates over the existence of a political class, arguing this ‘class’ is homogenised along lines of characteristics, attitudes, and behaviours, and carefully analysing potential defences of the political class. However, in presenting the intrinsic case, as well as an extensive and detailed range of other cases, against the political class the book presents a powerful critique of how politics is currently organised. Concluding with a range of practical suggestions for change, including quotas, randomised selection of representative, and changes to how politics is organised, the book will be essential reading for anyone concerned with who is in charge of society.

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Angela Geck, "The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Geck provides an innovative and eye-opening analysis of strategic arguing as a means of power in global politics. Based on an empirical case study of arguing processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the book shows how discursive contexts, institutional norms and procedures, and unequal human resources condition who has the power to persuade.

While accounts of arguing in international relations are typically based on a notion of arguing as a power-free mode of interaction oriented towards understanding, Dr. Geck shows how such an approach precludes the question of persuasive power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Geneva diplomats and a document-based analysis of the negotiations on two Doha Round issues, the book examines the practices governing strategic arguing in the WTO and uncovers two sources of persuasive power: firstly, prevalent discourses and connected regime norms empower some actors over others; secondly, their ability to debate is conditioned by exclusionary procedures and unequal human resources.

Offering a grounded theory of strategic arguing in trade politics, The Power to Persuade presents a novel analysis of the relationship between arguing and power.

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Rama Sundari Mantena, "Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between the decline of empire and the rise of the Indian nation-state in the context of seismic global transformations of the early twentieth century-namely the two World Wars and the crisis of the imperial order. Rama Sundari Mantena argues this period is defined by not only the dominance of the nation state and debates over a new global order, but also mass participation in defining and negotiating the form and substance of democratic political futures. Mantena recovers this debate by reconstructing the emerging vocabularies of liberalism, political rights, and self-government in colonial South India, especially in the princely domain of Hyderabad and among Andhra speakers in British India’s Madras province. Provincial Democracy shifts the focus from the dominant narrative of linguistic nationalism as defining regionalism to debates over questions of representation, rights, political reforms, and federalism. Thus, it uncovers a broad perspective on political imaginaries that anticipated democracy in independent India.

Rama Mantena is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her first book The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) explored everyday practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early period of British colonial rule in India.

Anindita Ghosh is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her dissertation is about the histories of absorption of the eastern native states of South Asia into the nations and their socio-political afterlives in the post-colonial nations.

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Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019)

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one’s wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, theorizing freedom in negative and positive terms can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward.

Maria Dimova-Cookson is Associate Professor in Politics at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK.

Yorgos Giannakopoulos (@giannako) is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism.

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Gerarldo Cadava, "The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump" (Ecco, 2020)

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of more than two to one. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Because of decades of investment and political courtship, as well as a nuanced and varied cultural identity, the Republican party has had a much longer and stronger bond with Hispanics. How is this possible for a party so associated with draconian immigration and racial policies?

In The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava illuminates the history of the millions of Hispanic Republicans who, since the 1960s, have had a significant impact on national politics. Intertwining the little understood history of Hispanic Americans with a cultural study of how post–World War II Republican politicians actively courted the Hispanic vote during the Cold War (especially Cuban émigrés) and during periods of major strife in Central America (especially during Iran-Contra), Cadava offers insight into the complicated dynamic between Latino liberalism and conservatism, which, when studied together, shine a crucial light on a rapidly changing demographic that will impact American elections for years to come.

Tiffany Jasmin González is an AAUW Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th-century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez.

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Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the application of international environmental law, a topic of increasing relevance for global civil society.

Putting into perspective the practices of various international courts and tribunals, Dr Bendel works within the constraints of the existing judicial framework to sharpen international environmental justice and governance. She provides judges and litigators with tools that they can use when confronted with environmental disputes, to extract the best practices in the interest of improving environmental litigation for each phase of a judicial procedure.

In this podcast, Dr Bendel discusses the complexity of multiple legal, regulatory and guidance frameworks insofar as international environmental law is concerned. She explains how it is highly likely that the subject matter of an environmental dispute will cover common areas or resources that affect global or multilateral interests, which inevitably adds a political dimension to any dispute resolution when it comes to areas that transcend national jurisdictions. Dr Bendel explores how typically bilateral proceedings under international law might be expanded to accommodate the interests of other states – and non-state actors such as international non-governmental organisations – through creatively and flexibly adapting procedures that already exist before international courts and tribunals, including dispute resolution and non-compliance procedures. Now is the time, she says, for international courts and tribunals to be used to resolve environmental disputes and to make authoritative legal determinations on protecting the planet and its precious resources.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. He has a particular interest in, and practitioner experience of, international criminal law and transitional justice. Twitter: @batesmith

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Isabel Bramsen, "The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do micro-interactions of resistance, fighting and dialogue shape larger patterns of peace and conflict? How can nonviolent resistance, conflict transformation and diplomacy be analysed in micro-detail? Exploring these questions in The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Isabel Bramsen introduces micro-sociology to Peace Research and International Relations.

Breaking new methodological, empirical and theoretical ground, Bramsen develops a novel theoretical and analytical framework for analysing micro-dynamics of peace and conflict. The book features chapters on the methods of micro-sociology (including Video Data Analysis) as well as analytical chapters on violence, nonviolence, conflict transformation, peace talks and international meetings. It is at once broad and specific, analysing a wide variety of phenomena and cases, while also introducing very specific lenses to analysing peace and conflict.

Presenting a highly practical and micro-detailed approach, The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict will be of use to students, researchers, practitioners, activists and diplomats interested in understanding and addressing contemporary conflicts. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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Jeremy Black, "Rethinking Geopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century.

In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a packed house at the Royal Geographical Society in London about the historic changes then taking place on the world stage. Britain was the great power of that historical moment, but its political, military, and economic primacy was under serious challenge from the United States, Germany, and Russia. Mackinder predicted that the "heartland" of Eastern Europe held the key to global hegemony and that the struggle for control over this region would be the next great conflict. Ten years later, when an assassin's bullet in Sarajevo launched the world into a calamitous war, Mackinder's analysis proved prescient.

As esteemed historian Jeremy Black argues in Rethinking Geopolitics (Indiana UP, 2024), the 2020s may be history's next great pivot point. The continued volatility of the global system in the wake of a deadly pandemic exacerbates these pressures. At the same time, the American public remains divided by the question of engagement with the outside world, testing the limits of US postwar hegemony. The time has come for a reconsideration of the 120 years from Mackinder's lecture to now, as well as geopolitics of the present and of the future.

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Stuart Elden, "The Birth of Territory" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

The Birth of Territory (U Chicago Press, 2013) provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University.

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Democracy Promotion, Progressive Realism and the Labour Government’s Policy Towards Asia

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Does the Labour Party’s 2024 election victory spell the end of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy interest in Asia? And how will its ‘progressive realism’ foreign policy paradigm shape its democracy promotion efforts in this region? Listen to Ben Bland as he talks to Petra Alderman about the UK’s post-Brexit tilt towards Asia, the new Labour government’s foreign policy priorities, and the tensions the ‘progressive realism’ paradigm might pose to the UK government’s democracy promotion activities in Asia. While Ben and Petra discuss these issues from a regional perspective, they focus more closely on what this means for the UK’s relations with Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Ben Bland is the director of the Asia-Pacific programme at Chatham House. His research focuses on the nexus of politics, economics and international relations in Southeast Asia, as well as China’s growing role in the broader region and the contours of US-China strategic competition.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

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Heath Brown, "Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency" (UP of Kansas, 2024)

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency (UP of Kansas, 2024), examines the presidential transition between the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration in late 2020 and into 2021. Presidential transitions are not all that frequent, since presidents who are re-elected do not need to go through a transition to their second term. Thus, while there have been over forty presidents, there have been far fewer transitions. And until January 6, 2021, the history of transitions has been marked by the peaceful change of power between presidents and parties. While Brown is not focusing on January 6, 2021, he is analyzing the unique transition between Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden, and their respective administrations, and how that particular transition did not necessarily reflect the institutional norms of previous presidential transitions.

Roadblocked tells two stories about the roadblocks. There were the external roadblocks, which came from the various ways in which the transition from Trump to Biden was stymied by members of the Executive branch, including the Director of the Government Services Administration (GSA) and the legal process of ascertainment, as well as principals who were uncooperative with the incoming team. There were also internal roadblocks within the Biden transition team itself, which also contributed to the rocky start of the new administration. Brown delineates the oddity of how the transition itself works—which is generally secretive and private. There are general discussions of transitions in political science and history, in terms of what is supposed to happen during this process, when those leaving positions and those entering positions generally sit side by side to learn the ins and outs of the position from the person holding that position. But the Biden transition also took place during the depths of the COVID-19 crisis, before vaccines were available, so much of the transition was virtual, another twist to the already complicated process.

The areas where the Biden transition team met with the most difficulty from the outgoing administration was with regard to the budgeting process and the Office of Management and Budget, and with the Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and Defense sectors. The appointees who ran these parts of the Executive branch were the least cooperative, and generally dismissive of the incoming Biden appointees. For the rest of the Executive branch, which is vast, there was generally good cooperation at most levels.

In terms of the internal difficulties, there were great concerns about technological vulnerabilities and the potential for hacking. This led to a kind of fragmented dynamic within the transition team, since there was a lot of siloing and not a lot of coordination. Given the abbreviated timeline, the general secrecy that goes on with presidential transitions, and the fact that much of this transition was taking place virtually, with members of the team distributed around the country (as well as in other countries), this all contributed to an internal discombobulation in terms of the transition.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Claudio Lomnitz, "Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico" (Duke UP, 2024)

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.

In this episode, host Richard Grijalva and Claudio Lomnitz discuss the long gestation of what became Sovereignty and Extortion, the challenges of writing for a broader public discussion, the affordances and responsibilities of a writer in a public-facing institution like El Colegio Nacional, the central ideas and arguments animating Sovereignty and Extortion, and the prospects facing president-elect Claudia Shienbaum Pardo's tenure in confronting the issues Lomnitz raised in these lectures. They also discuss the kind of traction that this work has produced in Mexico and the possibilities for collective, collaborative work that the topic warrants.

Claudio W. Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of several books in English and Spanish, including Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (Univ. of California Press, 1992), Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2014), and Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021). In 2021, he was named a member of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico City. Sovereignty and Extortion gathers the cycle of inaugural lectures he delivered at the Colegio, which was published in Spanish in 2022 by Ediciones Era as El tejido social rasgado.

Richard A. Grijalva is a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American Studies based in Austin, TX. From 2022-2024 he was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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James Madison and the Spirit of Self-Government: A Conversation with Colleen Sheehan

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Who was James Madison? Why were his Notes on Government so valuable to the American founding? Did James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington all achieve what Sheehan calls “Civic Friendship”? Colleen Sheehan joins Madison’s Notes to discuss her seminal works on James Madison: The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Colleen Sheehan is a former Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. A former, longtime member of the Villanova University faculty, she is currently a professor of politics and ethics in the Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Peter Charles Hoffer, "The Supreme Court Footnote: A Surprising History" (NYU Press, 2024)

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When the draft majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health was leaked, the media, public officials, and scholars focused on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They noted Justice Alito’s strident tone and radical use of originalism to eliminate constitutional protection for reproductive rights. My guest today has written a book that asks us to also notice over 140 footnotes in the majority opinion and dissent. Are these notes part of the law? In his new book, The Supreme Court Footnote: A Surprising History (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Peter Charles Hoffer insists that these notes are significant. The footnotes reveal the justices' beliefs about the Constitution's essence, highlight their controversial reasoning, and expose “vastly different interpretations of the role of Supreme Court Justice.”

Using a comprehensive qualitative analysis, The Supreme Court Footnote, offers a history of the evolution of footnotes in US Supreme Court opinions and a thoughtful set of case studies to reveal the particular ways that the footnote has affected Supreme Court decisions. Hoffer argues that justices alter the course of history through their decisions and the footnote is the way in which they push their own understanding of the Constitution.

Eight case studies show how the footnote has evolved over time. He begins with Chisholm v. Georgia in 1792 and ends with Dobbs v. Jackson case in 2022. Using Dred Scott, Viterbo v. Friedlander, Muller v. Oregon, United States v. Carolene Products, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and District of Columbia v. Heller, Hoffer demonstrates how the footnotes reflect the changing role of the Supreme Court justice and the manner in which they interpret the Constitution. Dr. Hoffer looks back in order to look forward. He offers a study of the footnote that is relevant to contemporary debates over the Supreme Court, methods of interpretation, and politics.

Dr. Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Hoffer went to University of Rochester and Harvard and has taught at Ohio State, Notre Dame, and UGA (since 1978). He has written books on the Supreme Court, the Federal Court System, infanticide, impeachment, abortion, early American history, slave rebellions, and historical methods.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1999)
My NBN conversation with Laura F. Edward’s on her book (The People and their Peace), originalism and domestic violence
The University of Kansas’s Landmark Law Series
Peter’s book Reading Law Forward: The Making of a Democratic Jurisprudence from John Marshall to Stephen G. Breyer (University of Kansas, 2023)
The June 2024 recording of Justices Roberts and Alito on godliness
Susan’s “Sensitive Places?: How Gender Unmasks the Myth of Originalism in District of Columbia v. Heller” (Polity, 2021)

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Spencer Piston, “Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor people and disdain for the wealthy? And what if those feelings have demonstrable policy effects? Join us as we speak with Spencer Piston about a provocative new book Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a work that unsettles some long-held assumptions about American class attitudes.

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How – and How Much – has Malaysian Politics Changed Since 2018, and Why?

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host LSE Southeast Asia Centre Director John Sidel speaks with Meredith Weiss, Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and a leading specialist on Malaysian politics. In the interview, Professor Weiss provides in-depth analysis and insights with regard to the complex patterns of continuity and change in Malaysian politics since the watershed election of 2018.

Meredith Weiss is a Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, identity politics, elections and political parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with a special focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her published work includes Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford, 2006); Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP, 2011); The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020); and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022).

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Catherine Boone, "Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Dr. Boone trains our analytic focus on the spatial inequalities and territorial institutions that structure national politics in Africa, showing that regional cleavages find expression in both electoral competition and policy struggles over redistribution, sectoral investment, market integration, and state design.

Leveraging comparative politics theory, Dr. Boone argues that African countries' regional and core-periphery tensions are similar to those that have shaped national economic integration in other parts of the world. Bringing together electoral and economic geography, the book offers a new and powerful map of political competition on the African continent.

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Paul Volcker: “The only number that works is zero”

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In the fourth and final episode of this series, he talks to William Silber – author of Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (Bloomsbury, 2012). A giant (literally) of 20th-century policymaking, Volcker chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, implementing monetarist shock therapy, driving up the fed funds rate from 11% to 20% to crush inflation expectations, and pulling inflation down from nearly 15% in early 1980 to below 3% three years later.

“For Volcker, the most important denigrating fact of inflation was … that it undermines trust in government,” says Silber. “When we give the government the right to print money … we trust that the government will not debase the currency … When you think about inflation in that context, there is no number – two, four, six. Any number is bad. The only number that works is zero .. If you asked Volcker – and I asked him – what's the right number, he said zero”.

From 1990 until his retirement in 2019, Bill Silber was professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His award-winning book is built on more than 100 hours of interviews with Volcker. The author of seven other books, Silber’s latest – The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business – will be published in paperback in September 2024.

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Arthur Burns: “The smartest guy in the room”

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy.

“If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”.

An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997.

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Jacob Soll, "Free Market: The History of an Idea" (Basic Books, 2022)

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022) shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue.

This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out. Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work. A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures. It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Jacob Soll is an American university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Soll's work examines the mechanics of politics, statecraft and economics by dissecting the various elements of how modern states and political systems succeed and fail.

