Explore every episode of the podcast New Books in Political Science

Mao Zedong lived one of the most epic and influential lives of the twentieth century. His impact on the People's Republic of China was vast. Half a century after his passing, he remains a divisive and controversial figure. Kerry Brown's Mao: Power and Contradiction (Reaktion Books, 2026) gives an accessible narrative of his life, from the fall of the Qing in the early part of the twentieth century to the long years in which Mao Zedong struggled not only to ensure the Communist Party of China survived, but that it then came to power after a civil war with the nationalists. Mao's tragic failures as ruler were some of the worst to ever befall a modern society, while his personal life remains a source of intense interest.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.

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

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In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast host Andrea Talabér talked to Marius Turda about his new book, In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania. We discussed the importance of the social and medical sciences in understanding Romanian nationalism, the intellectual sources of Romanian nationalist thought, and the various discussions surrounding biopolitical debates in interwar Romania amongst other topics.

You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://www.aup.nl/en/imprint/ceu-press

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him.

A book for a nervous moment

Tariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Research Associate at the NBER, takes the long view. Trade, capital and migration surged between 1850 and 1914, collapsed between the wars, and were rebuilt after 1945. His conclusion is that globalisation is hard to kill, but not guaranteed to survive. That depends on political choices and international cooperation.

If you teach economics, history or political science, or simply want to know whether today’s headlines signal the end of globalisation, this book and this conversation are for you. 

What we talk about

• Why the first globalisation happened, and what a Briton, an Argentine or an American in 1900 would have made of today’s world
• Migration: we have liberalised goods and capital far more than people, so how much does that limit globalisation’s power to reduce inequality?
• Whether backlash was always built into globalisation, or whether wars and shocks brought it down, and what that means for today’s politics
• The Great Depression and the question of leadership: can the world economy function without a power willing to underwrite it?
• The paradox of the US dollar, and why capital flows towards the richest economy rather than the poorest
• What evidence would convince Chris that “this time really is different”
• Writing a first book, and why economics works best inside history rather than bolted on beside it.

Some of these questions came from my own students, where the book is now core reading. They like it because it explains long-run change while making formal theory accesible.

What other reviewers say

Barry Eichengreen, in Foreign Affairs, praised its clarity and concision across nearly two centuries. In Good Reads, Jason Furman called it a reliable, readable history, well grounded in the research literature. Donald Boudreaux, in The Independent Review, judged it an admirable survey of key events and theories, although he took issue with some analytical choices. That makes it a useful starting point for readers who want to form their own view.

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On October 5, 2026, Brazil had elections for the president, governors, and congressmen. On October 25, 2026 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Lula won the presidency of Brazil. He won during the run-off election after coming in second in the first election. Afro-Brazilians played a decisive role in Lula's electoral win as well as in securing their own wins during the election. This conversation examines the raced and gendered contours of the 2026 election and electoral politics in Brazil. 

Dr. Gladys Mitchell-Walthour is the Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair at North Carolina Central University. Dr. Mitchell-Walthour is a political scientist whose research examines race and politics in Brazil. She is the author of The Politics of Survival: The Political Opinions of Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the USA (Columbia University Press) as well as numerous articles and books. 

Dr. Kia Lilly Caldwell is the Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar in Arts & Sciences in the Department of African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Caldwell is an anthropologist whose research has examined race, gender, and health in Brazil. She is the author of Health Equity in Brazil: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Policy (University of Illinois Press) as well as numerous articles and books. 

Dr. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press).

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When one hears about needs in the context of politics, one might imagine that they are dealing with facts that simply cannot be circumvented. Moving from this idea, Boss sees a tension, one in which politics, a field of negotiated agency, might find itself strangled by a closed concept. Without wanting to contend that people can actually live without having certain basic needs met, Boss wants to ensure that politics itself remains a realm of freedom, and finds in his own reading of Karl Marx a thread of thinking that slowly unwinds social and economic theories that unwittingly create situations they imagine themselves to be mirroring. Reading Marx in dialogue with economics, critical theory and contemporary political theory, Boss seeks to interrogate the ways in which our thinking about politics may not be best thought of as detached reflections on reality but active forms of participation in and creation of reality, a process that locks down what we should be trying to keep open. Marx and the Politics of Need  (Routledge, 2026) is slowly but surely throughout the book turned into a need of politics, a careful and methodical reflection on what political thinking itself is.

George Boss is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

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From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion—their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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What revolutionary disability politics look like today, with lessons for larger liberatory movements. In recent political times, disability identity has been mobilized in ways that paradoxically compound bodily injury and disability. This single-issue approach obscures the oppression of disabled people and prevents solidarity across difference. In Disability, Revolution (U California Press, 2026), Robert McRuer introduces alternatives to "one-dimensional disability," providing an accessible overview of disability justice movements and their relevance to larger emancipatory coalitions. Exploring the most prominent examples from the past several decades, the book focuses on the convergence of queer and crip movements, mad pride, intersectional disability justice work, neurodiversity, and the globalization of disability alliances. Essential for anyone interested in disability politics, this book shows how these multivalent movements help us imagine alternative disabled worlds. A transcript of this episode is available here.

Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. He is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally.

Clayton Jarrard is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer working at the nexus of queer and trans studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies.

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Local democracy doesn’t work as it should, declares Brian Adams in Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy (Temple UP, 2026). Local politics is where citizens have the most opportunity for direct participation, control, and influence, but that activism doesn’t necessarily translate into majority rule.

