New Books in Political Science

Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford UP, 2021) helps us think about the complexity of the American political system that has grown up over the past 200 years, and how this system functions (or, at times, misfunctions) given the demands and pressures on the governmental system and the American constitutional framework. Stephen Skowronek, John Dearborn, and Desmond King focus on the concept of the deep state, a term that was frequently used during the Trump Administration, with different meanings to different audiences and citizens. The deep state has also been more clearly revealed, in certain regards, by presidential inclinations towards the unitary executive. The phantoms of the title refer to the shadows of both the deep state and the unitary executive as embedded in the original constitutional arrangement crafted in Philadelphia in 1787, through the vesting clause in Article II, Congress's capacity to expand the republic and create more and diverse aspects of government, and the way in which congressional legislation establishes both legal regulations and norms with which the executive branch and the president are expected to cooperate. A key contention by the authors is that this uneasy tension has been in the shadows of our constitutional system since the beginning, but during other periods, elected officials finessed some of these difficulties through the presidential nominating/selection process, and with attention from the parties and the roles that the parties played in managing the system itself. With the evolution of the selection system, particularly with the shift to direct primaries and caucuses, and with parties now operating as extensions of the presidency and the president, the unitary executive has become more entrenched within the system. This beleaguered republic may be moving towards the form and function of a presidential democracy, often leaning into populism, and away from the contours and structure of the original republic. The unitary executive can operate more freely because of the system's commitment to separation of powers, with all executive power in the hands of the president. Parallel to these developments has been the slow growth of the administrative state in the U.S., derogatorily referred to as “the deep state.” As discussed in Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic, the state is deep in a number of directions. The reach of the national government works its way to individuals, localities, and states through a host of different means and paths. The administrative state also extends horizontally, across the dimensions of the national government itself, with layers of civil servants, policy experts, political appointees, administrative judges, staff, all doing the work they are entrusted with by elected officials and led by the president. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic dives into these dual dimensions of our political system—the potential for unified power in the president and presidency, and the substantive capacity of the administrative state— bringing forward the tensions between this strengthened Executive and the national state the president leads as head of the executive branch. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Development economists have been doing intensive research in recent years on conditional cash transfer programs as a tool to help get people out of poverty. Meanwhile in the US there has been a lot of talk about Universal Basic Income as a remedy for inequality and social disclocations. On paper, China's Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao, sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income. Jennifer Pan shows that this tool of poverty alleviation has instead been turned into a tool of surveillance and oppression. Ultimately, this focus on “stability” may backfire. Pan's book Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers (Oxford UP, 2020) offers insights gleaned from a remarkable combination of in-person field interviews, surveys, online field experiments, and data generated from automated analyses of massive numbers of government documents and social media posts. Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, and an Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University. She conducts research at the intersection of political communication and authoritarian politics, showing how authoritarian governments try to control society, how the public responds, and when and why each is successful. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In 2017, Myanmar's military launched a campaign of widespread targeted violence against its Rohingya minority. The horrific atrocities was later described by United Nations experts as genocide. This had been building since 2012, when earlier ethnic violence erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in Western Myanmar. These very grave incidents leading to the deaths and also the flight of thousands of Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh was the most concentrated exodus of people since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of the Muslim 'Other' (Zed Books, 2017, 2019), Francis Wade identifies the underlying causes which flamed division, segregation and resulted in a horrific loss of life and violence. Wade explores how the manipulations by a ruling elite turned prompted neighbours to take up arms against neighbour, by politicising ethnic identity.  The crisis is contextualised in the legacy of British colonialism which calcified the previously fluid dynamics of cultural groups across the country.The military junta is shown to have exploited these divisions in its campaign which targeted the Rohingya minority. In the period of extreme violence, Wade draws out how the U.N., and more broadly, how Western backers of the apparent political transition to democratisation contemporaneously ignored the unfolding situation. Through his on-the-ground accounts, Wade explores how citizens experiencing rights and freedoms unseen for half a century, under a much lauded civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, became complicit in this humanitarian catastrophe.  Francis Wade is a journalist specialising in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 and went on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence which accompanied it. He has reported for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, TIME, New York Review of Books and more.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

