New Books in European Politics

What is the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people? Why is radical nationalism on the rise in Europe and throughout the world? In Living Right: Far Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024), Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life...

On this edition of Ctrl Alt Deceit: Democracy in Danger, we are live at the Royal United Services Institute. Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones are joined by a world-class panel to discuss the dangers posed by the waves of dark money threatening to overwhelm our democratic institutions. Panelists:--Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Finance and Security, RUSI--Darren Hughes, Chief Executive, E...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, co-authors of The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (Polity Press, 2024). In this conversation, they discuss how today’s right-wing movements, from the United States to Hungary, are waging a new form of politics that undermines the...

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives...

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over. How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of...

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'tog...

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, a...

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State: Th...

Live from the Frontline Club in London, Ctrl Alt Deceit is back for its second season. Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones host a fascinating discussion on the myriad threats to democracy, particularly in light of Trump's re-election. Joined by Gabriel Gatehouse is an award-winning BBC journalist and broadcaster, formerly International Editor of Newsnight and host of the award winning pod...

Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on...

Though European administrative laws have gained global significance in the last few decades, research which provides both theoretical analysis and original empirical research has been scarce. The Common Core of European Administrative Laws Retrospective and Prospective (Brill/NIjhoff, 2023) an important account of the evolution of judicial review and administrative procedure legislation, using a f...

Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans. Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story. "When it comes to Russia's interests,” he...

In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Stoicescu critiques Trump's transactional diplomacy, emphasizing the critical role of alliances such as NATO in maintaining international peace and sta...

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing ins...

East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025)  examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated....

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading playe...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, about the implications of Donald Trump’s second administration for Europe. The discussion explores how Trump’s approach to foreign policy—characterized by protectionism, nationalism, and disdain for multilateralism—affects European politics, par...

Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s.  It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries – and their close ties to "founding father" Jean...

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine. In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War...

Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture the EU formulatio...

Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale in...

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Eu...

Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton UP, 2023) shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals. Where race or...

Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory of the Holocaust, the nature of the Sozialstaat, the tensions between an energy...

Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks. "The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton...