New Books In Political Science

What explains the varying treatment of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia? Why have some states in the region been far more successful than others in handling relations with minorities? And why have countries like Thailand had far more challenging experiences with certain ethnic minorities than with others? In this podcast about Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022), co-author Jacob Ricks is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about the key issues and arguments raised in this short but provocative book. Amy H. Liu is a professor of government at University of Texas, Austin, while Jacob I. Ricks is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University.  Duncan McCargo is a professor in the public policy and global affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University.  This book conceptually disaggregates ethnicity into multiple constituent markers – specifically language, religion, and phenotype. By focusing on the interaction between these three ethnic markers,

Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinating overview of immigration policies and prohibitions throughout U.S. history, but not in a linear mode—instead, she integrates the historical record into the discussion of the domestic policies that were developed over the past 70 years. These policies are the central focus of the book, since it is the structure, execution, and implementation of these policies that constrain and impact citizens and non-citizens in the United States. The Walls Within examines education policy and court decisions, labor policy and the debat

Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience and grace (which includes really listening) to people we disagree with and regard as eccentric. So why not talk it over on Almost Good Catholics? Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio. Kevin Vallier’s personal website. Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled. Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna. “What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar.  Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern E

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday,

Natural law theory is known to be more emphasized among Catholics than Protestants. Why is that the case, and should it be? Do Protestants need to focus more on philosophy? Today's guest, Andrew T. Walker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, discusses why Protestants need natural law too, and specifically the work of the Madison Program’s founder and Director, Professor Robert P. George. We discuss Dr. Walker's book, Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George, which features essays from a variety of Protestant scholars on Professor George and the importance of his contributions to the field of natural law. Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an associate dean in their School of Theology. He also serves as the executive director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement, as Managing Editor of WORLD opinions, and as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. More on

In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power.  Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by th

Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her.  In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates ab

Wedged between Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, at the intersection of the world’s busiest shipping routes, Djibouti has long been a global geostrategic hub. In Djibouti: A Political History (Lynne Rienner, 2023), Samson Bezabeh traces the tortuous political history of this tiny country since its independence from France in 1977. Bezabeh challenges much conventional wisdom as he dissects Djibouti's trials and tribulations. Focusing on the internal, external, and historical factors that drive its domestic politics, his work exposes the troubling dynamics that have allowed the state to survive despite, or perhaps because of, the fragmentation of its society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration. In Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (Yale UP, 2023) Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley explore the uncanny parallels, and productive differences between ancient Rome and the modern West, moving beyond the tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to unearth new lessons. From 399 to 1999, they argue, through the unfolding of parallel, underlying imperial life cycles, both empires sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Has the era of Western global domination indeed reached its end? Heather and Ra

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine. The book reflects on the limits of progress that legislative reform may make, and the way that increased regulation can actually limit access to rights protections. Broadly transferrable beyond its specific field, this book will be useful to socio-legal scholars, feminist scholars, trans scholars, policy makers and practitioners. Dr Chris Dietz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law & Social Justice at The University of Leeds.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U Illinois Press, 2023), Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin provide an edited collection of new research on this understudied workforce:  Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether cert

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn. Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, w

The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965–1976, in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. Dhufar, the southernmost governorate in today's Sultanate, captured global attention for its revolutionaries and their liberation movement's Marxist-inspired social change. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives.  Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Alice Wilson offers a groundbreaking study of the legacies of officially silenced revolutionaries. How do their underlying convictions survive and inspire platforms for progressive politics in the wake of disappointment, defeat, and repression? Dr. Wilson considers the "social afterlives" of revolutionary values and networks. Veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate

In May 2019, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the world's largest election. Indrajit Roy edited volume Passionate Politics: Democracy, Development and India’s 2019 General Election (Manchester UP, 2023) brings together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain why Indians voted the way they did. Prof Roy is the Professor of Global Development Politics at the University of York’s, Department of Politics, UK. His research and teaching strengthen critical approaches to ordering global development politics. Tusharika Deka is a PhD student in International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Three political theorists, Smita A. Rahman (DePauw University), Katherine A. Gordy (San Francisco State University), and Shirin S. Deylami (Western Washington University) have brought together an excellent edited volume titled Globalizing Political Theory (Routledge, 2022). And this is precisely what this book does—moving beyond theory categories like “the canon” or comparative political theory—and instead examining political theory from its local roots in different places and different spaces. The book explores political theory in a generative way, not working to reproduce a non-western canon, or to focus on geographic regions. Instead, Globalizing Political Theory includes six umbrella themes, threading chapters together within those themes, and often having chapters, authors, thinkers, and ideas in conversation with each other. The six thematic sections of the book are: Colonialism and Empire; Gender and Sexuality; Religion and Secularism; Marxism, Socialism, and Globalization; Democracy and Protest; Race,

Today’s episode of POSTSCRIPT explores and examines director Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie. This Warner Brothers’ movie has been in theaters for under a month but has crossed the $1 billion dollar mark during that time, breaking all kinds of box office records and making Gerwig the first solo female director to enter this rarified realm. Barbie is now Warner Brothers’ most successful film, surpassing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which had held that position at Warner Brothers. Barbie has hit a kind of cultural and cinematic sweet spot—with a marketing campaign around the movie establishing pink as the new black, bringing in Barbie-connected products across almost all consumer platforms, from Barbie-themed furniture to holiday home rentals, from lunchboxes and tee-shirts to new Mattel Barbies reflecting characters in the film. Barbie has also received positive reviews in the United States and globally, with audience members attending the film in pink clothing and accessories, often accompanied by friends

America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good. The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the hist

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained a renewed momentum in recent years, and have come to be viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women's human rights around the world has remained under-explored.  Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco's book Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2023) aims to fill the gap, providing new insights from a set of case studies from across the Global South. Bringing an intersectional feminist approach to PPPs, these cases enable analysis that can inform advocacy and activism, whilst challenging dominant narratives and resisting the negative impacts of PPPs on women and historically marginalized communities' human rights. Widely advocating for stronger regulatory

Two blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how law makers, law enforcers, and federal courts have responded. They discuss differences among the conservative justices that produced this fragile holding, the growing dependence on history but disdain for historians, how the Bruen approach hurts laws involving domestic violence or controlled substances, the problem of overreading historical silences, and the ways violence may be addressed through community violence intervention, free markets, etc. – in ways SCOTUS cannot control. Jacob Charles is an Associate Professor of

In Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (Duke UP, 2023), Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces rather than mitigating violence. Chaturvedi tr