New Books in Political Science

For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle E...

In the 1770s, the American colonies were working up to a revolution. But while the colonists were increasingly dissatisfied with British rule, there was no general consensus on what to do about it. Thomas Paine saw a clear solution. In 1776, he published Common Sense. Caroline Winterer discusses Common Sense, a pamphlet that uses the language of the people to denounce monarchical rule and advocate...

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere across the ideological spectrum. Technocracy is seductive. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself. This episode is the first in a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. First, Gordo...

We are all familiar with the spread of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But just when we thought we’d seen the worst of it, along comes TikTok. What started out as an app for dance challenges and musical duets has, in recent times, emerged as one of the most concerning tools for amplifying political propaganda and lies. What does this mean in a count...

There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn't working for us anymore--what's more, it's not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American sto...

There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn't working for us anymore--what's more, it's not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American sto...

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism. The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight...

Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllabl...

Italy has just held an election in which it appears that a far-right candidate from a post Fascist Party has won, and his leader will become the next prime minister of the country. What's happening in Italy? What does this election tell us about wider developments in Europe today? In this episode of International Horizons, Andrea Mammone from Sapienza University of Rome explains the linkages of Gi...

In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones and psychoanalyst Daniel Pick discuss brainwashing, thought control and group think. In the case of totalitarian political systems, do dissidents prove that brainwashing cannot be guaranteed to work? Or do the techniques used by advertisers and political leaders in fact mean people are being manipulated and can do nothing about it? Pick is the author of Brainwash...

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative...

From Austria to New Zealand, coalition governments often pave the road to foreign policy. In Western Europe, nearly 90 percent of postwar governments include two or more political parties. Israel, the Middle East’s only consolidated democracy according to many, has never experienced single-party rule in its history. Even the United Kingdom, known for its long streak of single-party rule, now navig...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confedera...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that A...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of po...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to sug...

We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication an...

In 1948, the United Nations presented a document outlining human rights for every person in the world. This document was called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document has inspired human rights movements around the globe and gave the world something tangible to strive for. Mathias Risse is the Lucius Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration, as well as the Direct...

In Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (FSG, 2022), Wall Street Journal national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon reveals the strategy debates, diplomatic gambits, and military operations that shaped the struggle against the Islamic State. With extraordinary access to top U.S. officials and military commanders and to...

As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a seminal thinker on the subjects of liberty, freedom and nondomination. We can do so most effectively by reading Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill (Princeton UP, 2022) by John Peter DiIulio. Mill (1806–73), for all his...

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville...

For much of the Cold War the United States had thousands more nuclear weapons than it needed. And it took decades for American political leaders to realise no one had ever asked: ‘how many nuclear weapons is enough?’ As for Ronald Reagan, he went into office a nuclear hawk and came out considering total disarmament. These aspects of the history the US nuclear programme are described in Fred Kaplan...

Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. His research aims to further the discourse on regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society. He is currently a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency. Networks, whether...

Rohan J. Alva is a counsel practicing in the Supreme Court of India. He earned his LLM from Harvard Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, which he read for on numerous scholarships including as a Tata Scholar and on a Harvard Law School Scholarship. Prior to starting his counsel practice, he was a professor at Jindal Global Law School, where he was awarded the Excellence in Research...

Desertion: Trust and Mistrust in Civil Wars (Cornell UP, 2020) examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. Theodore McLauchlin's explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and thei...