New Books in Political Science

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In turn, if we accept these thinkers as doing something distinct, how can this sociologically be explained? These are the questions which animate Alex Law’s The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process (Routledge, 2026). Structured around two sections, Sociology and the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment, Law sees these thinkers as thinking through what Elias would later call the civilising process. He so doing he explores how questions of state formation, violence and emerging commercial society structured their interest and how the particular position of Scotland, a stateless nation experiencing rebellion, provided the space for what he calls their ‘pre-sociology’. In our podcast we discuss how Law’s attempt to see the Scottish Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times. We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent’ figure for sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and historical insight sociology should have. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Was Brexit really a sudden, populist shock, or was the writing on the wall for decades? This week on International Horizons, Eli Karetny sits down with award-winning cultural historian Prof. Iain Quinn to discuss his forthcoming book, Cultural Dissonance: Brexit Reconsidered. Quinn dismantles the narrative that Leave voters were simply misled, arguing instead that the referendum was the inevitable boiling point of a deep, historical distrust in Westminster and the media. From the decline of serious policy debate to the modern reimagining of political parties like the GOP, this episode offers a profound new lens for understanding the ongoing democratic fragmentation in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead (University of California Press, 2026), Gary Hoover asks the reader a simple question: Is our economy a ladder or a lottery? Are people able to control their position on the economic spectrum by their actions? Some argue that, in our market-based economy, if you play by certain rules and make certain choices, you'll achieve upward mobility no matter what economic position you were born into. Drawing on his vast economic expertise, Hoover explores what this "social contract" requires of its citizens, and what it offers in return. Hoover shows how civil unrest is often directly related to broken society-level promises, exploring protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and student debt forgiveness as case studies. He also predicts where future protests can be expected if results promised are not results delivered. This insightful and data-driven book tackles challenging issues around income inequality, health care, and artificial intelligence, and ultimately equips readers to answer these pressing questions: Is our social contract a ladder to higher economic standing, accessible to all no matter where they start? Or rather a lottery in which many will buy a ticket but only a few will find success? And how can we best align social promises with our lived economic realities? Gary Hoover is Executive Director of the Murphy Institute, Professor of Economics, and Affiliate Professor of Law at Tulane University. Dr. Zachery Williams is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at LSU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This week on Democracy Dialogues, Maya Tudor speaks with two keen observers of Indian politics, Gilles Verniers and Yamini Aiyar, about what India’s 2026 state elections reveal about the future of the world’s largest democracy. Why did the incumbent government BJP make major gains in some states while struggling in others? Do competitive elections still mean democracy is entirely healthy? And why have places like Tamil Nadu and Kerala remained resistant to Hindu nationalist politics? This episode analyses one of the most important democratic stories in the world right now — and asks what state elections might tell us about India’s democracy more broadly. Gilles Verniers, Centre for South Asia at Stanford University. Gilles Verniers’ work on Indian politics and elections hereYamini Aiyar, Visiting Professor of the Practice at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Yamini Aiyar’s recent writing on democracy and electoral administration in India here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Black women have always been the most relentless instigators for change—building a democracy for all. In The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn from Them (Harper, 2026), Atima Omara draws on her political knowledge and expertise, as well as history, to examine how they have responded to failed strategic decisions by movement leaders and the modern Democratic Party in previous elections as a context for the present. She also provides actionable recommendations to organizers, donors, candidates, strategists, political party leaders, that everyday people can use in their communities to build an inclusive democracy that endures beyond one election cycle. The Instigators is at once an urgent political guide, historical exploration, and a poignant memoir that pulls from Omara’s two decades of work in Democratic politics and the progressive movement as an elected Democratic Party leader, movement organizer, former candidate, gubernatorial aide, campaign staff to candidates at the national, state, and local level; and now political strategist. Powerful, insightful, and practical, it is imperative reading for everyone eager to protect and rebuild our democracy and create a better tomorrow for all. Our guest is: Atima Omara, who works and leads at the intersection of electoral politics and issue advocacy in the progressive movement. She is a political strategist, advocate, trainer, leader, and speaker with significant political, government, and non-profit experience, and she is a sought-after commentator and strategist. She is the author of The Instigators. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide The End of White Politics The Vice-Presidents Black Wife Never Caught Leading From The Margins