"The populist radical right is by far the best-studied party family within political science”. Extremism expert Cas Mudde may be right but, as Léonie de Jonge argues in The Success and Failure of Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Benelux Countries (Routledge, 2021), less studied are the specific conditions under which right-wing populism succeeds and - just as importantly - fails. Why, for example, do these parties poll above 40% in Italy and France yet remain absent in Portugal and Ireland? Part of the answer to this puzzle could lie in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium (and more specifically in its Dutch- and French-speaking regions). "In the earlier phases of a party's development", writes Professor de Jonge, the success and failure of right-wing populist parties depends to a large extent on exogenous factors – notably the degree of political and social ostracism they face in a given polity”. Léonie de Jonge graduated from Cornell College, Iowa, and the University of Cambridge, where she also obtained her PhD, and is now an Assistant Professor in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen. *The author's book recommendations were Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown (Allen Lane, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno once quipped that much of his work was written without practical applications in mind, and that the constant demand for immediate practical relevance felt like being asked by occupied forces to present one's papers. While hyperbolic, the frustration is real among many progressive activists and intellectuals, and also points to a real problem within political engagement, with how the need to act right now sometimes can cloud judgment. Against this grain, some occasionally step up in encouraging us to step back and collect ourselves and our thoughts. One such writer is the topic of this episode, Marcello Tari, whose recent book There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (Common Notions, 2021) recently became the first of his translated into English. Written from and for a scattered and confused left, the book has a style resembling the more esoteric and messianic figures in the lefts history, most notably Walter Benjamin, who appears throughout the books footnotes. In a series of chapters that wander through a number of disparate topics, it slowly develops a few key themes around late capitalism, violence, oppression, revolution and temporality, although a simple definition or analysis of any one of these elements in isolation never comes; instead they are developed and intertwined in various ways as a way of understanding the social and psychological knots we're caught in. Easy fixes don't come easy here either; instead Tari's goal is in many ways to cultivate our sensitivity to our current political predicament, to speak to comrades in a way that generates a productive confusion that might help us think more critically about what's needed. In the discussion that follows, Tari was unable to join us, but I was instead joined by two artists, Ayreen and Rene, who have known Tari for some time and proved careful and patient guides through the text. My typical formula for working through texts with guests broke down here; with every question I asked if they could define a term, or explain a passage, and every time they would take various detours through topics and themes I hadn't expected, only to eventually come back to my initial question, but with a newfound angle into it I hadn't picked up on during my own reading of the book. As a result, I left the conversation feeling like I was finally able to read the book, and I appreciate their willingness to sit with me on it. This book was challenging to read, and is even more challenging to describe, but it should be of interest to anyone engaged in contemporary political struggle. Tari is a self-described ‘barefoot' researcher of contemporary political movements and struggles, and has published works in both French and Italian. He is also the translator of The Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Elite white women have branded feminism, promising an apolitical individual empowerment along with sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity. As Rafia Zakaria expertly argues in Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption (W. W. Norton, 2021), those promises have been proven empty and white feminists have leant on their racial privilege and sense of cultural superiority. Drawing on her own experiences as an American Muslim woman, as well as an attorney working on behalf of immigrant women, Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism that forges true solidarity by bringing Black and brown voices and goals to the fore. Ranging from the savior complex of British feminist imperialists to the condescension of the white feminist-led "development industrial complex" and the conflation of sexual liberation as the "sum total of empowerment," Zakaria presents an eye-opening indictment of how whiteness has contributed to a feminist movement that solely serves the interests of upper middle-class white women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Constitutional Investigations is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Linda Colley is a leading expert on British, imperial and global history since 1700. After inspiring insights about Linda Colley's teachers and professors who had a strong impact on her future career as a historian, this wide-ranging conversation provides a detailed examination of the global history and present state of constitutions and their impact. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity. In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children." With Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence. Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines. Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is often invoked, but usually as a means of cultural critique and analysis. However, my guest Lorenzo Fusaro argues in his recent book Crises and Hegemonic Transitions: From Gramsci's Quaderni to the Contemporary World Economy (Haymarket Books, 2020) that Gramsci's work is permeated by Marx's economic critique and his theories of value. Split into two parts, the book is both a critical rereading of Gramsci, followed by a rereading of the last century of economic and political developments. The first half of the book involves a careful rereading of key concepts in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, rethinking concepts such as hegemony as being more closely related to the base, instead of simply being superstructural description. Hegemony is not above and beyond economic dynamics and antagonisms, but emerges from them and changes alongside them. This allows for a broadening of the theory conceptually, and also allows him to apply it to international relations, instead of being confined to a particular state. The second half of the book then traces the economic history of the 20th century, starting with the rise of the United States in the international scene in the 1920's, and following through to its eventual unraveling on the world stage in the present day. And even though the book was first published in 2018, at the end Fusaro offered some speculations on how this reworked theory of hegemony might help us think about the recent COVID crisis and its aftermath. Synthesizing theory, history and economics, this is a book that offers a powerful punch, and will reward readers from a number of different angles, and offers some dynamic theoretical resources for understanding our current crisis, and what might be just around the corner.  