While greater local engagement can produce policy that better reflects activists’ strong preferences, Adams explains that activists are not representative of the public-at-large and states that a reconceptualization of how the public should be able to influence local officials is required. Based on interviews with activists in San Diego, California, Adams concludes that activism can be beneficial, but we need to view it as distinct from majority rule, with a focus on managing the tension between the two.

Improving local democracy is not just a matter of generating more activism. It requires articulating when we want policy to reflect majority preferences and when we want activists to hold sway.

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This is a special episode that we recorded a week after elections in both Brazil and Serbia saw the defeat of authoritarian forces. In this preview episode of the RESISTANCE research project, host Licia Cianetti is joined by Brazilian and Serbian colleagues Déborah Monte and Aleksrandra Krstić to talk about what happened in their respective countries and what made anti-authoritarian mobilisation successful against the odds. They talk about how, in both countries, online and offline mobilisation were combined to overcome skewed communication systems, the civic infrastructure that was needed to make that mobilisation possible, and their fears and hopes for the future.

RESISTANCE – Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions is a research project that aims to uncover how authoritarian ideas, practices, technologies, and policies are produced and spread in a thickly interconnected world, how they create local authoritarian ecosystems, and how they can be resisted. It is funded by European Union’s Horizon-Europe grant no. 101286676 for the years 2026-2029. To know more and sign up to the project newsletter visit here 

Guests:                                                                                     

Aleksrandra Krstić is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication, in the Faculty of Political Sciences, at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is an expert in media and journalism studies, including on the role of local media in Serbian democracy. She co-leads the RESISTANCE project’s work stream on digital authoritarianism and surveillance technologies.

Déborah Monte is International Relations Professor at the Federal University da Grande Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She was Visiting Fellow at CEDAR/University of Birmingham in 2024-25 and co-hosted the People Power Politics Podcast episode on Militarization and Democracy in Contemporary Brazil. She recently started a new research project on “Autocratisation and democratic resilience: Brazil in global perspective” as the recipient of a CNPq/Fundect Research Productivity Fellow grant.

Presenter:

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (2026-2029, funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).

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. Transcript for this episode here.

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The War on Terror remained an enduring feature of American foreign policy for over two decades. The War on Terror(Agenda Publishing, 2025), by Professors Andrew Thomson and Rubrick Biegon, positions the War on Terror within the broader context of Cold War interventionism and the rise of various transnational threats to American (and global) security during the late twentieth century. It introduces readers to the main concepts, debates and theories which have been used to understand and make sense of the War on Terror. These include approaches that frame it as a disparate set of policies aimed at reducing the risk of terrorist attacks against American citizens at both home and aboard; as part of a project aimed at helping maintain the United States' dominant position within international politics; and as an idea intimately bound up with perceptions of American national identity and America's place in the world. In this way, the book aims to show how the War on Terror has changed global politics, as well as why it has been fought and proven so difficult to end despite multiple failed attempts at course correction. The book, published in 2025 and now available from University of Edinburgh Press, is ideally suited for courses on international security, American foreign policy and contemporary world politics.

Rubrick Biegon is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. Co-author Andrew Thomson, reader in peace and conflict studies at Queens University Belfast, joined historian and U.S. army veteran Jacob Hagstrom in a discussion about the book's major themes, sources, and theoretical underpinnings.  

Jacob Hagstrom is a military historian and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026)

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Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 2026), by Ryan Jablonski, examines how democracy operates in countries dependent on foreign aid. Drawing on over six years of fieldwork, the book investigates the relationships between international donors and domestic politicians, exploring how aid dependency shapes policymaking and influences voters’ assessments of political performance. Challenging the assumption that voters simply reward politicians for attracting foreign aid, Jablonski demonstrates that electoral choices depend on citizens’ beliefs about how politicians influence the delivery of aid. This produces a ‘visibility-uncertainty’ paradox, whereby foreign aid can either strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. Combining surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, the book revisits conventional understandings of foreign aid and political behaviour, showing how aid can sometimes lead citizens to vote against their own interests and benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. By examining the political consequences of aid dependency, Jablonski offers important insights into the trade-offs between aid effectiveness, political capture, and state capacity-building. This research makes an important contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratic accountability, and the political economy of foreign aid.

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I sat down with Lydia Sizer to chat about her experience developing applied history initiatives at the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian. We talked about what it’s like to collaborate with policymakers and what it means to negotiate productive tensions between political science and historical methodologies.

Lydia talks about her doctoral dissertation, in which she drew on political science, history, and her own experience at the State Department’s Libya Desk to analyze how diplomats make high-stakes decisions with very limited information. We discuss how history can be useful for analyzing institutional memory in government and private organizations, and how #applied history initiatives can help mitigate some of the institutional memory loss that is built into democratic politics.

We discuss Lydia’s positive experience using #AI in her work and talks about her ongoing efforts to anticipate policy trends rather than merely respond to them.  We also talk about the punk band The Clash and how their 1982 hit song “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” can help us understand practical approaches to history.