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Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many of these elections, democracy itself is at stake. The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, Samuel Ely Bagg explains why we should shift our orientation away from maximizing collective self-rule and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Bagg argues we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture - a vision that is at once more realistic and, he argues, more inspiring. The book presents an ambitious and comprehensive engagement with democracy's foundations, principles, and practices. Make no mistake, this work of political theory is profoundly worldly: it bears reading for those interested in politics across time, space, and scale - from the reconstruction US to contemporary Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela.

Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before coming to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.

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Bill Martin: “Truman looked at him and said: ‘Traitor’”

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this second episode, he interviews Robert Bremner – author of Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System (Yale University Press, 2004). Bill Martin still holds the record for the longest chairmanship at the Fed – holding the office from 1951 to 1970. A Democrat, he was first nominated by President Harry Truman and reappointed (more or less willingly) by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He dismantled government wartime controls over interest rates, battled to save the postwar currency-management regime, democratised the Fed, and fought successive presidents to keep its independence.

These conflicts started early, says Bremner. “Martin told this story about walking down Wall Street and passing the president going the other way and Martin said: ‘Good morning, Mr. President, great to see you’. And Truman looked at him and said: ‘Traitor’. Basically Truman wanted to continue low interest

rates certainly until he left office and for as long as possible”.

After a career in finance at the World Bank and in the mutual-fund industry, Bob Bremner is now a director of the Westminster Ingleside Foundation.

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Marriner Eccles: Reform “may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there”

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this first episode, he interviews Mark Nelson - author of Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940 (University of Utah Press, 2017). Eccles chaired the Fed from 1934 to 1948, turned it into a Washington power centre, and centralised policymaking with the Board of Governors.

The US might have been better served if Eccles and his nemesis Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary from 1934-1945, had swapped roles, says Nelson. "That's true except for the fact that Eccles did do something very important at the Fed and that is the Banking Act of 1935, which really changed the Fed in an enormously important way and Morgenthau would not have done that ... I think it would have happened at some point. You could make the argument, though, that it may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there because Eccles took the job at the Fed on the understanding that these changes would be made”.

An actor-turned-historian, Mark Nelson was educated at Pepperdine University and Claremont Graduate University and today teaches at Greenville Technical College, South Carolina. His next book will be Race and Recovery: James F. Byrnes and the New Deal.

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Jason Blakely, "Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology.

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Race, Gender, and the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation election has been a bit unusual—with President Joe Biden deciding not to pursue re-election but doing so after the primary season has concluded. Thus, there is a rather condensed election season, and Vice President Kamala Harris has worked to bring the Democratic Party together after she received President Biden’s endorsement after he withdrew from the race. Given the changing dynamics of the presidential race, we also find ourselves with an unexpected choice for the presidency, Kamala Harris, a former attorney general for California, a senator from California, a former prosecutor, and now the vice president of the United States. Harris is also bi-racial, of South Asian and Black heritage, and she will be the second woman nominated as the standard bearer for one of the two major political parties in the United States.

I invited three experts on presidential politics, gender, and race in American politics to join me to discuss Kamala Harris’s historic and unique run for the presidency. Mary McHugh, Executive Director of Civic and Community Engagement, Stevens Service Learning Center at Merrimack College and member of the Political Science Department at Merrimack, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Deputy Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science SEA Change Program, and professor of political science at Purdue University, and Linda Beail, Professor of Political Science at Point Loma Nazarene University and co-author of the 2012 book, Framing Sarah Palin: Pit Bulls, Puritans, and Politics, all joined the conversation to think about the presidential race, Kamala Harris, race, gender, masculinity, and partisan politics. We cover a lot of ground, including the presentation of masculinity at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, how TikTok and viral memes may influence younger voters, and how Kamala Harris is trying to frame herself and how others are trying to frame her in the course of the abbreviated election cycle. We examine historical contexts for women ascending to office, and how that might be a component of the shifting candidates and how Americans think about elections. We also dive into some of the controversial comments about “crazy cat ladies” and concepts of motherhood, politics, and racial and gendered double binds.

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The Dragonbear in the Geopolitics of the 21st Century

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to geostrategist Velina Tchakarova about the dragonbear in the geopolitics of the 21st century.

What does the Dragonbear really aim to achieve in global affairs? First and foremost, it is about counterbalancing arising centrifugal forces in all fields — from economy, finance, trade, diplomacy, to military, defense and strategic alliances. But it also has a lot to do with Russia and China’s overlapping understanding that the world is in a system transformation, whose results are unpredictable and whose implications might be very dangerous for them. Velina Tchakarova’s previous position as the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna is marked by profound contributions to understanding the geopolitical domain and its implications for various sectors. In her current consulting firm, FACE For A Conscious Experience, Velina leverages her broad network and practical experience as a geopolitical strategist to deliver tailored solutions, helping the public and private sector adeptly navigate the complex geopolitical terrain. In this episode, Velina Tchakarova articulates that the unpredictable trajectory of Russia's war against Ukraine may force Putin to align Russia more closely with China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic interests, increasing dependencies within the dragonbear modus.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

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Rachel M. Scott, "Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021) highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law.

Dr. Rachel M. Scott analyses the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She argues that the sharia is not dismantled by the modern state when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, but rather recast in its service. In showing the particular forms that the sharia takes when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, Scott pushes back against assumptions that introductions of the sharia into modern state law result in either the revival of mediaeval Islam or in its complete transformation. Scott engages with premodern law and with the Ottoman legal legacy on topics concerning Egypt's Coptic community, women's rights, personal status law, and the relationship between religious scholars and the Supreme Constitutional Court. Recasting Islamic Law considers modern Islamic state law's discontinuities and its continuities with premodern sharia.

Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

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Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, "Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror by groups like the IRA and the suffragettes and lone wolves such as the Unabomber, it uncovers the surprising ubiquity of mail bombs. This chronological account meticulously covers each decade, from early anarchists and world wars through the Cold War to the rise of the serial bomber. Astounding in scope, this book sheds light on the psychopathy, motivations and political implications behind murder by mail.

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Edward Kaplan, "The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022).

The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC).

From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.

Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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Politics in Action 2024: Myanmar Update

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.

In this podcast the presenter of the Myanmar update, Dr Moe Thuzar, discusses the political situation in Myanmar.

Moe Thuzar is a Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, where she coordinates its Myanmar Studies Programme. From 2008 to 2019 she was the lead researcher in the ISEAS ASEAN Studies Centre. Prior to joining ISEAS, Dr Thuzar spent ten years at the ASEAN Secretariat, where she headed the Human Development Unit from 2004 to 2007. A former diplomat, she researched Burma’s foreign policy implementation (1948–88) for her PhD at the National University of Singapore. She was a Fox International Fellow (2019–2020) at Yale University’s MacMillan Center during her PhD candidacy. Her research interests include Myanmar’s foreign policy, ASEAN integration impacts and issues (socio-cultural areas) and ASEAN’s dialogue relations. Among many other publications, she has also contributed to several compendia and edited volumes on ASEAN and on Myanmar.

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Julia Sonnevend, "Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with. They win elections not because of the elevated rhetorical performances we often associate with charisma ("ask not what your country can do for you"), but because of something more ordinary and relatable.

The everyday magic spell that politicians cast using mass and social media is what sociologist Julia Sonnevend calls "charm." In Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton UP, 2024), Sonnevend explores charm (and the related "charm offensive") as a keyword of contemporary global politics. Successful political leaders deploy this form of personal magnetism--which relies on proximity to political tribes and manifests across a variety of media platforms--to appear authentic and accessible in their quest for power.

Sonnevend examines the mediated self-representations of a set of liberal, illiberal, and authoritarian political leaders, past and present: New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Iran's Mohammad Javad Zarif, North Korea's Kim Jong-un, and Germany's Angela Merkel. She considers how charm (or the lack of it) is wielded as a political tool, and the ways charm is weaponized to shape the international image of a country, potentially influencing decisions about military aid, trade, and even tourism. Sonnevend argues that charm will shape the future of democracy worldwide, as political values will be increasingly embodied by mediated personalities. These figures will rise and fall, often fading into irrelevance; but if we do not understand charm's political power, we cannot grasp today's fragile political moment.

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Oliver Traldi, "Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2024)

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there’s plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy, there is also an increasing reliance on ideas like misinformation, bias, expertise, and propaganda. These latter notions belong, at least in part, to epistemology – the area of philosophy that deals with issues concerning knowledge, rationality, evidence, and belief. Relatively recently, the subfield of political epistemology has emerged. Political epistemologists explore philosophical issues of political belief, political expertise, political information and so on. But they also are concerned to examine the ways in which political arrangements can go well or badly, depending on the character of the epistemic practices that prevail in society.

Political epistemology is — by philosophy’s standards – a new subfield. Perhaps it is no more than two decades old. Yet the field is organized around a few disputes. In Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge 2024), Oliver Traldi surveys the terrain, often leading the reader to the conclusion that things are more complicated than they might seem.

This book is available open access here.

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Bernard E. Harcourt. "Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment.

Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm.

A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.

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On Sino-Vietnamese Border Relations

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietnam relations and the borderlands between the two countries, and discusses other projects she has begun working on beyond her forthcoming book.

Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. Her book State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2024. Subsequent projects focus on how capitalist Southeast Asian countries shaped China during the latter’s early reform era in the 1980s and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Dr Yin is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degree and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. She also serves as the Book Review Editor of Journal of Military History and on the Editorial Board of Cold War History.

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Will Urban Youth Fundamentally Change African Politics?

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Africa are contesting marginalization and claiming citizenship, and set out the broader context that led to Kenya’s youth-led protests of June/July 2024. They also push back against simple binaries that depict the youth as either a problem or a solution – the reality, they point out, is both more nuanced and more interesting.

Amy Patterson is Professor of Politics and the Director of the Office of Civic Engagement at the University of the South and Megan Hershey is a Professor of Political Science at Whitworth University in Spokane Washington. Along with Professor Tracy Kuperus, Professors Patterson and Hershey have published an important new book on Africa’s Urban Youth: Challenging Marginalization, Claiming Citizenship (Cambridge UP, 2023). Their work breaks new ground based on in-depth research in a number of African countries, and is sure to be a touchstone for the emerging literature on youth politics for years to come.

Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Bilge Yesil, "Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership.

Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power.

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Austin Knuppe, "Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State.

Dr. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State.

Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities.

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Postscript: Changing Dynamics in the Presidential Race, 2024

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Republican Party held its nominating convention a week ago in Milwaukee, formally nominating former President Donald Trump as the standard-bearer for the GOP, and also his vice-presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH). Just before the convention kicked off, Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The GOP convention was unique in having the former president there over all days of the event. But since the convention concluded, President Joe Biden has announced that he will not be standing for re-election, and immediately endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become the Democratic nominee for president. As we are taping this podcast on Wednesday, July 24th, Vice President Kamala Harris looks like the presumptive Democratic nominee, about 4 weeks before the Democratic convention. It has been a head spinning two weeks of politics in the United States and the dynamics and focus of the presidential race has shifted dramatically.

To take stock of where the race stands about 100 days out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Dr. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University. Meena and Dan are the co-editors OF a new De Gruyter Series in Presidential Politics, Leadership, and Policy Making. The first volume is Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter, 2024) edited by Meena Bose and Paul Fritz. It includes a chapter on presidential leverage and Obama’s decision making on Syria by Dan Ponder and Jeff VanDenBerg.

Previously, Meena joined the podcast to discuss her book Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (co-authored with Andrew Rudalevige) and Dan also chatted with Lilly about his book Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State. They are also veterans of Postscript, having come on the show in the past few weeks to discuss the state of the presidential election and consider it in historical and institutional context.

We spend this conversation talking about the changing dynamics in the presidential field, and the decisions made by President Biden to step aside. We go over the conventions, discussing the recent Republican convention and what the Democratic convention may be like in a few weeks’ time. We talk about issues that may define the race or are defining the race, including the economy, immigration, and reproductive rights. We also, as good political scientists, discuss the prospective options for the vice-presidential selection that Vice President Harris will have to make over the next few weeks.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Julia Azari’s Substack post at Good Politics/Bad Politics on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign kickoff event in West Allis, WI on Tuesday, July 23.
The Daily’s episode focusing on the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
Susan Liebell’s piece in The Medium from April on Vice President Kamala Harris and Reproductive Rights.
Bret Stephen’s op-ed at the New York Times titled “Democrats Deserved a Contest, Not a Coronation.”

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Mark Baker, "Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024), Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.

Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology.

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Quantifying the American Mind: George Gallup, and the Promise of Political Polling

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling.

This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Anne Applebaum, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" (Doubleday Books, 2024)

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024).

Applebaum's new book develops the themes she rehearsed in Twilight of Democracy (2020), an analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and national conservatism in the UK and the US. Ranging across the club of authoritarians but with an inevitable focus on China and Russia, Autocracy Inc. examines autocrats' growing sophistication and coordination and how they have been enabled by the naivety (and greed) of business and politicians in liberal democracies. "The vehicles of disruption can be right-wing, left-wing, separatist or nationalist - even taking the form of medical conspiracies or moral panic," she writes. "Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy Inc. hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself".

Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish historian and staff writer for The Atlantic. Apart from Twilight of Democracy, she has written three histories - Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012), and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017).

*The author's book recommendations were The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn (Harvard University Press, 50th Anniversary edition 2017) and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (OUP, 2016 - translated by Rosamund Bartlett).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.

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Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, "Fascism in America: Past and Present" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Has fascism arrived in America?

In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism.

Gavriel David Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history.

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Arie Perliger, "American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by right-wing ideologies. The need to understand the nature and danger of far-right violence is greater than ever.

In American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism by Arie Perliger (Columbia University Press, 2020), Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right. Perliger draws on a comprehensive dataset of more than 5,000 attacks and their perpetrators from 1990 through 2017 in order to explore key trends in American right-wing terrorism. He describes the entire ideological spectrum of the American far right, including today’s white supremacists, antigovernment groups, and antiabortion fundamentalists, as well as the histories of the KKK, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Based on these findings, Perliger suggests counterterrorism policies that can respond effectively to the far-right threat. A groundbreaking examination of violence spawned from right-wing ideologies, American Zealots is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the transformation of domestic terrorism.

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Steve Gillon, “The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After” (Basic Books, 2009)

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power from JFK to LBJ, however, has been neglected. I was under the impression that after JFK was pronounced dead, LBJ took an oath and that was that. As Steve Gillon points out in his terrific new The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President (Basic, 2009), that was not that. Rather, the transition was marked by confusion, doubt, anger, mistrust, jealousy, intrigue, and drama of every sort. At the center of it all were two parties–the out-sized president-presumptive, LBJ, and the Kennedy Clan, led by RFK. They were not on good terms. LBJ liked and admired JFK, but he resented the pretense and privilege of the Kennedy Clan. He hated RFK. JFK liked and admired LBJ, but his “people” thought Johnson was a buffoon, and they could not imagine him as president. RFK hated LBJ. JFK managed to kept LBJ and the Clan separated. But he was now dead and the battle was therefore joined. Read all about it in this page-turner of a book.

By the way, the History Channel has made a documentary based on Steve’s book. You can read about it here.

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Alessandra Montalbano, "Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them.

Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism.

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Hamilton Nolan, "The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor" (Hachette Books, 2024)

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential--or allow it to be squandered--will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.

In chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers the actual places where labor and politics meld. He highlights how organized labor can and does wield power effectively: a union that dominates Las Vegas and is trying to scale nationally; a successful decades-long campaign to organize California's child care workers; the human face of a surprising strike of factory workers trying to preserve their pathway to the middle class. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the fiery and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader, to try to fix what is broken. The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor (Hachette Books, 2024) draws the line from forgotten workplaces in rural West Virginia to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor solidarity can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself.

A labor journalist for more than a decade, Nolan helped unionize his own industry. The Hammer is a urgent on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement.

