New Books in Political Science

“Economics is the long-run driver” in the history of Europe’s monetary union, writes Richard Pomfret in the first of a new Cambridge Elements series on the Economics of European Integration: The Road to Monetary Union (Cambridge University Press, 2021). “Politics often determined the timing of the next step ... but it has not determined the direction of change”. In this "Element" – intended to be...

Dina Hassan (Lecturer, Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, University of Oklahoma, USA) speaks with Nicola Pratt (Associate Professor, International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK) about Pratt’s recent book, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020). Waves of protests drew women an...

Today on the New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network, we’re here today with Christopher Close, Associate Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University in the incomparable city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to talk about his latest book, State Formation and Shared Sovereignty: The Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 1488- 1696, out this year, 2021, with Cambridge Universit...

In this very special episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science we feature Lee Ann Fujii’s Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Routledge, 2018), which is the fifth title in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. Lee Ann Fujii was a professor at the University of Toronto who published widely on political violence, and on interview methods. S...

Myisha Cherry is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. Myisha’s research focuses on the intersection of moral psychology and social and political philosophy. More specifically she is interested in the role of emotions. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. S...

The last several decades have seen tremendous political and cultural strides forward for the LGBTQ+ community with both the legislative and cultural recognition helping many secure a more safe and open lifestyle than possible just a short while ago. However, these advances have raised a number of criticisms and qualifications, and not just from stuffy conservatives either. Many on the radical left...

In Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author Lindsay Thomas studies the relationship between fiction and U.S. national security — specifically, the instrumentalization of fiction in preparedness materials, in which fictional events are phrased not only as real, but as producing eligible information and ‘intelligence.’ Approachi...

Faced with a major terrorist threat, states seem to reach instinctively for the most coercive tools in their arsenal and, in doing so, risk exacerbating the situation. This policy response seems to be driven in equal parts by a lack of understanding of the true nature of the threat, an exaggerated faith in the use of force, and a lack of faith that democratic values are sufficiently flexible to al...

The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how China's authoritarian state ensures political control by non-violent mechanisms. Daniel C. Mattingly demonstrates how coercive control is achieved through informal means to achieve goals such as land redistribution, the enforcement of family planning policies, and the suppression of protest. He draws on a broad comb...

Evil is among our everyday moral concepts. It is common to hear politicians and others condemn certain acts, purposes, people, or even populations as evil. But what does it mean to say that something is evil? Is the evil simply the exceedingly wrong? Is evil rather a distinctive kind of wrongness? Is it a kind of wrongness at all? Are acts evil regardless of the motives of those who commit them, o...

Political theorists Melvin Rogers and Jack “Chip” Turner have produced a truly magisterial edited volume centering the work by African American thinkers over the past centuries. With thirty contributed chapters, ranging across time, place, and person, this Collected History opens up the dialogue among theorists, writers, students, and scholars to explore the work that has often been considered vit...

How do we make sense of the “durability and gigantic scale” of China’s economic expansion alongside the reports of “rising” and “explosive” corruption? How has China moved from an “impoverished communist regime to a capitalist superpower rivaling the United States” despite a crisis of corruption that its own leadership describes as “gave” and “shocking”? Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang’s her new book China’s Gi...

Rebecca Bryant, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, and Mete Hatay, the Senior Research Consultant at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, co-authored Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). The monograph is based on more than two decades of ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus – an e...

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological ag...

Carolyn Holmes’ new book, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-building in Democratic South Africa (U Michigan Press, 2020),takes its title from a cartoon that captured the complicated nature of democratization and nation-building in South Africa in the period that followed the end of apartheid. As Holmes explains in her deeply researched book, the promise of a diver...

There are currently eleven million Uyghurs living in China, but more than one million are being held in so-called reeducation camps. A cultural genocide is taking place under the guise of counterterrorism.  In this profound and explosive book, Sean Roberts shows how China is using the US-led global war on terror to erase and replace Uyghur culture and persecute this ethnic minority in what has bec...

Robbie Shilliam’s new book for the Polity Press’s “Decolonizing the Curriculum” series explores how the discipline of political science was born of colonialism, and takes us through different ways of reimagining our study of politics. In this conversation, Robbie talks to host Yi Ning Chang not just about reconceptualizing the various subfields, but also about the university, the politics of knowl...

Quassim Cassam is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. You can follow him on Twitter at .@QCassam.  Quassim’s research focus is epistemology, the area of philosophy that deals with topics pertaining to knowledge, 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...

My students are generally 19 or 20 or 21. They have never known the Middle East without American boots on the ground. They have never turned on the news and seen a story about the region featuring a young couple in love, or a technological innovation or a sports star. Instead they see images of guns or bodies or burning buildings or all three. Laura Robson, in her new book The Politics of Mass Vio...

How do we make sense of Turkey’s recent turn against the West – after decades of Turkish cooperation and desire to be integrated into the European and wider Western community in terms of foreign policy? Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s new book Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge UP, 2019) interrogates the dynamics of the relationship between Turkey and the West, pa...

The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policies. Religious leaders from Billy Graham to David Wilkerson found growing concerns around juvenile delinquency and general lawbreaking as strategic connection points for their evangelistic message and ministries. In God's Law and Order: The Politics of...

Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford UP, 2020) takes on a number of different dimensions of neoliberalism to help readers consider not only how this ideological framework structures our lives, but also to lead us towards the capacity to reorient our thinking and understanding of the world, and politics. Benjamin McKean explores the way that we can try t...

Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, Marina Zaloznaya's The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2017) offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid po...

If, as expected, he re-emerges as prime minister after the Dutch election on March 17, Mark Rutte is on track to become the Netherlands' longest-serving prime minister. By mid-2022, he will beat the record set by Ruud Lubbers in 1994 and, assuming everything goes according to plan, he will serve until at least 2025. Yet, despite being a veteran on the European stage, Rutte remains an enigma - even...

On the face of things, the Constitution is concerned with individual and collective rights - to free speech, assembly, religion and that part about guns. Supreme Court cases serve as public tests of its core precepts, and lightning rods for current political argument. The focus tends to be on the Bill of Rights. Between ‘We the People’ and the end of the 7th Article is everything else, of which th...