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This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in social and political theory. We discussed the need to move beyond frameworks emphasizing either subordination to the state or revolt against the state in order to better understand how marginalized and oppressed groups can use the state as a means to enact transformative justice aimed at greater social equality. As Lisa and Hari point out, this requires moving beyond theories of deliberative democracy that rest on conceptions of rational communication. Instead, they argue for the need to consider the role of embodied practices, such as pulling the emergency chain on trains or blocking road traffic, and instances of “positive coercion,” such as Reconstruction Era laws and the U.S. Civil Rights Act, in expanding the parameters of democratic participation. Through Lisa’s account of what she calls a “materialist genealogy of collective action” in India and in Hari’s readings of B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the NAACP’s legal brief on Brown v. Board of Education, we come to understand the state as a complex terrain of power with different pressure points that allows for novel forms of relationality and maneuver. In the process, we also see political collectives, not as fixed identity groups, but as the product of shifting coalitions. 

Guests

Lisa Mitchell: Professor or History and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Hari Ramesh: Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University

References

Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023)

Hari Ramesh, Harnessing the State: Oppressed Groups and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2026)

John Dewey: philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was one of the most prominent American scholars of the twentieth century. 

B.R. Ambedkar, “States and Minorities” (1947)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004)

Jurgen Habermas: philosopher and social theorist whose work addressed notions of communicative rationality and the public sphere. 

Adhaar card: 12-digit unique identification number tied to biometric data and demographic information issued to residents of India 

Telengana movement: a decades-long political and social campaign for the creation of a separate state out of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh in India, which culminated in the formation of Telangana as India’s 29th state on June 2, 2014. 

Iris Marion Young: political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference. 

Sally Haslanger: philosopher and feminist theorist who work on the social construction of categories, especially of gender and race.

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The national parks are loved by many Americans and visitors from around the world. Yet, few realize how often these landscapes and their history have been shaped by questions answered in the courts. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has shaped and defined the character of the parks. Litigation has determined how land can be added to national parks, answered questions about treaty and free speech rights on park land, and settled numerous other disputes that have helped determine what the parks look like today. In her new book National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (University of Nevada Press, 2026), Carla Chung Mattix examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks over the course of nearly a century. These cases provide readers with a new lens to understanding the parks and help them understand the role of the courts in the nation's public lands. In this episode, Mattix, who was an attorney for the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of the Solicitor for 25 years, discusses her new book and the Court's influence on the national parks.   

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In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable  argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power.

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.

Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press.

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How has Yoweri Museveni remained in power for four decades – and what happens when he is gone? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Mesrob Vartavarian about three important books on Uganda and his argument that the country has become a "militarised family state". Their discussion explores whether Museveni's durability rests on coercion, patronage and political manipulation or negotiation with powerful social institutions; how far today's system reflects deeper patterns in Uganda's history – and whether a political order increasingly dependent on Museveni, his family and the military can survive him.                                                                               

Mesrob Vartavarian is an independent scholar based in the United States whose research focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, state formation, nationalism and political change, with a particular interest in Africa and the Middle East. Mesrob’s work examines how political orders are constructed and maintained, and the relationship between formal institutions, social structures and political power. His recent review essay, "Coercion, co-optation and kinship: Uganda's militarised family state" in the Journal of Modern African Studies, brings together three major studies of contemporary Uganda to examine the durability and transformation of Yoweri Museveni's rule.

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

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

Transcript here

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Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices.

This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here.

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Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and otherwise—is far from obvious. Does it mean that we are all the same, and so the same standards should apply indifferently to everyone? Or does it mean that we are all different in ways similarly deserving of respect? These questions, and many more, reflect the profound ambiguities and contradictions that have riddled the history of the idea of equality.

First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism (Harvard UP, 2026) by Professor Teresa Bejan examines a radical turning point in that history. Since antiquity, influential legal and philosophical traditions have held that all humans are fundamentally equal. Yet these claims proved surprisingly at home in a world defined by social hierarchy, political exclusion, and enslavement. In seventeenth-century England, the meaning—and practical circumstances—of equality began to change. Political philosopher Dr. Bejan traces this transformation, revealing how equality finally became a concrete and actionable political ideal.

Crucially, Professor Bejan shows that influential early modern theorists of equality—chief among them Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early feminist Mary Astell—were responding to the increasingly radical visions proffered by contemporary social movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Inspired by the Leveller leader John Lilburne, these movements insisted that equality must be a basis on which ordinary men and women could demand to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with elites. These early modern activists and philosophers can still enchant us today, Dr. Bejan argues, while also helping us to restore the power of equality as a political ideal.

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

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Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.

Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.

Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting. 

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In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, Professor Tyrell Haberkorn discusses her new book, Dictatorship on Trial: Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand (Stanford UP, 2024). This book examines five court cases brought during the regime of the National Council for Peace and order, involving protests and human rights. It features alternative judgments by the “Court of the People” which are offered alongside critical discussions of the actual case outcomes. 

Tyrell Haberkorn is a prominent scholar of Thailand, with interests in state violence and dissident cultural politics from the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 to the present. She is currently Plaenert-Bascom Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison 

Her previous books are In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) and Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). 

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

Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is hosted by Duncan McCargo. Our production assistant is Shermaine Lau. 

Website: here 

You might also enjoy these related podcasts:

A 2021 conversation with Tyrell Haberkorn discussing this book as a work in progress: here

Duncan McCargo talking about his book Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell 2019). here

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The first full biography of the controversial and complex First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler--an unjustly scandalized New Yorker, the second wife to President John Tyler, and a savvy and consequential political figure in the age of the Civil War.

Myths, rumors, and gossip have long circulated around First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. Commonly believed to be politically insignificant, most of our fascination with Tyler surrounds her reputation as a highly desired superficial flirt. This salacious mythos was based on her status in a politically influential New York family and the popular rumor that she posed for a sexually suggestive advertisement for a dry goods store in Manhattan.

Now, in the first full biography of Julia Tyler, Christopher J. Leahy and Sharon Williams Leahy correct such longstanding misconceptions about President John Tyler's second wife and establish her reputation as an influential political force. Presidentess: The Life of First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler (UP of Kansas, 2026) shows a presidential spouse who was more consequential than people realize and made a lasting contribution to the evolving role of first lady.

Leahy and Leahy present a compelling portrait of a determined woman who came to embrace her new Southern identity after marrying John Tyler, serving as a faithful defender of his views and values--including his decision to renounce the Union and join the Confederate government. In the aftermath of the Civil War, she orchestrated a public relations campaign to restore and protect her legacy as well as that of her late husband, the "traitor president." In her later years, she successfully lobbied Congress for a pension and reclaimed her status as a former first lady.

Presidentess casts a new light on Julia Gardiner Tyler's life and legacy, including new revelations about the scandalous "Rose of Long Island" advertisement, an exploration of the dark side of New York City's print culture, and Tyler's essential role as an unwitting character in the presidential election of 1844. Presidentess gives a fully developed portrait of Julia Tyler, illuminating this controversial first lady and this pivotal turning point in American history.

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What can democracies in different parts of the Global South learn from one another - and what can democracies in the Global North learn from them? The Democracy Exchange: South to South is a new mini-series from the People, Power, Politics podcast, bringing together researchers and activists from across the Global South to exchange ideas and experiences of democratic resilience. Produced as part of the Southern-led Approaches to Democratic Resilience project, with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the series starts with Asia Asks, Latin America Responds. Join Janjira Sombatpoonsiri and Jennifer Cyr as they discuss what makes democracy resilient in Latin America, who the primary resisters are in different countries, and why context is so vital for how democratic erosion, resistance, and recovery occurs in Latin America and across the globe.

Guest:

Jennifer Cyr is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on political representation, democratisation, and institutional stability and change in Latin America, as well as qualitative and mixed research methods. She is the author of The Fates of Political Parties: Institutional Crisis, Continuity, and Change in Latin America and Focus Groups for the Social Science Researcher. Her recent work examines the challenges facing democratic resilience, including the difficulties democracies face in recovering from periods of authoritarian erosion. She is working on this IDRC-sponsored project with Matías Bianchi (Asuntos del Sur) and Paula Clerici (CONICET-UTDT).

Presenter:

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, and a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Her research focuses on democratic resilience, civil resistance, protest movements, civic space and digital repression, particularly in Southeast Asia. She leads the Asian component of the Southern-Led Approaches to Democratic Resilience project and has published widely on pro-democracy movements and authoritarian responses to dissent. She is the author of Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia and the forthcoming A Thousand Cuts: Digital Repression and Pro-Democracy Movements in Thailand.

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

Transcript here

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Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. In Civil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advocacy, and bury groups in paperwork, to name just a few examples. Because the measures look like routine regulation, they rarely make headlines. Democracies have become as skilled at using them as dictatorships.

We discuss how the fading liberal international order has given governments more freedom to act. We also talk about why urgent threats draw violence while long-term ones draw bureaucracy, and how lawmakers copy each other's anti-NGO laws word for word. We then look at why China tolerates Greenpeace, how one Ethiopian law closed nearly 90 percent of the country's human rights groups, and what shrinking aid budgets mean for the sector. 

Our guest is Suparna Chaudhry, an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College.

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

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The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America (Princeton UP, 2026), Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions.

Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime—although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America.

Professor Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

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In this episode, I spoke with Jacob Ware, co-author, with Bruce Hoffman, of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press, and winner of the 2025 Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize.

Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither novel nor unprecedented. They are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy. God, Guns, and Sedition offers the definitive account of the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States—and how to counter it. 

Jacob Ware is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. He is a recipient of the 2026 National Security and Counterterrorism Fellowship from the McCain Institute, and also currently serves as a Survivor Fellow at Everytown for Gun Safety. Jacob serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and holds an MA in security studies from Georgetown and an MA (Hons) in international relations and modern history from the University of St Andrews.

Chris Millington is Professor of Modern European History and lead of the Histories and Cultures of Conflict research group at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of eight books including Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe ((Manchester University Press, 2025), The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford University press, 2023), and France in the Second World War Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

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Most international organisations today-from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the World Health Organisation-present themselves as technical institutions separate from political concerns. And yet they are frequently accused, whether by the public or by governments, of hiding behind this technocratic veil only to privilege a few rich and powerful nations. Experts appear as guardians of stability and protectors of an unequal status quo. Scholars of International Relations (IR) and international law have illuminated the production and contestation of expertise. But its historical emergence and distinctiveness remain under-explored. The Technocratic International: Experts and the Making of a World from Nowhere (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Jan Eijking is the first book to historically examine and comprehensively theorise the role of experts in the institutionalisation of modern international order.

How exactly did technical expertise come to be a central tenet to the work of international organisations? Based on archival material from Paris, London, and Geneva, The Technocratic International reconstructs the neglected history of expert mobilisation at early moments of institutionalised international cooperation in the nineteenth century. To understand how expertise works at the international level, examining how expert status and knowledge are produced is not enough. Instead, we must bring into view how expertise relates to claims about the very domain in which it operates. Historically, experts were not merely-as institutionalist and functionalist accounts assume - mobilised to epistemically optimise international policymaking. Instead, technocratic elites constructed “the international” through Eurocentric performances of expert approval.

