New Books in Political Science

In How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine (Ibidem, 2022), Oleksandra Keudel proposes a novel explanation for why some local governments in hybrid regimes enable citizen participation while others restrict it. She argues that mechanisms for citizen participation are by-products of political dynam...

Edward Mead Earle was a historian, scholar, professor, and international relations expert; he was also a founding father of the field we know as Security Studies. Listen as David Ekbladh and International Security Editor Sean Lynn-Jones discuss Earle's contributions to the field, his views on what Security Studies should be, his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and what he might think...

Much has been made of the rise of China's economy, and some fear that China will surpass the United States as the world's largest economy in the coming years. Michael Beckley goes against the grain in his article "China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure" (International Security, Winter 2011/12), arguing that the size of a nation's economy doesn't necessarily dictate its global power, and t...

In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the proc...

The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’. – Michael W...

Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or examining how the criminal justice system works in Latin American countries, Flom has focused, instead, on the illegal drug markets as economic and political institutions to examine how they actually...

Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Mareike Schomerus argues that this is because p...

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green...

The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers. Pittsburgh’s Renaissance’s apparent success quickly became a model for several struggling i...

This new compendium Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond (APSA, 2022), is a true asset to the discipline of Political Science (and other graduate programs as well) in the myriad ways that it provides guidance, advice, and thoughtful reflection for those considering graduate work, in graduate school, and beyond. This book should be referenced not only by those who are at the nascent...

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different...

Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence (Routledge, 2022) examines the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s and their ties to the state. The study draws on the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which conducted dozens of trials relating to paramilitary violence,...

This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified b...

In The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (UP of Kansas, 2022), Drs. Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren ask what lessons does Marvel – a “hulking, hegemonic media franchise” teach the public? What might we learn about ourselves and our understanding of the world from this “cinematic juggernaut?” Popular texts encourage audiences to imagine worlds different from their own. Questioning their...

In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal...

Ever since Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, non-violent resistance has held a special place in the public imagination. What can be better after all than forcing political change without the violence that so often accompanies it. But the Gandhi and King stories are so powerful they can perhaps crowd out other aspects of non-violent resistance. Many of these aspects have been explored by Julie...

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left ...

Malaysia is a classic example of a plural society, with a diverse population consisting of the indigenous peoples, collectively called bumiputera, and the descendants of immigrant populations from southern China, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. In this multi-ethnic context, the question of identity, notably of Malay identity, has remained elusive and open to varying interpretations. Joinin...

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen t...

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to b...

"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the...

Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Re...

Rohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest...

Why has Thailand had 20 constitutions since 1932? What accounts for the remarkable veneration Thais often feel towards these short-lived documents? How is that military coups can be viewed as completely legal in Thailand? And what accounts for the leading role prominent legal experts play in Thailand’s political order? In this podcast, Thailand scholar Duncan McCargo talks to Eugénie Mérieau about...

The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics.  The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics (Verso, 2022) gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort...