New Books in Political Science

Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the conditions that inflame ethnic riots after the fall of authoritarian rule as well as the factors that cause violence to subside. It examines the case of post-1998 Indonesia but it provokes reflection on the legacies of ethnic riots in post-authoritarian countries’ long-term political...

Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road investments, the Pakistani power sector continues to stifle economic and social life across the country. Why? In Access to Power: Electricity and the I...

Deleuze and Guattari never identified as anarchists, nor do they seem to know much about its historical development or continued praxis. Yet their individual and collective work belies this apparent and wilful oversight through a steady consideration of revolutionary subjectivity and active political experimentation. In Anarchism After Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (Bloomsbury, 2022). C...

Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This t...

From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (U Chicago Press, 2022) examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of pol...

Chris Kempshall's The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy (Routledge, 2022) provides the first detailed and comprehensive examination of all the materials making up the Star Wars franchise relating to the portrayal and representation of real-world history and politics. Drawing on a variety of sources, including films, published interviews with directors and actors, novels,...

This week on International Horizons, David Abraham from the University of Miami discusses the origins of social democratic parties in Europe and the parallels with similar movements in the US. Following his teacher Adam Przeworski, Abraham argues that Keynesianism boosted social democracy by convincing people that the state could manage economic growth. For a time, the iron curtain heightened soli...

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar G...

What happens to policies when a president dies in office? Do they get replaced by the new president, or do advisers carry on with the status quo? In November 1963, these were important questions for a Kennedy-turned-Johnson administration. Among these officials was a driven National Security Council staffer named Robert Komer, who had made it his personal mission to have the United States form bet...

Citizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2018) investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, an...

Why are there so few women from non-elite backgrounds in Sri Lankan politics? What barriers do they face on their pathways to politics? And what can be done to support them? Ramona Vijeyarasa and Nadine Vanniasinkam join Petra Alderman, associate researcher at NIAS and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, to talk about non-elite women’s political leadership in Sri Lanka. T...

What areas of our lives are governed by constitutional law? When asked about what constitutional law is, Americans tend to think of notable Supreme Court cases such as the abortion law case Roe v. Wade or the Civil Rights landmark of Brown v. Board of Education. But vast swaths of our lives are governed by, of all things, the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which gives Congress the power “...

Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony discusses the Enlightenment, the American Founding, his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Publishing, 2022), and Conservatism's past and future. Dr. Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute, based in Jerusalem, and the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington D.C., which recently hosted...

When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration", fearing she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support". On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter. A new European External Acti...

What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level...

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of r...

This week, RBI director John Torpey interviews Prof. Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, about recent developments in Latin American politics. Arias delves into Peru's recent political unrest and how it resembles the times of Fujimori's authoritarianism and discusses the origins of polarization in the politics of Brazil. Arias also ass...

What kind of country is America? Zachary Shore tackles this polarizing question by spotlighting some of the most morally muddled matters of WWII. Should Japanese Americans be moved from the west coast to prevent sabotage? Should the German people be made to starve as punishment for launching the war? Should America drop atomic bombs to break Japan's will to fight? Surprisingly, despite wartime ang...

In Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (Wesleyan UP, 2019), Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhi...

The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the...

Microchips are both important and in short supply. So how important? And what can be done to make them more plentiful? Also, what are the geopolitical implications of having the production of microchips concentrated in relatively few hands. Owen Bennett Jones talks microchips with Julian Kamasa of the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A...

Since 2020, Europe's financial sector has been severely stress-tested by a global pandemic and a major land war yet, compared to the period between 2007 and 2012, the impact has been remarkably muted. Still minnows compared to their US peers, Europe's post-crisis recapitalised banks nevertheless have held up well. And so, by and large, has the quality of their assets despite ten years of slow grow...

For almost a year now, we have been absorbing news and information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are a variety of different, or competing, narratives to explain and define what we understand about the origins of this conflict and the ongoing military successes and failures on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia. I had the chance to interview Jordan Miller for PostScript (a special seri...

In Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia UP, 2022), Kevin Munger marshals novel data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will define the politics of the next decade. He shows that a common "cohort consciousness" binds aging Boomer voters into a bloc--but a shared identity and purpose among Millennials and Gen Z could topple...

Western sanctions have slowed Iran's economy, causing protests against the absence of freedom and opportunities -- teachers their lack of pay; farmers their lack of water; retirees their fear of economic insecurity. But at the heart of this powerful new movement has been Iran's women, whose frustration with Iran’s misogynist theocracy had been mounting for four decades. This week on International...