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

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When American fascists suddenly goose-stepped down Main Street in the 1930s, fascism was seen by the rest of the country as a terrifying and radical new European import. It was not. It didn’t come from abroad. Nor was it new or radical. The seed of American fascism was planted by elite southern planters who insisted that slavery need not be addressed in the Constitution because it would soon die out on its own.

In The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2026), Joseph Kelly chronicles fascism’s deep roots in the antebellum South; its codification under Jim Crow; and, then, after the Spanish American War, its ascendency in the form of Anglo-Saxon nationalism, proposing that the nation belongs to a master-race-the original lie of American fascism. Dr. Kelly’s gripping book reminds us that the monied elite have always exceled at deploying disinformation to bias and inflame the masses, and that there have always been courageous patriots helping us to fight our way out of darkness toward the light.

Guest: Dr. Kelly is a professor of literature and history at the college of Charleston. He is the author of Marooned, The Biggest Lie, and America’s Longest Siege.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. She works as a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.

Listeners may also be interested in:

• Paper Heroines
• No Common Ground
• Thy Will Be Done
• Preparing for War
• Understanding Disinformation
• Campus Monuments
• What Might Be
• The Social Constructions of Race
• Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
• Belonging

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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“If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a category of hardworking, respectable workers dominant even in the Left, Heather Berg extends Marxist theorization of lumpenproletariat: the working-class “who were criminalized, itinerant, and otherwise making a living of ‘dubious means’ ” (13). Although lumpenproletariat is not a cohesive category, with sex workers offering different perspectives and experiences, Berg reads lumpenness as a “critical standpoint” (14) to reimagine the world where we are able to not only survive, but also thrive, collectively. Through theorizing, the book invites the readers to think with sex workers on the question of how we can thrive in this increasingly precarious world. This book is a thought-provoking and beautiful read for anyone who is interested in exploring these questions together at the intersections of gender studies, labor studies, and political theory. Beyond academia, anyone who wants to delve deeper into the couple-form, work, and state structure, dreaming of escape and alternatives, would find this to be a rewarding read. 

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In the absence of adequate federal safeguards against pollution and toxic chemicals, state policies are the strongest tools available to create safe, sustainable environments. The good news is, around the country, red states and blue states are taking up the charge. In California, state agencies are partnering with disadvantaged communities to measure air quality, reduce pollution, and advance environmental justice. In Texas, a state law requires every school to cut down on the use of dangerous pesticides, helping to keep kids safe. In New York, a network of clinics trains medical professionals in occupational health and children’s environmental health, ensuring that patients receive excellent care and specialists are ready to advocate for protective policies. The success of these programs is not haphazard; instead, effective approaches share key elements, including state-university-industry partnerships, collaboration across government agencies, and strong environmental health education. In A Healthy Union: How States Can Lead on Environmental Health (Island Press, 2025), Susan Kaplan highlights examples of groundbreaking state environmental health policies, exploring what has worked, what needs improvement, and how other areas of the country can build on these advances. Further, she shows how public health advocates can push forward new protections, creating safer environments for the next generation. Ultimately, Kaplan argues, we need a coordinated federal and state response to environmental health threats. Until then, innovative policy solutions can go a long way to improve the nation’s wellbeing, one state at a time.
 

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Imagine that you have just lost your job. You wonder: “Who or what can I depend on now?” The answer, it turns out, varies significantly depending on where you live. In Norway, a small European social democracy, you would almost certainly turn to the country’s comprehensive public welfare system. With a work history, you could be eligible for two years of unemployment benefits that replace upwards of 62% of your previous salary. Meanwhile, you would not be too worried about covering other major expenses: annual out-of-pocket healthcare costs are capped at a few hundred dollars, parents receive monthly payments per child, public education is tuition-free, and pensions are guaranteed. What would this experience teach you about government, work, taxes, and freedom? 

In Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (U Toronto Press, 2026), anthropologist Dr. Kelly McKowen explains what happens to those without jobs in one of the world’s wealthiest and most egalitarian countries. Following the daily lives of a diverse group of unemployed individuals during the “oil crash” of the mid-2010s, he shows that being “down and out” in a social democracy offers people a unique moral education with lessons about the nature and value of the state, labor, welfare, and belonging. 

Engaging, timely, and illuminating, Down and Out in Utopia makes the case that through social policy, we shape life’s hardships – and these hardships, in turn, shape us and how we view the world. 

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

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Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Nicolas Guilhot, however, challenges us to see conspiracy theories as a sign of the public’s desperation in light of liberal democracy’s failures. Conspiracism is widespread across the political spectrum, as citizens struggle with their disenfranchisement. How are we to imagine the future at the purported “end of history”? And how might this impasse make us susceptible to hallucinations and paranoia?

Conspiracy shows that narratives of conspiracy historically gain popularity when politics ceases to offer hope and apocalyptic thinking becomes a last refuge. Taking the reader from Karl Popper’s coining of the term “conspiracy theory” in 1948 through the essential commentary of Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Koyré, Richard Hofstadter, and others, Dr. Guilhot reveals how the fear of conspiracies has always operated against a backdrop of antagonism between the powerful and the many, the rich and the poor, the oligarchy and the masses. Today’s fear of a grand plot is no exception.

Turning conventional wisdom on its head, Dr. Guilhot shows that society’s focus on truth and falsehood masks how conspiracy theories feed on the dysfunctions of liberal democracies that no longer offer credible pathways toward a better future. Conspiracy theories offer a ready-made explanation for the feeling that one lacks agency and freedom. Rather than the cause of the current crisis, they are one of its consequences.