The book was first published by Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and is now available in paperback from Haymarket. Lorenzo Fusaro received his PhD in international political economy at King's College, London. He is an associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico, and is also one of the editors of Revisiting Gramsci's Laboratory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck's new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book's granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority. Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy. Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States' role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice's series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021's Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil's Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex. Amy S. Kaufman is a scholar of medieval studies and popular culture. Paul B. Sturtevant is Editor in Chief of The Public Medievalist and a Visitor Research Specialist at The Smithsonian Institution. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion and violence in India when the Indian constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender equality? This is the puzzle that animates Natasha Behl's book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India (Oxford University Press, 2019), but it is, as we explore in episode eight of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, in no way merely an intellectual one. To the contrary, Gendered Citizenship is a book that is guided by Behl's own bodily experiences of gendered politics in India and also in the academy. Through her study of India, Behl offers a persuasive critique of the existing literature on citizenship in political science, particularly in democratisation studies, as well as of her experiences as a graduate student in a hostile discipline. Along the way she develops an account of situated citizenship that not only serves as the methodological basis for her fieldwork, but, as we discuss, is itself a kind of empirical political theory. Congratulations to Natasha Behl for being awarded the soon-to-be-officially-announced 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence of the American Political Science Association! Listeners interested to know more about Lee Ann Fujii's life and work can listen to the recent interview in this special series with two of her former students, Jessica Soedirgo and Aarie Glas. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

What influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fredriksen to discuss the Milk Tea Alliance. Departing from the Thai and Hong Kong contexts, they explore what role this alliance plays in the broader political context, and what future it may have. Wasana Wongsurawat is an associate professor at the Department of History at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research has focused on the Chinese diaspora and Thai nationalism. Mai Corlin Fredriksen is a Carlsberg Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her current work focuses on the role of protest walls and the use of visual material in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is a student of social anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Scott Krzych's book Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers the first scholarly study of contemporary right-wing documentary film and video. Drawing from contemporary work in political theory and psychoanalytic theory, the book identifies what author Scott Krzych describes as the hysterical discourse prolific in conservative documentary in particular, and right-wing media more generally. In our chat, Scott and I review the development of conservative documentaries and discuss the various frameworks used to present ideas, as well as specific methods used to present information. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is sometimes described as “the most important governmental office no one has ever heard of” and it certainly occupies a very important position and role in the functioning of the American presidency and the way that the Executive branch operates. Political Scientists Meena Bose (Hofstra University) and Andrew Rudalevige (Bowdoin College) have edited an excellent primer on OMB, not just in terms of exploring what it does and how it works, but also integrating a host of perspectives examining the history, function, and details of OMB. The book begins with a Forward and an introductory chapter by the Honorable Jacob J. Lew, who served as OMB Director during both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Lew's chapter sets up the rest of the work in Executive Policymaking: The Role of the OMB in the Presidency (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), since he discusses OMB as an insider and a leader of the agency, as well as from the position as a cabinet secretary who also needed to work with OMB and as President Obama's chief of staff, a position that requires a similar kind of broad understanding of the functioning and structure of the entire Executive branch. The rest of the chapters in Executive Policymaking follow Lew's lead, with analysis from academics who study and research the presidency and the Executive branch and bureaucracy along with co-authored chapters that bring in the perspectives from other current and former OMB employees. The Office of Management and Budget has evolved from the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) that was put into place in 1921, a century ago. Over time, the BOB was moved to the Department of Treasury, but OMB was given more the responsibilities that provide it with the capacity to essentially manage the workings of the Executive branch, which is no small undertaking. The president's budget is the way that the Executive branch can broadly manage the priorities of the bureaucracy, and OMB is the centralizing actor in the way that this essentially operates. Bose and Rudalevige, both experts on the presidency and the bureaucracy, have brought together authors who examine OMB from important and distinct perspectives. The first section of Executive Policymaking explains the role that OMB plays in the federal budget process. This section also includes a chapter that specifically looks at the president's budget powers during the Trump Era, since abuse of these powers also led to the first of President Donald Trump's two impeachments. The next part of the book explores Executive Orders, Central Clearance, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), all of which are key components of the role that OMB plays in regard to the Executive branch agencies and departments. The final section of the book shifts the focus a bit from the budget to management, looking at the role that OMB plays in terms of managing the entirety of the Executive branch and also managing itself. The authors in this section also include OMB employees, who speak to their own experiences working inside this complex and important agency and the role and position that OMB holds in relation to the president, the presidency, and the Executive branch. This is a fascinating and useful examination of the many dimensions of the Office of Management and Budget, placing the agency in historical, political, and institutional context. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Why has the United States, the world's premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America's leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book, Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition (Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Philip Lohaus explores the roots of America's “efficacy deficit” and offers recommendations for how the United States can ensure a favorable place on an increasingly crowded global stage. Lohaus argues that the American way of competition, rooted in a black-and-white approach to conflict and an overreliance on technology, impedes effectiveness in the amorphous landscape of the 21st-century conflict. By tracing the geographic and historical development of the United States, China, Russia, and Iran, Lohaus shows that America's principal competitors have developed more dynamic approaches to competition and conflict outside of warfare. Unless the United States adapts, Lohaus writes, it will find itself on the path to decline. Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Lohus previously served as an Intelligence Analyst in the US Department of Defense, where he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently a Reserve Officer in the US Navy. John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master's degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor's degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Today we are talking to a New Yorker staff writer Carrie Battan about her piece from March of this year "How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community" – about how a quote unquote “nice website about yarn” got involved in radical politics. Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018. She has contributed to the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, and the Web site Pitchfork, where she worked as a staff writer from 2011 to 2014. She lives in Brooklyn. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (Cambridge University Press 2020) advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Steven Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as “worldly mediators,” or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, the book challenges us to rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King's College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Heritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past (Routledge, 2020) studies the impact of heritage policies and discourses on the Chinese state and Chinese society. It sheds light on the way Chinese heritage policies have transformed the narratives and cultural practices of the past to serve the interests of the present. As well as reinforcing a collective social identity, heritage in China has served as an instrument of governance and regulation at home and a tool to generate soft power abroad. Drawing on a critical analysis of heritage policies and laws, empirical case studies, and interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and local communities, the authors offer a comprehensive perspective on the role that cultural heritage plays in Chinese politics and policy. They argue that heritage-making appropriates international, national, and local values, thereby transforming it into a public good suitable for commercial exploitation. By framing heritage as a site of cooperation, contestation, and negotiation, this book contributes to our understanding of the complex nature of heritage in the rapidly shifting landscape of contemporary China. Nick Pozek is Assistant Director at the Parker School of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

How Social Science Creates the World is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and UC Berkeley political scientist Professor Mark Bevir. Mark Bevir is an internationally acclaimed expert in the theory of governance. This thought-provoking conversation explores how attempts to shoehorn political science into a natural science framework commonly fail and how correctly appreciating what social science is and does has a direct bearing on our everyday social lives. By adopting the false belief that the social world is composed of some unchanging, fundamental entities on par with atoms or molecules—be they markets or classes or what have you—we will have no means of recognizing, or even describing, what happens when circumstances change and a new social dynamic is created. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Exploring Southeast Asia is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jacques Bertrand, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Collaborative Master's Program in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. This conversation explores Jacques Bertrand's extensive research on the politics and political changes in Southeast Asia and provides detailed insights into this extensive and complex region which consists of countries with remarkably diverse histories and cultures. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD's Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Christian Ydesen offers a well-edited volume that illuminates how the OECD normalized its influence over global education policy from its Cold War origins until today. Ydesen argues for an interpretation of the OECD as a “global governing complex” that roots its power in comparative data and the production of educational norms. How did the OECD, initially an outgrowth of Marshall Plan funds, become a dominant player in global education policy? Listen in to find out. Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how they relied on private financial institutions that encouraged risky lending practices. Yet federal policy makers did little to change their approach to curbing risky lending practices and there was little political response from consumers or consumer groups. How can political scientists explain the behavior of government actors, interest groups, or borrowers?  In Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection (U Chicago Press, 2020), Dr. SoRelle insists that the expansion of consumer financing -- in terms of access and economic significance -- is fundamentally a political issue with serious political and economic consequences. She offers a policy-centered explanation sensitive to what she calls regulatory feedback effects that shape the behavior of bureaucrats, consumer advocates, and ordinary Americans. Individuals did not fail – they responded to systemic incentives and goals. SoRelle explains how angry borrowers' experiences with nearly invisible government policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals--they threaten the stability of entire economies. In addition to explaining the political dynamics of failure, SoRelle identifies possible remedies. This multi-method scholarship contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in an important and timely case study. Dr. Mallory E. SoRelle is an assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research interrogates how public policies are produced by, and how they reproduce, socioeconomic and political inequality in the United States. She has worked in both electoral politics and consumer advocacy. The podcast drops the week of the 10th anniversary of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren't Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post's Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021's Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be concerned with enacting policy and legislative changes. Scholars flying this flag have concentrated on the organization and language (for example, rallies and speeches) that are meant to enact social change. Counterpublic theory, on the other hand, focuses less on policy changes and more on the unequal distribution of power and resources among different protest groups, which is sometimes synonymous with subordinated identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Nonetheless, contributors argue that in recent years the distinctions between these two methods have become less evident. By putting the literatures of the two theories in conversation with one another, these scholars seek to promote and imagine social change outside the typical binaries. Christina Foust is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver.  Amy Pason is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently spends most of her time as Faculty Senate Chair and most recently, been elected to represent all Faculty Senate Chairs for the Nevada System of Higher Education.  Kate Zittlow Rogness, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Minneapolis College.  Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

It might seem somewhat paradoxical that in the Wars of 1898 and their aftermath—the era in which the United States expanded its imperial reach deep into the Caribbean and Pacific—international law became a feature of US foreign policy. In the midst of all of the militarism (think of Teddy Roosevelt's roughriders storming Cuba), colonial conquest, and the use of torture to quash Philippine resistance to US colonial rule, the US government sought to make its empire legalistic and to help build a broader international legal order. Benjamin Coates, in his book Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2019), ably dissects this project, and, in the process, helps illuminate aspects of the United States' overseas empire that other scholars have overlooked. Coates, an associate professor at Wake Forest University, explores the many ways in which international law bolstered imperial rule and interimperial relations. International-law arguments, for example, helped justify the seizure of the Panama Canal Zone. In Coates' telling, then, it was not a coincidence that the US foreign-policy apparatus lawyered up—filling the State Department's ranks with a multitude of international lawyers—at the same moment that it began to administer colonial populations abroad. I hope you enjoy our discussion! Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political Scientist Nathan Kalmoe has written a fascinating historical and political exploration of the connections between violence and partisanship before, during, and after the American Civil War. This book brings together work by historians and political scientists and straddles both disciplines in the examination of the way that partisan politics at the time of the Civil War also contributed to the rise and use of violence, and how this violence then fed back into partisan politics during this period. Kalmoe engaged a multi-method approach to the research, examining election returns, especially county-level returns during this time; he also integrated the census data from the time to map where voters lived and where soldiers were coming from when they became part of the military. Kalmoe dug deeply into the records about the soldiers (which have been digitized), learning about what happened to them, where they fought, and where they called home. Finally, in order to get a clear sense of the partisan divisions and the action and rhetoric of the party elite, he integrated content from local newspapers—these newspapers were often the media arms of particular political parties in cities and localities, and thus they directly reflected the thinking of the party leaders in those same cities and localities. Kalmoe noted that literacy rates were quite high during this time, which also makes the case for the usefulness of what these partisan newspapers were writing about and reflecting to their readership. With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines this violent period of American history, and Kalmoe is able to essentially measure how casualties effected voting and mass political behavior by using all of these historical sources to discern this data. By tracing these related behaviors, Kalmoe highlights some of the changes in attitude and approach that takes place in the two main political parties at the time. He finds that the northern Democrats shifted markedly from a pro-war stance earlier in the war to, in 1864, every northern Democratic newspaper taking an anti-war position. This is a rather dynamic change that takes place over a short time. During this same period, the northern Republican partisans were suffering significantly more losses, and they were even more committed to the war, as reflected in the newspapers and in the public events where speakers addressed the topic of the war. This pattern of war memory also continues in Reconstruction, as Republican states built monuments to remember the fallen, and as the regiments also wrote up their own histories, delineating the heroic deeds of those who were members of the respective regiments. This is a sophisticated and complex analysis of the connection between violence and partisan in an earlier era in the United States, when the Union and the Confederacy were moved to take up arms and to commit to violence in ways that were also directly related to the active political parties and partisan affiliation with those parties. In reading through With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War it hard not to see echoes and images of more recent political violence and the way that this more contemporary violence is also tied to partisanship. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Why is Vietnam's modern history so closely associated with a place that lies only just within the country's borders? What was at stake in the contest for the mountainous Black River region that culminated in the legendary French defeat of 1954? How did the different ethnic groups living around Điện Biên Phủ position themselves, when forced to choose between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam? Why did some groups in the region dream of greater autonomy, under a just king, following the pivotal battle? How come women played such a crucial role in this conflict? In what ways has the Vietnamese state deployed "lessons" from Điện Biên Phủ, for nation-building purposes? And how far does what happened there force us to rethink our understandings of notions of territory, and how "ethnic minorities" are constructed and imagined? Christian C. Lentz, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, discusses his ground-breaking book Contested Territory Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale 2019) with Duncan McCargo, Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.  Contested Territory is the winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies for the best first book in Southeast Asian Studies.  Read more here: https://www.asianstudies.org/a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, Ballvé argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state-building projects. Indeed, these projects have thrust together an unlikely gathering of guerilla groups, drug-trafficking paramilitaries, military strategists, technocratic planners, local politicians, and development experts each seeking to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of "the state" in a space in which it supposedly does not exist. By untangling this odd mix, Ballvé reveals how Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient, if not at all benevolent, regimes of rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in his new book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (Princeton UP, 2021). Drawing on more than three decades of research, and reams of data from within Russia itself, Frye depicts a "personal autocrat", but one subject to numerous constraints and trade offs. And the shows of force we have seen in recent years, from his treatment of opposition figures to the planning for the upcoming election, highlight those weaknesses. Regardless of your view of Putin, you will want to hear about and understand the challenges that he faces. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge, 2021), William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly. William Walters is Professor of Politics and Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current research concerns secrecy, migration and deportation infrastructures. He has published widely in the areas of political sociology, political geography, citizenship studies, security and insecurity, and Foucault studies. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Eating One's Own: Examining Civil War is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and intellectual historian David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blanfein Professor of History at Harvard University. This conversation covers Prof. Armitage's extensive research on the history of ideas of civil war from Ancient Rome to the present. A salient feature of his work is a strong focus on etymology as it relates to our understanding of how people interpreted (or misinterpreted) and perceived events in history which results in a fascinating exploration of how our understanding of various concepts has been prejudiced by past societies and past beliefs that we might not even be aware of, and how they, in turn, go on to influence other societies; and how this cumulative process frames our understanding of these ideas. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society. The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood. Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political Theorist Sara Rushing's new book, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the very real experiences that individuals have in the context of healthcare, especially healthcare and medical approaches to the most human of all experiences, birth, illness, and death. Rushing's analysis posits that the corporal bodies that we all inhabit are also sites of politics—not the problem for politics, as others have theorized, but rather a place and space where politics transpires. Instead of beginning an exploration from an abstract position, Rushing starts from her own experiences, since her encounters with birth, death, mourning, and grief engaged her thinking about how we as citizens, as individuals, engage and face medical experiences and all of the settings where these experiences take place. Rushing focuses the theoretical framework around these issues of humility and vulnerability, which is often how we find ourselves in context of these human experiences that engage the “medical-industrial complex.” We often consider humility as a quality associated with a religious bearing but Rushing urges a reconsideration of the concept of humility, as a means to embrace one's vulnerability and thus move towards a redefined understanding of autonomy. This is the context into whichThe Virtues of Vulnerability then examines three distinct human experiences, birth, illness—in this case, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as suffered by American military veterans—and death, exploring how we encounter these life experiences and how politics essentially happens in these medicalized spaces. A substantial component of the theoretical analysis in The Virtues of Vulnerability is wrestling with the way that choice and freedom are presented within the medical environment but are delimited in what we can actually choose and what we understand and know about these choices as well. This concept of freedom and choice are also connected to the way that neoliberalism frames our experiences, thus we perceive of our autonomy in these medicalized environments through the appearance of choices we get to make, or options provided to us, but often these are actually quite narrow in scope, constrained by the demands of health insurance and healthcare/medical marketplace. Rushing's analysis gets at these many competing dimensions of healthcare and how it is operationalized, leading the reader to consider how we experience our interactions and how we might reconsider our autonomy within these environments by understanding how our vulnerability and humility can help us work more collaboratively with those who are engaging in this ethics of care with us. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement--two situations where state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed--one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one--they present the same question: how do we know someone's sexuality? In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. This narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often functions as a disciplining example—a means of scolding activists and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics. Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021) charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King's College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The connection between local news and political polarization is a hot topic that scholars in political science, journalism, and other fields have explored from multiple angles. It's not often that a real-world experiment presents itself, but that's exactly what happened when a Google alert landed in the inboxes of Joshua P. Darr., Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna Dunaway. During the month of July 2019, the Palm Springs Desert Sun  dropped national politics from its opinion page and instead filled the space with columns from local writers and letters to the editor about local issues.  In Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (Cambridge UP, 2021), the authors use a show that after this quasi-experiment in Palm Springs, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change. While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores national politics could help local newspapers push back against political polarization. Darr and Hitt join New Books Network host Jenna Spinelle for this conversation.  Joshua P. Darr is assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Matthew P. Hitt is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald. P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford UP, 2020) seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics.  In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain--three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself. Dr. Rahul Rao is Reader in Political Theory at SOAS University of London. He is also the author of Out of Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010) also published by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy collective and blogs at The Disorder of Things. He is currently writing a book about the politics of statues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellions since the 1960s (Liveright, 2021) Dr. Elizabeth Hinton asserts the significance of Black rebellions in post-civil rights America, arguing that the riots were indeed rebellions or political acts in response to the failures and unfulfilled promises of the Civil Rights period. She investigates an overlooked trend of Black uprisings emanating from poor and working-class Black neighborhoods, towns, and cities often sparked by police terror between 1964 and 1972. In refuting the racist pathologies that community violence in response to racist policing and economic disinvestment has been assigned by commissions, politicians, liberals and conservatives alike, Hinton presents a redefinition through the analytic of rebellion that enhances our understanding of resistance to anti-Blackness and policing today. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, Ike was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, as well as his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He was a man of judgment, and steadying force. He sought national unity, by pursuing a course he called the Middle Way that tried to make winners on both sides of any issue. Ike was a strategic, not an operational leader, who relied on a rigorous pursuit of the facts for decision-making. His talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the context of the long game, and his ability to see causes and various consequences, explains his success as Allied Commander and as President. After making a decision, he made himself accountable for it, recognizing that personal responsibility is the bedrock of sound principles. Susan Eisenhower's How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions (Thomas Dunne, 2020) shows us not just what a great American did, but why--and what we can learn from him today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government's largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans' use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they've been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Unlike other athletes, the rock climber tends to disregard established norms of style and technique, doing whatever she needs to do to get to the next foothold. This figure provides an apt analogy for the scholar at the center of this unique book. In Rocking Qualitative Social Science, Dr. Ashley T. Rubin provides an entertaining treatise, corrective vision, and rigorously informative guidebook for qualitative research methods that have long been dismissed in deference to traditional scientific methods. Recognizing the steep challenges facing many, especially junior, social science scholars who struggle to adapt their research models to narrowly defined notions of "right," Rubin argues that properly nourished qualitative research can generate important, creative, and even paradigm-shifting insights. This book is designed to help people conduct good qualitative research, talk about their research, and evaluate other scholars' work. Drawing on her own experiences in research and life, Rubin provides tools for qualitative scholars, synthesizes the best advice, and addresses the ubiquitous problem of anxiety in academia. Ultimately, this book argues that rigorous research can be anything but rigid. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, meaning-making, and identity work as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the use of festivals by small-towns to make-meaning and do identity work. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Today I talked to Rob Tempio, the editor of a wonderful collection of books from Princeton University Press called "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers." The series presents the timeless and timely ideas of classical thinkers in lively new translations. Enlightening and entertaining, these books make the practical wisdom of the ancient world accessible for modern life. The titles of the various volumes gives you a good idea of what's on offer.  How to Drink (Obsopeous) How to Be Content (Horace) How to Be a Bad Emperor (Suetonius) How to Think about God (Cicero) How to Win an Argument (Cicero) How to Be Free (Epicutetus) How to Run a Country (Cicero) How to Grow Old (Cicero)  How to Keep your Cool (Seneca) There are 19 pearls of Ancient Wisdom currently in the series with more to come. Enjoy!  Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Discussions of the ethics and politics of immigration tend to focus on those seeking entry into a new society. We ask whether a country has the “right to exclude” those who want to relocate within it. We explore the moral implications of more-or-less restrictive immigration policies, often with a view towards the plight of immigrants and refugees. These are of course important questions, but in his new book, Immigration and Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2021) Chandran Kukathas argues that a state's immigration policies also exert control over its domestic population. He asks whether this exercise of power is justifiable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Nicole Curato's Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action (Oxford UP, 2019) investigates how democratic politics can unfold in creative and unexpected of ways even at the most trying of times. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in disaster-affected communities in Tacloban City, Philippines, this book presents ethnographic portraits of how typhoon survivors actively perform their suffering to secure political gains. Each chapter traces how victims are transformed to 'publics' that gain voice and visibility in the global public sphere through disruptive protests, collaborative projects, and political campaigns that elected the strongman Rodrigo Duterte to presidency. It also examines the micropolitics of silencing that lead communities to withdraw and lose interest in politics. These ethnographic descriptions come together in a theoretical project that makes a case for a multimodal view of deliberative action. It underscores the embodied, visual, performative and subtle ways in which affective political claims are constructed and received. It concludes by arguing that while emotions play a role in amplifying marginalized political claims, it also creates hierarchies of misery that renders some forms of suffering more deserving of compassion than others. The book invites readers to reflect on challenging ethical issues when examining political contexts defined by widespread depravity and dispossession, and the democratic ethos demanded of global publics in responding to others' suffering. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

We often hear or read the phrase “crimes against humanity” when we learn about the Holocaust, or genocide in places like Rwanda or Serbia. And just as often, we don't reflect on what this phrase means because it seems to simply encompass horrific actions by individuals or groups, directed towards specific ethnic, religious, or cultural groups. Sinja Graf's new book, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), helps us to consider what this terminology actually means and how we can and should think about both the crimes themselves and the humanity of the victims and the perpetrators. As Graf explains in the book and in our conversation, once we start to unpack this term and our conceptualization of it, the complexity of truly understanding “universal crimes” becomes starkly clear. It is also clear that this is an understudied realm within contemporary political theory. The Humanity of Universal Crime seeks to explore this complexity and to provide a path to think about and consider both the idea itself and how it is has been used in politics and processes over the past centuries. Graf knits together this exploration and understanding across disciplines, weaving in concepts from international law, political theory, colonial studies, and human rights. In the initial section of the book, John Locke's engagement with this idea of universal crime is traced and explored to understand how Locke, who was so influential to the establishment of classical liberal thought and structures, saw the place and role of universal crime in context of the coercive power of the state. The next section of the book, which is both historical and theoretical, examines the way that colonialism created fragmentation within concepts of humanity, determining that there were those who are included under this umbrella of humanity, and, as a result, get to enjoy the protections and rights associated with being included. And there are those who were considered not fully human, and thus could be excluded from this umbrella category. As with so much else that was part of western imperial colonialism and 19th century eurocentrism, these distinctions fell along racial, religious, national, and ethnic lines. Graf's research examines this normative fracturing of humanity during this period. The final section of The Humanity of Universal Crime is focused on more contemporary debates about distinctions between war and policing, especially in the context of the post-Cold War world. In this more recent period, structures and processes have been established and developed to legally respond to “crimes against humanity.” But Graf notes that, even so, these international systems do not necessarily have clear understandings of humanity – and how the perpetrators and the victims are both included under that umbrella category. The Humanity of Universal Crime is a keen investigation of these complex concepts and how they have been put into effect, and what we really understand about crimes against humanity and what we still need to consider. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

If many people were shocked by Donald Trump's 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations—crazed extremists who did not represent the real US.  It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU Press, 2021) demonstrates that, rather than being exceptional, such white power extremism and the violent atrocities linked to it are a part of American history. And, alarmingly, they remain a very real threat to the US today. Hinton explains how murky politics, structural racism, the promotion of American exceptionalism, and a belief that the US has have achieved a color-blind society have diverted attention from the deep roots of white supremacist violence in the US's brutal past. Drawing on his years of research and teaching on mass violence, Hinton details the warning signs of impending genocide and atrocity crimes, the tools used by ideologues to fan the flames of hate, and the shocking ways in which “us” versus “them” violence is supported by inherently racist institutions and policies. It Can Happen Here is an essential new assessment of the dangers of contemporary white power extremism in the United States. While revealing the threat of genocide and atrocity crimes that loom over the country, Hinton offers actions we can take to prevent it from happening, illuminating a hopeful path forward for a nation in crisis. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science