In today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book T he War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at George Washington University. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California and has been studying the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, for some 30 years, including for his Master’s and PhD th...
Sep 11, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 489
"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap." This world of US diplomacy excluded women for a variety of misguided reasons: they would let their emotions interfere with the task of diplomacy, they were not up to the deadly risks that could arise overseas, and they would be unable to cultivate the social c...
Sep 01, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 63
States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, the book contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the international justice system to their advantage, a theoretical framework that challenges the “justice ...
Aug 26, 2020•54 min•Ep. 81
Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance...
Aug 26, 2020•46 min•Ep. 184
Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, “the main man who translated jihad into English.” By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism “as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.” In Incitement: Anwar al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad (Harvard UP, 2020), Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research ...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 62
In Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Caron Gentry looks at how gender, race, and heteronormative expectations of public life shape Western understandings of terrorism as irrational, immoral and illegitimate. Gentry examines the profiles of 8 well-known terrorist actors. Gentry identifies the gendered, racial, and sexualized assumptions in how their stories are told. Additionally, she interrogates how the current co...
Aug 12, 2020•55 min
Today’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT . Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. In a podcast devoted to the concerning political developments in China, four scholars -- from political science, history, and particle physics(!) -- provide insights into the devastating effects of new security laws in Hong Kong, the nuances of China’s censorship and survei...
Aug 10, 2020•1 hr 42 min
As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, American nuclear policy continues to be influenced by the legacies of the Cold War. Nuclear policies remain focused on easily identifiable threats, including China or Russia, and how the United States would respond in the event of a first strike against the homeland. In their new book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (BenBella Books, 2020), Tom Z. Collina , Policy Director at Ploughshares Fund, an...
Aug 06, 2020•49 min•Ep. 461
Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others? Black Wave: How Networks and Governance S...
Aug 05, 2020•47 min•Ep. 60
In Peace, Reconciliation and Social Justice Leadership in the 21st Century: The Role of Leaders and Followers (Emerald, 2019) co-edited by Dr. H. Eric Schockman , Vanessa Alexandra Hernandez Soto, and Aldo Boitano de Moras, expert contributors explore ways that leaders and followers can bring forth pacifism, peace building, nonviolence, forgiveness, and social cooperation. Chapters focus on the role of positive public policies on the national and international order and leadership and followersh...
Aug 04, 2020•54 min•Ep. 59
Gulf scholar Sigurd Neubauer’s The Gulf Region and Israel: Old Struggles, New Alliances makes a significant contribution to our understanding of what drives shifting alliances in the Middle East, an ever more volatile part of the world. Shunned by Arab states for much of its existence, Israel has become in recent years a key factor in efforts by Gulf states to punch above their weight, shape the greater Middle East in their mould, box in countries like Iran and Turkey, and manage their reputatio...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 107
The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies. Even on this highly diverse global background, however, the long process of licit and illicit familiarization between Russia and China as Eurasian neighbours is a particularly compelling story, one told in engrossing detail in Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for Wo...
Jul 20, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 337
The key question in The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge, 2020), is to what extent political activists in these three domiciles have made progress in their quest to liberalize and democratize their respective polities. Taking a long historical perspective, the book compares the political trajectory in the three regions from the 1970s until the present. Key political events are analyzed for their strategies, tactics, succe...
Jul 17, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 92
Former Secret Service agent and star of Bravo’s Spy Games , Evy Poumpouras , shares lessons learned from protecting presidents, as well insights and skills from the oldest and most elite security force in the world to help you prepare for stressful situations, instantly read people, influence how you are perceived, and live a more fearless life. Becoming Bulletproof means transforming yourself into a stronger, more confident, and more powerful person. Evy Poumpouras—former Secret Service agent t...
Jul 07, 2020•46 min•Ep. 57
Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?," the President echoed the confusion, anger and fear felt by millions of Americans, while also creating a politicized discourse that has come to characterize and obscure discussions of both phenomena in the media. Since then the American public has lived through a number of domestic attacks and threats,...