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

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What is Russia? For two centuries, observers inside and outside the country have tried to answer that question, and most of them have looked west. The familiar story holds that Peter the Great pulled a backward Muscovy toward Europe and that Catherine the Great finished the job by declaring Russia a European state.

In The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Michael Khodarkovsky looks south and east instead. He argues that Russia is best understood as a hybrid Eurasian empire, shaped as much by the steppe frontier as by Europe. He places Muscovite and Romanov practices alongside those of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Qing empires, all heirs in different ways to the political world the Mongols built.

Moving chapter by chapter, Khodarkovsky shows how these empires imagined their rulers as universal monarchs. He traces how they used treaties, hostages, and tribute to bind frontier peoples, often with each side understanding the relationship very differently. He also shows how they drew on elites from conquered peoples to govern, and how they took part in a vast Eurasian slave trade that until the eighteenth century was larger than the Atlantic one. He follows how they approached law, including how the Russian Empire governed the legal and religious lives of its Muslim subjects, and how all of these empires were built above all to wage war. Along the way, he argues that Russia's rulers were in some respects less restrained than their Ottoman or Qing counterparts, and that the deep structural break with the steppe inheritance came not with Peter but with the Great Reforms of the 1860s.

In our conversation, we talk about how the book grew out of Khodarkovsky's decades of work on Russia's frontiers, from the Kalmyk steppe to the North Caucasus. We also discuss what the comparison reveals that a Russia-only story cannot, and where the book sits in today's debates about Eurasianism and about Russia as a colonial empire.

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As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fundamental institutional change. They discuss Security Council reform, the veto, collective security and disarmament, UN financing, climate governance, artificial intelligence, and the role of the next Secretary-General. Rather than simply making the existing system more efficient, López-Claros argues for rethinking the institutions and structures needed to address the global challenges of the 21st century. 

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Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?

In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order (Columbia UP, 2026) Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order. 

Hosted by Sachin Nikarge

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Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?

So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.

Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

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From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, Great Power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on the march and national chauvinism seemingly in retreat. But events of the past decade have made one thing abundantly clear: The Great Powers are back. 

In The Return of the Great Powers (Basic Books, 2026), renowned historian Brendan Simms offers a new history of the rise, fall, and return of the Great Powers in our time.  He shows that over the past ten years or so, the major global actors have already resumed making decisions based on geopolitical rather than global economic considerations.

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When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government?

Alex Noyes has spent nearly two decades asking whether that reflex works. Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa out in 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania Press, draws on more than 120 interviews with senior politicians and stakeholders in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Togo to give an unsettling answer. 

Power sharing can advance democratic reform, but only when two conditions hold: inclusive politics among the parties, and outside enforcers willing to hold them to the deal. Both are rare. And even where the deal ends the killing, it rewards a losing incumbent with unearned power and sets a precedent.

In our conversation, Noyes explains why more than 600 such pacts have been struck since the Cold War, what the neglected Togo case reveals, and why he argues these arrangements should almost never be used after election violence. 

Against the scholarly consensus, Noyes finds these pacts can deliver real democratic reform, but only under conditions that rarely hold, and always at the cost of a compromised start. The costs outweigh the gains, and policymakers should stop defaulting to the model.

Our guest is Alex Noyes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology.

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

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The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford UP, 2025) explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted.

Taking readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, Fırat Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the help of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts' capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the legal system as a strategy of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that extends beyond the Kurdish case. Smuggling Law holds profound relevance in today's world, where ever-expanding regimes of surveillance, oppression, and dispossession unfold in the broader contexts of the global war on terror and data-driven capitalism.

Fırat Bozçalı is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

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Great Power Diplomacy. The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger (Princeton UP, 2025) is a captivating history of diplomacy—and an urgent reminder of why we need to revive its lost arts to survive in a dangerous era of great power competition. From the beginning of time, human societies have found themselves confronted by enemies too numerous or ferocious to defeat solely by force of arms. In these dramatic moments, wise leaders have turned to diplomacy to rearrange the gameboard in their favor and stymie seemingly unstoppable foes. In Great Power Diplomacy, American historian and diplomat A. Wess Mitchell recounts the forgotten story of how history’s most legendary empires have used diplomacy as a tool of grand strategy to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlast militarily superior opponents. Through fifteen centuries of history, Great Power Diplomacy recreates the perilous junctures, colorful personalities, and intricate statecraft that led to some of history’s most stunning diplomatic achievements—and greatest disasters. The protagonists include giants like Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, and Kissinger, but also a lesser-known cast of scoundrels, eunuchs, drunkards, and fools. At every turn, fortune favored those great powers with the foresight and dexterity to build winning alliances, splinter enemy coalitions, and, when necessary, make peace with their bitterest foes. Diplomacy of this kind has become a lost art in recent years as Western elites embraced the illusion that globalization and the spread of democracy would create a borderless world where nations would live in harmony and war would be abolished from the human story. But, as Great Power Diplomacy reveals, we will need to rediscover the secrets of skillful statecraft as the world enters an unstable new era in which continent-sized great powers compete for territory, resources, and prestige. By recalling diplomacy’s rich past, we can equip ourselves for a more dangerous future.

