Senegalese President Macky Sall has postponed the country’s presidential elections originally scheduled for February 25. It's part of a series of concerning moves by Sall to extend his stay in power. The Ufahamu Africa podcast talks with experts on the topic: Bamba Ndiaye and Michelle D. Gavin. Bamba Ndiaye is an assistant professor of African studies at Emory University's Oxford College. He is also host of The Africanist podcast and a former Ufahamu Africa non-resident fellow. Michelle D. Gavin...
May 29, 2024•57 min•Ep 190•Transcript available on Metacast The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’...
May 28, 2024•53 min•Ep 719•Transcript available on Metacast Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and for...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability,...
May 27, 2024•44 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast The U.S. Senate is so sharply polarized along partisan and ideological lines today that it's easy to believe it was always this way. But in the turbulent 1960s, even as battles over civil rights and the war in Vietnam dominated American politics, bipartisanship often prevailed. One key reason: two remarkable leaders who remain giants of the Senate--Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, the longest-serving majority leader in Senate history,...
May 26, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 259•Transcript available on Metacast The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things are rarely so cut-and-dried: it takes a lot of ‘soaking and poking’ before you can answer relatively s...
May 25, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 361•Transcript available on Metacast How do Asian nations exercise soft power in the Baltics? Soft power is a political strategy to influence other international relations actors by using a variety of political, economic, and cultural instruments. The rise of Asia aligns with its growing economic, political, and cultural influences worldwide, including in geographically distant Central Eastern and Nordic Europe. In this episode, Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska discusses China’s, India’s and Singapore’s activities in Estonia, drawing on th...
May 24, 2024•27 min•Ep 220•Transcript available on Metacast Peter Ireland (Boston College Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career as a monetary economist, his views on the history of monetarism, New Keynesian models, and the Shadow Open Market Committee which Peter sits on and celebrates its 50th anniversary. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the ...
May 24, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president – that the postwar trade liberalisation process threatened to go into reverse. With his trade...
May 23, 2024•50 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition. The aim of Sarah Cassella's book Global Risks and International Law: The Case of Climate Change and Pandemics (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023) is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine...
May 20, 2024•45 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) traces the political history of American political parties, not so much as historical institutions with different constituents—though it does that—but as living and breathing entities that have, over the course of more than 200 years, been, at times, vitally engaged with politics. The role of parties in the political system is to work in an organized way to get control of government and to c...
May 20, 2024•59 min•Ep 716•Transcript available on Metacast In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism. While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire. Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else...
May 20, 2024•42 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of International Horizons, Professor Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE) and Professor in the School of International Service at American University, discusses with RBI Director John Torpey her approach to dealing with the climate crisis. Fisher explains how the climate crisis is really a social crisis for which collective action seems impossible. Fisher further explains the actions of the players involved in resisting the problem of cl...
May 18, 2024•41 min•Ep 145•Transcript available on Metacast South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–88)...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a la...
May 16, 2024•50 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law becam...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 211•Transcript available on Metacast Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, D...
May 16, 2024•32 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life ...
May 15, 2024•47 min•Ep 270•Transcript available on Metacast In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiesc...
May 15, 2024•54 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and looks into the minds of war criminals themselves through an evaluat...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practic...
May 14, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast During an era of broad political dissatisfaction, what is the history and role of the Constitution? Does the Constitution still have the power to unite us? Dr. Yuval Levin joins Madison's Notes to discuss his forthcoming book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again. Along the way, he delves into key American figures from James Madison to Woodrow Wilson and the reasons for our present discord. Yuval Levin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
May 14, 2024•55 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast Defeating the forces of authoritarianism is the political combat task of our age, and we must take it up with the certitude and boldness that our eminent forebears did. Rebuilding the Democrats’ appeal by reestablishing reputations for superior strength and patriotism is a challenge. But the fact that democracy’s plight is due to flaws in liberals’ leadership and messaging rather than economic crises, popular prejudices, or a faulty Constitution is good news. It means that the Democrats can turn...
May 14, 2024•2 hr 54 min•Ep 188•Transcript available on Metacast Charles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons tran...
May 13, 2024•31 min•Ep 146•Transcript available on Metacast Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation towards development and secur...
May 13, 2024•45 min•Ep 717•Transcript available on Metacast Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshapi...
May 12, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 236•Transcript available on Metacast How do election campaigns in South Korea look like? Why have satellite parties become an important instrument of power politics? What do the election results mean for the Yoon government’s ability to implement its policy agenda? In April 2024, South Koreans went to the polls to elect a new parliament but many regarded the elections also as a referendum on President Yoon Suk-yeol and opposition leader Lee Jae-myung. In this episode, Outi Luova talks to Sabine Burghart about her observations durin...
May 10, 2024•23 min•Ep 219•Transcript available on Metacast Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the People’s Republic of China. Today’s Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is no exception to this, ...
May 09, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 527•Transcript available on Metacast China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere. Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global ...
May 09, 2024•44 min•Ep 186•Transcript available on Metacast Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in ...
May 08, 2024•36 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast 
