New Books In Political Science

  • Author: Vários
  • Narrator: Vários
  • Publisher: Podcast
  • Duration: 903:27:20
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Synopsis

Interviews with Political Scientists about their New Books

Episodes

  • Postscript: Politics, Identity, and the US Supreme Court

    23/06/2023 Duration: 59min

    Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary political events that engage their scholarship. Since the Supreme Court is wrapping up their term, three political scientists and one law professor joined Susan to talk about the power of the Federalist Society in shaping the courts (and how lawyers might strategically use political science research to get more progressive outcomes), how race, ethnicity, and gender issues have affected the construction of the U.S. Supreme Court over time, and a very lively discussion of this term’s Supreme Court decisions – and also actions outside the Court like Chief Justice Roberts refusing to appear before Congress. Dr. Christine C. Bird, JD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University and the Director of the Bird Law and Public Policy Lab (LAPP). Her research examines elite interests' influence on public policymaking in the judicial system.  Dr. Zachary McGee, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College fo

  • Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)

    23/06/2023 Duration: 31min

    On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project became the subject of a public hearing in a small town near the proposed site. But this time, local politicians and union leaders praised the mine proposal as an asset that would strengthen working-class communities in Minnesota. In many rural American communities, there is profound tension around the preservation and protection of wilderness and the need to promote and profit from natural resources. In Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range (NYU Press, 2023), Erik Kojola looks at both sides of these populist movements and presents a thoughtful account of how such political struggles play

  • Giulia Pecorella, "The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression" (Routledge, 2021)

    21/06/2023 Duration: 59min

    Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America on aggression, beginning with the Declaration of Independence up to 2020, covering the four years of the Trump Administration. The decision of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court to activate the Court's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in 2018 has added further value to a book concerning the position and practice of one of the most influential states, a global military power and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Organized along chronological lines, the work examines whether, or to what extent, the US position has evolved over time. The book explores how the definition of the crime can impact upon the US, notwithstanding its failure to ratify the Rome Statute. It also shows that the US practice and opinio iuris about the law applicable to the use of force might influence, as it has done in the past, the law itself. T

  • Samuel G. Freedman, "Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    21/06/2023 Duration: 56min

    From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century. During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate -but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists-the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, just 37 and the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium. Defying Truman's own desire to occupy the middle ground, Humphrey urged the delegates to

  • The Ascendance of Social Conservatism in the Public Square

    20/06/2023 Duration: 55min

    Within political discussions on the Right, social conservatism is on the rise. Why did the Right have a libertarian phase, and why is it leaving it behind? What does social conservatism look like in the world of practical public policy, and what is its future? How do religious citizens fit within the conservative movement? Ryan Anderson '04, is the director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a thinktank at the forefront of just such questions. After graduating from Princeton, Dr. Anderson pursued his PhD in Political Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the co-author of five books, most recently Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing (Regnery, 2022). His research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases. In addition to leading the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Anderson serves as the John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas, and the Founding Editor of Public

  • Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)

    19/06/2023 Duration: 01h03min

    The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia

  • Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    19/06/2023 Duration: 51min

    Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial features as an indication of an individual's character, while phrenology is a term for the study of the shape and size of the cranium as a measure of intelligence.  Today, many dismiss these ideas as pseudoscience but Dr. Rachel E. Walker argues these scientific approaches significantly shaped American society as “pervasive social practices and intellectual philosophies that people used to better understand their own brains, bodies, and behaviors.” Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores how these areas of study were once embraced by people of different backgrounds and political leanings. On the one hand, they were deployed to preserve social and political hierarchies – science functioned as a tool of oppression. But physiognomy and phrenology were also creatively deployed by activists (e.g., Frederick

  • Nicole Wegner, "Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

    18/06/2023 Duration: 51min

    Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism. Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treat

  • Margot Tudor, "Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    17/06/2023 Duration: 01h04min

    Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Margot Tudor reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Dr. Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together historie

  • Daniel E Agbiboa, "Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

    17/06/2023 Duration: 52min

    In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (U Michigan Press, 2022), Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided,

  • Leela Fernandes, "Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State" (U Washington Press, 2022)

    17/06/2023 Duration: 37min

    Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of post-liberalization developments, and fieldwork in the city of Chennai, Leela Fernandes traces the configuration of colonial historical legacies, developmental-state policies, and economic reforms that strain water resources and intensify inequality. While reforms of water governance promote privatization and decentralization, they strengthen the state centralized control over water through city-based development models. Understanding the political economy of water thus illuminates the consequent failures of the state wit

  • Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    15/06/2023 Duration: 01h16min

    How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable. In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights. Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals

  • Michael Magcamit, "Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts" (Oxford UP, 2022)

    15/06/2023 Duration: 38min

    Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2022) lays bare the causal mechanisms that lead state and non-state actors to identify particular ethnoreligious groups as threats to security, power, and status. It focuses on the cases of Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines to demonstrate how ethnoreligious others are transformed from strangers to enemies through passions, nationalism, and securitization. Advancing a novel ethnoreligious othering framework, the book offers a distinctive approach to understanding protracted conflict beyond dominant paradigms in international relations and conflict studies. In this interview, author Michael Magcamit shares the book’s back story, his ethical principles when doing field research in emotionally-charged and securitised sites, and the policy implications of his research. Michael Magcamit is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Politics at the University of Manchester. Before joining Manchester in August 2023, Michael was a Lecturer in Security

  • Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    14/06/2023 Duration: 30min

    We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us?  Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change (Cambridge UP, 2023) is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

  • The Future of Politicized Narratives: A Discussion with Andreas Krieg

    13/06/2023 Duration: 55min

    The word "narrative" is now so frequently heard that some think it over used. Perhaps its ubiquity results from it being so relevant – what used to be thought of as the mundane area of misinformation has become one of the most powerful elements of political practice. Andreas Krieg discusses the latest trends in the world of story-telling with Owen Bennett-Jones. Krieg is the author of Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives (Georgetown UP, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University 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

  • Patrick J. Charles, "Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)

    10/06/2023 Duration: 42min

    Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates including the National Rifle Association had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states' rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Following the enactment of the Gun Control Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began to stake out firm positions. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights be

  • Joshua St. Pierre, "Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication" (U MIchigan Press, 2022)

    09/06/2023 Duration: 43min

    In Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication (U Michigan Press, 2022), Joshua St. Pierre flips the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze's suggestion that "[w]e don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say," St. Pierre brings together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap--and produced and repaired within human bodies--to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to "de-face" the power of speech now entwined with capital. Shu Wan is currently matri

  • Lawrence Freedman, "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2022)

    08/06/2023 Duration: 47min

    Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations in command with a series of eleven vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates. Freedman covers defeats as well as vi

  • Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)

    07/06/2023 Duration: 55min

    Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes. Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle Eas

  • Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

    06/06/2023 Duration: 01h01min

    Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough (Georgetown UP, 2023), Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work--and how they fail--shows why the years of predictions were not enough. In the first in-depth analysis of the topic, Dahl examines the roles that both traditional intelligence services and medical intelligence and surveillance systems play in providing advance warning against public health threats--and how these systems must be improved for the future. For intelligence to effectively mitigate threats, specific, tactical-level warnings must be collected and shared in real time with receptive decision makers who will take appropriate action. Dahl shows how a combination of late and insufficient warnings about COVID-19, the Trump administration'

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