New Books in Political Science

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age The University of Chicago Press, 2024 Kenneth Lowande Political Scientist Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan) has a new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, examining the ways in which presidents seem to be using their extraordinary powers (of the office itself) but are often ho...

In September 2016, Islam Karimov–the first president of a post-Soviet Uzbekistan–died, at age 78. His death ended an oppressive dictatorship that had governed the Central Asian country for decades, which led to corruption, environmental damage, and political repression. Karimov was replaced with Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who instituted a tentative program of reforms. These years are the subject of Joann...

In Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Lisa Björkman invites our attention to political form and how they allow us to appreciate the various mediums through which representation is negotiated. Drawing on a decade of research in the city of Mumbai closely following the movements of corporation election candidates, protesting crowds, political rally orga...

International law scholars are often among the sharpest critics of the Trump administration—but what if the usual story misses something essential? In this episode, RBI interim director Eli Karetny speaks with NYU international law professor Robert Howse about Trump’s complicated relationship with the UN Charter system, from Gaza to Venezuela and Iran. The conversation also turns to political theo...

Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states. For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and...

Brussels is full of lobbyists. Over decades, big companies have been using their financial might not only to influence EU policies but even to shape how EU institutions are designed and what their key goals are. Host Licia Cianetti talks to Kenneth Haar, who for almost two decades has been conducting research on corporate lobbying in the EU for Corporate Europe Observatory. Kenneth explains how co...

In this episode of Democracy Dialogues, co-host Maya Tudor speaks with Yogendra Yadav – political thinker, activist, and one of India’s most prominent voices on democratic reform. A former academic and party leader, Yadav has led influential research initiatives, built new political movements, and worked at the intersection of grassroots activism and national politics. Their conversation explores...

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982. In 1982, resistance to South Africa’s apartheid was growing increasingly militant, and the state’s brutal repression heightened this tension. In her lecture, Gordimer speaks directly to this political l...

Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion and Maritime Connections (Routledge, 2026) assesses the impact of European colonization in the late 19th and early 20th century in ‘restructuring’ the shared past of India and Southeast Asia. It provides case studies that transcend colonial constructs and adopt newer approaches to understanding the shared past. The authors explore these developments t...

Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks...

Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book...

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I.  In World War I and the Foundations of America...

China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens...

In Behind Caesar's Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Caillan Davenport presents a thrilling exploration of what Romans thought about their emperors, and how rumors and gossip—ranging from new taxes to rulers’ sex lives—shaped leadership. Traversing more than seven hundred years of Roman history, this book explores how everyday Romans swapped gossi...

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake...

At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception (Cornell University Press 2025), Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecra...

If you asked a passerby on the street what anarchism is, they may answer that it is an ideology based on chaos, disorder, and violence. But is this true? What exactly is anarchism? Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. Prichard describes anarchism as a lived set of practices, with a rich historical legacy, and s...

In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officials systematically treat formally private firms as political instruments, extracting services that advance careers and maintain social control—often at the expense of business interests, economic efficiency and sustainable development. Ning Leng is an As...

Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for the office of president of the United States. In A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris(UP of Mississippi) author Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson uses womanist rhetorical criticism to analyze the presidential a...

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bri...

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead...

What happens when states experience a rapid increase in resource wealth? This book examines the significant diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, possibly the largest in over 100 years, and its influence on the institutional trajectory of the country. In Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Nathan Munier examines how this rapid increas...

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.  In Bl...

Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th century. Greenwich House, the community center Simkhovitch founded in 1902 in Greenwich Village, then a destination point fo...

What happens when an academic supervisor and their former student get together to write and edit a book on researching our social world? In How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers (Edward Elgar, 2025) readers have an answer to this question from two writers working by interpretivist lights: one, Colette Einfeld, an emerging new talent; the other, Helen Sullivan,...