New Books in Political Science

Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, "The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

30 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The image of the sheriff is deeply embedded in American culture – from pacifist Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again and gun averse Roy Scheider in...

Amos C. Fox, "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare" (Howgate, 2024)

30 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare ...

Inés Valdez, "Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antitheses of imperialism, while hist...

Jack A. Goldstone, "Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, thou...

Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. Ho...

David L. Swartz, "The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity" (Routledge, 2024)

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Remember the bleach drinking episode? Remember ‘alternative facts’? Remember ‘I have the best words’? These elements of the Trump presidency s...

Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of in...

David M. Driesen, "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power" (Stanford UP, 2021)

23 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Rep...

The Far-Right Threat in German Politics: A Discussion with Marcus Böick

23 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The recent elections in eastern Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to win a parliamentary election at t...

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

22 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial cri...

Andreas E. Feldmann, "Repertoires of Terrorism: Organizational Identity and Violence in Colombia's Civil War" (Columbia UP, 2024)

22 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Dr. Andreas E. Feldmann...

Joanna Allan, "Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019)

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial ...

Why Almost Everything You Think about Protests in Africa is Wrong

19 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For decades, media and academic analysis of African politics has emphasised instability, political violence, and male dominance. Yet a brilliant new a...

William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdo...

Celebrating Constitution Day, Part. 2: A Conversation with Julia Mahoney

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this conversation, we dive into key issues shaping the legal landscape today: the complexities of constitutional interpretation, the evolving role ...

Kevin J. McMahon, "A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

16 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpretin...

Meg Rithmire, "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

14 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian re...

Jennifer Redmond and Mary McAuliffe, "The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

14 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer in Gender Studies at UCD. Her latest publications include (is The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn co-authored wi...

Jennifer L. Lambe, "The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba" (UNC Press, 2024)

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNC Press, 2...

Postscript: Harris, Trump, and the Politics of Presidential Debates

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In June, a presidential debated ended the candidacy of incumbent President Joe Biden. On September 10th, Vice President Kamala Harris and Former Presi...

Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most ...

The Political Evolution of Taylor Swift

12 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we offer a political science / popular culture studies view of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in th...

Celebrating Constitution Day Pt. 1: A Conversation with Cass R. Sunstein

11 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Join us for an in-depth exploration of Professor Cass Sunstein's latest work, Campus Free Speech (Harvard University Press, September 2024).  Toget...

Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Culture?

10 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European...

Josh Cowen, "The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)

10 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

School vouchers are often framed as a way to help students and families by providing choice, but evidence shows that vouchers have a negative impact o...

Kaitlin Sidorsky, "All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women" (UP Kansas, 2019)

09 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Kaitlin Sidorsky’s new book, All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women (University Press of Kansas, 201...

Anthony Michael Kreis, "Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development" (U California Press, 2024)

09 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words de...

Aditi Malik, "Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge UP, 2024) develops a no...

Oren Kroll-Zeldin, "Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine" (NYU Press, 2024)

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine (NYU Press, 2024) digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage ...

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

05 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes - from shifting relations between social groups and evolving langu...

E. J. Fagan, "The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics" (Oxford UP, 2024)

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Political Scientist E.J. Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, once worked at a think tank, and...

Daniel Laqua, "Activism Across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and Beyond Europe" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the Occupy protests to climate change school strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 21st century has been rife with activism. Although ...

Jonathan Gienapp, "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique" (Yale UP, 2024)

03 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The legal theory of constitutional originalism has attracted increasing attention in recent years as the US Supreme Court has tilted with the weigh...

David Lay Williams, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx" (Princeton UP, 2024)

03 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Political Theorist David Lay Williams has a new book that traces the problem of economic inequality through the thought of many of the canonical think...

Sanjay Lal, "Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy" (Lexington Books, 2019)

02 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 pra...

Manuela Moschella, "Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy" (Cornell UP, 2024)

01 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Manuela Moschella investig...

Wendy Salkin, "Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

01 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly...

What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

30 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episod...

Bhaskar Sunkara, "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality" (Basic Books, 2020)

29 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2020), Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's ...

Notes from the Field: A Personal View of the War on Gaza

28 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We start this season of International Horizons with an interview with Dr. Eli Karetny, an American political scientist and administrative director of ...

Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, "Understanding Maritime Security" (Oxford UP, 2024)

28 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Whether it is pirates, smugglers, illicit fishing, or disputes in the South China Sea, the oceans are of increasing importance in international securi...

Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americ...

Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

26 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociologic...

Robert Vitalis, "Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy" (Stanford UP, 2020)

26 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We've heard and rehearsed the conventional wisdom about oil: that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this str...