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In Democracy on the Edge, leading political scientists John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel unravel the elections of 2020, 2022, and 2024 to show how each represented a flashpoint in the reordering of political priorities and electoral coalitions. The consequences have the potential to redefine our politics and shape our democracy for years to come. In 2020, American voters temporarily removed an authoritarian leader, only for this leader to instigate an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. The midterm election of 2022 broke with precedent on the basis of the public’s response to the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fallout from J6, as voters rejected election deniers and MAGA candidates across the board. In 2024, however, voters could not reject this threat to democracy a third time, and Trump’s return to the White House has instead left the country at a crossroads and a moment of peril.

In unpacking recent electoral cycles and placing them in broader historical context, White and Kerbel show that both major parties face unique difficulties. After Barack Obama’s election, Democrats believed they were on the cusp of securing a majority that heralded a new era of political realignment around their multiracial dominance. That majority has not yet materialized. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party has transformed the GOP into a party completely beholden to him, embracing election denialism, conspiracy theories, and policies that are far out of step with the country beyond his base. The efforts of Republicans and Democrats are buffeted by dramatic and unpredictable cultural and economic shifts. The generational divide between Baby Boomers and Gen X on one side and Millennials and Gen Z on the other has become a fault line of lived experiences, cultural values, financial realities, and political beliefs. This is all further complicated by chaotic realignments on lines of race and gender.

And underneath it all is a political system under unprecedented pressure. Our democracy faces its most severe test since the Civil War. The aspirations contained in the Declaration of Independence and the systems built by the Constitution are no longer universally accepted. The Republican Party, led by Trump, seeks to accelerate the accumulation of presidential power and limit the Constitution’s phraseology of “We, the People” to “We, the Wealthy” or “We, the Cultural Warriors.” The final denouement of this political saga has yet to be written, but Trump’s election leaves us with the possibility of two unfamiliar outcomes—a brand of American authoritarianism or the establishment of a multicultural republic.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a bystander what kind of government the framers had wrought. Franklin’s famous answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping the republic will depend on the fallout from the last three unprecedented election cycles. Ultimately, our future is up to us.

John Kenneth White is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of What Happened to the Republican Party? and Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Read his Substack.

Matthew R. Kerbel is professor of political science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine books, including Netroots and Next Generation Netroots, both about the emergence of internet politics and political engagement. Read his Substack.

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

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Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.

Roxanne L. Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge; Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman) Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (all Princeton).

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

YouTube Channel: here 

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In Iconic Fascism: The Excess of Destruction and Creation in Interwar Radical Right-wing Politics (Bloomsbury, 2026) Aristotle Kallis uncovers the paradox at the heart of fascist politics: the simultaneous obsession with destroying and creating powerful symbols. This book demonstrates how fascists were simultaneously some of history's most passionate icon-lovers and most ruthless icon-breakers, wielding symbolic excess as both weapon and worship in their revolutionary project. Through a sweeping comparative analysis, Kallis reveals how fascist movements and later regimes were driven by a relentless battle of absolutes, seeking not only to eradicate the icons and reclaim the spaces of their enemies, but to saturate public life with their own emblems, rituals, and myths; and to make the political visceral. Kallis demonstrates that fascist violence was never merely blind or indiscriminate. Instead, it was a meticulously choreographed struggle for symbolic dominance, in which the destruction of enemy 'false' icons was inseparable from the performative creation of new, sacred icons of fascist power. He traces how this constant pursuit of "destructive creation" evolved from street-level partisan warfare to state-sponsored spectacles of monumental architecture and mass liturgies. Kallis argues that fascism's 'iconic compulsion' - its need to condense moral absolutes into visible, emotionally potent symbols - remained constant whether fascists operated as fringe insurgents or totalitarian regimes, fuelling its cycles of rupture and rebirth. Spanning street-level violence, mass spectacle, and monumental urban planning, Iconic Fascism challenges us to rethink the role of symbols in the making-and unmaking-of political communities.

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What is freedom? Benjamin Constant and Isaiah Berlin divided the answers to that question into two categories: the positive conception of the ancients (freedom to participate in political life) and the negative conception of the moderns (freedom from external constraints). But what if this dichotomy is a false one?

My guest on Madison’s Notes thinks so. So in Episode 6 of Season 6, I interview the political philosopher, Philip Pettit. The L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton, the Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Professor Pettit is the author of many books, including Republicanism (1997) and The State (2023).

Today, drawing upon Republicanism and The State, the nature of freedom as “non-domination,” the neo-republican tradition that began in the Italian Renaissance with Machiavelli, and how this account worked through the Enlightenment and into the American Founding. Also along the way, we talk about Henrik Ibsen, what Constant and Berlin got wrong, the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, the relationship between technology and freedom, and how political freedom relates to spiritual freedom.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

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Even as Donald J. Trump keeps his tight grip on the Republican Party, conservative ranks are rife with sharpening tensions on both domestic and foreign-policy matters. I discuss this subject with Matthew Continetti, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism (Basic Books, 2022). Conservative thinkers and political figures have different answers to festering questions such as how aggressively American should assert its role in the world, whether America’s ties to Israel should be scaled back, what steps should be taken to regulate Artificial Intelligence, and how to accommodate the populist insurgency that gave rise to Trump. The 2028 Republican Party nomination contest, Continetti says, looms as a battle over the future of the post-Trump conservative movement.

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When powerful states go to war, why do they bother asking permission? In Strategies for Approval: Building Support for Military Intervention at the UN Security Council (Yale University Press, 2025), Stefano Recchia argues that the answer reveals something surprising about how power actually works. 

