What is the future of time and space in democracy? It's now widely accepted that Chinese politicians are advantaged by the lack of the short time horizons that come with electoral cycles. And all the discussion of immigration raises issues of borders in politics. Professor Jan Zielonka of Oxford University has been thinking about these matters and you can hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Zielonka is the author of The Lost Future: And How to Reclaim It (Yale University Press, 202...
Mar 28, 2023•46 min•Ep. 56
How poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 180
Political Theorist Lee Trepanier has a new edited volume focusing on thinking about human responses to disasters and diseases. Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID (Routledge, 2022) was clearly an opportunity for many of the contributing authors to consider how we should think about ourselves and our physical and spiritual health in context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Section I of the book is focused specifically on consideratio...
Mar 23, 2023•28 min•Ep. 646
Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in the history of conservatism, the New Right, and the Republican Party in the state of Georgia. Robin M. Morris examines how the growth of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s was due in large part to the political activism of white women. The book begins with the African American women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women an...
Mar 23, 2023•44 min•Ep. 50
Edward Mead Earle was a historian, scholar, professor, and international relations expert; he was also a founding father of the field we know as Security Studies. Listen as David Ekbladh and International Security Editor Sean Lynn-Jones discuss Earle's contributions to the field, his views on what Security Studies should be, his seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and what he might think of Security Studies today. This conversation was recorded on January 4, 2012. Learn more about your ...
Mar 22, 2023•26 min•Ep. 24
In How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine (Ibidem, 2022), Oleksandra Keudel proposes a novel explanation for why some local governments in hybrid regimes enable citizen participation while others restrict it. She argues that mechanisms for citizen participation are by-products of political dynamics of informal business-political (patronal) networks that seek domination over local governments. ...
Mar 22, 2023•52 min•Ep. 16
Much has been made of the rise of China's economy, and some fear that China will surpass the United States as the world's largest economy in the coming years. Michael Beckley goes against the grain in his article "China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure" (International Security, Winter 2011/12), arguing that the size of a nation's economy doesn't necessarily dictate its global power, and that the United States is not in great danger because of China's economic developments. Beckley and S...
Mar 20, 2023•30 min•Ep. 22
The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’. – Michael Walzer, NBN interview (2023) In the 1990 collection What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Reading...
Mar 18, 2023•51 min•Ep. 165
In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the process of decolonization, the CSW’s work grappled with issues like polygamy, family planning, FGM, and ...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 49
Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or examining how the criminal justice system works in Latin American countries, Flom has focused, instead, on the illegal drug markets as economic and political institutions to examine how they actually operates within Brazil and Argentina. From this perspective, we learn quite a lot about market forc...
Mar 16, 2023•52 min•Ep. 639
The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers. Pittsburgh’s Renaissance’s apparent success quickly became a model for several struggling industrial cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In A Good Plac...
Mar 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 280
Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Mareike Schomerus argues that this is because practitioners adhere to a mental model that emphasises linearity, certainty, and causality, assuming ...
Mar 15, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 131
In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green parties in Taiwan, the relevance that alternative and small parties may have on the overall evoluti...
Mar 15, 2023•29 min•Ep. 10
Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. Th...
Mar 14, 2023•47 min•Ep. 183
This new compendium Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond (APSA, 2022), is a true asset to the discipline of Political Science (and other graduate programs as well) in the myriad ways that it provides guidance, advice, and thoughtful reflection for those considering graduate work, in graduate school, and beyond. This book should be referenced not only by those who are at the nascent stages of their political science career, but also by their mentors, teachers, advisors, and peers ...
Mar 14, 2023•54 min•Ep. 641
Ever since Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, non-violent resistance has held a special place in the public imagination. What can be better after all than forcing political change without the violence that so often accompanies it. But the Gandhi and King stories are so powerful they can perhaps crowd out other aspects of non-violent resistance. Many of these aspects have been explored by Julie M. Norman of University College London. Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen...
Mar 13, 2023•41 min•Ep. 54
In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach in Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contem...
Mar 13, 2023•59 min•Ep. 14
In The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (UP of Kansas, 2022), Drs. Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren ask what lessons does Marvel – a “hulking, hegemonic media franchise” teach the public? What might we learn about ourselves and our understanding of the world from this “cinematic juggernaut?” Popular texts encourage audiences to imagine worlds different from their own. Questioning their current political worlds is at the heart of speculative fiction. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a ...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 644
This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified bloc in the first chapters of global governance, and that it has been women from the Global South suc...
Mar 13, 2023•49 min•Ep. 115
Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence (Routledge, 2022) examines the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s and their ties to the state. The study draws on the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which conducted dozens of trials relating to paramilitary violence, as well as the records from judicial proceedings in the region. In discussing how and why certain im...
Mar 13, 2023•51 min•Ep. 187
During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (Hurst, 2023) provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which ...
Mar 12, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 164
Malaysia is a classic example of a plural society, with a diverse population consisting of the indigenous peoples, collectively called bumiputera, and the descendants of immigrant populations from southern China, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. In this multi-ethnic context, the question of identity, notably of Malay identity, has remained elusive and open to varying interpretations. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Tom Pepinsky contends that identity is not set in st...
Mar 09, 2023•28 min•Ep. 78
Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K...
Mar 07, 2023•52 min•Ep. 643
The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writ...
Mar 07, 2023•37 min•Ep. 53
Why has Thailand had 20 constitutions since 1932? What accounts for the remarkable veneration Thais often feel towards these short-lived documents? How is that military coups can be viewed as completely legal in Thailand? And what accounts for the leading role prominent legal experts play in Thailand’s political order? In this podcast, Thailand scholar Duncan McCargo talks to Eugénie Mérieau about her wide-ranging new book, Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand's Sacred Monarchy vs. The Rule of Law...
Mar 06, 2023•35 min•Ep. 122
Rohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (...
Mar 06, 2023•48 min•Ep. 182
Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda explores h...
Mar 06, 2023•52 min•Ep. 645
"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their discontent w...
Mar 06, 2023•34 min•Ep. 114
The Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial world's most ambitious experiments. Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how India fused Soviet-inspired economic management and Western-style liberal democracy at a time when they were widely considered fundamentally contradictory. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning was meant to be independent India's route to prosperity. In this engaging and innovative account, Nikhil Me...
Mar 05, 2023•34 min•Ep. 177
The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics. The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics (Verso, 2022) gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the Squad and the new so...
Mar 05, 2023•38 min•Ep. 148