Hamilton Nolan is a labor journalist who writes regularly for In These Times magazine and The Guardian. He has written about labor, politics, and class war for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Gawker, Splinter, and other publications. He was the longest-serving writer in Gawker’s history, and was a leader in unionizing Gawker Media in 2015. Hamilton is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, East.

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Seth A. Berkowitz, "Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. In Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social mechanisms that link injustice to poor health. He also presents practical policies designed to create a system of social relations that ensures equal care for everyone.

As Berkowitz illustrates, the project of social democracy works to improve health by bringing relationships of equality to the sites of human cooperation: in civil society, in political processes, and in economic activities. This book synthesizes three elements necessary for such a project—normative justification, mechanistic knowledge, and technical proficiency—into a practical vision of how to create health equity. Drawing from the fields of medicine, social epidemiology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and more, Berkowitz makes clear that health inequity is social failure embodied, and the only true cures are political.

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Mark R. Beissinger, "The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton UP, 2022) focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city―accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms.

Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change.

The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future.

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Zana Gulmohamad, "The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How is foreign policy made in Iraq? Based on dozens of interviews with senior officials and politicians, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a clear analysis of the development of domestic Iraqi politics since 2003. Dr. Zana Gul explains how the federal government of Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have functioned and worked together since toppling Saddam to reveal in granular detail the complexity of their foreign policy making.

The book shows that the ruling elites and political factions in Baghdad and in the capital of the Kurdistan Region, Erbil, create foreign policies according to their agendas. The formulation and implementation of the two governments' foreign policies is to a great extent uncoordinated. Yet Dr. Gul places this incoherent model of foreign policy making in the context of the country's fragmented political and social context and explains how Iraq's neighbouring countries - Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria before the civil war - have each influenced its internal affairs. The book is the first study dedicated to the contemporary dynamics of the Iraqi state - outside the usual focus on the “great powers” - and it explains exactly how Iraqi foreign policy is managed alongside the country's economic and security interests.

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Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces.

Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022) shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others.

This book examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century.

In Frenemies, author Mark Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations.

Our guests today is Mark Haas, Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Watching the footage of the January 6 insurrection, Professor Bradley Onishi wondered: If I hadn't left evangelicalism, would I have been there?

Today’s book is: Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023), by Dr. Bradley Onishi, which unpacks recent U.S. history to show how the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots. Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Dr. Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country—communities of which Dr. Onishi was once a part—to ignite a cold civil war? Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Professor Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture.

Our guest is: Dr. Brad Onishi, who is a scholar of religion and cohost of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His writing has been published in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and Religion & Politics, among other outlets. He holds degrees from Azusa Pacific University, Oxford University, and L'institut catholique de Paris, and received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. A TEDx speaker and the author, editor, or translator of four previous books, Dr. Onishi teaches at the University of San Francisco. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

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Neil J. Young, "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (U Chicago Press, 2024) is a fascinating and engaging historical tour of those who were gay and active in Republican and conservative politics over the course of the last 80 years. Neil J. Young has written an accessible and deeply sources book that brings forward stories about those in the closet, those out of the closet, and in some cases, the move to come out as gay in Republican politics and in conservative activism. Young explains early on that part of the impetus for the book is the contemporary question: why would anyone be a gay Republican? But the discussion is far from simple, and the book traces more than eight decades of history focusing on the evolution and changing ideology of the Republican Party while also exploring different factions within the party, in a variety of places and regions in the United States. All of this is woven together to provide a lively history. Young himself is part of this history, as he explains his own political evolution and his personal story.

One of the points that becomes clear in Coming Out Republican is that there are distinctions between conservativism and Republican politics. It is also undeniable from the research and the history that the individuals who are gay Republicans, either in the 1950s or in the 1980s or in the 2020s, are generally middle- or upper-class white men. The book starts in the 1950s in Washington, D.C., where a number of closeted gay men were instrumental in fundraising and political activism for both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Young also notes that Washington, D.C. at this time had a lively gay community. What is fascinating with this starting point is that these gay men were adamantly anti-Communist, as Young explains it, they were essentially creating a kind of closet for themselves that protected them from many of the homophobic attacks that were made during the McCarthy era. Moving through historical periods and back and forth across the country, Young traces the different kinds of activists and the causes within the Republican party that animated them—personal freedom and liberty, bodily autonomy, fiscal conservativism, anti-statism, etc.—alongside the evolution of the Republican Party itself, which integrates white Evangelical voters, especially from the South, during this same time period.

Coming Out Republican provides the reader with essentially two historical accounts, focusing on the role and place of gay Republicans and conservatives within the party and the conservative movement as a whole, while also delineating the shifts in the conversative movement towards the New Right, and a Republican Party that highlights socially conservative policy, which tends to be more limiting of individual freedom and bodily autonomy. Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right also outlines the other side of the LGBTQ movement, teasing out how those on the left were or were not engaged in the quest for equal rights and full citizenship for LGBTQ individuals. This is a really interesting assessment, since it pulls out competing approaches to rights advocacy and political advocacy, and also spotlights the places and times when advocacy was absent.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Miranda Melcher, "Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique: The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Explaining how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties, this book offers a detailed examination of peace processes in order to demonstrate that how treaties are negotiated and written significantly impacts their implementation.

Drawing on case studies from the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars, Miranda Melcher demonstrates the critical importance of specificity in peace treaties in understanding implementation outcomes for military integration. Based on unique primary source data, including interviews with key actors who have participated in peace treaty negotiations, as well as thousands of previously unassessed UN archival documents, Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique: The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers new insights and policy recommendations for key details whose presence or absence can have a significant impact on how peace processes unfold.

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Dmitri Alperovitch, "World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century (PublicAffairs, 2024), Dmitri Alperovitch (with Garrett M. Graff) argues that the United States is in a “Cold War II” with China, and lays out a set of policy recommendations for how the US can win this new Cold War.

Alperovitch is currently the Founder and Executive Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank focused on “advancing American prosperity and global leadership in the 21st century and beyond.” Before moving into the think tank world, Alperovitch was the CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity company that gained public attention for investigating the 2016 DNC email leaks and 2014’s North Korean hack of Sony Pictures.

Through his work at CrowdStrike and McAfee before that, Alperovitch was involved in investigating numerous Chinese cyber-intrusions into US and global institutions, for instance Operation Aurora and Operation Shady RAT. Alperovitch’s cybersecurity expertise has also led him to advise numerous US government institutions including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

Drawing from his experiences across the private and public sectors, Alperovitch injects World on the Brink with incisive analyses and historical precedents that should spark the interest of those who follow US-China competition.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

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Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?

This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.

Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Postscript: Does the June POTUS Debate Matter?

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On Thursday, June 27th, President Joe Biden and Trump debated for 90 minutes without a live audience or the usually provided by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Instead, two CNN journalists – Dana Bash and Jake Tapper – asked the questions. Not only was the format a departure but the timing was unusually early for a presidential debate. Today’s podcast is a conversation between Susan Liebell at Saint Joseph’s University and Dr. Daniel E. Ponder, the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University. We started with a little context about American debates (including the first televised debate between the 1960 presidential candidates Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy). Dan outlined some big moments in previous presidential debates and whether they mattered in November. We then assessed the performances of Biden and Trump – and how that might affect voters.

Some items we mentioned:

Did reading the transcript leave people with a more positive view of Biden?
“Our Debate Wraps:How the system failed. How Biden's stubbornness hurt him. And how it will play in November” from Jonathan Bernstein, Julia Azari, and David S. Bernstein on Good Politics/Bad Politics, June 27, 2024
Gretchen Whitmer Wants a Gen X President — in 2028” The Interview via The New York Times, June 22, 2024
Lilly Goren and Susan’s earlier conversation with Meena Bose and Dan Ponder, “Previewing the 2024 Presidential Race,” Postscript via New Books Network, June 17, 2024
Biden’s strong performance in the VP debate with Paul Ryan in 2012 in full here with key moments at 11:11 (Iran), 21:48 (jobs), 32.43 (Medicare and social security), and 1:13 (abortion).
Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates (Brookings, 2016) and Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again (Brookings, 2016)
Nicolle Wallace, Trump lied “as often as he breathed” on MSNBC, June 27, 2024.
CNN Flash Poll, June 27, 2024.

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Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In political philosophy, “liberalism” is not the name of a particular social platform. Rather, it refers to a framework for thinking about politics. It is the way of thinking according to which the state, its laws, and its institutions all stand in need of justification, and that the justification of the state must be addressed to those who live within its territory. In this way, liberalism as a philosophical stance affirms the moral equality of persons and prioritizes the liberty of each, “taken one by one,” as it were. The idea of liberalism as a way of life thus may seem curious. According to many traditional liberal thinkers, liberalism is distinguished from other approaches by the denial that it is a “way of life.” On these views, a liberal political order establishes the conditions under which each individual can “seek their own good in their own way,” as John Stuart Mill put it.

In Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press 2024), Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism currently informs our cultural sensibilities. What’s more, he argues that liberalism is a worthwhile way of life.

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Erin Lin, "When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia.

Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land.

Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past.

As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped.

Our guest today is Erin Lin, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Nicolas Véron, "Europe's Banking Union at Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative" (Bruegel, 2024)

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born.

Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) - the effort to "break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns remains fragile and incomplete".

Together with Jean Pisani-Ferry, Nicolas Véron is a co-founder of the Bruegel public-policy think tank in Brussels and a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington. A specialist in financial systems and regulatory reform, he is an alumnus of the École Polytechnique and the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and - until 2000 - was a French civil servant. He has written and co-written many papers on banking supervision, crisis management, and Eurozone policy governance.

*The author's book recommendations were Central Banking Before 1800: A Rehabilitation by Ulrich Bindseil (OUP, 2020) and 7500 Euros: Pastiches politico-littéraires by David Spector (Wombat, 2022).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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The Democratic Regression: The Political Causes of Authoritarian Populism

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why are so many democracies experiencing the rise of authoritarian populism? And what can we do to address this? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn about their new book The Democratic Regression: The Political Causes of Authoritarian Populism (Polity Press, 2023). Armin and Michael explain what authoritarian populism is, why and how it is driven by increasingly unresponsive and unrepresentative parliaments, as well as the transfer of power to unelected institutions, and offer some possible solutions for countering this trend.

Armin Schäfer is a Professor of Political Science with a focus on Comparative Politics at the University of Mainz.
Michael Zürn is Director of the research unit Global Governance at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of International Relations at the Free University Berlin.
Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development.

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Amy Schiller, "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It" (Melville House, 2023)

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Amy Schiller, who spent a number of years working in both political and major gift fundraising, has a new book detailing some of the fundamental problems currently afflicting American philanthropy and how to correct some of these problems. Schiller, a political theorist currently at Dartmouth College’s Society of Fellows, brings two important perspectives to her research in The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023)—combining her experience in the philanthropic world with her training and expertise in political theory, especially democratic theory. The Price of Humanity also provides the reader with a vital history of philanthropy and giving, especially in the West, and how thinking about the role of supporting others as part of the common good has shifted over the course of more than two millennia. Schiller makes an important point about how St. Augustine, in his teachings on donations and giving, shifted the framing and understanding of giving from a community-based common good to a global approach to donating, tying the act of giving to individual salvation. This approach not only highlighted suffering and need and stratified those who give from those who are in need, but it also disconnected the philanthropic experience from the immediate community while objectifying those who are in poverty or generally in need.

The Price of Humanity doesn’t dwell in the past but provides this important lens that continues to apply to our contemporary thinking about giving. This more disconnected approach is also overlaid, in our current environment, with the demand that non-profits and philanthropies product quantifiable goods: how many cases of malaria have been eradicated, how much food has been provided to those experiencing scarcity, how are the dollars donated spent and by whom and in what ways? Thus, in so many ways, philanthropic organizations have to report out their successes in the same ways that private corporations need to detail their fiscal health to their boards of directors and shareholders. All of these approaches tend to disconnect the act of giving from the world in which we live, according to Schiller, and this disconnection makes the reason for giving much more attenuated, distancing us from each other, our communities, and the real role of the common good. Instead of linking individuals together in our shared love for one another and humanity as a whole—which is actually what the word philanthropy means in the original Greek—we live in a philanthropic world that separates and isolates. The Price of Humanity spotlights different approaches to giving, with discussions of the Gates Foundation, Effective Altruism, Robber Barons and the Gilded Age, and other forms of the business of giving. Schiller also focuses on modern examples of philanthropy as the common good, which brings it into the realm of democratic theory, as a means to provide the flourishing of humanity, not merely fulfilling the desperate needs of individuals. This is a fascinating and valuable interrogation of the idea of giving to others, and how we need to reconsider our thinking about the act of giving itself and the role that this act plays in our community and in our democracy.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Donald Stoker, "Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024).

Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Understanding this history is vital if America is to relearn how to use its power to meet the challenges ahead and to think more clearly about political aims and grand strategy.

The interview reflects the opinions of the author and not that of the US government or National Defense University.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, "The Political Development of American Debt Relief" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections. The Political Development of American Debt Relief (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

Emily Zackin is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book was Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton UP, 2013).

Chloe Thurston is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her first book was At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (Cambridge UP, 2018).

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book was America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge UP, 2020).

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Shuchi Kapila, "Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Shuchi Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Dr. Shuchi Kapila, Professor of English at Grinnell College, has a new book that explores the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947 through the lens of memory, generational conversation and inheritance. Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is most clearly focused on this idea of how we learn to remember the past, particularly the complexities of a past that includes trauma and violence along with independence and hope. This book, part of the Palgrave MacMillan series on Memory Studies, examines these ideas of memory and nostalgia and how they have shaped the cultural and political understanding of Partition in India, but also in the diaspora. Kapila starts with her own lived experiences, recalling bits of stories her mother told of her life before Partition. This is the path that Postmemory and the Partition of India continues along, as Kapila notes that the memories of Partition are fragmented, are communicated in bits, often in a non-linear way. Thus, the memories themselves were not fully communicated to the children of those who experienced Partition, and this generation of children, now adults, are reflecting on their own inheritance from Partition, even though they themselves did not live through it. Part of the focus in Learning to Remember is drawing out this approach to remembering—what is it that the traumatized generation passed along, even unknowingly, to their children. The transfer of more than 12 million people without much planning or organization, in context of the British removal of colonial power from the Asian subcontinent, and the establishment of independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, were all jarring events, leaving individuals stateless, or newly engulfed in nation-states that had not previously existed. Families were separated, women were abducted, violence and displacement all dominated this period—and for those who lived through it, it was not necessarily contextualized by a state power committing crimes against particular populations, as was the case in the Holocaust, or the Apartheid regime in South Africa, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Thus, the responses that happened in regard to these events, with the Nuremburg Trials, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did not happen in the same way in terms of Partition.

Kapila explores different avenues that have been developing to rectify some of this missing memory of Partition. She does interviews with those who experienced Partition and she also interviews her generational contemporaries, examining how different generations have essentially experienced Partition and also how they have learned to remember this assaultive experience that is also the foundation of independent nation-states. This is the thrust of the first half of the book—these intergenerational conversations and understandings of Partition. The second half of the book looks more closely at the two physical spaces that have been established to communicate about Partition. These two physical spaces include the Berkeley, California 1947 Partition Archive, which now contains at least 10,000 oral histories of Partition, available for researchers, scholars, and individuals to explore and examine. India has also recently opened the Partition Museum, Amritsar, the first museum of its kind in India. Museums tend to craft particular narratives of events or experiences, and Kapila considers this new museum, and how it is participating in that narrative design, while also engaging with critiques and analysis of the newly established museum, which opened in 2017.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Postscript: Unpacking the 2024 U.S. Presidential Debate, Conventions, and Polling

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The first presidential debate will be held on June 27th, 2024 and the Republicans are heading to Milwaukee (a city Donald Trump recently called “horrible” and crime-ridden). Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell had a wide ranging discussion including analysis of the upcoming debate, summer conventions, party platforms, and polling with three experts.

