How much do we need to worry about the global state of democracy? And what do we need to do to better understand what is happening in different parts of the world? Join Petra Alderman and Nic Cheeseman in this opening episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast to learn more about these questions and the newly established Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) at the University of Birmingham. Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Dev...
Jul 25, 2023•19 min•Ep. 1
Ronan Bolton's book Making Energy Markets: The Origins of Electricity Liberalisation in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) charts the emergence and early evolution of electricity markets in western Europe, covering the decade from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Liberalising electricity marked a radical deviation from the established paradigm of state-controlled electricity systems which had become established across Europe after the Second World War. By studying early liberalisation processes ...
Jul 24, 2023•56 min•Ep. 79
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the “Other” to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as an essential concept of the new nation-state. The construction of Others served as a backdrop to the articulation of Turkishness –and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keff...
Jul 22, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 223
In Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—ind...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 73
For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continu...
Jul 18, 2023•58 min•Ep. 396
The 2016 election of Donald Trump focused people's minds on populism, and most of the attention paid to the subject since has been on the threat it poses to wealthy democracies. In Democracy Unmoored, Samuel Issacharoff takes a far wider-angle view of the phenomenon, covering countries from across the globe: Brazil, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and more. Just as importantly, he focuses on populism's attack on the institutions of governance. Democracy requires two critica...
Jul 15, 2023•56 min•Ep. 394
Why aren't ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin's own historical propaganda narratives, Russia's invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to anti-Western conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population. In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russ...
Jul 14, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 241
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated. In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2023), Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, cou...
Jul 11, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 179
When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer....
Jul 10, 2023•39 min•Ep. 69
From 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Looking back, the commander of the 300 professional troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prospect...
Jul 07, 2023•33 min•Ep. 13
In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the ...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 1334
In his timely My Russia: War or Peace? (RiverRun Press, 2023), Mikhail Shishkin provides a searing account of Russian political culture that explains both Putin's autocratic regime and its invasion of Ukraine. An Russian emigre who has lived in Switzerland for many years and writes in Russian and German, Shishkin traces the roots of Russia's problems, from 'Kievan Rus' through to the current Russian Federation. He explores the uneasy relationship between state and citizens, explains Russian atti...
Jul 05, 2023•40 min•Ep. 241
Before this century's first global financial crisis struck Europe in 2007-2012, only people in the Brussels bubble had heard of the Eurogroup. By then, finance ministers from countries using the euro had been meeting in this format every month for ten years but – as Joscha Abels writes in The Politics of the Eurogroup: Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2023) - “the group had been almost invisible to the public". Over the next decade – and especially during the most ...
Jun 30, 2023•59 min•Ep. 12
Do experts perform better than generalists? In the midst of the fraught 2016 Brexit campaign one of the most British senior British politicians arguing that the UK should leave the EU said “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts “– and was widely derided for doing so. Amanda Goodall thinks he was wrong, as she explains to Owen Bennett-Jones. Goodall is the author of Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders (PublicAffairs, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist an...
Jun 24, 2023•40 min•Ep. 67
The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford UP, 2023) investigates the political and social imaginaries of 'terrorism' in early twentieth-century France. Chris Millington traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organiz...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 113
Four months after taking office in May 1996, Italian prime minister Romano Prodi flew to Valencia for a bilateral summit with his Spanish counterpart José María Aznar. Germany, France and the EU's core members were getting ready to create the euro but Italy needed more time to get its economy in order. In Valencia, Prodi lobbied Aznar to join him in a second wave but met a firm veto. "The Aznar position was very tough and somehow shocking for both Prodi and (Treasury minister) Ciampi," says Vinc...
Jun 18, 2023•47 min•Ep. 8
With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by the Allies in 1944 that France was able to rebuild itself but faced many challenges both external and internal. Externally, the war against Germany still waged until May 1945. At the same time, the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union meant France would be forced to pick sides. Internally, the legacy of polarized politi...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 27
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 j...
Jun 13, 2023•54 min•Ep. 65
Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems. In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energ...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 77
Exactly a century ago, intelligence agencies across Europe first became aware of a fanatical German nationalist whose political party was rapidly gathering momentum. His name was Adolf Hitler. From 1933, these spy services watched with growing alarm as they tried to determine what sort of threat Hitler's regime would now pose to the rest of Europe. Would Germany rearm, either covertly or in open defiance of the outside world? Would Hitler turn his attention eastwards - or did he also pose a thre...
Jun 11, 2023•35 min•Ep. 1325
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts...
Jun 10, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 56
Is there such a thing as “the Israel lobby,” and how powerful is it really? Hilary Frances Aked's book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (Verso, 2023) provides a forensically researched account of the activities of Israel's advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid. The book traces the history and changing fortunes of key actors within the British Zionist movement in the context of the Israeli government's contemporary efforts t...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 86
In this episode of International Horizons, Valerie Rosoux, Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) discusses the disagreements in the historiography of Belgium's human rights violations during its colonial activities in Congo, and how Belgium's case differs from those of Netherlands and France in coming to terms with their colonial past from the perspective of the elites', religion, and parties. In dealing with these, she argues that had Belgium's politicians known l...
May 30, 2023•34 min•Ep. 123
Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically assesses UK foreign policy over the past 25 years, from Kosovo in 1998 to Afghanistan in 2021, while also scrutinising British policy towards the powerhouses of the USA, Russia, India, and China. Far from being unimportant, Snell reveals, Britain has often played a pivotal role in world affairs. For instance, London supplied the false intelligence that ...
May 29, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 169
Will Wales ever become an independent country? The UK’s other constituent parts – Scotland and Northern Ireland - seem more likely to breakaway: the Scots voted no to independence in 2016 but it was by quite a narrow margin (55% to 45%) and next time, who knows? In Northern Ireland Catholics are for the first time becoming a majority and with some protestants who would rather be in the EU than the UK, a referendum there could lead to Irish unity. But what about the Welsh? Polls suggest support f...
May 29, 2023•48 min•Ep. 63
How did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History, which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union. Prof. Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebecca ...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 58
Where lay the fissures of Soviet power in Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Why did France fail in its postwar efforts to make its African colonies part of France itself? In two complementary books, Rachel Applebaum and Emily Marker explore the soft-power mechanisms of the Soviet and French empires after World War II. Their findings shed light on not only the distinctive characteristics of postwar empires, but on the reasons why Soviet internationalism and the unique French model of decoloniza...
May 20, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 234
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resentment and grievances in former colonies drawing from the cases of Algeria and South Africa. Bucaille delves deeper into the case of Algeria and the affected populations whose identities were crossed cut by institutions and personal experiences as a former colony. Moreover, she explains how Algeria, considered not a colony but a French territory, st...
May 18, 2023•42 min•Ep. 121
As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German respo...
May 17, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 187
How do we explain the rise of populism, extremism, and conspiracy theory in the Americas and Europe? Why do members of a society come to feel this strong sense of discontent with their political system – so deep and broad that they believe the system to be irreparably broken? Scholars have explained these phenomena using two main models. The first focuses on economics and imagines the source of discontent is long-term economic change that creates winners and losers. An alternative model posits t...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 656