The Wisdom of the Ancients: Four Ideas That Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2025) is about four cornerstones of modern thought that were put in place by people living in the ancient Mediterranean world. It covers approximately 2,000 years in time (from ca. 1000 BCE to 1000 CE) and spatially moves from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia (roughly, modern Iraq), through Greece and Rome, to the new Germanic states growing in what is now western Europe. The four ideas, as author H. A. Drake proposes, are monotheism, the idea that there is only one god, not many; individual rights, the idea that there is a limit to what the state can order us to do; naturalized citizenship, the idea that the full rights and privileges of citizenship can be extended to people who have no birthright to them; and creation of a standard by which to judge the performance of states. It is easy, now, to take these ideas for granted. For believers, it seems obvious that only a singular, omnipotent deity can account for the splendour of the universe. Similarly, the common notion that individuals can stand up for their rights, that citizenship can be freely given, or that governments ought to be held to a standard of justice for all, is often accompanied by the assumption that, at the time they were introduced, such ideas must have been immediately recognized as superior and gratefully accepted. The record is far more complicated, and that makes the story of their success far more interesting. By discussing these ideas in their historical context with clarity and wit, The Wisdom of the Ancients reminds readers how preposterous they were originally and how different our world would be if they had not taken hold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

When we think about threats to democracy, we often imagine dramatic breakdowns—military coups, constitutional crises, or sudden collapses. But today, a common danger is slower and less visible: democratic erosion driven by elected leaders themselves. Across different regions, presidents and prime ministers are weakening institutions, undermining accountability, and reshaping the rules of the game from within. Why is this happening now, and why do voters sometimes tolerate it? In this episode, CEDAR host Temitayo Odeyemi speaks with Susan Stokes about her article in the Journal of Democracy, “Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy,” and what it reveals about the changing nature of democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century. Drawing on this work, as well as her recent book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2025), the conversation explores how rising inequality, shifting party systems, and deepening polarisation create openings for backsliding leaders, and how strategies such as “democratic trash talk” can erode public trust in institutions. Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on democratic theory, distributive politics, and comparative political behaviour. Temitayo Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and reshaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (UNC Press, 2023) offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American voluntary sector responded to major catastrophes around the world. Focusing on US responses to sudden disasters caused by earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods—crises commonly known as "natural disasters"—historian Julia F. Irwin highlights the complex and messy politics of emergency humanitarian relief.Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance—and humanitarian aid more broadly—to US foreign affairs.Julia F. Irwin, PhD, Yale University, 2009, is professor of history at Louisiana State University. Her research focuses on the place of humanitarian aid in twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (2013), is a history of U.S. international relief efforts during the World War I era; the dissertation on which it is based won the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

When we think about threats to democracy, we often imagine dramatic breakdowns—military coups, constitutional crises, or sudden collapses. But today, a common danger is slower and less visible: democratic erosion driven by elected leaders themselves. Across different regions, presidents and prime ministers are weakening institutions, undermining accountability, and reshaping the rules of the game from within. Why is this happening now, and why do voters sometimes tolerate it? In this episode, CEDAR host Temitayo Odeyemi speaks with Susan Stokes about her article in the Journal of Democracy, “Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy,” and what it reveals about the changing nature of democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century. Drawing on this work, as well as her recent book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2025), the conversation explores how rising inequality, shifting party systems, and deepening polarisation create openings for backsliding leaders, and how strategies such as “democratic trash talk” can erode public trust in institutions. Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on democratic theory, distributive politics, and comparative political behaviour. Temitayo Odeyemi is a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and reshaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Maya Tudor speaks with her colleague and fellow political scientist Pepper Culpepper about his new book Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy, co-authored with Taeku Lee. They explore how corporate scandals—from industry exposes to data privacy breaches—can become moments of democratic reckoning, mobilizing public outrage against concentrated corporate power. The conversation examines why scandals matter politically, the circumstances under which public backlash can still generate meaningful accountability, and what good populism is in an era of growing economic inequality and democratic strain. Links: Bloomsbury here Journal of Democracy here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political historian Oscar Winberg has a fascinating new book titled Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics. This book weaves together quite a few different threads in examining the historical context in which the television show, All In The Family, landed on American television screens. Archie Bunker for President examines why this particular sitcom was a kind of inflection point within U.S. politics, within the media landscape at the time and moving forward, and how television production shifted and changed around this one particular television series. Winberg also lays out the path from the early 1970s, when All in the Family first aired, to our contemporary political moment, when celebrity and politics seem to be inescapably intertwined. As Winberg notes in our conversation, television as an entity is inherently conservative, since the functional model was about appealing to the lowest common denominator so that advertisers would be willing to pay for time during shows. In order to reach the most viewers, at least in the age of network television, the television series needed to appeal to the largest market possible, and not “turn off” viewers. What happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the television show All in the Family is that this dynamic shifts, and the case is made that it isn’t about reaching the most people, but about reaching the people who have the means and inclination to purchase what the advertisers are selling. This is part of the pitch that Norman Lear makes, that CBS executive Bob Wood finally decides to gamble on by greenlighting All in the Family. The dynamic inside the show itself is to focus on politics: to have the characters within the series discuss different political issues, and engage with the impacts of these issues, from women’s rights and reproductive health to homosexuality to racism and the anti-war movement. In designing All in the Family with Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Conner) clearly defined as a conservative and as a bigot, and with Archie’s daughter, Gloria Stivic (played by Sally Struthers) and son in law, Mike Stivic (played by Rob Reiner), as liberals and politically active, the show embedded politics within the narrative. Edith Bunker, played by Jean Stapleton, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was making its way through the ratification process while the series was airing, providing yet another avenue for political discussion within the show’s structure. There were quite a few other shows that were developed at the same time as All in the Family that took up similarly political themes in iconic ways, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to Maude</

Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War⁠ (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nature of governance. This wartime state expansion is examined through the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the Council of Defense system on the ability of the United States to mobilize for a significant conflict in a foreign land.  Dr. Nathan K. Finney focuses on North Carolina's Council of Defense to describe how the council was mediated by specific people at various levels of society and the results of their decisions. The result is a compelling story about how individuals drove dynamic and compelling regional and national events that propelled a massive national wartime mobilization.  Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council of Defense mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, the council was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization and supporting an increase in the nation's ability to mobilize for the war.  The council's intermediary role, however, also allowed those managing the state mobilization to prevent any significant challenge to the state's social and political structures, despite the dynamic changes wrought by the need to mobilize the nation for war. As a result, Orchestrating Power helps us understand the crucial decisions and developments of early twentieth-century America, showing why the country mobilized for war in the specific ways that it did.  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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Erica Bornstein, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon (and Divisional Associate Dean), has a new book that delves into the regulatory reforms within the nonprofit sector in India. These reforms transpired over more than a decade, and Bornstein spent extended time developing this ethnographic study of not only the changes, but the institutional structures that manage nonprofit organizations and how the various regulatory decisions are made. The research explores the ways in which these changes happened, exploring the various actors within the discussions, and evaluating the process of change within the nonprofit sector in India. A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector (Stanford UP, 2025) is a deeply researched undertaking, paying attention not only to the shifts and changes that were happening in New Delhi, at the seat of the national government, but also in towns and communities in other parts of India, where similar dialogue and processes were also happening, and where the results of so many of these changes could be seen as they moved into implementation. In order to think through the analysis in A Revolution of Rules we must also think about the nonprofit sector as a significant part of political structure in India (and elsewhere). As we discuss in our conversation, there are essentially three sectors, the government or the public sector, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector. Each sector is managed differently and operates towards different ends. But part of the role of the nonprofit sector is to provide capacity where the public sector may not be able to or is not able to fulfill demands. This space, where the rules and regulations are being revised, reformed, and rewritten is where, in a very interesting way, democracy is happening. These are civil society organizations, embedded within the structure of political and economic outcomes, but distinct from both sectors. Since these groups are not aiming at making a profit, the regulatory regime is in a kind of counterpoint to capitalism, and thus in need of different kinds of rules regimes. This is where various stakeholders are coming together to negotiate with each as to how best to manage nonprofits, which are not all the same by any measure, and have different goals, different funding streams, different processes, and different policy formats. This makes the process of regulation complex, since there are constellations of parts that fall under differing kinds of management. This undertaking, designing modes of regulation and policy processes, is not an exercise in creating red tape as much as it is designing processes to achieve important goals and capacities. Bornstein explains that writing policy of this kind, that writing laws is actually writing the future,