Dr. Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and a prolific media commentator on politics. Her scholarship focuses on the American presidency, political parties, political communication and American political development. Her most recent public facing pieces on are “Making sense of the 2024 election:When nothing seems to make sense, social science can still help” and “Checking in on Biden and Political Time.” Dr. Jonathan Bernstein is a political scientist who focuses on US politics, Political Parties, Congress the Presidency, Elections, and Democracy. He is now co-writing Good Politics/Bad Politics (a “plain newsletter about government and elections in the U.S.”) with Julia and David S. Bernstein. He recently wrote “How Debates Work. And all the things they don't - and shouldn't – do” and “Trump Acts Like an Idiot. Don’t Blame It on Age.” Dr. Seth Masket is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center on Politics at the University of Denver. He writes about political parties, American Politics, polarization, nominations, state legislatures, social networks, campaigns and elections. He can be found on Substack as Tusk and recently published “When debates are no longer automatic:Why Biden and Trump are debating and what they hope to get out of it” and “The Republican State Party Network: A deeper dive into party platforms, with some raised eyebrows at Michigan.“

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Julia Azari and Seth Masket’s June 27 live-blog of the first Presidential Debate will be at Arena. Follow them on social media for updates on what will be a GREAT conversation.
Nat Cohen, “If Everyone Voted, Would Biden Benefit? Not Anymore.” New York Times, 6/15/24 (on infrequent voters)
Seth Masket, “It's not just Texas State GOPs veer to the extremes on policy and democracy.” 6/7/24 (on extremism in state party platforms)
Erika Franklin Fowler, 6/19/24 Bluesky post on advertising when candidates are well-known
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: The Presidential Transition Project available here and summarized on Jenn White with Todd Swillich on podcast 1A, “If You Can Keep It” (on conservative nationalist “platform” that is not authored by GOP).

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Hank Willenbrink, "Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Age of Trump" (Routledge, 2024)

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From his overwhelming embrace by evangelicals and other people of faith to his championing of policies and conservative judicial candidates long sought by right-wing Christians, Donald Trump’s candidacy, campaign, and presidency were empowered by believers of many stripes who employed different methods of rationalizing or Christianizing Trump and his administration. In Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era (Routledge, 2024), Hank Willenbrink examines this intersection of political power and religion through the lens of performance studies, in part via Trump’s own expressions but predominantly through mass media performances of his Christian supporters.

From Trump’s affiliation with his “court evangelicals” and televangelists to the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy and other prophetic/apostolic movements latching onto Trump’s ascension in service of dominionistic ends, and from his support among very conservative Catholics to the “cult” of Trump that has coalesced in conspiratorial online spaces advocating QAnon beliefs, the last decade has witnessed a mainstreaming of theology and ideology ripe for an interdisciplinary analysis of the performative aspects of Trump’s faith-based support. Dr. Willenbrink joined the New Books Network to discuss all these subjects as well as Christian nationalism in the present American political climate.

Hank Willenbrink (Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. A scholar and theatre artist, Hank has published on a range of topics like Hell Houses, the playwright Naomi Iizuka, the intersections of playwriting and nature writing, and the use of music in HBO’s Girls. With his wife, Dr. Yamile Silva, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese writing. Hank’s play, The Boat in the Tiger Suit, premiered in New York and is published by Original Works Publishing. He’s developed theatrical work internationally, including at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Hank has also led several interdisciplinary, community-engaged projects that bring together students and community members of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to engage in deeper and more intentional ways through collectively created theatrical performance. Hank played in a number of questionable bands, co-founded the music blog We Listen for You, and hails from Toad Suck, Arkansas. He is currently continuing the research that he discusses on today’s podcast episode on his Substack: performingforthedon.substack.com.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) primarily hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Andreas Fulda, "Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security" (Bloombury, 2024)

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technology, politics and academia. We spoke about the blind spots of policy makers and academics have, and the way that China policy is constructed and interpreted as a result. We also spoke about the implications for national security and German sovereignty, and the way that Germany entanglement with China is a warning sign for democratic states everywhere.

Dr Fulda is a political scientist and China scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of science. You can listen to an interview about his previous book, The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong KongSharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge: 2019) here.

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Postscript: The Supreme Court’s Decisions on Bump Stocks and Mifepristone

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of our occasional series, Postscript, we focus on the Supreme Court’s recently published decisions in two cases, about guns and abortion, but more about how the Executive and Judicial branches of government function in the United States. Constitutional Law scholar (and New Books in Political Science co-host) Susan Liebell takes us through Garland v. Cargill, which focused on the Trump Administration’s implementation of a prohibition against bump stocks for rifles following the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2017. Liebell, a published expert on the Second Amendment and the long history of gun regulation in the United States, explains the thrust of the case, which is only tangentially connected to the Second Amendment, but calls into question the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm’s (ATF) expertise, particularly in context of the majority opinion’s decision that the ATF was not using its administrative power correctly. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, may signal the Supreme Court’s inclinations towards Chevron deference, which is also before the Court this term in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

Liebell, also an expert on abortion access, reproductive health regulation, and citizenship, explains the Court’s unanimous decision in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, focused solely on the question of standing, and whether the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine actually qualified to bring the case since there was no clear injury that had been sustained in the suit they brought before the District Court in Amarillo, Texas. Thus, the drug Mifepristone, which was to be banned nationwide in the initial court ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, was not banned as a result of this lawsuit brought by the Food and Drug Administration. This case, not dissimilar from Garland v. Cargill, focuses on procedural questions more than it focuses on other issues. And the unanimous decision is about that legal procedure, not about the FDA, or the process to through which drugs are brought to market in the United States, or about the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine’s indictment of the process for prescribing mifepristone. Our conversation threads through these cases, and others (like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and District of Columbia v. Heller) that set the foundation for these cases to come forward.

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Politics in Action 2024: Indonesia Update

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this podcast the presenter of the Indonesia update, Ms Navhat Nuraniyah, discusses the political situation in Indonesia.

Navhat (Nava) Nuraniyah is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. Her doctoral research focuses on how Islamist opposition groups in Indonesia respond to political repression and its broader implications for democratic decline. She was previously an analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), where she researched extensively on violent extremism, communal conflict and Islamist activism in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Prior to that, she was a researcher at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has been published in academic journals and media such as Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, The New York Times, and Sydney Morning Herald.

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Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind.

Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024).

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

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Jared McDonald, "Feeling Their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choice, less understood is the question of how candidates convince voters they truly "care about people like them." In Feeling their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Jared McDonald provides a framework for understanding why voters view some politicians as more compassionate than others.

Dr. McDonald shows that perceptions of compassion in candidates for public office are based on the number and intensity of commonalities that bind citizens to political leaders. Commonalities can come in many forms, such as a shared experience ("I've been through what you've been through"), a shared emotion ("I feel the way you feel"), or a shared identity ("I am who you are"). Compassion is conceptualised through the lens of self-interest. Compassion may be universal, such as when candidates convey empathy to all individuals who are struggling. Or compassion may be exclusionary, such as when candidates express a preference for some groups over others. Thus, the way campaigns choose to wield compassion in their messaging strategies has important implications not only for election outcomes, but for American political polarisation as well.

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John Keane and Baogang He, "China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), authors Dr. John Keane and Dr. Baogang He, target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire is economically and politically powerful, and heavily armed. Its gravitational, push-pull effects are impacting every continent--and even outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power.

The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a "big power" or monolithic "autocracy", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book charts the developments that have made its rising empire so novel, including the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, and internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The book notes the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire. It therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.

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Postscript: Previewing the 2024 Presidential Race

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

States are holding primaries. The Democrats and Republicans will convene in July and August but it has already been decided that the presidential race will be a rematch. Former President Donald Trump will challenge President Joe Biden. To take stock of where the race stands five months out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Dr. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University. Meena and Dan are the co-editors of a new De Gruyter Series in Presidential Politics, Leadership, and Policy Making. The first volume is Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter, 2024) edited by Meena Bose and Paul Fritz. It includes a chapter on presidential leverage and Obama’s decision making on Syria by Dan Ponder and Jeff VanDenBerg.

Previously, Meena joined the podcast to discuss her book Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (co-authored with Andrew Rudalevige) and Dan also chatted with Lilly about his book Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State. They are also veterans of Postscript and we are thrilled to welcome them back to talk about the 2024 presidential race.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Frances Lee’s Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (U of Chicago, 2016)
Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates (Brookings, 2016) and Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again (Brookings, 2016)
Ezra Klein’s New York Times opinion piece “The Democrats have a better option than Biden,” 21 February 2024
Ezra Klein’s interview with Elaine Kamarck, “Here’s How An Open Democratic Convention Would Work,” New York Times, 21 February 2024
Peter Baker’s “For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It,” New York Times, 2 March 2024
University of Chicago’s GenForward Poll (June 2024)

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David Criekemans, "Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew" (Brill, 2021)

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Although we live in a globalised world, territorially embedded factors are highly relevant in such domains as security, economy, energy, environment, politics & diplomacy. Today's analysts of world affairs are often loosely referring to 'geopolitics', but do not always clearly define it. Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew (Brill | Nijhoff, 2021) therefore offers a necessary framework: an introduction into the main components of geopolitical analysis, an overview of the main geopolitical schools of thought, as well as reflections on how technology and geopolitics affect each other in economy, energy and security. In addition, several empirical studies are showcased, each developing innovative approaches. Leading authors reflect upon containment, analyse geopolitical myths, research geoeconomic rivalries, study mental maps, analyse conflict through territorially embedded variables & greed motivations and apply 'neo-medievalism' to study sub-state diplomacy.

David Criekemans is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He also teaches at KU Leuven (Belgium), University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University) in Middelburg (the Netherlands), Geneva Institute of Geopolitical Studies (Switzerland) and Blanquerna, Ramon Lull University in Barcelona (Spain).

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Jessica Calarco, "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net" (Portfolio, 2024)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities.

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Meredith Weiss et al., "Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Politicians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries.

Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. The book draws on an extensive, multi-country, multi-year research effort involving interactions with hundreds of politicians and vote brokers, as well as surveys of voters and political campaigners across the region. Chapters explore how local machines in the Philippines, ad hoc election teams in Indonesia, and political parties in Malaysia pursue distinctive clusters of strategies of patronage distribution – what the authors term electoral mobilization regimes. In doing so, the book shows how and why patronage politics varies, and how it works on the ground.

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Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, "Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal education.

This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements of the late 1960s. By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to "reclaim" American higher education.

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is instructor of higher education at the University of New Orleans.

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Lydia Walker, "States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India at a time when dozens of European colonial possessions secured statehood. The work illuminates the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states and highlights transcontinental networks of Asian, African, American, and European activists and insurgents who pushed against legal-political constraints of an emergent postimperial world order. Finally, the author recovers riveting “hidden dramas” of decolonization by amplifying the voices of marginalized historical actors, lost non-state archives, and understudied regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Dr. Lydia Walker is the Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at the Ohio State University.

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The Complexities of the EU Parliament Elections

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey spoke with Francesco Ronchi and Udo Zolleis, two European Parliament officials and analysts. With the European Parliament elections taking place shortly after we spoke, they share their insights on the direction that politics in Europe may take in the coming months and years, especially with regard to right-wing nationalist groups. With its unique position as a supranational institution with diverse political parties and the power to elect the president of the Commission, the European Parliament faces important challenges for Europeans to reach consensus in light of war on the continent, immigration, and global economics.

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Branding Foreign Aid: Soft Power and Popular Attitudes in International Development

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do international donors brand foreign aid? And what impact does it have on popular attitudes towards them? Join Matthew Winters and Petra Alderman as they talk about soft power, foreign aid branding, and popular attitudes towards USAID and Japan in India, Bangladesh, and Uganda. They discuss whether foreign aid branding works and address several tensions linked to this practice, including branding in the context of unequal North-South power relations and colonial legacies.

Matthew Winters is Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois and a recent holder of the Fulbright-University of Birmingham Distinguished Scholar Award at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

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Mark Gilbert, "Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy" (Norton, 2024)

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Italy's resurrection from 20 years of fascism, three years of war, and two years of civil war is one of the 20th century's great, under-told stories. It's a history of a decade of clashes and compromises between two mass movements - Communism and Christian Democracy - backed offstage by two superpowers.

Above all, it's about the party management of one man - Palmiro Togliatti - and the West-facing vision and cunning of another, Alcide De Gasperi. From the ashes of war, De Gasperi chose a republican government and a market economy, resisted pressure from the Vatican to ally with the far right, and wooed the Americans while acknowledging the unique organisational powers of the Communists until picking the right time to drop them. On top of that, he won Marshall Aid, drove through land reform, and helped found the European communities.

As Professor Gilbert writes in Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Norton, 2024): "One need only envision what might have happened had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls to see how much his agency mattered for Italy's transition to democracy".

Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe in Bologna. Educated at Durham and the University of Wales, he taught history at the universities of Trento and Bath before joining SAIS.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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What and Why are Political Beliefs? A Conversation with Oliver Traldi

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What are political beliefs and how do we form them? Oliver Traldi, a current John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Madison Program, discusses this and more in his recently-published his first book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2024), a textbook which aims to explain the reasons behind political beliefs and disagreements from a philosophical perspective. In this conversation, Oliver delves into the unique contributions of philosophy to the study of political beliefs, the sources of our political ideas, the impact of online discourse and technological advancements on political trust and polarization, the importance of developing personal heuristics for evaluating information, and the challenges of maintaining trust in institutions and experts.

Oliver Traldi received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he specialized in epistemology. After his You can read Oliver's essays and other writings here, and his textbook is available for free here.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Stephanie Ternullo, "How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial support for the electoral victories of Republican presidents from Reagan to Trump.

In How the Heartland Went Red Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie Ternullo argues for the importance of place in understanding this rightward shift, showing how voters in these small Midwestern cities view national politics—whether Republican appeals to racial and religious identities or Democrat’s appeals to class—through the lens of local conditions.

Offering a comparative study of three White blue-collar Midwestern cities in the run-up to the 2020 election, Ternullo shows the ways that local contexts have sped up or slowed down White voters’ shift to the right. One of these cities has voted overwhelmingly Republican for decades; one swung to the right in 2016 but remains closely divided between Republicans and Democrats; and one, defying current trends, remains reliably Democratic. Through extensive interviews, Ternullo traces the structural and organisational dimensions of place that frame residents’ perceptions of political and economic developments. These place-based conditions—including the ways that local leaders define their cities’ challenges—help prioritise residents’ social identities, connecting them to one party over another. Despite elite polarisation, fragmented media, and the nationalisation of American politics, Ternullo argues, the importance of place persists—as one of many factors informing partisanship, but as a particularly important one among cross-pressured voters whose loyalties are contested.

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Robert G. Boatright, "Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Until 1900, most political parties in the United States chose their leaders – either in back rooms with a few party elites making decisions or in conventions. The direct primary, in which voters select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century Progressive movement.

Intuitively, the direct primary sounds democratic. Voters directly select the candidates. They have more of say over who will ultimately represent or govern them. But decades of scholarship suggests that direct primaries might not have changed the outcomes of party nominations. The conventional wisdom is that as the strength of the Progressive movement declined and voters paid attention to other issues. Party leaders were able to reassert control over candidate selection. In Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Robert G. Boatright insists this narrative is incorrect and misleading for contemporary efforts to reform the primary election system in the U.S. because some of the early concerns about primaries are still with us today.

The book presents data from 1928-1970 explaining the type of reforms states implemented and their success or failure. Dr. Boatright argues that the introduction of the indirect primary created more chaos than scholars have previously documented. Political parties, factions, and reform groups manipulated primary election laws to gain advantage, often under the guise of enhancing democracy. How does this history impact contemporary plans for reform of the primary system? Many suggested reforms were tried – and failed – during the 20th century. Boatright concludes that despite the clear flaws in the direct primary system, little can be done to change the primary system. Reformers should instead focus on elections and governance. The end of the podcast features his suggestions.

