In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Bl...
Jul 31, 2023•45 min•Ep. 666
Anchored in the principles of free-market economics, neoliberalism emerged in the 1990s as the world's most dominant economic paradigm. It has been associated with political leaders from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton, to Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh. Neoliberalism even penetrated deeply into communist China's powerful economic system. However, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the related European Sovereign Debt Crisis triggered a decade of economic volati...
Jul 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 402
In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2021. India has understood its relations with Africa within the framework of South-South cooperation, where postcolonial states collaborated for scientific and technological exchanges, as well as to craft common political positions against the hegemony of 'northern'...
Jul 28, 2023•24 min•Ep. 191
Today I talked to Benjamin Studebaker about his new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. ...
Jul 28, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 401
In Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke UP, 2023), Lisa Mitchell explores the methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable, demand inclusion in decision making, and stage informal referendums. Mitchell traces the colonial and postcolonial lineages of collective forms of assembly, in which—rather than rejecting state authority—participants mobilize with expectations that officials will uphold the...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 199
The Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment rights. When the assaulted woman later obtained a restraining order against Mr. Zackey Rahimi, fede...
Jul 24, 2023•55 min•Ep. 18
Why is Malaysia in need of electoral reform? How can we explain recent changes including the anti-party hopping law and the successful UNDI18 campaign to lower the voting age? And what does the outcome Malaysia's GE15, the November 2022 general election, mean for the health of Malaysian democracy? In this podcast, editors Helen Ting and Donald Horowitz discuss their recent volume on electoral reform in Malaysia with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo Helen Ting is an associate professor at IKMAS at UK...
Jul 21, 2023•35 min•Ep. 190
Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never atta...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 191
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
What is natural law, and what does it have to do with originalism? Why does the Right defend religion yet so often struggle to define it? Next up in our "Summer of Law" series, Hadley Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder and Director of the James Wilson Institute sits down to chat about his recent book, Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (Regnery Publishing, 2023). More on Prof. Arkes is avai...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 80
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
In Violent America: The Dynamics of Identity Politics in a Multiracial Society (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia counterintuitively analyses why and how various ethnoracial groups proactively and instrumentally use different forms of violence to achieve their goals. Combining a historical analysis spanning the centuries with an examination of contemporary problems, she considers how and why ethnoracial groups can be both perpetrators and victims of violence, why so...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 300
How do emotions mobilise in politics? How do they frame ideologies? Broadly focusing on these questions, Ajay Gudavarthy's book Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’ (Routledge, 2023) explains the role emotions play in Indian politics and the part they played in the aftermath of the 2019 general elections. It traces the consolidation of the Right in India and highlights the reasons for its electoral successes with a focus on the interplay between ethics and emotions such as fear, anxiety,...
Jul 16, 2023•35 min•Ep. 197
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
Roluah Puia's book Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. Nationalism in the Vernacular examines this proc...
Jul 15, 2023•46 min•Ep. 196
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
Did the bloody 1 February 2021 military coup in Myanmar produce an unexpected ‘solidarity dividend’ by unifying opponents of the new regime from a range of ethnic backgrounds and political perspectives? How can political ethnographers continue to study Myanmar without having physical access to the country? Why might it be fruitful to reimagine Myanmar through the lens of the ‘state-nation’ concept? Cecile Medaile is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and recently...
Jul 14, 2023•25 min•Ep. 189
There is a growing list of human rights abuses and acts of violence against those who have sought to promote political transparency and freedom in Laos. Laos has long been an authoritarian state with no tolerance for public criticism. Increasingly, however, it appears to be also becoming a criminal state, where corrupt elites have enmeshed themselves within the state apparatus for the purpose of accumulating wealth. To discuss whether Laos is now a criminal state, Dr Kearrin Sims, Senior Lecture...
Jul 13, 2023•34 min•Ep. 81
Each June in the United States, scholars, journalists, law makers, law enforcers, lawyers, and members of the public wait for the announcement of major decisions from the Supreme Court. Justices often read a summary of their decision from the bench dressed in their robes. Paper copies are available in a special office – and more recently on the Supreme Court website. This year, the Supreme Court opinions have shaped policy on affirmative action, public accommodation for LGBTQ+ people, voting rig...
Jul 10, 2023•55 min•Ep. 665
How can we build a better social and political settlement? In Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality (Policy Press, 2023), Marcos González Hernando an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute and Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portale, and Gerry Mitchell a freelance policy researcher, combine a wealth of quantitative analysis with detailed fieldwork interviews to understand the top 10% of contemporary society. Broadening the ...
Jul 08, 2023•43 min•Ep. 392
Why and how has India’s Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, become so adept at appealing to and recruiting people from the lower castes? And what does this mean for Indian politics in the short to medium term? In this episode we are joined by Samantha Agarwal to discuss the rise of Hindu nationalism, focusing on the strategies it deploys to recruit people and voters from lower caste groups as it seeks to rework its image as a Brahminical and upper caste political organization. Samantha Agarwal is ...
Jul 07, 2023•27 min•Ep. 188
When we teach about how women go into politics, how are we looking for the places and ways that women get involved? Are we giving enough consideration to small towns, and to grassroots work? Heather Lende joins us to share what it was like to run for office in her Alaskan town. This episode considers: How she ended up in Alaska. What led her to run for office. Why she was subjected to a recall. How she rebuilt relationships with neighbors who voted against her, and what happened when she couldn’...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 167
Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson have each worked on and researched questions of gender, leadership, executive positions, and popular culture. In Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture, Horn Sheeler and Vasby Anderson examine the experiences of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin as both women ran for office in 2008, at the presidential and vice-presidential level respectively. Woman President digs into the question of gendered presidentiality, and how this...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 664
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
Many experts believe that we are at a fulcrum moment in history, a time that demands radical shifts in thinking and policymaking. Calls for bold change are everywhere these days, particularly on social media, but is this actually the best way to make the world a better place? In Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (Oxford UP, 2023), Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue that, contrary to the aspirations of activists on both the right and the left, incremental reform is the best ...
Jul 05, 2023•52 min•Ep. 174
The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind (Twelve, 2023) investigates how Washington works, and how different kinds of people try to make it work for them. Ben Terris presents an inside history of this crucial moment in Washington, reporting from exclusive parties, poker nights, fundraisers, secluded farms outside town, and the halls of Congress; among the oddballs and opportunists and true believers. This book is abou...
Jul 05, 2023•31 min•Ep. 227
It has been a momentous few weeks for the Supreme Court. What better time to discuss the Court's history and future? We are therefore launching our "Summer of Law" series to shed light on the legal world . Kicking the series off is John Yoo, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has written 8 books and over 100 ac...
Jul 03, 2023•53 min•Ep. 79
Amidst all the talk of a green revolution what about the blue stuff? There are the seas that will wash over inhabited land, there’s the sea economy with fisherman and cargo crews facing hard times and, amidst all the debate about animal rights, where do sea creatures fit in? Professor Chris Armstrong author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean (Yale UP, 2022) with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and p...
Jul 03, 2023•35 min•Ep. 68
Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision. Is this the best democracy can offer? In Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner offers a novel solution for the sad state of our deliberative democracy: the power of good game design. What if public meetings featured co...
Jul 02, 2023•15 min•Ep. 123
John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task of ...
Jul 01, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 318
