Why are young men leaning right while young women shift left? Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones speak with NYU’s Scott Galloway, political analyst Sophie Stowers, and commentator Oliver Dean to explore the forces behind this growing divide. Whether it’s a broken social contract where young people no longer believe they will lead better, more prosperous lives than their parents or the work of algorithms that feed off rage and division, the implications are profound. This podcast was re...
Apr 30, 2025•56 min•Ep. 11
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, co-authors of The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (Polity Press, 2024). In this conversation, they discuss how today’s right-wing movements, from the United States to Hungary, are waging a new form of politics that undermines the very foundations of the modern, rules-based state. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of “patrimonialis...
Apr 29, 2025•33 min•Ep. 165
In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts: A Reader. I’m also pleased to host two of the chapter authors, Drs. Nancy Hiems...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 767
The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply “stick to the facts” and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us? Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the centre of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science...
Apr 27, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 207
Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over. How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismi...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 527
Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis takes on the idea and terminology of freedom, examining our understanding of this concept and our relationship to the word itself as well as what it means to society, culture, and politics. Randy Laist and Brian A. Dixon, two scholars who often explore popular culture to better understand the society and politics all around us, have brought their admirable skills to Figures of Freedom, where they have assembled a broad array of co...
Apr 25, 2025•50 min
The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration. Politic...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 44
Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones analyze the global fallout after Donald Trump plunged America and the world into a trade war with China. David Rennie, The Economist’s geopolitics editor and former Beijing and Washington D.C. bureau chief, joins the podcast to unpack how Xi Jinping is playing the long game and playing to win. In this episode, we explore Xi’s high-stakes strategy in the global trade war. From embracing economic pain to fostering innovation under autocracy, China is ch...
Apr 23, 2025•48 min•Ep. 10
In The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023), political scientist Marcus Kreuzer synthesises the different strands and traditions of Comparative Historical Analysis to show how interpretive and positivist research designs might complement rather than compete with one another. Like the contents of the book, our discussion on this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science is wide-ranging and lively, addressing topics like the ma...
Apr 22, 2025•57 min•Ep. 21
After being sworn in as the 47th president, President Donald Trump quickly altered American government – and political discourse. He issued a slew of executive orders that affected how American government functions and he spoke about officers of the government, federal agencies, executive power, the press, the Constitution, and the rule of law in ways that surprised citizens, journalists, and many scholars. Postscript has devoted three podcasts to how professional historians have assessed Trump’...
Apr 21, 2025•43 min•Ep. 40
Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they ...
Apr 20, 2025•48 min•Ep. 765
Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived...
Apr 19, 2025•46 min•Ep. 360
How and why do local political processes in rural Nepal become an arena for political mythmaking? And, how do political myths obscure their own historical construction, thereby making hierarchical power structures appear inevitable? In this episode we discuss these questions with Ankita Shrestha whose ethnographic explorations into these issues foreground the persistent centrality of caste, gender and indigeneity to everyday forms of domination and hierarchy in contemporary rural Nepal. Ankita S...
Apr 18, 2025•33 min•Ep. 244
As the civil conflict in Myanmar passes its fourth anniversary, is this ethnically complex country any closer to a peaceful resolution of its internal conflict? Do opposition forces have a singular vision for what a post-conflict Myanmar might look like, or could the country simply break apart? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Claire Smith about the evolution of Myanmar’s ongoing conflict, the different domestic and international actors involved, potential pathways for peace, and the broader ...
Apr 17, 2025•41 min•Ep. 28
Live from the Frontline Club in London, Ctrl Alt Deceit is back for its second season. Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones host a fascinating discussion on the myriad threats to democracy, particularly in light of Trump's re-election. Joined by Gabriel Gatehouse is an award-winning BBC journalist and broadcaster, formerly International Editor of Newsnight and host of the award winning podcast The Coming Storm. And Connor Tomlinson is a commentator and writer, contributing to Ayaan Hirsi...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes ...
Apr 15, 2025•52 min•Ep. 115
How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research? Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven and Dána-Ain Davis answers these questions. The book is at once a how-to manual for doing feminist eth...
Apr 14, 2025•56 min•Ep. 764
Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites - or actors. Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutio...
Apr 13, 2025•1 hr 11 min
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Muriel Blaive to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Pandemic Power: The Covid Response and the Erosion of Democracy - A Liberal Critique. In the podcast we talked about the (failure of the) pandemic response, the necessity of critique, being shadowbanned on Facebook, censorship, and about liberal intellectuals abandoning their core values. Pandemic Power is available in Open Access, thanks to the support of the Austrian Science ...
Apr 12, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 20
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.” James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy ...
Apr 11, 2025•39 min•Ep. 139
The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (Cambri...
Apr 10, 2025•1 hr 41 min
Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on the ballot, with both candidates suggesting the election might well be the last one ever. The conse...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 206
Political rumors and misinformation pollute the political landscape. This is not a recent phenomenon; before the currently rampant and unfounded rumors about a stolen election and vote-rigging, there were other rumors that continued to spread even after they were thoroughly debunked, including doubts about 9/11 (an “inside job”) and the furor over President Obama’s birthplace and birth certificate. If misinformation crowds out the truth, how can Americans communicate with one another about impor...
Apr 08, 2025•45 min•Ep. 150
Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely designed to end fighting. But as Dr. Eric Min argues in Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2025), that wartime negotiations are not just peacemaking tools. They are in fact a highly strategic activity that can also help states manage, fight, and potentially win war...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 262
Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive policy measures? The Art of State Persuasion (Oxford UP, 2024) delves into China's strategic use of state propaganda during crucial crisis events, particularly focusing on border disputes. Frances Wang aims to explain the diverse strategies employed in Chinese state media, analyzing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This va...
Apr 06, 2025•25 min•Ep. 263
What explains the growing divide between elites and the broader public in democracies across Europe and the United States? In this episode of International Horizons, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck joins RBI director John Torpey to discuss the rise of populism, the limits of globalism, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism. Drawing from his recent book, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024), Streeck examines how market forces, technocracy, and the e...
Apr 05, 2025•39 min•Ep. 166
The debate about the impact of colonialism on the prospects for democracy and development continues to rage. Was the legacy of colonialism equally destructive everywhere? Or were some forms of colonial rule more likely to give rise to stable and effective democracies? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Alexander Lee and Jack Paine about their important new book, The Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge UP, 2024), which makes a compelling new contribution to the debate. Find o...
Apr 04, 2025•36 min•Ep. 27
Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sincerely committed to equality and “wokeness,” why do they simultaneously benefit from—and perpetuate—the very inequalities they denounce? Join us as we dive into Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). We explore al-Gharbi’s central argument: the d...
Apr 03, 2025•46 min
A coalition of educators and allies has come together to push back against a variety of different kinds of attacks on higher education and students at colleges and universities, particularly in the United States. This group is driven by the belief that a democracy is only as strong as its commitments to academic freedom, intellectual integrity, human diversity, and individual dignity. The impetus among this particular group of academics and staff members is to make sure that students at all the ...
Apr 02, 2025•48 min•Ep. 39
Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series, a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contempora...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 15
