New Books in Political Science

Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative,...

Despite—or because of—its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang. In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands...

In American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020), Darryl Hart's addresses the foundational changes in thinking about church-state relations within American Catholicism that contributed so much to the development of the modern conservative movement. Hart tracks the ways in which American Catholics adapted their tradition in the context of a largely protestant repub...

Bonnie Honig the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and Political Science at Brown University. Bonnie works at the intersections of political theory, democratic theory, and culture. She has written broadly on traditional topics in political philosophy, while also examining the political significance of film, drama, and literature. You can follow Bonnie on Twitter at @bonnie_ho...

Today, I am introducing a recording of an event on Israel-Palestine organized by members of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The event took place on May 19th, 2021 and was co-sponsored by the Jadaliyya e-zine as well as the New Books Network. Here is the text of the event poster: When it comes to Palestine, there is a sharp disconnect between the ways acad...

Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the "externality" that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how...

All political candidates make strategic choices about how to present themselves to voters but not all candidates have to “weigh decisions about their self-presentation alongside stereotypical tropes, culture norms that denigrate Blackness, and European beauty standards, in addition to the historical legacies of racism, colorism, sexism, and heteropatriarchy.” Sister Style: The Politics of Appearan...

Why do people participate in genocide? In The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Rutgers UP, 2020), Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with p...

What is violence? In Violence Toby Miller, Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Cuajimalpa, Mexico offers a reconsideration of the concept, along with an overview of how the idea matters across a range of disciplines and social settings. The book ranges from a detailed engagement with how we measure violence in historical and modern settings, through to con...

Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans conti...

Michelle Schwarze’s engaging new book, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (Cambridge UP, 2020), delves into the idea and role of resentment within the political environment and how spectatorial resentment can work to support the pursuit of justice within society and political systems. Schwarze argues that resentment, as an emotion, recognizes the humanity in...

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile wi...

Today I talked to Joseph McQuade about his book A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' o...

What does it mean to be resilient in a societal or in an international context? Where does resilience come from? From which discipline was it 'imported' into international relations? If a particular government employs the meaning of resilience to its own benefit, should scholars reject the analytical purchase of the concept of resilience as a whole? Does a government have the monopoly of understan...

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Support our show by becoming a premium...

Western media accounts often suggest that China is rising inexorably as a global economic and political powerhouse. A new book by Luke Patey offers a more nuanced picture, focusing on the growing backlash against Chinese aspirations. Author Luke Patey, a senior researcher from the Danish Institute for International Studies, discusses his new book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Globa...

There has been a resurgent global interest in the origins and formation of authoritarian regimes as many states around the world drift away from liberal democracy. Indonesia’s experiences with such an authoritarian turn in the 1950s and 1960s offers many lessons from history. In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period (Brill, 2020), Farabi Fakih offers a historical ana...

Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes', blinds us to other types of human...

Cristina Beltrán has written a thoughtful and interrogating analysis of the concept of citizenship, particularly in the United States, and how the history of the United States as a country has shaped an understanding of who gets to be “belong” as a member of this society. The book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy is part of the Forerunners book series publish...

Why do liberal great powers like the United States struggle to defeat insurgencies across the globe? In her new book, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Cornell University Press, 2021), Professor Jacqueline Hazelton argues that they are bringing the wrong conceptual models to the conflict. As a result, they are not just fighting the wrong war. They underestimate the costs o...

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Practice: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of Courts (Oxford UP, 2018) brings together an extraordinary collection of data and analysis which concerns how domestic courts interpret and apply the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is the first thorough comparative collection of research which brings together th...

Christine M. Philliou's Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021) challenges conventional understandings about the transition from the Ottoman Empire to Republic of Turkey. From its earliest days, the dominant history of the republic was told as a triumphant narrative of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. In that officially sanctioned acco...

In this episode, we are talking to a British writer Ian Leslie, a journalist and author of acclaimed books on human behavior. His latest book, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes (Harper Business, 2021), is about how to disagree better. Ian regularly publishes in The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Economist. He co-hosted the podcast series Polarized and created a...

Mira Sucharov’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), is a work that takes seriously the feminist adage that the “personal is political,” and vice versa. Through an intimate telling of her life, Sucharov uses the work to trace her shifting relationship to Israel, and the Israeli-Plaestinitan conflict, the meaning of diaspora Jewish identity, and what writing about I...

In this episode Kennth Bo Nielsen of Asianettverket at the University of Oslo is joined by Niladri Chatterjee (University of Oslo), Zaad Mahmoud (Presidency University) and Arild Engelsen Ruud (University of Oslo) to analyse the results of the recently concluded West Bengal state assembly elections. The elections dealt a major blow to the expansionist ambitions of the party of Prime Minister Naren...