During the podcast, Rob mentions Dr. Jack Santucci’s More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford 2022).

Dr. Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, MA and the Director of Research for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest groups with a particular emphasis on primary elections and campaign finance laws. He is the author or editor of 9 books. Heath Brown and I have interviewed Rob previously on New Books in Political Science: Trumping Politics as Usual:Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections

(with co-author Valerie Sperling) and The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws.

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Ibrahim Fraihat, "Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ibrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict. Based on years of field research, Fraihat builds a framework that initially could help Saudi Arabia and Iran prevent their conflict from spinning out of control, create mechanisms for communication and travel down a road of confidence building that could create building blocks for a resolution. Fraihat’s book could not have been published at a more critical moment. A devastating coronavirus pandemic has hit both Saudi Arabia and Iran hard. So has the associated global economic breakdown and the collapse of oil markets. The double whammies constitute the most existential crisis the kingdom has faced in at least half a century. They hit Iran particularly hard as it labours under harsh US sanctions. Fraihat offers a roadmap that would allow Saudi Arabia and Iran to ultimately extricate themselves from costly proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya. By providing a detailed roadmap, Fraihat’s book makes a major contribution not only to a vast literature of conflict in the Middle East but also to policymakers in Saudi Arabia and as well as would-be mediators.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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Timothy P. Storhoff, "Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Gizem Zencirci, "The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2024)

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Since coming to power in 2002, Turkey’s governing party, the AKP, has made poverty relief a central part of their political program. In addition to neoliberal reforms, AKP’s program has involved an emphasis on Islamic charity that is unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Social, defined as a welfare regime that reimagined and reconfigured Islamic charitable practices to address the complex needs of a modern market society.

In The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey (Syracuse UP, 2024), Zencirci explores the blending of religious values and neoliberal elements in dynamic, flexible, and unexpected ways. Although these governmental assemblages of Islamic neoliberalism produced new forms of generosity, distinctive notions of poverty, and novel ways of relating to others in society, Zencirci reveals how this welfare regime privileged managerial efficiency and emotional well-being at the expense of other objectives such as equality, development, or justice. The book provides a lens onto the everyday life of Islamic neoliberalism, while also mapping the kind of political concerns that animate poverty governance in our capitalist present.

Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor of political science at Providence College. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Cultural Economy.

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Naosuke Mukoyama, "Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonisation and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonised states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different if not for these resources?

These questions are at the heart of Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which focuses primarily on oil as the most significant natural resource of the modern era. Dr. Naosuke Mukoyama provides a compelling analysis of how colonial oil politics contributed to the creation of some of the world's most “unlikely” states. Drawing on extensive archival sources on Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain, he sheds light on how some small colonial entities achieved independence despite their inclusion in a merger project promoted by the metropole and regional powers.

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Nicholas Tampio, ed., "Democracy and Education" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) transformed how people around the world view the purposes of schooling. This new edition makes Dewey's ideas come alive for a new generation of readers.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is the author of Teaching Political Theory: A Pluralistic Approach (2022) and Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (2018).

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

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We Should Not Take the UN For Granted: A Discussion with Abiodun Williams

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In times where conflicts around the globe are an everyday topic, the place of the United Nations in resolving these conflicts is constantly being questioned. In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey discusses this issue with Professor Abiodun Williams, Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Tufts University and former Director of Strategic Planning to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. A leading analyst of the UN, Williams is also a past Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS).

The conversation is centered on the findings of Williams’ recent book, Kofi Annan and Global Leadership at the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2024). As a former UN official himself, Williams offers an insider’s point of view on how to improve the UN's conflict prevention efforts, emphasizing the importance of strengthening the organization’s means of preventing conflicts and recruiting talented international civil servants.

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Ronald R. Sundstrom, "Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification.

In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country’s legacy of unjust housing policies.

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All About Money? Elections, Campaign Spending and the Effects on Democracy

Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Election campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? And what role do large businesses play in this? Listen to William Horncastle as he talks to Petra Alderman about his research on campaign spending, the UK and the US campaign finance rules and regulations, and the effects money has on democracy and the current state of politics.

William Horncastle is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bedfordshire.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

*** This episode was recorded before the announcement of the UK general election date. The election is taking place on 4 July 2024.***

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South Africa Goes to the Polls

Fri, 31 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000

On May 29, South Africans voted in the seventh election since the end of political apartheid in the early 1990s. This is the first election in which the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is polling below 50 percent, which could force them into a coalition with one or more other parties to govern the country after the election.

To learn more, we speak with Carolyn Holmes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is an expert on South African politics and the author of The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa (U Michigan Press, 2020).

Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.

Books, Links, & Articles:

The Black and White Rainbow by Carolyn E. Holmes
“Family of American caught up in Congo failed coup says their son went to Africa on vacation.” by Hannah Schoenbaum and Jessica Donati
“The Politics of “Non-Political” Activism in Democratic South Africa.” by Carolyn E. Holmes

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Nisrin Elamin on the Conflict in Sudan

Thu, 30 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan.

Books, Links and Articles

“Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots.” Analysis by Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly
Darfur Diaspora Association
Keep Eyes On Sudan
Dabanga Sudan
Sudan Tribune
“Tanzania’s Threat to Expel Burundians Sets a Dangerous Precedent.” by Clayton Boeyink and Stephanie Schwartz
“Home, Again: Refugee Return and Post-Conflict Violence in Burundi.” by Stephanie Schwartz

Find out more about the Ufahamu Africa podcast, cohosted by Kim Yi Dionne, associate professor of political science at UC Riverside, and Rachel Beatty Riedl, professor of government at Cornell University.

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Benjamin A. Schupmann, "Democracy Despite Itself: Liberal Constitutionalism and Militant Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 30 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Seeking a second term as US president in November, Donald Trump joins a roster of politicians whose declared aim is to use legal means to bend democracy to their will and in their interests. The system withstood his first term. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, and Hungary, the systems didn’t, and they are undergoing stress tests in Israel, Slovakia, and Georgia.

In Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary, elections still happen and parliaments, courts, and media are intact but checks and balances have been steadily eroded as one party bids for sustained majority rule. Since the turn of the millennium, 80% of cases of democratic retreat have taken this form rather than through violence.

Worst of all, “illiberal democracy” is popular. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump added 11 million votes. In 2022, after 12 consecutive years in power, Hungary’s ruling party extended its support. Recent polls show that a third of Americans would prefer a strong unelected leader to a weak elected one while a fifth of French under-35s are indifferent to the prospect of an end to democracy.

In Democracy Despite Itself: Liberal Constitutionalism and Militant Democracy (OUP Press, 2024) Benjamin Schupmann addresses this democratic internal rot and how to defend against it. "Democratic cannibalism is a perennial problem,” he writes. “It is a question of when, not if, popular anti-democratic movements will erupt from within and try to use legal revolutionary methods to devour democracy. Democratic constitution should be designed to provide democrats with the means to defend it and themselves".

Benjamin Schupmann is an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He got his PhD at Columbia University and then taught at Duke Kunshan University and the National University of Singapore. Democracy Despite Itself is his second book. His first – Carl Schmitt's State and Constitutional Theory – was published in 2017.

*The author's book recommendations are Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism by Alessandro Ferrara (OUP Oxford, 2023) and Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by Hartmut Rosa (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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Democratic Crisis in Senegal

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Senegalese President Macky Sall has postponed the country’s presidential elections originally scheduled for February 25. It's part of a series of concerning moves by Sall to extend his stay in power. The Ufahamu Africa podcast talks with experts on the topic: Bamba Ndiaye and Michelle D. Gavin.

Bamba Ndiaye is an assistant professor of African studies at Emory University's Oxford College. He is also host of The Africanist podcast and a former Ufahamu Africa non-resident fellow.

Michelle D. Gavin is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has over twenty years of experience in international affairs in government and non-profit roles.

The Ufahamu Africa podcast is cohosted by Kim Yi Dionne, associate professor of political science at UC Riverside, and Rachel Beatty Riedl, professor of government at Cornell University.

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Eileen M. Hunt, "The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Tue, 28 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’s The Last Man and her Journal of Sorrow, both of which were written side by side in the mid-1820s. Hunt’s writing of The First Last Man reflects Shelley’s own approach to writing, which integrates her own experiences into her imagined universes to explore humanity and our thinking. Thus, The First Last Man is a pivotal analysis of Shelley’s iconic work of plague fiction or pandemic novels and Hunt researched and wrote the book during our contemporary experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. While Shelley’s Frankenstein may loom large in the background of The Last Man, the focus of the novel is on the legacy of disease, of mass death, of war and conflict, and how to move forward in a destroyed world. Hunt’s thesis about postapocalyptic literature, especially Shelley’s work in this regard, is that the thread of hope that comes through all of this death and destruction is what sustains us as humans. And this is also what sustained Shelley in the face of her own tragedies, which included the loss of a number of her own children, the tragic drowning death of her beloved husband, and the loss of other family members. For Shelley, plague was a metaphor for her, both literally and figuratively having to contend with all of these experiences that were outside of her control.

Hunt explains that Shelley’s pandemic novel is well positioned within the extended literature that focuses on plagues and pandemics. Shelley is deeply read—in literature, political theory, the Bible, classical work, and the like—and her work reflects these various genres and the ways in which they wrestle with the ideas of apocalypses and what happens after such destructive events. But Shelley’s work is not just situated among these writings on plagues; she actually creates a new form of this kind of work that brings in love and hope while opening up new vistas and beginnings, compelling people to think about what happens in the aftermath of plagues or pandemics. This leads us to post-apocalyptic thinking, compelling the focus on what happens next. Hunt suggests that Mary Shelley is a kind of modern-day Sophocles, a great tragic thinker who helps guide our wrestling with these more eternal questions and does so through fictional prose creations. Such creations push on our imaginations and compel us to think about worlds that may be different than our own, but certainly reflects back our very existences.

The First Last Man is a beautiful book, weaving together Mary Shelley’s work, her journals and personal experiences, and commentary on her work at the time of the publications. Into this, Hunt brings some of her own journal entries from her research excursions during the Covid pandemic, and her own experiences with tragedy in her own life, honoring Shelley’s many skills as a writer in so many different genres and capacities.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Carola Binder, "Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

Carola Binder is Associate Professor and Chair of Economics at Haverford College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Vanessa Walker, "Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

Jo Butterfield is the Advisor for the Human Rights Certificate offered by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and is an Adjunct Asst. Professor with the UI Department of History.

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Marc C. Johnson, "Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)

Sun, 26 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The U.S. Senate is so sharply polarized along partisan and ideological lines today that it's easy to believe it was always this way. But in the turbulent 1960s, even as battles over civil rights and the war in Vietnam dominated American politics, bipartisanship often prevailed. One key reason: two remarkable leaders who remain giants of the Senate--Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, the longest-serving majority leader in Senate history, so revered for his integrity, fairness, and modesty that the late Washington Post reporter David Broder called him "the greatest American I ever met." The political and personal relationship of these party leaders, extraordinary by today's standards, is the lens through which Marc C. Johnson examines in Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate (U Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Working together, with the Democrat often ceding public leadership to his Republican counterpart, Mansfield and Dirksen passed landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation, created Medicare, and helped bring about a foundational nuclear arms limitation treaty. The two leaders could not have been more different in personality and style: Mansfield, a laconic, soft-spoken, almost shy college history professor, and Dirksen, an aspiring actor known for his flamboyance and sense of humor, dubbed the "Wizard of Ooze" by reporters. Drawing on extensive Senate archives, Johnson explores the congressional careers of these iconic leaders, their intimate relationships with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and their own close professional friendship based on respect, candor, and mutual affection.

A study of politics but also an analysis of different approaches to leadership, this is a portrait of a U.S. Senate that no longer exists--one in which two leaders, while exercising partisan political responsibilities, could still come together to pass groundbreaking legislation--and a reminder of what is possible.

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Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, "After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things are rarely so cut-and-dried: it takes a lot of ‘soaking and poking’ before you can answer relatively straightforward questions like “what is this a case of?” and “what is your dependent variable?”

Moreover, the entire idea of trying to impose a template developed for experimental studies on comparative and historical data by arbitrarily slicing an integrated reality up into variables and trying to isolate one-directional causal effects doesn’t seem appropriate for the dynamism and complexity of social reality.

Today, I’m talking to the Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, the editors of a new edited volume that charts a different path. The contributors to After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology (Columbia UP, 2024) provide new ways of thinking about the purposes of comparison in historical social science, what the ‘units’ of historical analysis are, and how historically-oriented social scientists should go about conducting comparisons.

Nicholas Wilson is an associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, and the author of Modernity’s Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India (Columbia 2023). Damon Mayrl is associate professor of sociology at Colby College, and the author of Secular Conversions: Political Institutions and Religious Education in the United States and Australia, 1800-2000.

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Peter Ireland (Boston College Econ Prof) on Monetary Policy, Monetarism and New Keynesian Models

Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Peter Ireland (Boston College Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career as a monetary economist, his views on the history of monetarism, New Keynesian models, and the Shadow Open Market Committee which Peter sits on and celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution.

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Asian Soft Power in Estonia: A Discussion with Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska

Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do Asian nations exercise soft power in the Baltics? Soft power is a political strategy to influence other international relations actors by using a variety of political, economic, and cultural instruments. The rise of Asia aligns with its growing economic, political, and cultural influences worldwide, including in geographically distant Central Eastern and Nordic Europe. In this episode, Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska discusses China’s, India’s and Singapore’s activities in Estonia, drawing on the findings from a new report on “The Political, Economic and Cultural Role of Asia in Northern and Eastern Europe”, published by the University of Tartu Asia Centre.

Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska is a research fellow at the University of Tartu Asia Centre Centre. She received her PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her current work focuses on two specific themes: China’s and India’s soft power, and the implications of Putin’s nuclear blackmail for the perception of nuclear weapons in South Asia. She also leads a scientific project about China’s environmental diplomacy and its green soft power, funded by Poland’s National Science Centre.

Heidi Maiberg, the host of the episode, is the Head of Communication at the University of Tartu Asia Centre.

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Dmitry Grozoubinski, "Why Politicians Lie About Trade...How, and What You Need to Know" (Canbury Press, 2024)

Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president – that the postwar trade liberalisation process threatened to go into reverse.

With his trade expertise and a voice made for Twitter, Dmitry Grozoubinski was – as he admits in Why Politicians Lie About Trade: … and What You Need to Know About It (Canbury Press, 2024) - “in the right place at the right time with the right credentials to stand in front of the firehose of bullshit that was the public debate around trade policy in the late 2010s and cry: ‘um, no, that's not how that works".

Executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform and founder of ExplainTrade, Grozoubinski was once an Australian diplomat who negotiated trade agreements in Geneva at the World Trade Organization. Before joining the Australian civil service, he taught at the Monash Graduate School of Business, where he took his Masters in Diplomacy and Trade.

*The author's book recommendations are The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin (Harvard University Press, 2019) and The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins (Wildfire, 2023).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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Sarah Cassella, "Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics" (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023)

Mon, 20 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition.

The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine the characteristics that make them a new category of risk, and to analyse the changes they bring about in the main mechanisms of international law. Drawing on the relationship between international law and other legal systems, and in particular national law, this book highlights possible responses to the challenges posed by global risks. The study is based on extensive practice related to the examples of climate change and pandemics, but opens up perspectives on conclusions that could be common to other global risks, such as financial risks or cyber risks.

Sarah Cassella, Ph.D. (2009), is Professor of International Law at Université Paris.

