In this episode, host LSE Southeast Asia Centre Director John Sidel speaks with Meredith Weiss, Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and a leading specialist on Malaysian politics. In the interview, Professor Weiss provides in-depth analysis and insights with regard to the complex patterns of continuity and change in Malaysian politics since the watershed election of 2018. Meredith Weiss is a Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast ...
Aug 10, 2024•50 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's m...
Aug 09, 2024•49 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's m...
Aug 08, 2024•48 min•Ep 157•Transcript available on Metacast After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022) shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that numb...
Aug 08, 2024•2 hr 30 min•Ep 221•Transcript available on Metacast More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's m...
Aug 07, 2024•48 min•Ep 156•Transcript available on Metacast This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many of these elections, democracy itself is at stake. The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, Samuel Ely Bagg ...
Aug 07, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep 727•Transcript available on Metacast If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a repres...
Aug 06, 2024•40 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's m...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to geostrategist Velina Tchakarova about the dragonbear in the geopolitics of the 21st century. What does the Dragonbear really aim to achieve in global affairs? First and foremost, it is about counterbalancing arising centrifugal forces in all fields — from economy, finance, trade, diplomacy, to military, defense and strategic alliances. But it also has...
Aug 05, 2024•28 min•Ep 225•Transcript available on Metacast Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation election has been a bit unusual—with President Joe Biden deciding not to pursue re-election but doing so after the primary season has concluded. Thus, there is a rather condensed election season, and Vice President Kamala Harris has worked to bring the Democratic Party together after she received President Biden’s endorsement after he withdrew from the rac...
Aug 05, 2024•52 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021) highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Dr. Rachel M. Scott analyses the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She ar...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 338•Transcript available on Metacast Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror...
Aug 02, 2024•43 min•Ep 111•Transcript available on Metacast Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries. In this podcast the presenter of the Myanmar update, Dr Moe Thuzar...
Aug 02, 2024•27 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcom...
Aug 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there’s plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy, there is also an increasing reliance on ideas like misinformation, bias, expertise, and propaganda. These latter notions belong, at least in part, to epistemology – the area of philosophy that deals with issues concerning knowledge, rationality, evidence, and belief. Relatively recently, the subfield of political epistem...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 350•Transcript available on Metacast Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with. They win elections not because of the elevated rhetorical performances we often associate with charisma ("ask not what your country can do for you"), but because of something more ordinary and relatable. The everyday magic spell that politicians cast using mass and social media is what sociologist Julia Sonnevend calls "charm." In Charm: H...
Aug 01, 2024•32 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Africa are contesting marginalization and claiming citizenship, and set out the broader context that led...
Jul 31, 2024•39 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietnam relations and the borderlands between the two countries, and discusses other projects she has beg...
Jul 31, 2024•48 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, ...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 472•Transcript available on Metacast In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework t...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 282•Transcript available on Metacast How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. Dr. Austin J....
Jul 26, 2024•54 min•Ep 281•Transcript available on Metacast The Republican Party held its nominating convention a week ago in Milwaukee, formally nominating former President Donald Trump as the standard-bearer for the GOP, and also his vice-presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH). Just before the convention kicked off, Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The GOP convention was unique in having the former president there over all days of the event. But since the convention concluded, President Joe Biden has announced tha...
Jul 25, 2024•55 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024), Mark Baker ...
Jul 24, 2024•52 min•Ep 537•Transcript available on Metacast Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling. This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. ...
Jul 24, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast "Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024). Applebaum's new book develops the themes she rehearsed in Twilight of Democracy (2020), an analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and national cons...
Jul 23, 2024•45 min•Ep 189•Transcript available on Metacast Has fascism arrived in America? In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpis...
Jul 22, 2024•39 min•Ep 268•Transcript available on Metacast You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power from JFK to LBJ, however, has been neglected. I was under the impression that after JFK was pronounced dead, LBJ took an oath and that was that. As Steve Gillon points out in his terrific new The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President (Basic, 2009), that was not that. Rather, the transition was marked by ...
Jul 21, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by right-wing ideologies. The need to understand the nature and danger of far-right violence is greater than ever. In American Zealots: Inside Right-Win...
Jul 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential--or allow it to be squandered--will ...
Jul 19, 2024•54 min•Ep 190•Transcript available on Metacast For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Rans...
Jul 19, 2024•52 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast 