Jul 06, 2020•59 min•Ep. 56
The "guard is tired." With that simple phrase, the newly installed Bolshevik regime in Russia dismissed the duly elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. And, one might say, so started Russia's century-long interference in elections and electoral outcomes. In his new book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (Knopf, 2020), David Shimer narrates in meticulous but page-turning detail a century of covert electoral interference, by both the United Stat...
Jul 06, 2020•56 min
Why did the word “Jakarta” appear as graffiti on the streets of Santiago in 1973? Why did left-wing Chilean activists receive postcards in the mail with the ominous message “Jakarta is coming”? Why did a Brazilian general lose his temper in an interview with university students, threaten their safety, and yell the name of Indonesia’s capital city? In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020) journalist Vincen...
Jul 01, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 744
We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change . – Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World The biggest question of the twenty-first century is: What does China want? China is without question the rising power of the a...
Jun 29, 2020•54 min•Ep. 331
The history of the Cold War is littered with what-ifs, and in Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959–1960 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), Professor of History, E. Bruce Geelhoed of Ball State University explores one of the most intriguing: What if the Soviets had not shot down the American U-2 spy plane and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had visited the Soviet Union in 1960 as planned? In August 1959, with his second term nearing its end, Eisen...
Jun 24, 2020•54 min•Ep. 736
The Russian state is back. That may not be a big surprise to Russia watchers. The degree to which it is a KGB state, however, is documented in great detail in Catherine Belton 's new book Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020). Certain elements of the KGB were playing a "long game" as early as the 1980s and saw the need for an alternative to the sclerotic late Soviet system. And they were going to be part of that post-Soviet regime...
Jun 23, 2020•37 min•Ep. 121
The success of populist politicians and the emergence of social justice movements around the world, and the recent demonstrations against police violence in the United States, demonstrate a widespread desire for fundamental political, economic, and social change, albeit not always in a leftwards direction. What can movements and parties that hope to bring about fundamental social change learn from the past? In Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Lawson analyzes rev...
Jun 19, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 35
Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militarization of police, concerns about the rise of the private security industry, and the long-standing belief that policing should be controlled by municipal governments suggest that police should be civilians who defend the public interest, and that they should be accountable to the communities that they s...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 37
Paul D’Anieri ’s Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) documents in a nuanced way the development of the current military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The book includes a meticulous account of numerous developments which, according to D’Anieri, led to the war that still remains officially undeclared. The roots of the conflict can be found in the beginning of the end of the USSR: different visions that Russian and Ukrainian politician...
Jun 17, 2020•49 min•Ep. 65
Latin America and the Global Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for b...
Jun 16, 2020•55 min•Ep. 85
Kurt Braddock 's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of persuasion to domains unique to this digital era, such as social media, YouTube, websites, and message boards to name but a few. Terrorists deploy a range of communication methods and harness reliable communication theories to create strategic messages that persuade peaceful individuals to join their grou...
Jun 09, 2020•58 min•Ep. 55
Lauren Turek is an Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2015 and holds a degree in Museum Studies from New York University. A specialist in U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, Dr. Turek’s first book, titled To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2020), examines the growth and influence of...
Jun 09, 2020•39 min•Ep. 97
Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to reflect on the state of research about the genocide. Among the many books that were published in the past year, Joyce E. Leader 's new book From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide (Potomac Books, 2020) stands out. Leader was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Rwanda from 1991 through April 1994. As such, she was ideally positio...
Jun 05, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 114
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival . He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the...
Jun 02, 2020•2 hr 1 min•Ep. 20
Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. In Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma (Avery Press, 2020), Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects ...
May 27, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 54
Richard Lachmann ’s First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) is a two-for-one deal. The first half of the book is a historical analysis of why some empires transform their geopolitical power into global hegemony while others fail to do so, and why hegemons eventually lose their global predominance. Focusing on the great European empires (Spain, France, Britain, and the Netherlands), Lachmann argues that while imperial expansion can de...
May 27, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 33
