New Books in Political Science

Is religion indispensable to public life? What can Gandhi’s thought contribute to the modern state? With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi's political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world. In Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy (Lexington Boo...

What are we to make of the year’s first presidential debate? Listen in as John R. Hibbing, Jonathan Weiler and I discuss this question and others surrounding the 2020 presidential race. Hibbing is a Foundation Regents University Professor of political history and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a NATO Fellow and a Senior Fulbright Fellow. He is the...

Rogers M. Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a new book on the connection between our understanding of peoplehood and community, and the contemporary growth of populism around the world. This book and the meditation on these issues of populism and nationalism come out of the presentations Smith gave as the 20...

Discourse in wealthy Western countries about refugees tends to follow a familiar script. How many refugees is a country morally required to accept? What kinds of care and support are host countries required to provide? Who is responsible to maintaining the resulting infrastructure? What, ultimately, is to be done with refugees? Many of these questions assume that states are morally required to res...

Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City (U Georgia Press, 2020) explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and...

Democratic socialism is on the lips of activists and politicians from both the left and the right. Some call it extremism; some call it common sense. What are we talking about? At a time when the capitalist experiment has made fewer people richer than ever before and seems to be well on the way to killing the planet, a new generation is reassessing old-fashioned principles of community. Millions a...

The European Union is arguably facing the greatest existential threat in its history. One of its big four member states has left and the main opposition parties in France and Italy flirt with leaving, while Hungary and Poland drift away from liberal democracy, and the Russian and US presidents openly seek the union’s destruction. In The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values (Pol...

Stephanie Newell, Professor of English at Yale University, came to this project, which explores the concept of “dirt” and how this idea is used and applied to people and spaces, in a rather indirect way, having read the memoirs and journals of merchant traders – particularly the white British traders who were writing about their visits to many of the African colonies. In observing the ways in whic...

Next year, Germany goes to the polls. For the first time in 15 years, Angela Merkel will not be a candidate for chancellor. Although a leadership election is underway inside Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, all eyes are on the CDU’s Bavarian sister party and its leader Markus Söder as her likely successor. A “shameless” self-publicist and political chameleon, Söder first rose to national promi...

Anais Angelo, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Vienna has written an exceptional book entitled Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (Cambridge University Press) in CUP's prestigious African Studies Series. Angelo’s book analyses the little-studied institution of the Office of the President by studying its first postcolonial off...

We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues in her Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press) that we owe our...

Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such cr...

On the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, Americans often present increased polarization as the result of Trumpian extremism or America’s complex racial history but David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020) cautions Americans to look back to the 1970s with an eye to class to better understand our poli...

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland fresh...

In June of 2019, a proposed amendment to Hong Kong’s Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, sparked widespread protests across the region. Protestors saw in the bill a threat to the judicial independence that Hong Kong has enjoyed since its return to China from the United Kingdom in 1997. The Special Administrative Region plunged into turmoil as disaffected youth combined the ideology the Arab Spring with...

The title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Press, 2020). Keyssar presents the reader with a deep, layered, and complex analysis not only of the institution of the Electoral College itself, drawing out how it came about at the Constitutional Conventio...

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood. Vi...

In her latest book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press), Kathryn Sikkink puts forward a framework of rights and responsibilities; moving beyond the language of rights that has come to dominate scholarship and activism, she makes the case that human rights cannot be truly implemented unless we also recognise that there are corresponding obligatio...

Logic, the study of how certain arguments either succeed or fail to support their conclusions, is one of the most important topics in philosophy, its importance illustrated by the common assumption that if one is being logical, they are probably right. However, the importance of logic has led to a certain amount of misuse and abuse over the years, with questionable arguments being given a veneer o...

The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorr...

Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge University Press) changes that. It argues that such accounts fundamentally underestimate the political power of whites' animus toward Latinos and thus...

How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in...

In 2007, Ecuador joined the Latin American “Pink Tide” by electing a left-wing president, Rafael Correa, who voiced opposition to US imperialism and advocated higher levels of redistribution and social investment. However, shortly after coming to power, Correa came into conflict with members of his own coalition over the future of resource extraction in the country. Should Ecuador try to leverage...

Despite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has been unjustly forgotten. In Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party (Potomac Books, 2020), Meg Heckman describes the ways in which she shaped both journalism in New Ham...

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the r...