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Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, "The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 20 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the political history of American political parties, not so much as historical institutions with different constituents—though it does that—but as living and breathing entities that have, over the course of more than 200 years, been, at times, vitally engaged with politics. The role of parties in the political system is to work in an organized way to get control of government and to connect electoral actors with the power to do things within the governmental system. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld dive into all kinds of archival data and information to get at the records and comments of party stalwarts, not just presidents or elected officials often associated with the parties. They were looking to see how the folks who were inside the parties, or parts of the parties, thought about the parties themselves and their work in them. Some of this is well-trodden ground, but much of the political history in The Hollow Parties really fleshes out much more of the daily engagement among party members and how they made American political parties work and thus how they made American politics work. But part of the story is also that the parties did not and do not always work the same in tandem. In fact, according to the examples laced throughout the book, often times one party, say a dominant party like the Republican Party during and after the Civil War, or the Democratic Party in the post-war period, operated differently and was structured differently than its opposition.

The underlying thesis of The Hollow Parties is that while the political parties at the moment, at this time of high polarization, may seem to be vessels of ideology antagonistic to stable democracy, in fact, we need parties to be vitally engaged in politics, as they have been in the past. Scholzman and Rosenfeld also note that the current polarized era has produced different outcomes in the ways the parties operate: for the Democrats, they become ineffectual; for the Republicans, they have become extremists. The Hollow Parties explains that it may currently feel as if the parties are hollow, especially on the Right where so many other entities have come into the space that had belonged to the party itself. But that the way to stem the crisis in democracy in the United States is for the parties to re-establish themselves as functional political institutions working with and in the formal components of the American political system. The Hollow Parties explains a kind of typology of how the parties in the United States operate and that at different times, each party has embodied different strands within this typology. This is a useful and important framework to consider how American political parties function and how these different strands aim towards different forms of operation and different goals.

Finally, this book is beautifully written, marrying archival information with contemporary examples and whisking the reader along on a fascinating and revealing ride through American political development. The Hollow Parties focuses on American political parties but can’t help but enlighten the reader about American history and current political developments that are all directly connected to past party activities and political history.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society" (Norton, 2024)

Mon, 20 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism.

While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire.

Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else?

Narratives of neoliberalism have been accepted as gospel despite decades of research showing that less regulation and more trust in the 'hidden hand' of free market economics do not produce greater prosperity or freedom for most individuals.

Stiglitz examines how unregulated markets reduce economic opportunities for majorities by prioritizing the freedom of corporations and wealthy individuals over that of individuals, resulting in the siphoning wealth from the many to ensure the freedom of the few, from property and intellectual rights to education and opportunity.

The Road to Freedom re-evaluates of what constitutes a good society and provides a roadmap to achieve it.

Recommended reading: The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy

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The Climate Crisis as a Problem of Collective Action: A Discussion with Dana Fisher

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a social crisis for which collective action seems impossible. Fisher further explains the actions of the players involved in resisting the problem of climate change and their interests in doing so. Finally, she explains how important it is to approach change through strong communities and the solid infrastructures that support them.

Fisher is the author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024).

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Joan E. Cho, "Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

Fri, 17 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–88), the political system first became increasingly authoritarian. Because modernization was founded on industrial complexes and tertiary education, these structures initially helped bolster the authoritarian regimes. In the long run, however, these structures later facilitated the anti-regime protests by various social movement groups—most importantly, workers and students—that ultimately brought democracy to the country.

By using original subnational protest event datasets, government publications, oral interviews, and publications from labour and student movement organisations, Dr. Cho takes a long view of democratisation that incorporates the decades before and after South Korea’s democratic transition. She demonstrates that Korea’s democratisation resulted from a combination of factors from below and from above, and that authoritarian development itself was a hidden root cause of democratic development in South Korea. Seeds of Mobilization shows how socioeconomic development did not create a steady pressure toward democracy but acted as a “double-edged sword” that initially stabilised autocratic regimes before destabilising them over time.

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The Politics of Development: A Conversation with Claire Mcloughlin and David Hudson

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, David Hudson and People, Power, Politics host Nic Cheeseman – as they talk about the novel approach of their volume (co-edited with Sameen Ali and Kailing Xie) and the many lessons it reveals about why getting it right can be so hard. Listen now to find out why The Politics of Development is “destined to become essential reading” (Duncan Greene)!

Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and the lead editor of The Politics of Development.

David Hudson is Professor of Politics and Development, also at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and an editor of The Politics of Development.

Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development.

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Lisa Langdon Koch, "Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions.

Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits.

The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. This book identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development.

Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits.

Our guest today is Lisa Langdon Koch, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Kunal M. Parker, "The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state.

Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Lisa Bhungalia, "Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.

Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.

Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University. Her new position (as of fall 2024) will be Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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José Ciro Martínez, "States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action.

States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.

If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar.

José’s book recommendations are:

Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
Hisham Matar, My Friends

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Chris Stephen, "The Future of War Crimes Justice" (Melville House, 2024)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and looks into the minds of war criminals themselves through an evaluation of evidence from psychiatric studies. With international law advocates fighting for justice on one side, and reluctant governments unwilling to relinquish control on the other, he sets out to answer whether the world of the future will be governed by the rule of law or might is right.

The podcast begins by exploring what is meant by ‘justice’ in the context of war crimes – whether it is (or should be) a process and collection of rights-respecting investigations and trials, or an outcome (the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of people who have committed the worst crimes) – and then discusses the challenges at the heart of the system of international war crimes justice as it has developed from the post-World War II trials of Nuremberg and Toyko. Chris Stephen discusses the impossibility of bringing leaders of major powers to justice, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, under the current system of war crimes justice, acknowledging the role that realpolitik and national state interest plays in preventing greater engagement with the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn.

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M. Steven Fish, "Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge" (Rivertowns Books, 2024)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Defeating the forces of authoritarianism is the political combat task of our age, and we must take it up with the certitude and boldness that our eminent forebears did. Rebuilding the Democrats’ appeal by reestablishing reputations for superior strength and patriotism is a challenge. But the fact that democracy’s plight is due to flaws in liberals’ leadership and messaging rather than economic crises, popular prejudices, or a faulty Constitution is good news. It means that the Democrats can turn the tables on Trumpism now.

– Introduction to Comeback (2024)

The fate of American democracy now hinges on the Democrats' ability to defeat the Republicans for the foreseeable future. But for the Democrats to win consistently, they must reestablish their credentials as fearless leaders, tough fighters, and fierce patriots.

Comeback delivers a bold new take on democracy's crisis. Many liberals think that escalating economic anxieties and cultural backlash drove voters to Trump. But a crush of data shows this thinking to be deeply flawed. It also strikes working-class voters as condescending and repellent. And while the Democrats stick to "kitchen table" issues and showing how much they care, voters care more about strength and commitment to principle than prescription drug prices.

Politics is a dominance game and a contest to capture the flag. Politicians who seem to be the strongest leaders and most passionate patriots hold the advantage. The Republicans get it. The Democrats don't.

Republicans have a high-dominance political style. They take risks, savor conflict, and use provocative language. Democrats have a low-dominance style. They're risk-averse, afraid to engage on cultural issues-and more than a little boring. Republicans hammer away at their patriotism, even as they betray the nation and shred American values. Democrats are loyal to American values but have grown squeamish about patriotism and have no national story.

Ordinary people often don't recognize themselves in the stories liberal politicians tell about them, while the authoritarians speak a language of dominance and national greatness that connects. The Democrats need a new approach to messaging. Comeback spells it out and provides a roadmap for trouncing Trumpism.

Steven Fish is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a comparative political scientist specializing in democracy and authoritarianism, religion and politics, constitutional systems, and national legislatures. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and universities in Russia, Poland, China, and Indonesia.

His previous books include: Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (1995); Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, co-authored (2001); Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (2005); The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey (2009); and Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (2011).

His latest book and the focus of the interview – Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge was published by Rivertowns Books, Irvington, N.Y. in 2024.

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Can the Constitution Still Unite Us?: A Conversation with Yuval Levin

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

During an era of broad political dissatisfaction, what is the history and role of the Constitution? Does the Constitution still have the power to unite us? Dr. Yuval Levin joins Madison's Notes to discuss his forthcoming book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again. Along the way, he delves into key American figures from James Madison to Woodrow Wilson and the reasons for our present discord.

Yuval Levin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy, and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of National Affairs, as well as a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels. He holds a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.

Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.

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What does Biden’s temporary suspension of offensive arms transfers mean for US-Israeli relations?

Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Charles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons transfers, which imposes stringent controls to avoid the misuse of U.S. weaponry. Blaha also discusses the role of the protests on campuses and their doubtful effects on changing American or Israeli policy. Finally, the conversation delves into the overall posture of the United States vis-à-vis arms transfers to Israel.

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Shelley X. Liu, "Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation towards development and security. Where does the victor choose to spend, and why? And what are the implications for ultimately consolidating power and preventing conflict recurrence?

The book examines wartime rebel-civilian ties under rebel governance and explains how these ties--along with rebel governing institutions--shape the rebel victors' post-war various resource allocation strategies to establish control at the sub-national level. In turn, successfully balancing resources dedicated toward development and security helps the victor to consolidate power. The book relies on mixed-methods evidence from Zimbabwe and Liberia, combining interviews, focus groups, and archival data with fine-grained census, administrative, survey, and conflict datasets to provide an in-depth examination of subnational variation in wartime rebel behavior and post-war governing strategies. A comparison of Zimbabwe and Liberia alongside four additional civil wars in Burundi, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and Angola further demonstrates the importance of wartime civilian tie-formation for post-war control. The argument's central insights point to war and peace as part of a long state-building process, and suggest that the international community should pay attention to sub-national political constraints that new governments face. Her findings offer implications for recent rebel victories and, more broadly, for understanding the termination, trajectories, and political legacies of such conflicts around the world.

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Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming, "Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life" (Routledge, 2023)

Sun, 12 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response.

The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships. Despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down, in ways both large and small. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other hand, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture.

Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, media, law, and culture.

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South Korea after the 2024 Parliamentary Elections

Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do election campaigns in South Korea look like? Why have satellite parties become an important instrument of power politics? What do the election results mean for the Yoon government’s ability to implement its policy agenda? In April 2024, South Koreans went to the polls to elect a new parliament but many regarded the elections also as a referendum on President Yoon Suk-yeol and opposition leader Lee Jae-myung. In this episode, Outi Luova talks to Sabine Burghart about her observations during the election campaign in Seoul and Jeonju, the government’s controversial medical reform plans, new political actors and gender differences in voting behavior.

Sabine Burghart is University Lecturer and Academic Director of the Master’s Degree Programme in East Asian Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku, Finland.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Asianettverket, University of Oslo (Norway), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden).

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Jeremy Garlick, "Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Thu, 09 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.

Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Ian Johnson, "Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 09 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the People’s Republic of China.

Today’s Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is no exception to this, and indeed is making unusually strenuous efforts to circumscribe an acceptable vision of the past. Yet, as Ian Johnson’s beautifully put together and captivatingly written new book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Oxford UP, 2023) shows, no small number of scholars, film-makers, artists, writers and researchers continue to work to ensure that less convenient histories endure into the future. Based on years of research and experience, this is a powerful – and ultimately cautiously hopeful – book about the possibility for ordinary people to keep hold of often-painful but vitally important pasts. Working to make this more likely, Ian Johnson also heads the China Unofficial Archives project.

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and socialism and empire in Eurasia.

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David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States.

Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties.

Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.

The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies.

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James Wolfinger, "If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia" (Temple UP, 2022)

Mon, 06 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress demonstrates that “Philadelphia must be central to any analysis of African American political history.”

But politics means more than elected office and the book highlights political strategies such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. The book highlights grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged (white) Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect (Black) Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter.

Dean James Wolfinger (he/him/his) serves as dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.

Dr. Stanley Arnold (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of American History at Northern Illinois University.

Dr. Alyssa Ribeiro (she/her/hers) is the Henry A Logan, Sr, Professor of American History at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

Ms. Daniela Lavergne at Saint Joseph’s University served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

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Tanisha M. Fazal, "Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition.

In Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War (Oxford UP, 2024), Tanisha Fazal traces the modern history of medical treatment and casualty rates in American conflicts from the Civil War to the more recent counterinsurgency wars. As she shows, wars became increasingly survivable for wounded troops, to the point now where a large majority of wounded soldiers survive.

Yet the human and financial implications of this steep increase in the wounded-to-killed ratio are dramatic, and her powerful analysis of this shift provides a necessary corrective to how we understand the costs of war. For each major conflict, Fazal analyzes the weapons used, injuries sustained, and policies put in place for veterans' care and pensions. As she argues, these improvements have significant financial and deeply personal implications for the returned wounded and their families, as well as the US government and its citizenry. Fazal's analysis highlights the significance of policymakers underestimating the costs of war, which in turn makes it easier both to initiate and continue military action abroad, contributing to Americas' penchant for engaging in so-called "endless wars."

Tanisha Fazal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. In addition to her new book, she is the author of two award-winning books and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow

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Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. These ideas, he shows, were and are flawed and have undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace afterwards. America's leaders he argues have too often taken the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory, leading to the “forever wars” of today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 2019) dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow. Why American Loses War is a must read for policy practitioners, serving soldiers and the lay educated public.

Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

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Harris Mylonas and Maya Tudor, "Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 04 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Nationalism has long been a normatively and empirically contested concept, associated with democratic revolutions and public goods provision, but also with xenophobia, genocide, and wars. Moving beyond facile distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' nationalisms, Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press 2023) argues that nationalism is an empirically variegated ideology. Definitional disagreements, Eurocentric conceptualizations, and linear associations between ethnicity and nationalism have hampered our ability to synthesize insights. This book proposes that nationalism can be broken down productively into parts based on three key questions: 1. Does a nation exist? 2. How do national narratives vary? 3. When do national narratives matter? The answers to these questions generate five dimensions along which nationalism varies: elite fragmentation and popular fragmentation of national communities; ascriptiveness and thickness of national narratives; and salience of national identities.

Our guests are: Maya Tudor, who is an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. And Harris Mylonas, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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J. P. Messina, "Private Censorship" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 01 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When we think of censorship, our minds might turn to state agencies exercising power to silence dissent. However, contemporary concerns about censorship arise in contexts where non-state actors suppress expression and communication. There are subtle and not-so-subtle forms of interference that come from social groups, employers, media corporations, and even search engines. Should these “new” forms of censorship alarm us? Should we assess them in ways that mirror our typical views about state-enacted censorship? If not, how should we think about non-state modes of censorship?

In Private Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2024), JP Messina takes up these broad questions. He examines a range of emerging sites of non-state censorship – what he calls “private” censorship – and sorts through the normative, political, and legal issues.

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The Rhetoric of Crisis in Israel-Palestine: A Discussion with Amos Goldberg

Wed, 01 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This week, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Among other rhetorical aspects of the conflict, Goldberg reflects on the meaning of such slogans as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They also discuss the question whether Israel is committing genocide and what that means. Finally, the conversation addresses how the conflict might end, an especially appropriate question as the parties seem to be returning to the bargaining table in a serious way.

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Éric Fassin, "State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond" (CEU Press, 2024)

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Éric Fassin (Université Paris 8) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond (2024).

Éric Fassin examines the trend of state anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that today’s world requires an examination of this phenomenon beyond Cold War geopolitical divisions and highlights a global shift towards authoritarian neoliberalism. His book is a plea for the political urgency of intellectual work in a global moment of political anti-intellectualism.

Éric’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

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George R. Boyer, "The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War.

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David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024). An expert in constitutional law, Pozen argues that the drug war has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of money, efficacy, and human rights. But even as activists peel off the drug war’s more unsavory aspects through cannabis and psychedelic legalization, Pozen also argues that they’ve neglected to consider the impact America’s courts could have on rectifying oppressive drug laws.

It wasn’t always this way. The Constitution of the War on Drugs also details the “hidden history” of a brief legal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when lawyers effectively argued for liberalized drug policies – on the sound basis of the Constitution. The moment was eventually overturned, but Pozen argues it could be a useful historical lesson for people interested in the effects of constitutional law on the drug war today.

A link to the digital edition of The Constitution of the War on Drugs will soon be available here.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is coming out soon from the University of Chicago Press.

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India Votes 2024

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is at stake at the 2024 Indian national elections? And, what can we expect if the incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi wins another five years in office? From April to June 2024, close to one billion Indian voters can cast their ballot at what is set to be the largest democratic exercise in world history. India is often spoken about as the world’s largest democracy, and the current Indian government describes the country as “the mother of democracy”. But there are also indications that Indian democracy is on the decline. Global indices now place India among the top “autocratizing countries” in the world, categorising it as an electoral autocracy. And, under Modi, the space for dissent has narrowed, the freedom of the media been undermined, and religious minorities and oppositional groups in civil society targeted and repressed. In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Arild Engelsen Ruud and Francesca Jensenius about the 2024 elections and the future of Indian democracy.

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo

Francesca Jensenius is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

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Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, "Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show to Barack Obama referencing Jay-Z's song "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," politicians have used music not only to construct their personal presidential identities but to create the broader identity of the American presidency. Through music, candidates can appear relatable, show cultural competency, communicate values and ideas, or connect with a specific constituency. On a less explicit level, episodes such as Clinton's sax-playing and Obama's shoulder brush operate as aural and visual articulations of race and racial identity. But why do candidates choose to engage with race in this manner? And why do supporters and detractors on YouTube and the Twittersphere similarly engage with race when they create music videos or remixes in homage to their favorite candidates?

With Barack Obama, Ben Carson, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump as case studies, Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency (U Michigan Press, 2023) sheds light on the factors that motivate candidates and constituents alike to articulate race through music on the campaign trail and shows how the racialization of sound intersects with other markers of difference and ultimately shapes the public discourse surrounding candidates, popular music, and the meanings attached to race in the 21st century. Gorzelany-Mostak explores musical engagement broadly, including official music in the form of candidate playlists and launch event setlists, as well as unofficial music in the form of newly composed campaign songs, mashups, parodies, and remixes.

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Boubacar N’Diaye, "Mauritania's Colonels: Political Leadership, Civil-Military Relations and Democratization" (Routledge, 2017)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Boubacar N’Diaye's book Mauritania's Colonels: Political Leadership, Civil-Military Relations and Democratization (Routledge, 2017), the result of more than a decade of research, focuses on the socio-political dynamics and civil-military relations in a little studied country: Mauritania, located in the troubled North-western part of Africa. Boubacar N'Diaye brings into light the political evolution of this country which holds lessons for African politics, and could affect the future of the West African sub-region.

Mauritania's Colonels examines the personalities and policy of five military officers turned heads of state who ruled Mauritania for nearly forty years. After comparing and contrasting the personal traits, social origins, itineraries, and evolution as military officers, it critically evaluates the policies they enacted to address four key challenges their country faces. These are, namely, the difficult cohabitation between the country's ethno-cultural communities, the illusive democratization and military withdrawal from politics, the judicious management of the country's abundant natural resources to meet the socioeconomic needs of their people, and the prudent conduct of foreign policy given Mauritania's location, straddling Arab North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Showing the impact that each Colonel has had on the evolution of Mauritania, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of West Africa, African politics, civil-military relations and democratization processes.

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Social media’s business model is changing democracy, and not for the better

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Democracies in Europe and the world over are grappling with the challenges posed by social media. In this episode, Charlotte Galpin and Verena Brändle talk with host Licia Cianetti about the multiple ways in which the online and the offline intersect in contemporary democracies, and how the engagement-maximising business model of privately owned social media platforms drives polarisation, undermines the quality of traditional media, and pushes extreme content onto unsuspecting users. There is no easy solution, but democracies must grapple with this new reality.

Charlotte Galpin is Associate Professor in German and European Politics at the University of Birmingham.
Verena Brändle is Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR.

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Matt Qvortrup, "The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics" (CEU Press, 2024)

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Matt Qvortrup (Coventry University) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics (CEU Press, 2024).

Putting the “science” back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between liberals and conservatives, can predict our behaviour, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions, and wars. The book also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the organ that shapes our politics. It warns that if we rely on the evolutionarily primitive parts of the midbrain, those engaged when we succumb to polarised politics, we stand in danger of squandering the gains we made through the last eight million years.

Matt’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

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Anu Bradford, "Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Michael J. Graetz, "The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Graetz.

In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton UP, 2024), Graetz chronicles the movement from a fringe theory promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric to a highly organized mainstream lobbying force, funded by billionaires, that dominates and distorts politics.

Building on vague and disproven theories about "supply side" economics, the movement has undermined long-held beliefs that taxes are a reasonable price to pay for civil society, sound infrastructure, national security, and shared prosperity.

Leaders have attacked the IRS, protected tax loopholes, and pushed aggressively for tax cuts from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Also known as "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics, these theories falsely claim that tax cuts will pay for themselves, when in fact they have led to the need for increased debt, including massive foreign debt, to pay for critical national investments.

The antitax movement has expanded to include anti-government ideas and now, as told by Graetz, threatens the nation’s social safety net, increases inequality, saps American financial strength, and undermines the status of the US dollar.

In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” In this book Graetz argues that it is the antitax movement itself that wields this destructive power.

Suggested reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

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Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, "America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is happening to the politics of race in America?

In America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rogers Smith and Desmond King argue that the nation has entered a new, more severely polarized era of racial policy disputes, displacing older debates over color-blind versus race-targeted measures. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and studies of federal, state, and local initiatives linked to global developments, the authors map the memberships and the goals of two rival racial policy alliances, comprised of grassroots activists, NGOs, government agencies, and wealthy funders on both sides. Today's conservatives promise to "protect" traditionalist Americans against assaults from what they see as a radical American Left. Today's progressives seek to "repair" all American institutions and practices that embody systemic racism. Though these sides have some common ground, they advance sharply opposed visions of America that threaten to make profound racial policy conflicts, sometimes erupting into violence, all too pervasive in the nation's present and future.

Professor Rogers Smith is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Desmond King is Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is a Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Ahmed M. Abozaid, "Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis" (Brill, 2023)

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000

Ahmed M. Abozaid’s Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis (Brill, 2023) introduces new non-Western perspectives on the Arab Uprisings, decentering and decolonizing International Relations, and Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork, ethnography, over 250 interviews, and empirical research, it is one of the first books to evaluate the position of International Relations theorists towards studying the Arab Uprisings. It relies on local IR scholarship from the region, which is rarely considered. It provides a critical account of why democratic revolutions have failed, how counterrevolutions and authoritarianism have fortified, and why revolutions will once again experience a resurgence in this part of the world.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies.

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Plutarch as Philosopher and Political Thinker: A Conversation with Hugh Liebert

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Plutarch is one of history's most influential authors: his insights were foundational to thinkers ranging from William Shakespeare to Alexander Hamilton, Nietzsche to Montesquieu. Yet, today his writings have fallen out of favor, in part because the genre he pioneered, biography, has fallen out of favor within academia, though it retains popularity among the general public. West Point political scientist Hugh Liebert delves into Plutarch's thought, revealing that Plutarch had profound philosophical insights despite his reputation as a historian. Along the way, he illustrates areas where Plutarch's thought might seem foreign to us versus those where his insights are evergreen, and makes the case for the continued importance of the biographical genre.

Hugh Liebert is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. There, he serves as Director of the West Point Graduate Scholarship Program and Co-Director of the American Foundations minor. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Plutarch’s Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2016), recipient of the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science, and Gibbon’s Christianity (Penn State University Press, 2022). He is currently at 2023-24 Visiting Fellow here at the James Madison Program.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Lorenza B. Fontana, "Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms?

By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics.

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D. J. Taylor, "Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell" (Yale UP, 2024)

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

An intellectual who hated intellectuals, a socialist who didn't trust the state--our foremost political essayist and author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a man of stark, puzzling contradictions. Knowing Orwell's life and reading Orwell's works produces just as many questions as it answers.

Celebrated Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor guides fans and new readers alike through the many twists and turns of Orwell's books, life and thought. As a writer he intended his works to be transparent and instantly accessible, yet they are also full of secrets and surprises, tantalising private histories, and psychological quirks. From his conflicted relationship with religion to his competing anti-imperialism and fascination with empire, Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell (Yale UP, 2024) delves into the complex development of this essential yet enigmatic voice.

Taylor leads us through Orwell's principal writings and complex life--crafting an illuminating guide to one of the most enduringly relevant writers in the English language.

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Words of Attack: Rhetoric Against Liberal Democratic Values with James McAdams

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

With a presidential campaign in the US just around the corner and populist and authoritarian thinkers gaining broader platforms, University of Notre Dame political scientist A. James McAdams shines a light on the terms being used today by the Far Right to undermine liberal democracy. How successful are these thinkers in changing public views? And how worried should we be about what they are doing? These are among the topics McAdams addresses in his conversation with RBI Director John Torpey.

McAdams' most recent book (co-edited with Samuel Piccolo) is Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy (Routledge, 2024).

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Elliott Prasse-Freeman, "Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over three years have passed since a military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar precipitated a popular uprising that has since transformed into a revolutionary situation. While researchers and writers have cobbled together edited books trying to come to terms with all that has happened and how we might interpret it in relation to Myanmar’s recent past, Elliott Prasse Freeman’s Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023) is the first authoritative monographic study of the transitional 2010s and early revolutionary 2020s. Freeman spent the decade prior to the coup living and working with activists in Myanmar, and after it he did further digital ethnographic research and interviews. He combines a trove of data generated over these years with a sharp appreciation of social scientific theory to produce an account of the state in Myanmar as bluntly biopolitical.

Mark Goodale writes in the book's foreword that Rights Refused is noteworthy for its stunning ambition, both intellectual and political; its synthesis of debates, theories and methodology from across a range of disciplines; and, its movements across multiple registers, scales and temporalities. That makes it both a demanding and rewarding book — and so too is this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies!

Elliott manages the Burma Studies Group online, which features weekly updates of new publications on Burma aka Myanmar, like those forthcoming books he mentions at the end of this episode.

Looking for things to read? Elliott recommends Elsa Dorlin's Self Defense, and Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life.

Like this interview? You might also be interested in Gerard McCarthy’s Outsourcing the Polity; and, The Politics of Love in Myanmar by Lynette Chua.

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Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Melvin L. Rogers has a deep and rich new book delving into the work of a host of different African American political thinkers. But this work is much more than an exploration of some of the writings by African American thinkers, it importantly tells the story of America. The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2023) takes the reader on a journey through distinct work and pieces by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and others not in an effort to be exhaustive or completist in examining their work, but in teasing out vital thematic approaches to consider race, democracy, and freedom in the American republic. Rogers starts from a foundation in considering the idea of democracy—what are the habits and sensibilities that are located in the people who compose a democracy, or, more precisely, “who are we?” in the understanding of “we the people” or in the we of “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” While there is attention to the institutions that structure our democracy, Rogers reads many of these authors to expand that focus, to think about what the culture, the societal concepts, and the community define as who we are and who we might hope to be. Thus, as Rogers weaves together chronological approaches to considering these ideas from the authors and artists included in the conversation, he is also toggling together components that are often considered separately: political standing and culture standing, and how individuals, particularly black individuals, are situated in each.

The Darkened Light of Faith is deeply engaged with the conceptual duality of a place and an idea – the United States – that is at once mired in the tragic history of enslavement and, at the same time, moving (maybe?) towards the promise of a democracy that holds freedom among its most important qualities. This tension is also the darkened light of faith and hope that the thinkers, activists, and artists wrap themselves and their work in as they consider the opportunities and problematics that are America. Rogers does not confine his analysis to the written word. There is an exploration of anti-slavery pamphlets by abolitionist David Walker, who wrote and advocated against slavery in the 1820s and 1803s. The anti-republican nature of enslavement in the United States is another dimension of the book, examining the conflict inherent in a republican society that incorporates racial domination. Furthering this discussion, Rogers considers the idea of “the people” and how this concept is complicated by the exclusionary nature of slavery and categorization of individuals into groups of citizens who are included and others who are excluded based on race. The second part of the book pivots to the 20th century and expands the dimensions of thinking about these tensions and conflicts that are at the heart of the United States. The Darkened Light of Faith explores not just the extra-judicial nature of lynching, but how this is also a site of invisible laws that make lynching, by white Americans, possible without any threat or potential for penalties. This section weaves together work and advocacy by Ida B. Well, Billie Holiday’s song and performances of Strange Fruit, and the NAACP’s campaign using images of lynched bodies to focus on the horror of lynching and the undermining of democratic ethos in the U.S. The final sections of the book take up work by W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as they write about and comment on the complexity of American life, noting that charting a path forward towards the promise of the American experiment cannot leave untold or unknown the history in slavery and domination.

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Egor Lazarev, "State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Egor Lazarev explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives?

The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Maria Snegovaya, "When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024), Maria Snegovaya argues that, contrary to the view that emphasizes the sociocultural aspects (xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc.) of the rise of the populist right, especially in postcommunist Europe, the rise of the populist right is inextricably linked to the pro-market, Neoliberal reforms of the left, which had the effect of disenfranchising working-class and other voters, and providing an natural opportunity for the right to gain power.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China" (Random House, 2023)

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades.

Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for decades. These insights are the foundation of his latest book: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China (Random House, 2023)

In his book, Kaplan criticizes how the U.S. has approached the region—intervention and regime change (including his own mea culpa for his previous support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only for Washington to look somewhere else when newly-formed regimes inevitably disappoint.

In this interview, Robert and I talk about his idea of the “Greater Middle East,” some of the experiences that most stood out to him, and his conclusions on how to think about democracy, order, and anarchy in this part of the world.

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel, including Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House: 2022), The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian (Random House: 2021), The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House: 2012), Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House: 2014), Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House: 2010), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Random House: 2000), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (St. Martins Press: 1993). He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel.

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Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

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Hume, the Epicureans, and the Origins of Liberalism

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Enlightenment philosopher David Hume enjoyed a tremendous influence on intellectual history. What did Hume believe, why was it so controversial at the time, and why to many does it seem so common-sensical now? What can Humian thought explain, and where does it fall short? To discuss, Aaron Zubia, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida's Hamilton Program and 2019-2020 Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow here at the Princeton's James Madison Program joins the show to delve into his new book, The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination (U Notre Dame Press, 2024).

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Sumita Pahwa, "Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers" (Syracuse UP, 2023)

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Despite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government.

To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers (Syracuse UP, 2023) examines the movement's internal debates on preaching, activism, and social reform from the 1980s through the 2000s. In doing so, Sumita Pahwa finds that the framing of political work as ethical conduct has been critical to the organization's functioning.

Through a comprehensive analysis of texts, speeches, public communications, interviews, and internal training documents, Pahwa shows how Islamic and religious ideals have been folded into the political discourse of the Brotherhood, enabling the leadership to shift the boundaries of justifiable and righteous action. Over a period of three decades, the movement has built an influential Islamic political project and carved a unified identity around how to "work for God."

Sumita Pahwa is an Associate Professor of Politics at Scripps College in Claremont CA, where she also teaches in the Middle East and North Africa Studies program. She grew up in India, and received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Middlebury College. Her research focuses on religion and politics and social movements in South Asia and the Middle East, with older research on Egypt and Morocco, and newer research on civil society in India. Cooking and gardening are her main hobbies, and she has done informal comparative research on mango varieties in Egypt and India.

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Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023)

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deployed by enslavers. The letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved reveal the complex ways in which enslaved people analyzed and fought these comparisons. Dr. Chris Blakely focuses on human-animal relationships to unpack “how, where, and when did such decisions regarding the chattel nature of human captives take place?”

In Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World (LSU Press, 2023), they argue that slaving and slavery relied on and generated complex human-animal networks and relations. Exploring these groupings leads to a deeper understanding of how enslavers worked out the process of turning people into chattel and laid the foundations of slavery by mingling enslaved people with nonhuman animals.

Efforts to remake people into property akin to animals involved exchange and trade, scientific fieldwork that exploited curiosity, and forms of labor. Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Dr. Blakley describes human-animal networks spanning from Britain's slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and the American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved.

Dr. Chris Blakley is a visiting assistant professor in the Core Program at Occidental College and a historian interested in more-than-human relationships with a focus on racialization and empire-building. Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World is their first book and they are just beginning a second project on science, race, and the senses in the nineteenth century.

Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

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Jonathan W. Hackett, "Theory of Irregular War" (McFarland, 2024)

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From Afghanistan to Angola, Indonesia to Iran, and Colombia to Congo, violent reactions erupt, states collapse, and militaries relentlessly pursue operations doomed to fail. And yet, no useful theory exists to explain this common tragedy. All over the world, people and states clash violently outside their established political systems, as unfulfilled demands of control and productivity bend the modern state to a breaking point.

Jonathan W. Hackett's Theory of Irregular War (McFarland, 2023) lays out how dysfunctional governments disrupt social orders, make territory insecure, and interfere with political-economic institutions. These give rise to a form of organized violence against the state known as irregular war. Research reveals why this frequent phenomenon is so poorly understood among conventional forces in those conflicts and the states who send their children to die in them.

Jonathan W. Hackett is a U.S. Marine with two decades of experience. He has held positions at the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Marine Forces Special Operations Command, and the Marine Corps operating forces prior to teaching full spectrum human intelligence operations and security cooperation in Dam Neck, Virginia.

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Annika Schmeding, "Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Annika Schmeding’s new book Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford UP, 2023) is a deeply sensitive and rich study of a variety of facets of Sufism in contemporary Afghanistan. Focused on the intersection and interaction of Sufism and Afghan civil society, this book simultaneously offers a layered and often moving account of Sufism in Afghanistan, while also presenting an excellent critique of Western NGO driven understandings of civility and civil society. The book also engages a number of themes connected to Sufism in Afghanistan including Sufism and the state, gender and Sufism, Sufis and the ‘ulama’, and Sufi religious authority through the oneiric imagination. This wonderfully written book will also be a pleasure to teach in the classroom.

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Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organisations and in the United Nations.

Dr. Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinises high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like "moral economy," and concepts, such as "food sovereignty" and "civil society."

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of land grabbing, counter agrarian reform, and a looming climate catastrophe, and celebrates engaged research from Central America to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

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Matthieu Grandpierron, "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do great powers go to war? Why are non-violent, diplomatic options not prioritised? Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024) by Dr. Matthieu Grandpierron argues that world leaders react to status decline by going to war, guided by a nostalgic, virile understanding of what it means to be powerful. This nostalgic virility - a system of subjective beliefs about power, bravery, strength, morality, and health - acts as a filter through which leaders articulate glorified interpretations of history and assess their power and their country’s status on the international stage.

In this rigorous study of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Dr. Grandpierron tests the theory of nostalgic virility against the two more common theoretical frameworks of realism and the diversionary theory of war. Consulting thousands of newly declassified government documents at the highest levels of decision making, Dr. Grandpierron examines three specific cases - the early years of the Indochina War (1945-47), the British reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 - convincingly contending that status-seeking behaviour and nostalgic virility are more relevant in explaining why a leader chooses war and conflict over non-violent, diplomatic options than the dominant frameworks.

Looking to the recent past, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War considers how this new model can be applied to current conflicts - from the Russian war in Ukraine to Chinese actions in the South China Sea - and provides surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between power, decision makers, and causes of war.

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Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy?

In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist political parties in modern Indian history: the All-India Hindu Mahasabha (HMS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She compares three critical periods to show the increasing involvement of women in Hindu nationalist politics over time. In its formative years in the early 1900s, the HMS marginalized women; in the 1980s, the BJP began to mobilize them; and in the contemporary period, as the BJP returned to power in 2014, it has incorporated women into its structures and activities. Williams contends that the incorporation of women into Hindu nationalist politics has significantly advanced the BJP's electoral success compared to prior periods when women were either marginalized or mobilized in more limited ways. Given that the BJP is one of the most dynamic religious/ethno-nationalist parties in the world at present, Williams' account of how it incorporated masses of women into its coalition is essential reading for scholars and students interested not just in India, but in the relationship between gender and right-wing populist politics globally.

Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu

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Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast his vision for limited government and market economics as the natural outworking of religious conviction. The news media broadcast this message with enthusiasm, and white evangelicals rallied to the president’s cause. With their support, Reagan won reelection and continued to dismantle the welfare state, unravelling a political consensus that stood for half a century.

In Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Diane Winston reveals how support for Reagan emerged from a new religious vision of American identity circulating in the popular press. Through four key events—the “evil empire” speech, AIDS outbreak, invasion of Grenada, and rise in American poverty rates—Dr. Winston shows that many journalists uncritically adopted Reagan’s religious rhetoric and ultimately mainstreamed otherwise unpopular evangelical ideas about individual responsibility. The result is a provocative new account of how Reagan together with the press turned America to the right and initiated a social revolution that continues today.

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Yuliya Zabyelina, "Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do top-level public officials take advantage of immunity from foreign jurisdiction afforded to them by international law? How does the immunity entitlement allow them to thwart investigations and trial proceedings in foreign courts? What responses exist to prevent and punish such conduct?

In Between Immunity and Impunity: External Accountability of Political Elites for Transnational Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Yuliya Zabyelina unravels the intricate layers of impunity of political elites complicit in transnational crimes. By examining cases of trafficking in persons and drugs, corruption, and money laundering that implicate heads of state and of government, ministers, diplomats, and international civil servants, she shows that, despite the potential of international law immunity to impede or delay justice, there are prominent instruments of external accountability. Accessible and compelling, this book provides novel insights for readers interested in the close-knit bond between power, illicit wealth, and impunity.

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W. B. Allen, "Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition" (Anthem Press, 2023)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made more accessible to English readers than it ever has been.

There have been in English only two prior translations of this work that first appeared in 1748. The deficiencies of those two efforts have been broadly identified in the scholarship. Although the text is still used with regularity in university instruction (having been recovered after a lull in the 1950s and 60s), it deserves – and now receives – a presentation that enhances its usefulness in the analysis both of politics and the philosophical foundations of human life.

Montesquieu’s singularity – the first secular argument against race-based slavery and only the second secular argument against the servitude of women – provides a special heritage for the modern word to preserve and a key to making operational those fundamental insights within the context of sustained political and cultural development. The replacement of blood and tribe with the universal attributes of humanity (while recognizing the highly variable ecologies of communities) constitutes the single-most important moral and political development of the modern world. And The Spirit of the Laws bears a primary responsibility for that accomplishment. Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition (Anthem Press, 2024) is a worthy translation.

W. B. Allen studies and writes broadly in political philosophy and history, with special focus on traditions of self-government and liberalism.

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Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.

Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’s authoritarian state and its increasingly powerful but unruly tech companies, and an ideology that fuses nationalism with high modernism, technological fetishism, and meritocracy. Some have compared China’s extraordinary transformation to America’s Gilded Age. This provocative book reveals how it is more like a gilded cage, one in which the Chinese state and tech capital are producing rising inequality and new forms of social exclusion.

Ya-Wen Lei is professor of sociology at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Paul Carter, "Richard Nixon: California's Native Son" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 04:00:00 -0000

Born in Yorba Linda and raised in Whittier, California, Nixon succeeded early in life, excelling in academics while enjoying athletics through high school. At Whittier College he graduated at the top of his class and was voted Best Man on Campus. During his career at Whittier's oldest law firm, he was respected professionally and became a chief trial attorney. As a military man in the South Pacific during World War II, he was admired by his fellow servicemen. Returning to his Quaker roots after the war, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the vice presidency, all within six short years. After losing to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon returned to Southern California to practice law. After losing his gubernatorial race he reinvented himself: he moved to New York and was elected president of the United States in 1968. He returned to Southern California after Watergate and his resignation to heal before once again taking a place on the world stage.

Richard Nixon: California's Native Son (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) is the story of Nixon's Southern California journey from his birth in Yorba Linda to his final resting place just a few yards from the home in which he was born.

Paul Carter is an attorney with more than twenty years of experience in investigation and trial work.

Caleb Zakarin is an Editor at New Books Network.

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Citizenship Across Time and Space with David Jacobson

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey discusses the past and future of citizenship with David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida (Tampa). They discuss the origins of the concept of citizenship in the ancient Near East a few thousand years ago and how kinship notions shape the debate on citizenship even in our own time. In their recent book Citizenship: The Third Revolution (Oxford UP, 2023), Jacobson and his co-author, Manlio Cinalli, turn to the experience of the medieval guilds as an alternative that may help rejuvenate the institution of citizenship today. The conversation closes with a discussion of Jacobson’s project on violence among the Vikings and how the monopolization of the legitimate means of violence contributes to the decline of violence in societies, as Norbert Elias argued that it did.

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Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary politics is characterized by the rise (and fall) of many new parties. But what tools do political scientists have to map and measure electoral volatility? How can we best capture this change? And what insights can political scientists draw from other disciplines? Join host Tim Haughton for a discussion with Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker, the authors of a new book, Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2023). Their book draws on a database of 200 000 electoral candidates from over 60 elections across nine democracies.

Allan Sikk is Associate Professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Philipp Köker is Lecturer and Research Fellow at Leibniz University in Hannover.
Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a founding co-director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham.

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Michael Davis, "Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values in Hong Kong" (Association for Asian Studies, 2023)

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

"What happened in Hong Kong is not an anomaly but a warning" - Hong Kong Human Rights defender Chow Hang Tung, speech written from prison upon receiving a human rights award.

In our interview today, I spoke with Professor Michael C. Davis, author of Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong (AAS and Columbia UP, 2024). In his latest book, he writes about how one of the world's most free-wheeling cities has transitioned from a vibrant global center of culture and finance into an illiberal regime. We spoke about the progressive shifts towards authoritarian governance in Hong Kong's post-colonial period, leading up to the introduction of the National Security Law of 2020, and the rapid erosion of human rights and liberal freedoms since. Professor Davis explained the significance of Hong Kong's new domestic National Security Law, introduced last week, and its implications for the erosion of global democratic institutions globally.

Professor Michael C. Davis is a former long-time professor at the University of Hong Kong and prior to that at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he taught course on human rights and constitutional development. He is currently a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a Senior Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University, and a Professor of Law and International Affairs at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. He also enjoys research affiliations at New York University and the University of Notre Dame.

You can listen to our earlier interview, about Professor Davis' book, Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law (Columbia UP, 2020) here.

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William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern.

This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.

William Bain is Associate Professor of International Relations at National University of Singapore. He is the author of Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (OUP, 2003) and editor of, and contributor to, Medieval Foundations of International Relations (Routledge, 2016) and The Empire of Security and the Safety of the People (Routledge, 2006). He has written widely on the theory of international society and the history of international thought.

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Kevin P. Reihle, "The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service" (Georgetown UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Since its founding in 1995, the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, has regained the majority of the domestic security functions of the Soviet-era KGB. Under Vladimir Putin, who served as FSB director just before becoming president, the agency has grown to be one of the most powerful and favored organizations in Russia. The FSB not only conducts internal security but also has primacy in intelligence operations in former Soviet states. Their activities include anti-dissident operations at home and abroad, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, criminal investigations of crimes against the state, and guarding Russia's borders.

In The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service (Georgetown University Press, 2024), Kevin P. Riehle provides a brief history of the FSB's origins, placed within the context of Russian history, the government's power structure, and Russia's wider culture. He describes how the FSB's mindset and priorities show continuities from the tsarist regimes and the Soviet era. The book's chapters analyze origins, organizational structure, missions, leaders, international partners, and cultural representations such as the FSB in film and television.

Based on both English and Russian sources, this book is a well-researched introduction to understanding the FSB and its central role in Putin's Russia.

Kevin P. Riehle is lecturer in intelligence and security studies at Brunel University London. He also spent over 30 years in the US government as a counterintelligence analyst. He is the author of two previous books, including Soviet Defectors: Revelations of Renegade Intelligence Officers, 1924-1954 (2020).

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William W. Parsons and Regina M. Matheson, "The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump" (NYU Press, 2023)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How and why the election of Donald Trump inspired more women to enter politics.

Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election shocked and dismayed many women, and motivated many to run for office at all levels of government. In The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump (NYU Press, 2023), Regina M. Matheson and William W. Parsons explore this inspiring phenomenon and its impact on women's representation.

Drawing on national surveys and in-depth interviews of over 900 women, across almost every state, Matheson and Parsons show us why more women decided to run for state legislature during the Trump administration, the obstacles they faced on the campaign trail, and whether they ultimately succeeded or failed in their bid for office. Candidates share valuable lessons they learned from their recent campaign experiences, providing future insight for women--on both sides of the aisle--who may be inspired to follow in their footsteps.

Matheson and Parsons examine the impact Donald Trump had on women candidates--both positive and negative--and women's ambitions to pursue political office. The Pink Wave celebrates the hundreds of trailblazing women creating new political opportunities for representation, now and in the future.

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Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do repressive governments sometimes shut down the Internet when faced with uprisings? And how have cyber controls become a dependable tool in the weapons arsenal that states use in civil conflict?

In Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Anita R. Gohdes addresses these questions, and provides an original and in-depth look into the relationship between digital technologies and state violence. Drawing on large-scale analyses of fine-grained data on the Syrian conflict, qualitative case evidence from Iran, and the first global comparative analysis on Internet outages and state repression, Dr. Gohdes makes the case that digital infrastructure supports security forces in their use of violent state repression. More specifically, she argues that mass access to the Internet presents governments who fear for their political survival with a set of response options. When faced with a political threat, they can either temporarily restrict or block online public access or they can expand mass access to online information and monitor it to their own advantage. Surveillance allows security forces to target opponents of the state more selectively, while extreme forms of censorship or shutdowns of the Internet occur in conjunction with larger and more indiscriminate repression. As digital communication has become a bedrock of modern opposition and protest movements, Repression in the Digital Age breaks new ground in examining state repression in the information age.

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Lisa A. Baglione, "Understanding Comparative Politics: An Inclusive Approach" (CQ Press, 2024)

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Research in political science shows that collections and textbooks often mention race, gender, ethnicity, and religion – but they don’t consistently use those lenses to understand politics. In

Understanding Comparative Politics: An Inclusive Approach (CQ Press, 2024), Dr. Lisa A. Baglione creates a new kind of textbook that puts issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion into context and encourages critical thinking about world regions and individual countries through the lens of current events such as social justice movements and the COVID-19 pandemic. She helps readers make personal connections and actively learn and explore through maps, data, theory, and reflection questions.

Dr. Lisa A. Baglione is a professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University who has conducted research in five areas over the course of her career. While they are varied, she has benefited from integrating insights from each: negotiations between adversaries, authoritarian transformation, peacebuilding, gender in politics, and pedagogy. Many listeners will be familiar with Dr. Baglione’s Writing a Research Paper in Political Science: A Practical Guide to Inquiry, Structure, and Methods published by CQ Press. The book is in its 4th edition with a 5th edition in the works. She co-authored “’Pale, Male, and Stale?’ An Analysis of Introductory Readers in Political Science” with Becki Scola and Laura Bucci.

During our conversation Lisa mentions:

Research on gender published by U of I (meaning Indiana) by Ekaterina M. Levintova and Alison Kathryn Staudinger Gender in the Political Science Classroom.
Valerie Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynn Nielson, First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance & National Security Worldwide (New York: Columbia U Press, 2021) and Cynthia Enloe, Seriously: Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

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