New Books in Political Science

The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the political history of American political parties, not so much as historical institutions with different constituents—though it does that—but as living and breathing entities that have, over the course of more than 200 years, been, at times, vitally engaged with politics. The role of...

In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism.  While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire. Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are...

Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition.  The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefo...

In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a social crisis for which collective action seems im...

South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national...

Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that po...

In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented aroun...

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons de...

The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines altern...

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits an...

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Pal...

Defeating the forces of authoritarianism is the political combat task of our age, and we must take it up with the certitude and boldness that our eminent forebears did. Rebuilding the Democrats’ appeal by reestablishing reputations for superior strength and patriotism is a challenge. But the fact that democracy’s plight is due to flaws in liberals’ leadership and messaging rather than economic cri...

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While i...

During an era of broad political dissatisfaction, what is the history and role of the Constitution? Does the Constitution still have the power to unite us? Dr. Yuval Levin joins Madison's Notes to discuss his forthcoming book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again. Along the way, he delves into key American figures from James Madison to Woodrow Wilson and the...

Charles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversati...

Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal c...

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large-scale phenome...

How do election campaigns in South Korea look like? Why have satellite parties become an important instrument of power politics? What do the election results mean for the Yoon government’s ability to implement its policy agenda? In April 2024, South Koreans went to the polls to elect a new parliament but many regarded the elections also as a referendum on President Yoon Suk-yeol and opposition lea...

Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the Pe...

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere. Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing i...

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on ideali...

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested aga...

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power c...

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdro...

Nationalism has long been a normatively and empirically contested concept, associated with democratic revolutions and public goods provision, but also with xenophobia, genocide, and wars. Moving beyond facile distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' nationalisms, Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press 2023) argues that nationalism is an empirically v...