Here in Episode 8 of Season 5, I interview Professor Sherif Girgis. A graduate of Princeton University, the University of Oxford, and Yale Law School, Girgis is a tenured professor of law at the Notre Dame Law School and a Spring 2026 visiting professor at Harvard Law School. A former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito and member of the American Academy of the Arts and Letters, he is co-author of two books: What is Marriage? Man, Woman, A Defense (2012), and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (2017). Using some of his recent articles and speeches—such as “The Future of Originalism” (2026)—we discuss the current state of constitutional jurisprudence. As an originalist and textualist reading of the Constitution has, thanks to advocacy groups like the Federalist Society, gone from a dissenting movement to the current governing theory of the Supreme Court, new problems have arisen that go beyond what early forerunners like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia foresaw. We also discuss other (often competing) theories like living constitutionalism and living traditionalism, whether success has undone originalism, and what the future holds for this legal movement. 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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026), Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle among competing elites—between rising elites and ruling elites. Real political change comes from the interaction between social movements and elite political institutions such as parties. But, although true democracy—the rule of the people—may never be achieved, striving towards it can bring about worthwhile democratic results. At the turn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels put forward “elite” theories of democracy and gave us terms such as the “ruling class” and “elites” itself. Drawing on their work and tracing the history of democratic thought through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and Raymond Aron, Elites and Democracy reveals that this fundamentally elitist basis of democracy—democracy understood as competition between elites—was there all along. The challenge is to think it anew. Moving away from procedural or principled conceptions of democracy, Elites and Democracy develops a dynamic theory of democracy, one grounded in movement. With current politics defined by a populist backlash against elites, dynamic democracy offers the tools we urgently need to understand our contemporary predicament and to act upon it. Hugo Drochon is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is a historian of modern political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Why do states exit international organizations (IOs)? How often does exit from IOs – including voluntary withdrawal and forced suspension – occur? What are the effects of leaving IOs for the exiting state? Despite the importance of membership in IOs, a broader understanding of exit across states, organizations, and time has been limited. Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiation for Institutional Change (Cambridge UP, 2025) addresses these lacunae through a theoretically grounded and empirically systematic study of IO exit. Von Borzyskowski and Vabulas argue that there is a common logic to IO exit, which helps explain both its causes and consequences. By examining IO exit across 198 states, 534 IOs, and over a hundred years of history, they show that exit is driven by states' dissatisfaction, preference divergence, and is a strategy to negotiate institutional change. The book also demonstrates that exit is costly because it has reputational consequences for leaving states and significantly affects other forms of international cooperation. NOTE: This book was just awarded the 2026 Chadwick Alger prize for best book in international organizations from the International Studies Association. Our guests are Felicity Vabulas who is the Blanche E. Seaver Associate Professor of International Studies at Pepperdine University and Professor Inken von Borzyskowski, who is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Carlos Martins joins the New Books Network to discuss his book Fascism: Beyond Hitler and Mussolini (Desassossego, 2022) (in Portuguese Fascismos: Para Além de Hitler e Mussolini), a comparative study of fascist movements across Europe and beyond. Working from a rigorous definition of fascism based on its ideological content, Martins examines eight case studies, analysing these specific manifestations of fascism to identify what they had in common and what separated them. In this conversation, we discuss the problem of defining fascism, the distinctions between fascism and populism and why Martins argues that not every dictatorship or radical right movement should automatically be classified as fascist. The discussion also turns to the Portuguese case, including the Estado Novo, National Syndicalism and the debate surrounding Salazarism’s relationship to European fascism. At a moment when the word “fascism” is increasingly invoked in public debate, Martins makes the case for conceptual precision without losing sight of fascism’s historical adaptability and political force. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about ideology, political modernity and the uses, and misuses, of language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Helen Haas speaks with political scientist Sean Lee about the changing relationship between majorities and minorities in the Middle East, the collapse of the post-October 2023 regional order, and why questions of citizenship, identity, and political power remain at the centre of conflicts from Syria and Lebanon to Israel–Palestine. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Sean Lee, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, discusses the evolving relationship between majority and minority groups in the Middle East. He argues that the minority question is not simply about ethnic or religious groups themselves, but about how political power, history, and institutions shape the categories of majority and minority. These identities are not fixed; they change depending on political and historical circumstances. Using examples from Syria, Lebanon, Israel–Palestine, and other regional conflicts, Lee explains how civil wars and political violence reshape social boundaries and reinforce divisions between communities. In Syria, for example, the post-war political transition has intensified tensions between Sunni Arab majorities and minority groups such as the Druze, Kurds, and Alawites. Lee also highlights how outside powers increasingly use minority groups as instruments in regional politics. A major theme of the discussion is the breakdown of the liberal international order after October 2023. According to Lee, this has weakened international law and increased instability in the region. He suggests that unresolved questions about citizenship and equal rights, especially in Israel and Palestine, continue to fuel conflict and resistance. Drawing comparisons beyond the Middle East, Lee argues that similar dynamics can be observed globally, particularly with the rise of ethnonationalism and populism. He concludes that long-term stability depends on moving away from systems based on ethnic or religious identity and toward citizenship-based political systems in which all individuals enjoy equal rights regardless of background. Helen Haas is a Middle East researcher at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and the Middle East Coordinator at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the diversity of Islam. She teaches Turkish and courses on Islamic history and culture, and works as an interpreter and translator of Turkish literature. She is the managing editor of the Usuteaduslik Ajakiri (Journal of Religion). Sean Lee is an assistant professor of political science at The American University in Cairo. His research focuses on political violence and social movements in the Levant. He is currently completing a book manuscript on minoritized communities during the civil wars in Lebanon and Syria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a

Roads, bridges, a renewable power plant, and an electricity grid: UN peacekeepers might be unusual infrastructure builders, but they’re certainly not unambitious. Since the beginning of the UN’s peacekeeping activities after the end of World War II, the Blue Helmets have cemented streets, constructed bridges, and dug wells in conflict zones. But how did the military arm of the world’s primary diplomatic forum become involved in such activities in its quest for peace, and with what consequences? Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Silvia Danielak analyzes the turn to ever-more-complex infrastructure projects, from early road building via urban community projects to the commissioning of entire renewable power plants, in the context of an evolving understanding of peace “problems” and solutions. Tracing the global travel of policies, technologies, and expertise, Dr. Danielak investigates how the shift toward risk management, legacy, and climate security was driven by, and materialized in, conflict zones, shaping the very idea of peace.The book critically engages with the UN’s ambition to insert itself in the sustainable development of the countries it seeks to assist, arguing that we need to consider peace operations’ spatial, urban, and material ways of engagement—especially in the face of mounting climate risks. Infrastructure is poised to take a more prominent position within peace operations, but a more nuanced understanding that recognizes its opportunities, as well as its potential for violence, is required. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

From a Distinguished International Relations Scholar comes The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford UP, 2024), an important book that looks at India's search for major power status. It is an unfinished quest with a long and winding road ahead. This is not to say that India's ambitions in world politics for greater peer recognition and institutional position is unattainable; but its current political class, bureaucratic elites, and intelligentsia must reorient India's statecraft. In this accessible and incisive book Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status, T.V. Paul charts India's cumbersome path toward higher regional and global status, covering both the successes and failures it has experienced since the modern nation's founding in 1947. Paul focuses on the key motivations driving Indian leaders to enhance India's global status and power, but also on the many constraints that have hindered its progress. Paul's analysis of India's quest for status also sheds important light on the current geostrategic situation and serves as a new framework for understanding the China-India rivalry, as well as India's relative position in the broader Indo-Pacific theater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political Scientist Steve Knott has a new book that focuses on conspiracy theories within the American presidency and often promulgated by the president himself. This is not, per se, a book about conspiracy theories in general, but about the narratives that presidents have used—that constitutes a kind of conspiracy thinking—to engage voters and push for particular policy ideas and outcomes. Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency (UP Kansas, 2025) spans the entire history of the United States, paying close attention to presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and finally Donald Trump. These particular presidents, both during their administrations and after, made use of conspiracies and/or demagogic rhetoric to encourage their supporters and to appeal to public fears. As Knott notes, Alexander Hamilton warns against this in both Federalist #1 and Federalist #85, wrapping the discussion of the new Constitution in concerns with regard to demagoguery. So many of the conspiracies that are pushed by presidents have at their base racism and an effort to fan the flames of racial fear and resentment. Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson, and Wilson all made use of racism as a part of their conspiracies. Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency also mines the deep vein of conspiracy theories around moneyed and elite interests, since many presidents cast these interests as predatory and “out to get” the average citizen. This is another constant approach among the presidents from the early days of the republic through to our contemporary “conspirator in chief” Donald Trump. Part of the way that presidents use these kinds of conspiracies is to set up a dichotomy of those who are with the president and those who are against the president, and this latter group is, inevitably, also opposed to the country as a whole and the way of life in the United States. Knott explains that this was the kind of rhetoric that both FDR and Truman used in their implementation of this kind of conspiratorial rhetoric. This also leans on national security as a point of contention, and that those in opposition to the president or the president’s policies are also potential threats to the republic. This is another dimension that Trump builds on in his use of this kind of rhetoric and division. In the final part of Conspirator in Chief, Knott sketches out those presidents who go far in standing against this kind of language and these kinds of attacks. Included in this grouping are John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William Howard Taft, and John F. Kennedy, among others. These individuals

The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war?Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming and going of theories to fashions. While in vogue, fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of meaning. At the same time, they are bestowed with authority and power that allows them to withstand criticism and marginalizes alternative perspectives. These characteristics severely affect the quality, depth, and diversity of research by narrowing and siloing the field of inquiry.Tracing three concepts—revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare—through their fashion lifecycle, Dr. Libiseller demonstrates how fashionability affects the concepts themselves, related research, and the field more generally. Embedded within a discussion of the history and dynamics of Strategic Studies, the book calls for more reflexivity in the study of war and strategy. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

A provocative new history of America's constitution and an urgent call to action for a nation confronted by challenges its founders could never have imagined The American Revolution occurred at a time when Britain's constitutional order failed to adapt to the extraordinary growth of its colonies. The framers designed an American constitution to succeed where Britain's had faltered, planning for continuous population and territorial expansion that would eventually cross the continent. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, it was already ill-suited for an increasingly urban, industrialized society, and the transformations of the twentieth century have pushed it to a breaking point. The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History (Princeton UP, 2026) charts the history and aims of the American constitution from its origins in an agrarian past to the grave crisis we face today. Mark Peterson traces the American constitutional tradition to the control of land in medieval England, showing how the founders incorporated the aspirations of Magna Carta with the administrative principles of the Domesday Book, a meticulous survey and valuation of landed property commissioned by William the Conqueror. This framework encouraged the growth of democratic self-government in a young nation. It also institutionalized the colonization of territory and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, establishing a legal blueprint for transforming tribal lands into revenue-yielding real estate for settlers. Peterson's riveting narrative paints an arresting picture of a dynamic republic whose frame of government has changed enormously to meet the challenges of the modern age but whose written constitution has changed very little. Marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution reveals how this widening disconnect threatens the very existence of our democracy. It calls for a constitution that sustains the ideals developed over the past thousand years while meeting the challenges of the future. Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton) and The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England. Mark Peterson traces the American constitutional tradition to the control of land in medieval England, showing how the founders incorporated the aspirations of Magna Carta with the administrative principles of the Domesday Book, a meticulous survey and valuation of landed property commissioned by William the Conqueror. This framework encouraged the growth of democratic self-government in a young nation. It also institutionalized the colonization of territory and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, establishing a legal bl

