New Books in Political Science

The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle (Verso, 2023) argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of...

What went wrong in Afghanistan, and who is to blame? Is America safer today than on September 10, 2001? What lessons should the leaders of America's foreign policy draw from the war in Afghanistan? Ambassador Nathan Sales is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the former U.S. State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and former acting Under Secretary of State for Civilian...

The news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that exacerbate existing global inequalities. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, even if adhered to, may not be sufficient. The situation seems hopeless. However, in Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (O...

In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil's white middle class, which culminated with the 2018 election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He identifies the rise of a significant status panic among middle-class publics following the relative economic and...

The Emergence of Arthur Laffer: The Foundations of Supply-Side Economics in Chicago and Washington, 1966–1976 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores the origins of Arthur Laffer’s economic theories and how they became a part of mainstream economic policy. Utilizing interviews and archival material, Laffer’s life is traced from his early education through to his time working for the Nixon and Reagan a...

In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resolutions highlighted the need to include more women in peace processes, the perpetration of gender-based violence during war, the underrepresentation of women as peacekeepers, and the need for greater diversity at all levels of governance to respond to in...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Yan Sun, Professor of Chinese politics at Queens College and the Graduate Center, to discuss the origins of the ethnic divisions in China and their contemporary effects. Yan addresses the imperial administrative system and the historical incorporation of non-core peoples into it. Furthermore, she discusses the complexit...

Humanitarianism and Security: Trouble and Hope at the Heart of Africa (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) contends that the search for stability and peace remains central to the political environment within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Despite some positive political and economic progress observed in the Central African Region and the DRC in particular, the future of the region remains uncertain...

Evert van der Zweerde in his 2022 book Russian Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy (Edinburgh University Press) details a through history of political thought from the very beginning of the Rus' up to the 21st century. Political philosophy in Russia has always sought, and sometimes found, a middle way between embracing anarchy and searching for authority. Political philosophy in Russia has n...

Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence (Columbia UP, 2022) recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective. Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a th...

Francy Carranza-Franco's Demobilisation and Reintegration in Colombia: Building State and Citizenship (Routledge, 2020) investigates disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) in Colombia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The six large peace processes and amnesties that took place in Colombia over this period were nation-led, providing an interesting case study for the wid...

In an era of broad disappointment in the integrity of political figures, Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books, 2022) revives the idea of statesmanship, dwelling on figures ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Vaclav Havel, all of whom sought to preserve freedom in times of crisis. Professor Mahoney, a 2020-21 G...

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics movement to take full effect, with multiple states pas...

This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to celebrate the 2023 Otto and Frank Walter Memorial Lecture. The conversation goes explaining the term “Zeitenwende” and what that entails for Germans, its history and how the military approach of Germany came to a new era. David Gill also discusses the ef...

A discussion with the the author of Citizenship (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series), Dimitry Kochenov, in which we discuss the glorification of citizenship and the structures of power underlying this supposedly positive concept. Featuring an incredible new soundtrack produced by artists and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux....

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with a range of responses in Eastern Europe – with some leaders offering muted solace to Vladimir Putin and others arming Ukraine. To learn more about why that has happened and the future Eastern Europe Owen Bennett Jones has been speaking to Zsuzsanna Szelényi a Hungarian writer, politician, and foreign policy expert. Szelényi is the author of Tainted...

The war in Ukraine is entering what could well be its decisive phase as Kyiv prepares a counter-offensive and Russia announces plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus as early as the summer. More than ever before, this moves Belarus onto the front line of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its confrontation with NATO. Yet, for three decades, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka ha...

In the United States, one in four women will be victims of domestic violence each year. Despite the passage of federal legislation on violence against women beginning in 1994, differences persist across states in how domestic violence is addressed. Kaitlin Sidorsky and Wendy J. Schiller's book Inequality across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United State...

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and over...

The rise to power of populists like Donald Trump is usually attributed to the shifting values and policy preferences of voters-the demand side. Paul Kenny's Why Populism?: Political Strategy from Ancient Greece to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2023) shifts the public debate on populism and examines the other half of the equation-the supply side. Kenny argues that to understand the rise of populism is...

This book carries out a multidisciplinary analysis of different aspects of the peace process between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), as well as the challenges of early implementation of the agreement reached in 2016. The authors of Excombatientes y acuerdo de paz en Colombia address practical issues regarding reintegration, impleme...

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that...

Even as Vladimir Putin massed close to 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border in February 2022, many experts claimed it was a bluff. At worst he would take the Donetsk and Luhansk regions but a full-scale invasion could only fail in the long term and the Russian president wasn't stupid. How to explain his decision? Did Russia feel besieged by NATO's eastern expansion and did Putin himself feel threate...

In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover from the country’s time as a socialist country. It was an ignoble end to the government body, which in the early days of independence charted the country’s Five-Year Plans for economic development. Nikhil Menon, in his first book Planning Democracy: Mo...

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less:...