This week on International Horizons, David Abraham from the University of Miami discusses the origins of social democratic parties in Europe and the parallels with similar movements in the US. Following his teacher Adam Przeworski, Abraham argues that Keynesianism boosted social democracy by convincing people that the state could manage economic growth. For a time, the iron curtain heightened solidarity in the West, including among social democrats. More recently, social democratic politics has ...
Feb 06, 2023•44 min•Ep. 111
What happens to policies when a president dies in office? Do they get replaced by the new president, or do advisers carry on with the status quo? In November 1963, these were important questions for a Kennedy-turned-Johnson administration. Among these officials was a driven National Security Council staffer named Robert Komer, who had made it his personal mission to have the United States form better relations with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser after diplomatic relations were nearly severed during ...
Feb 05, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 21
What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, historians Gyan Prakash, Jeremy Adelman, and their collaborators argue that the multipl...
Feb 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 1296
What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion sur...
Feb 03, 2023•45 min•Ep. 131
When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration", fearing she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support". On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter. A new European External Action Service had been built from scratch and the HR/VP had become a pivotal global player - brokering ...
Feb 03, 2023•51 min•Ep. 6
Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony discusses the Enlightenment, the American Founding, his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Publishing, 2022), and Conservatism's past and future. Dr. Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute, based in Jerusalem, and the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington D.C., which recently hosted the popular National Conservatism Conference in Miami, FL. Annika Nordquist is the Communications Co...
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 161
What areas of our lives are governed by constitutional law? When asked about what constitutional law is, Americans tend to think of notable Supreme Court cases such as the abortion law case Roe v. Wade or the Civil Rights landmark of Brown v. Board of Education. But vast swaths of our lives are governed by, of all things, the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes....
Feb 03, 2023•2 hr 47 min•Ep. 179
Why are there so few women from non-elite backgrounds in Sri Lankan politics? What barriers do they face on their pathways to politics? And what can be done to support them? Ramona Vijeyarasa and Nadine Vanniasinkam join Petra Alderman, associate researcher at NIAS and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, to talk about non-elite women’s political leadership in Sri Lanka. This research is part of a larger comparative project funded by the Australian government’s Departmen...
Feb 03, 2023•34 min•Ep. 166
Citizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2018) investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwork ...
Feb 03, 2023•49 min•Ep. 174
In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of rationale is increasingly vulnerable in a country that’s largely convinced that it has achieved a “po...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 306
This week, RBI director John Torpey interviews Prof. Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, about recent developments in Latin American politics. Arias delves into Peru's recent political unrest and how it resembles the times of Fujimori's authoritarianism and discusses the origins of polarization in the politics of Brazil. Arias also assesses the overall political situation of Latin America and highlights four phenomena: military and p...
Jan 30, 2023•47 min•Ep. 110
What kind of country is America? Zachary Shore tackles this polarizing question by spotlighting some of the most morally muddled matters of WWII. Should Japanese Americans be moved from the west coast to prevent sabotage? Should the German people be made to starve as punishment for launching the war? Should America drop atomic bombs to break Japan's will to fight? Surprisingly, despite wartime anger, most Americans and key officials favored mercy over revenge, yet a minority managed to push thei...
Jan 29, 2023•47 min•Ep. 6
Microchips are both important and in short supply. So how important? And what can be done to make them more plentiful? Also, what are the geopolitical implications of having the production of microchips concentrated in relatively few hands. Owen Bennett Jones talks microchips with Julian Kamasa of the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, G...
Jan 28, 2023•48 min•Ep. 48
The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through th...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 178
In Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (Wesleyan UP, 2019), Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to conf...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 11
Since 2020, Europe's financial sector has been severely stress-tested by a global pandemic and a major land war yet, compared to the period between 2007 and 2012, the impact has been remarkably muted. Still minnows compared to their US peers, Europe's post-crisis recapitalised banks nevertheless have held up well. And so, by and large, has the quality of their assets despite ten years of slow growth and low inflation followed by enormous volatility, high inflation and interest rates heading to t...
Jan 27, 2023•53 min•Ep. 7
For almost a year now, we have been absorbing news and information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are a variety of different, or competing, narratives to explain and define what we understand about the origins of this conflict and the ongoing military successes and failures on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia. I had the chance to interview Jordan Miller for PostScript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) about his work on narrative and ...
Jan 26, 2023•51 min•Ep. 15
In Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia UP, 2022), Kevin Munger marshals novel data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will define the politics of the next decade. He shows that a common "cohort consciousness" binds aging Boomer voters into a bloc--but a shared identity and purpose among Millennials and Gen Z could topple Boomer power. Kevin Munger is an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics ...
Jan 25, 2023•41 min•Ep. 214
Western sanctions have slowed Iran's economy, causing protests against the absence of freedom and opportunities -- teachers their lack of pay; farmers their lack of water; retirees their fear of economic insecurity. But at the heart of this powerful new movement has been Iran's women, whose frustration with Iran’s misogynist theocracy had been mounting for four decades. This week on International Horizons, RBI Research Associate Ellen Chesler is joined by Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women...
Jan 23, 2023•47 min•Ep. 109
Over the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to define this field of research, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future. Contributors include stars in this field who have written...
Jan 21, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 57
In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which le...
Jan 21, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 16
Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame-Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022) provides a psychoanalytic perspective to the global implications of the populist movement in the U.S. and its relationship to other parts of the world, particularly focusing on the presidency and legacy of Donald Trump. The book explores Trump's use of psychological form of manipulation known as projective identification and how his use of this defe...
Jan 21, 2023•49 min•Ep. 205
Why is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labour since 1979 tells the story – their record goes lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. But what does heading the centre consist of? And are their alternative strategies? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones discuss leftist parties and what they need to do to win with Eunice Goes of the Richmond American International Universi...
Jan 20, 2023•49 min•Ep. 47
In The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier, 2023), Washington insider Daniel Runde makes the case for building a new global consensus through vigorous internationalism and the judicious use of soft power. Daniel F. Runde is Senior Vice President and the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choic...
Jan 20, 2023•46 min•Ep. 159
This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world. In License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (U California Press, 2022), Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will: Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writer...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 94
Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of how spaces are designed and for what reasons. This idea of built environments—be they city centers in urban areas, software architecture, or the existence and width of sidewalks—contribute to how we, as individuals and community members, operate ...
Jan 19, 2023•40 min•Ep. 636
We have been ruled long enough. It is time to govern ourselves. If we are to get past the Constitution and all systems based on constitutions, we need to move past the nation state as the means by which we are governed from above. – Robert Ovetz, We the Elites (2022, p. 167) Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth, and misinformation -...
Jan 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 170
It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has...
Jan 18, 2023•43 min•Ep. 350
International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. Randle C. DeFalco's book Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 174
In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexualit...
Jan 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 118
