China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering? In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials,...
Aug 25, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. The purported “backwardness” of Indians as a people led to a democratic legitimation of empire, justifying self-government at home and imperial rule in the colonies. In response, Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of peoplehood. Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anti...
Aug 24, 2024•2 hr 48 min•Ep 732•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 21, 2024•1 hr•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history. In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the nature ...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, explores the rise of a specific type of political leader and what this means for our politics. The book works through debates over the existence of a political class, arguing this ‘class’ is homogenised along lines of characteristics, attitudes, ...
Aug 20, 2024•41 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast The Power to Persuade: Strategic Arguing at the World Trade Organization (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Geck provides an innovative and eye-opening analysis of strategic arguing as a means of power in global politics. Based on an empirical case study of arguing processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the book shows how discursive contexts, institutional norms and procedures, and unequal human resources condition who has the power to persuade. While accounts of arguing...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between the decline of empire and the rise of the Indian nation-state in the context of seismic global transformations of the early twentieth century-namely the two World Wars and the crisis of the imperial order. Rama Sundari Mantena argues this period is defined by not only the dominance of the nation state and debates over a new global order, but also m...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep 238•Transcript available on Metacast Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positiv...
Aug 19, 2024•44 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the application of international environmental law, a topic of increasing relevance for global civil society. Putting into perspective the practices of vario...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 230•Transcript available on Metacast In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of more than two to one. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Because of decades...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast How do micro-interactions of resistance, fighting and dialogue shape larger patterns of peace and conflict? How can nonviolent resistance, conflict transformation and diplomacy be analysed in micro-detail? Exploring these questions in The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Isabel Bramsen introduces micro-sociology to Peace Research and International Relations. Breaking new methodological, empirical and theoretical ground, Bramsen develops a novel theore...
Aug 17, 2024•43 min•Ep 730•Transcript available on Metacast Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century. In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a packed house at the Royal Geographical Society in London about the historic changes then taking place ...
Aug 17, 2024•42 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive own...
Aug 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden's Rocky Transition to the Presidency (UP of Kansas, 2024), examines the presidential transition between the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration in late 2020 and into 2021. Presidential transitions are not all that frequent, since presidents who are re-elected do not need to go through a transition to their second term. Thus, while there have been over forty presidents, there have been far fewer transitions. And unti...
Aug 16, 2024•59 min•Ep 729•Transcript available on Metacast Does the Labour Party’s 2024 election victory spell the end of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy interest in Asia? And how will its ‘progressive realism’ foreign policy paradigm shape its democracy promotion efforts in this region? Listen to Ben Bland as he talks to Petra Alderman about the UK’s post-Brexit tilt towards Asia, the new Labour government’s foreign policy priorities, and the tensions the ‘progressive realism’ paradigm might pose to the UK government’s democracy promotion activitie...
Aug 16, 2024•39 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical...
Aug 15, 2024•2 hr 53 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Who was James Madison? Why were his Notes on Government so valuable to the American founding? Did James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington all achieve what Sheehan calls “Civic Friendship”? Colleen Sheehan joins Madison’s Notes to discuss her seminal works on James Madison: The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Colleen Sh...
Aug 14, 2024•56 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast When the draft majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health was leaked, the media, public officials, and scholars focused on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They noted Justice Alito’s strident tone and radical use of originalism to eliminate constitutional protection for reproductive rights. My guest today has written a book that asks us to also notice over 140 footnotes in the majority opinion and dissent. Are these notes part of the law? In his new book, The Supreme Court Footnote: A S...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 728•Transcript available on Metacast It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor people and disdain for the wealthy? And what if those feelings have demonstrable policy effects? Join...
Aug 11, 2024•34 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Dr. Boone trains ou...
Aug 10, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 195•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