“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes traces the origins of the modern parental rights movement to the nineteenth century, when the introduction of compulsory schooling laws, child labor regulations, and vaccine requirements provoked a resistance rooted in the presumed right of white men to govern their homes. A wide-ranging coalition—including Irish Catholic immigrants in Illinois, Mormon enclaves in Utah, and Protestant clergy in Virginia—believed that the state had usurped the “natural rights” of parents and “invaded the home.”Dr. Bowes shows how, by the turn of the century, those disparate voices had coalesced into national conservative movements. Anti-vaccinationists, alternative medical practitioners, and parents who opposed compulsory school medical exams joined forces to form the National League for Medical Freedom. Deciding a case brought by conservative Catholic lawyers, the Supreme Court declared parental rights a “fundamental liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. And the Sentinels of the Republic, a conservative citizen’s lobby, mobilized a campaign to defeat the proposed federal Child Labor Amendment, bringing together pro-family and free-market politics with far-reaching consequences.Exploring the emergence of parental rights as an antistatist ideology through legal cases, legislative debates, and political movements, Dr. Bowes argues that the expansion of state power over children provoked such fierce opposition because the paternal rights of white men—considered the “rights-bearing” individuals of American democracy—were widely viewed as the mark and measure of their independence. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Today’s political debates are fiercely polarized. But looking beyond the headlines, The Trigger Points: Inequality and Political Polarization in Contemporary Society (Policy Press, 2026) shows that ordinary citizens hold much more nuanced, less divided views. Drawing on rich survey data and group discussions, this work maps four major areas of conflict: migration, climate change, diversity, and economic justice. Across these conflicts, most citizens take positions that are middle-of-the-road, contradictory, or undecided. It is only certain ‘trigger points' – like gendered pronouns or refugee admissions – that predictably ignite tensions and deep disagreement. Political entrepreneurs know this and weaponize trigger points for their agenda. Yet the real key to contemporary conflicts, the book argues, lies in social inequality. This is a vital work that maps today’s political landscape without sensationalism, offering a fresh lens on public debate. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based security analyst and writer who has spent over two decades documenting Taiwan’s political and security landscape. A former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), he is a Research Fellow and Executive Editor with the Prospect Foundation in Taiwan, and advises various private and governmental actors. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C., the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Hub. In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with Cole about his latest book, The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War (Polity, 2025). Starting with the Sunflower Student Movement and rise of Xi Jinping, the book explores why the Taiwan Strait has become such a “tinderbox”, and surveys various tactics that the People’s Republic of China has used to destabilize Taiwan. With the Ukraine War’s shadow looming, Cole also examines the prospects of conflict between Taiwan and China, and discusses various means through which Taiwan and its liberal democratic allies can build resilience and interconnection. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Coming in the thick of the second Trump term, What Does the American Presidency Mean? The Need for Interpretation in Presidency Studies is a timely and provocative new title for the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. In it, Richard Holtzman sets an agenda for interpretivist presidency research. Using Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency as a bridge between presidency studies and interpretive political science, the book succinctly outlines how by interpreting presidential words and symbols our understanding of the presidency is enriched, and causal-inferential studies of presidential behaviour, complemented. Though the book directly addresses researchers of the American presidency, as we discuss in this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, it holds lessons for researchers of executive power everywhere.  Presidency studies your thing? Other episodes on the New Books Network that might interest you include Coe and Scacco on The Ubiquitous Presidency, and Hennessey and Wittes talking about their Unmaking the Presidency. Looking for something to read? To start the day Rich suggests Thich Nhat Han’s Peace is Every Step, and perhaps to conclude it, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut.  This interview summary was not synthesised by a machine. Unlike the makers and owners of those machines, the author accepts responsibility for its contents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent.  Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe.  Siniša Malešević's Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century.  In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity.  The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world. Siniša Malešević is Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College, Dublin, and Senior Fellow at CNAM, Paris. He is the author of the award winning books Grounded Nationalisms (Cambridge, 2019) and Why Humans Fight (Cambridge, 2022). His work has been translated into fourteen languages.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. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders (U Arizona Press, 2026) reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders.Drawing on nearly fifty interviews with activists who fled El Salvador, Zimmerman traces how political refugees carried with them strategies of resistance and community organizing that shaped social justice movements in the United States. The book addresses the political turmoil and grassroots mobilizations in El Salvador, the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, contemporary activism, and the impact of women’s strategies and forms of resistance.Essential reading for scholars and students of migration, Central American studies, and political movements, Contentious Citizenship is a bold intervention into contemporary debates on identity, legality, and resistance. Zimmerman’s work honors the ingenuity and resilience of Salvadoran activists and invites readers to consider what it means to belong. This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