Drawing on hundreds of declassified documents and more than fifty interviews with senior diplomats, among them Andrei Kozyrev, Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell, Recchia shows that money and muscle are rarely enough to move a reluctant Security Council. States that succeed also reassure: they accept time limits, geographic restrictions, and multilateral oversight written directly into the resolutions they seek.

Our conversation traces that logic through France's controversial 1994 intervention in Rwanda, the six-week "pause for peace" the United States conceded to Gorbachev and Mitterrand before the First Gulf War, and the very different failure of 2003. Recchia also discusses what his interviews revealed about the real aims behind the 2011 intervention in Libya.

The more powerful a state becomes, this book shows, the more its power frightens others, and the more it must bind itself to get anything done.

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At first glance, New Hampshire and Vermont seem like mirror images. Separated only by the Connecticut River, the oft-termed "Twin States" share a common history, relatively small populations, and heavily mountainous and forested landscapes dotted with small towns. Yet despite their similarities, they have evolved strikingly different political cultures, with Vermont prizing cooperation and community and New Hampshire celebrating independence and freedom from government. Perhaps nowhere is this divergence in political visions more pronounced than in their respective state mottos: Vermont's communal "Freedom and Unity" and New Hampshire's libertarian "Live Free or Die." Twin States, Different Paths: The Politics of New Hampshire and Vermont (U Mass Press, 2026) explores these contrasting political cultures. Brian Porto traces these differences back to the land itself: to the geology and geography that shaped early settlement, patterns of land use, and the distinct ways people built their communities. From these origins emerged two enduring civic philosophies--New Hampshire's devotion to low taxes and limited government, and Vermont's emphasis on equality and shared responsibility. Bringing historical and cultural analysis together with contemporary case studies, Porto examines how these traditions influence each state's approach to today's policy challenges, including affordable housing and public-school funding. The result is a clear, balanced portrait of how deeply rooted attitudes toward freedom, unity, and governance continue to shape public life in both states. Written with scholarly rigor yet in an engaging and accessible style, Twin States, Different Paths fills a notable gap in the study of New England politics. It offers insights not only for scholars and students of political culture, history, and public policy, but also for general readers, policymakers, and residents who wish to understand how two neighbors--so similar in geography and spirit--continue to follow such different paths in defining the role of government and community.
 

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In this episode, hosts Lee Vinsel and Ben Waterhouse, along with producer Joe Forte, chat with historian Lily Geismer. Their conversation covers the evolution of the Democratic party, what it means to study political science as history, and a bit about how a scholar’s work can emerge from their personal experience and identity. Lily is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2015) and Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (2022). She teaches contemporary history and is a key participant in a group of scholars working to rethink and revitalize our approach to political history of the United States. One product of those collaborations has been her edited volume, with Brent Cebul, Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s (2025). This conversation was recorded in July of 2026.

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Why do so many citizens continue to support politicians who undermine democracy? And why have nationalist appeals become such a powerful tool for democratic backsliding? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Filip Milačić about his new book, Abandoning Democracy for the Nation (Cambridge UP, 2026). Drawing on evidence from Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Israel and Turkey, Milačić argues that democratic erosion is often driven not simply by populism or polarization, but by political leaders convincing citizens that the nation itself is under threat. The discussion explores why democratically minded voters sometimes accept attacks on democratic institutions, whether this argument travels beyond the cases in the book, and what lessons it offers for those seeking to defend democracy.

Transcript here

Guest:

Filip Milačić is a Senior Researcher for Democracy and Society at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's Democracy of the Future officein Vienna, visiting professor at the Central European University and a Research Affiliate at CEU's Democracy Institute. His research focuses on nationalism, democratic backsliding and resistance, political identity and party politics, with a particular emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He is the author of Abandoning Democracy for the Nation, a new book exploring the relationship between nationalism and democratic erosion. Through his academic research and policy work, Milačić examines the forces shaping the future of democracy and the challenges facing democratic societies today.

Presenter:

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

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

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Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges a widespread tendency to limit studies of Turkish - and Muslim - politics to 'Islamist vs. secularist' or 'Islam vs. democracy' debates. Instead, Nora Fisher-Onar's innovative argument centers on coalitions for and against pluralism. Retelling Turkey's story from the late Ottoman Empire to the present as a tale of pluralizing vs. anti-pluralist coalitions, this book offers an alternative explanation for major outcomes from elections and coup d'etats to revolutions. Here, cross-camp alliances pit those who are willing to coexist with 'Other(s)' against those who champion a unitary, national project in which everyone speaks, believes, looks, and loves as they do. Drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary data, Fisher-Onar introduces an analytical framework for capturing causal complexity in political contestation. This study rejects Orientalist exceptionalism, rereading the relationship between political religion, pluralism, and populism via a framework that travels across and beyond the Muslim-majority world.

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While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security has long been a part of US history. Drawing on six case studies, Professor Michael E. Neagle spotlights the commonalities of how the United States has leveraged popular understandings of "bandits" to justify incursions abroad as well as rally popular and political support at home.

Chasing Bandits: America's Long War on Terror (UNC Press, 2025) puts recent manhunts for such figures as Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into deep historical context. For more than a century, Americans have designated some enemies as bandits, but chasing them has yielded mixed results.

Dr. Michael Neagle is director of history and political science at Nichols College, where he is also co-chair of the terrorism studies program.

Dr. Jacob Hagstrom is an army veteran and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026).

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