New Books in Politics and Polemics

In her fascinating new book The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Iza Hussin, Lecturer of Politics at University of Cambridge examines the transformation of Islamic law in colonial Malay, Egypt, and India. Combining archival, institutional,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the... Learn more about your ad...

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

In Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017), a study of the transformations of the image of Chechnya in the Russian public sphere, Julie Wilhelmsen performs a post-structuralist revision of the Copenhagen schools concept of securitization a process by which state actors transform subjects into matters of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...

Tamar Carroll is an Assistant Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology and the Program Director for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Her book, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty and Feminist Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), focuses on three intertwined case studies of grassroots activism in New... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

With public debate about immigration law and policy at a peak, Anna Law is on the podcast this week to discuss her book The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which came out in paperback in 2014. Law is the Associate Professor and Herb Kurz Chair in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!...

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016) offers critical historical insight into the problem of defining refugee and the significance... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), changes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh...

Richard Crockatt is an Emeritus Professor in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His book, Einstein & Twentieth-Century Politics: ‘A Salutary Moral Influence‘ (Oxford University Press, 2016), is an intellectual biography of Einstein’s political thought. As one the most compelling figures of the twentieth century,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

The philosopher (and 1972 presidential candidate) John Hospers once wrote, “justice is getting what one deserves. What could be simpler?” As it turns out, this seemingly simple idea is in the opinion of many contemporary political philosophers complicated enough to be implausible. According to many these theorists, the question of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices S...

What is the role of evidence in the policy process? In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2016), Justin Parkhurst, Associate Professor of Global Health Policy at the London School of Economics, maps the history of evidence based policy making and offers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho...

Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that accompanied the emergence of East German literature from 1945-1959. Covering almost fifteen years, the research presents insightful observations of the literary process that happened to be intricately connec...

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, political theory, and political science, Democracy Against Domination reinterprets Progressive Era economic thought for the challenges of today. The book offers a... Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of America’s 26th president, but an account of a life that was adventurous and consequential in its own right. Coming of age in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newb...

Timothy Sandefur’s new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It (Encounter Books, 2016) is an argument against the restrictions on individual liberty by local, state and federal governments. Sandefur, the Vice President of Litigation at the Goldwater... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou...

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins are the authors of Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford University Press, 2016). Grossmann is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social research and associate professor of political science at Michigan State University; Hopkins is assistant professor of political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

As the founder of Sinn Fin and a leading architect of Irish independence, Arthur Griffith ranks as one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland. In his book Arthur Griffith (Merrion Press, 2015), Owen McGee offers a biography of the writer and patriot framed within the context of the Irish... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium mem...

We are nearing the end of the year and have for you a best-of-2016 podcast featuring an array of American politics books. Some of these books were featured on the podcast this year, but most are just new and really interesting. Another best-of is underway for political science books in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!...

During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium mem...

Born just five years after the abolition of slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois died the night before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In the many decades between, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed as much to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor...

Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) begins with two related puzzles: why does Vietnam simultaneously plant and cut trees at unprecedented rates; and, if reforestation projects that clear native species and mono-crop Australian exotics do not protect habitat, what do they... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world. Canada was once a leading producer of asbestos and home to the worlds largest chrysotile asbestos... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

With Republicans in control of Washington, many suspect that conservatism is on the ascent. Others are wondering what conservatism even means in 2016. In which version of conservatism does President-Elect Donald J. Trump believe? How would Trump answer the question that David Brooks posed to Barack Obama about Edmund Burke... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support o...