By exploring the dynamic relationships between politics, policymaking, and policy over time, Climate Politics: Can't Live with It, Can't Mitigate without It (Cambridge UP, 2026) aims to explain why climate change mitigation is so political, and why politics is also indispensable in enacting real change. It argues that politics is poorly understood and often sidelined in research and policy circles, which is an omission that must be rectified, because the policies that we rely on to drive down greenhouse gas emissions are deeply inter-connected with political and social contexts. Incorporating insights from political economy, socio-technical transitions, and public policy, this book provides a framework for understanding the role of specific ideas, interests, and institutions in shaping and driving sustainable change. The chapters present examples at global, national, and local scales, spanning from the 1990s to 2020s. This volume will prove valuable for graduate students, researchers, and policymakers interested in the politics and policy of climate change. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Miranda Yaver’s new book, Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States (Cambridge UP, 2026), has lots of examples and incidents that will seem quite familiar to anyone who has dealt with health insurance coverage in the United States. In a sense, this book speaks to everyone because we have all been in situations like the ones that Yaver hears about from her interviewees. We know what it is like to have a test or a scan or a prescription ordered by a medical professional for us only to have an insurance company tell us that we cannot have that test or scan or medicine. Yaver dives into this quagmire and unearths the constellations of causes and reasons why this is now the essential operating process for much of American health insurance. By unpacking these causes and reasons, Coverage Denied clarifies so many of our experiences and helps us to think about the myriad ways in which health insurers and health insurance contribute to inequality in the United States, across a range of dimensions including race, socio-economic position, gender, sexuality, ability, and more. Part of what Yaver’s research finds is that very few individuals appeal coverage denials with their insurance companies. The question becomes one of who is denied coverage or tests or prescriptions, and who is going to try to access the means for getting those denials reversed. This is part of the administrative burden that is not equally distributed, given different economic, disability, employment, and family situations. Thus, the appeals process is part of the driver of inequality in terms of healthcare and healthcare coverage. The findings also note that women are more likely to be denied coverage than are men, in part because women often make more use of healthcare than do men. But this inequity translates across minoritized groups, including those who are disabled and sick, of lower economic status, and/or are Black or Hispanic. Thus, the access to medical care is distributed unequally across a number of different vectors. The denial of coverage, thus the denial of care, also leaves the medical professionals in a quandary as well, since they are unsure of what to prescribe and what is likely to actually happen for a patient. Thus, those trying to prescribe different kinds of care, be it tests or prescriptions or interventions, have little certainty that their patients will receive what the prescribing individual intends for them. While the initial reason behind coverage assessments and the requirement for prior authorization was cost containment, the results, at this point, are a system that often does not work for those who need medical ass