Marie-Eve Desrosiers, "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

26 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (Univ. of Ottawa) has written a wonderful book. Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide ...

The Democrats Have a Party: DNC2024

26 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in Chicago. Lilly and Susan talk to two presidential politics s...

Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty...

Nazmul Sultan, "Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" (Harvard UP, 2024)

24 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peop...

Joachim C. Häberlen, "Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe" (Penguin, 2023)

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the str...

Lost in Ideology: A Conversation with Jason Blakely

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his...

Peter Allen, “The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)

20 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparati...

Rama Sundari Mantena, "Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

20 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between...

Angela Geck, "The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

20 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Geck provides an innovativ...

Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019)

19 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and ...

Justine Bendel, "Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals" (Edward Elgar, 2023)

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises h...

Gerarldo Cadava, "The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump" (Ecco, 2020)

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’...

Stuart Elden, "The Birth of Territory" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

17 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled p...

Isabel Bramsen, "The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

17 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do micro-interactions of resistance, fighting and dialogue shape larger patterns of peace and conflict? How can nonviolent resistance, conflict tr...

Jeremy Black, "Rethinking Geopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2024)

17 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has change...

Heath Brown, "Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency" (UP of Kansas, 2024)

16 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency (UP of Kansas, 2024), examines the preside...

Democracy Promotion, Progressive Realism and the Labour Government’s Policy Towards Asia

16 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Does the Labour Party’s 2024 election victory spell the end of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy interest in Asia? And how will its ‘progressi...

Claudio Lomnitz, "Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico" (Duke UP, 2024)

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extorti...

James Madison and the Spirit of Self-Government: A Conversation with Colleen Sheehan

14 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Who was James Madison? Why were his Notes on Government so valuable to the American founding? Did James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Wash...

Peter Charles Hoffer, "The Supreme Court Footnote: A Surprising History" (NYU Press, 2024)

12 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When the draft majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health was leaked, the media, public officials, and scholars focused on the overturning...

Spencer Piston, “Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

11 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly...

Catherine Boone, "Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

10 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African count...

How – and How Much – has Malaysian Politics Changed Since 2018, and Why?

10 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, host LSE Southeast Asia Centre Director John Sidel speaks with Meredith Weiss, Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and a le...

Paul Volcker: “The only number that works is zero”

09 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions e...

Jacob Soll, "Free Market: The History of an Idea" (Basic Books, 2022)

08 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The...

Arthur Burns: “The smartest guy in the room”

08 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions e...

Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many...

Bill Martin: “Truman looked at him and said: ‘Traitor’”

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions e...

Jason Blakely, "Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)

06 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his...

Marriner Eccles: Reform “may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there”

06 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions e...

The Dragonbear in the Geopolitics of the 21st Century

05 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to...

Race, Gender, and the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle

05 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation electi...

Rachel M. Scott, "Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making" (Cornell UP, 2021)

03 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religi...

Edward Kaplan, "The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age" (Cornell UP, 2022)

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our ...

Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, "Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of wea...

Politics in Action 2024: Myanmar Update

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, M...

Julia Sonnevend, "Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

01 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a be...

Oliver Traldi, "Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there’s plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, jus...

On Sino-Vietnamese Border Relations

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Q...

Bernard E. Harcourt. "Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory" (Columbia UP, 2023)

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—coopera...

Will Urban Youth Fundamentally Change African Politics?

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustr...

Bilge Yesil, "Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

28 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising play...

Austin Knuppe, "Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq" (Columbia UP, 2024)

26 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or...

Postscript: Changing Dynamics in the Presidential Race, 2024

25 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Republican Party held its nominating convention a week ago in Milwaukee, formally nominating former President Donald Trump as the standard-bearer ...

Quantifying the American Mind: George Gallup, and the Promise of Political Polling

24 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed ...

Mark Baker, "Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou" (Harvard UP, 2024)

24 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary...

Anne Applebaum, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" (Doubleday Books, 2024)

23 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that a...

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, "Fascism in America: Past and Present" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

22 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Has fascism arrived in America?  In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered ex...

Arie Perliger, "American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism" (Columbia UP, 2020)

21 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks ori...

Steve Gillon, “The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After” (Basic Books, 2009)

21 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power fr...

Alessandra Montalbano, "Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, an...

Hamilton Nolan, "The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor" (Hachette Books, 2024)

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline ...

Seth A. Berkowitz, "Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rat...

Mark R. Beissinger, "The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion" (Princeton UP, 2022)

17 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Pr...

Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)

13 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing ...

Zana Gulmohamad, "The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

13 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How is foreign policy made in Iraq? Based on dozens of interviews with senior officials and politicians, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Politi...