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Esam Boraey speaks with Shandana Khan Mohmand and Marjoke Oosterom, democracy experts at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released Democracy Report “Where’s the Dēmos in Democracy? Building Democratic Futures and Resisting Autocracy.” At a moment when autocracies outnumber democracies for the first time in twenty years, this report argues that the democratic crisis is not simply an institutional one, it is a crisis of exclusion. For too long, efforts to build democracy have focused on formal institutions like legislatures, courts, and electoral commissions, while neglecting the people those institutions are supposed to serve. The report puts forward eight building blocks for recentering citizens in democratic life, from building active citizenship and supporting informal mobilization, to reclaiming digital agency and strengthening accountability mechanisms. Drawing on decades of research across the Global South, from Pakistan and Zimbabwe to Uganda, Brazil, and beyond, Shandana and Marjoke bring the report's findings to life with vivid examples of how ordinary people fight back against backsliding, reclaim civic space, and keep democratic values alive even under authoritarian pressure. The conversation also addresses the role of inequality in driving democratic decline, the double-edged nature of digital technology, the power of youth movements, and what the dismantling of USAID means for global democracy support. Transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization based in Silicon Valley. Our conversation began with a discussion of the choice of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as the titular heads of the organization, then moved on to a conversation about its membership-based structure, the anti-caste struggles in which the AKSC has participated, and the significance of California in general, and the Silicon Valley in particular, as an epicenter of caste consolidation and anti-caste mobilization. Guests: S. Karthikeyan is an IT professional based in Silicon Valley and regular contributor to public outlets such as The Wire. S. Subbulakshmi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Centre on Longevity. Mentioned in the episode: B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?” Savera is a multiracial, interfaith, anticaste coalition of organizations and activists. S. Karthikeyan, “The Hindu Supremacist Disinformation Campaign Against the Caste Discrimination Litigation in US” S. Karthikeyan, “How Protections Against Caste Discrimination Are Being Opposed in the US” S. Karthikeyan, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Why and how did Labour win the 2024 election? In The British General Election of 2024 Robert Ford, a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, Will Jennings, Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton, and Paula Surridge, Professor of Politics at the University of Bristol present a detailed analysis of the context, campaign and election result. Part of a long running series of books that offer definitive accounts of British elections, the book uses a range of methods, including examining of social, print and televisual media, fieldwork with individuals from the key political parties, and deep psephological analysis to both describe and explain the 2024 result. As accessible and engaging as it as academically rigorous, the book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Maya Tudor speaks with two democracy experts at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Freedom House to understand the headlines from Freedom House’s 2026 Report, entitled the growing shadow of autocratization. We discuss the drivers behind the 20th consecutive year of global democratic decline and compare the similarities and differences between Freedom House and Varieties of Democracy reports. We conclude by anticipating what lies ahead, what our experts are looking to understand, and what everyday citizens can do to strengthen democracy. Links: Freedom in the World 2026 25 Years of Autocratization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Noo Saro-Wiwa is an author and journalist. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, she attended King's College London and Columbia University in New York.​ Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta), was published to critical acclaim in 2012. It was selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in 2012; named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012; shortlisted for the Author’s Club Dolman Travel Book of the Year in 2013; nominated by The Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. Looking for Transwonderland has been translated into French and Italian, and was awarded the Albatros Travel Literature Prize in Italy in 2016. Noo's second book, Black Ghosts (Canongate, 2023) explores the African community in China and was named Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year in 2025. Her latest publication, The Burning Ground: Oil and Militancy in Nigeria (Columbia Global Reports) examines the social and environmental effects of the insurgency that arose in the oil-rich Niger Delta after the death of her father, the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In the report, Noo highlights the undervalued role of women and meets individuals who are working towards sustainable development. It will be published in the US on 14th April 2026, and in the UK on 28th May 2026. Noo has also contributed to the following anthologies: Go Girl 2: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (2024); An Unreliable Guide to London (Influx Press, 2016); A Place of Refuge (Unbound, 2016), an anthology of writing on asylum seekers; and La Felicità Degli Uomini Semplici, an Italian-language anthology based around football. ​​ Noo is a staff writer for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, and she has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for various publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, City AM, and Chatham House. She lives in London and supports Liverpool FC. Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member!

Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Nikki Luke traces the intertwined history of Atlanta’s racialized uneven development and growing electricity use to show how electricity infrastructure shapes everyday life. Nikki Luke looks at how quotidian relationships with the electric utility catalyze intersectional organizing for energy democracy. She also investigates the legal and material construction of the investor-owned utility as a regulated monopoly and the state public service commission that regulates it.Contemporary organizing for energy democracy questions how the utility and the systems that govern it need to change to ensure energy affordability, provide remedy and reparation for enduring environmental and energy injustice, and build a just and equitable energy transition from fossil fuels. Bridging urban, environmental, and labor studies, the author demonstrates how these demands to change the utility emerge from the tradition of civil rights, labor, and environmental organizing for fair treatment from the utility, affordable energy, protection from pollution, and good jobs. The book is available Open Access. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Former Brazilian president Bolsonaro was found to have attempted a coup after losing the 2022 presidential elections, and he was convicted to 27 years in prison. Such a conviction is unusual both for Brazil and in global comparison and speaks to the difficult but crucial role the judiciary can play when an elected leader tries to concentrate power and exceed constitutional constraints. In this second PPP episode about Brazil (you can listen to the first one, on the role of the military, here), host Licia Cianetti talks to Luciano Da Ros and Manoel Gehrke about the role the courts played in Bolsonaro’s downfall, based on their recent article “How to Bring Authoritarians to Justice” published in the January 2026 issue of the Journal of Democracy. Guests: Luciano Da Ros is Associate Professor of political science at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. His research explores the links between democracy, judicial politics, corruption and anticorruption, particularly in Latin America, and he is the co-author of the book Brazilian Politics on Trial: Corruption and Reform under Democracy (Lynne Rienner, 2022). Manoel Gehrke is a Research Fellow at the University of Pisa, Italy, and former Research Fellow at CEDAR. He works on political accountability, contemporary threats to democracy, judicial politics, and the political economy of environmental degradation. He has published widely on the causes and consequences of prosecuting and convicting former heads of government. Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy 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. Follow us on LikedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power. Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art installations, and digital media, Dr. Black shows how yoga’s imaginative power supports diverse political and cultural ends. Although many cultural practices in today’s India exemplify “culture wars” between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a “culture peace” that conceals, without resolving, such tensions. This flexibility allows states, corporations, and individuals to think of themselves as welcoming and tolerant while still, in many cases, supporting practices that make minority populations increasingly vulnerable. However, as Dr. Black shows, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer new tools for critiquing hierarchical structures of power and race, Hindu nationalism, cultural appropriation, and self-help capitalism. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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.”<a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/admin/entries/episodes

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

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. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science