Advertise on podcast: New Books in Political Science

Mao Zedong lived one of the most epic and influential lives of the twentieth century. His impact on the People's Republic of China was vast. Half a century after his passing, he remains a divisive and controversial figure. Kerry Brown's Mao: Power and Contradiction (Reaktion Books, 2026) gives an accessible narrative of his life, from the fall of the Qing in the early part of the twentieth century to the long years in which Mao Zedong struggled not only to ensure the Communist Party of China survived, but that it then came to power after a civil war with the nationalists. Mao's tragic failures as ruler were some of the worst to ever befall a modern society, while his personal life remains a source of intense interest. Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast host Andrea Talabér talked to Marius Turda about his new book, In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania. We discussed the importance of the social and medical sciences in understanding Romanian nationalism, the intellectual sources of Romanian nationalist thought, and the various discussions surrounding biopolitical debates in interwar Romania amongst other topics. You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here. The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books. Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://www.aup.nl/en/imprint/ceu-press Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When one hears about needs in the context of politics, one might imagine that they are dealing with facts that simply cannot be circumvented. Moving from this idea, Boss sees a tension, one in which politics, a field of negotiated agency, might find itself strangled by a closed concept. Without wanting to contend that people can actually live without having certain basic needs met, Boss wants to ensure that politics itself remains a realm of freedom, and finds in his own reading of Karl Marx a thread of thinking that slowly unwinds social and economic theories that unwittingly create situations they imagine themselves to be mirroring. Reading Marx in dialogue with economics, critical theory and contemporary political theory, Boss seeks to interrogate the ways in which our thinking about politics may not be best thought of as detached reflections on reality but active forms of participation in and creation of reality, a process that locks down what we should be trying to keep open. Marx and the Politics of Need  (Routledge, 2026) is slowly but surely throughout the book turned into a need of politics, a careful and methodical reflection on what political thinking itself is. George Boss is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him. A book for a nervous moment Tariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Research Associate at the NBER, takes the long view. Trade, capital and migration surged between 1850 and 1914, collapsed between the wars, and were rebuilt after 1945. His conclusion is that globalisation is hard to kill, but not guaranteed to survive. That depends on political choices and international cooperation.If you teach economics, history or political science, or simply want to know whether today’s headlines signal the end of globalisation, this book and this conversation are for you.  What we talk about Why the first globalisation happened, and what a Briton, an Argentine or an American in 1900 would have made of today’s worldMigration: we have liberalised goods and capital far more than people, so how much does that limit globalisation’s power to reduce inequality?Whether backlash was always built into globalisation, or whether wars and shocks brought it down, and what that means for today’s politicsThe Great Depression and the question of leadership: can the world economy function without a power willing to underwrite it?The paradox of the US dollar, and why capital flows towards the richest economy rather than the poorestWhat evidence would convince Chris that “this time really is different”Writing a first book, and why economics works best inside history rather than bolted on beside it.Some of these questions came from my own students, where the book is now core reading. They like it because it explains long-run change while making formal theory accesible. What other reviewers say Barry Eichengreen, in Foreign Affairs, praised its clarity and concision across nearly two centuries. In Good Reads, Jason Furman called it a reliable, readable history, well grounded in the research literature. Donald Boudreaux, in The Independent Review, judged it an admirable survey of key events and theories, although he took issue with some analytical choices. That makes it a useful starting point for readers who want to form their own view. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment. In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament. Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion—their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized. Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On October 5, 2026, Brazil had elections for the president, governors, and congressmen. On October 25, 2026 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Lula won the presidency of Brazil. He won during the run-off election after coming in second in the first election. Afro-Brazilians played a decisive role in Lula's electoral win as well as in securing their own wins during the election. This conversation examines the raced and gendered contours of the 2026 election and electoral politics in Brazil.  Dr. Gladys Mitchell-Walthour is the Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair at North Carolina Central University. Dr. Mitchell-Walthour is a political scientist whose research examines race and politics in Brazil. She is the author of The Politics of Survival: The Political Opinions of Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the USA (Columbia University Press) as well as numerous articles and books.  Dr. Kia Lilly Caldwell is the Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar in Arts & Sciences in the Department of African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Caldwell is an anthropologist whose research has examined race, gender, and health in Brazil. She is the author of Health Equity in Brazil: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Policy (University of Illinois Press) as well as numerous articles and books.  Dr. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is a special episode that we recorded a week after elections in both Brazil and Serbia saw the defeat of authoritarian forces. In this preview episode of the RESISTANCE research project, host Licia Cianetti is joined by Brazilian and Serbian colleagues Déborah Monte and Aleksrandra Krstić to talk about what happened in their respective countries and what made anti-authoritarian mobilisation successful against the odds. They talk about how, in both countries, online and offline mobilisation were combined to overcome skewed communication systems, the civic infrastructure that was needed to make that mobilisation possible, and their fears and hopes for the future. RESISTANCE – Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions is a research project that aims to uncover how authoritarian ideas, practices, technologies, and policies are produced and spread in a thickly interconnected world, how they create local authoritarian ecosystems, and how they can be resisted. It is funded by European Union’s Horizon-Europe grant no. 101286676 for the years 2026-2029. To know more and sign up to the project newsletter visit here  Guests:                                                                                      Aleksrandra Krstić is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication, in the Faculty of Political Sciences, at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is an expert in media and journalism studies, including on the role of local media in Serbian democracy. She co-leads the RESISTANCE project’s work stream on digital authoritarianism and surveillance technologies. Déborah Monte is International Relations Professor at the Federal University da Grande Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She was Visiting Fellow at CEDAR/University of Birmingham in 2024-25 and co-hosted the People Power Politics Podcast episode on Militarization and Democracy in Contemporary Brazil. She recently started a new research project on “Autocratisation and democratic resilience: Brazil in global perspective” as the recipient of a CNPq/Fundect Research Productivity Fellow grant. Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (2026-2029, funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676). The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Transcript for this episode here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 2026), by Ryan Jablonski, examines how democracy operates in countries dependent on foreign aid. Drawing on over six years of fieldwork, the book investigates the relationships between international donors and domestic politicians, exploring how aid dependency shapes policymaking and influences voters’ assessments of political performance. Challenging the assumption that voters simply reward politicians for attracting foreign aid, Jablonski demonstrates that electoral choices depend on citizens’ beliefs about how politicians influence the delivery of aid. This produces a ‘visibility-uncertainty’ paradox, whereby foreign aid can either strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. Combining surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, the book revisits conventional understandings of foreign aid and political behaviour, showing how aid can sometimes lead citizens to vote against their own interests and benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. By examining the political consequences of aid dependency, Jablonski offers important insights into the trade-offs between aid effectiveness, political capture, and state capacity-building. This research makes an important contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratic accountability, and the political economy of foreign aid. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Local democracy doesn’t work as it should, declares Brian Adams in Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy (Temple UP, 2026). Local politics is where citizens have the most opportunity for direct participation, control, and influence, but that activism doesn’t necessarily translate into majority rule. While greater local engagement can produce policy that better reflects activists’ strong preferences, Adams explains that activists are not representative of the public-at-large and states that a reconceptualization of how the public should be able to influence local officials is required. Based on interviews with activists in San Diego, California, Adams concludes that activism can be beneficial, but we need to view it as distinct from majority rule, with a focus on managing the tension between the two. Improving local democracy is not just a matter of generating more activism. It requires articulating when we want policy to reflect majority preferences and when we want activists to hold sway. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What revolutionary disability politics look like today, with lessons for larger liberatory movements. In recent political times, disability identity has been mobilized in ways that paradoxically compound bodily injury and disability. This single-issue approach obscures the oppression of disabled people and prevents solidarity across difference. In Disability, Revolution (U California Press, 2026), Robert McRuer introduces alternatives to "one-dimensional disability," providing an accessible overview of disability justice movements and their relevance to larger emancipatory coalitions. Exploring the most prominent examples from the past several decades, the book focuses on the convergence of queer and crip movements, mad pride, intersectional disability justice work, neurodiversity, and the globalization of disability alliances. Essential for anyone interested in disability politics, this book shows how these multivalent movements help us imagine alternative disabled worlds. A transcript of this episode is available here. Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. He is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally. Clayton Jarrard is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer working at the nexus of queer and trans studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The War on Terror remained an enduring feature of American foreign policy for over two decades. The War on Terror(Agenda Publishing, 2025), by Professors Andrew Thomson and Rubrick Biegon, positions the War on Terror within the broader context of Cold War interventionism and the rise of various transnational threats to American (and global) security during the late twentieth century. It introduces readers to the main concepts, debates and theories which have been used to understand and make sense of the War on Terror. These include approaches that frame it as a disparate set of policies aimed at reducing the risk of terrorist attacks against American citizens at both home and aboard; as part of a project aimed at helping maintain the United States' dominant position within international politics; and as an idea intimately bound up with perceptions of American national identity and America's place in the world. In this way, the book aims to show how the War on Terror has changed global politics, as well as why it has been fought and proven so difficult to end despite multiple failed attempts at course correction. The book, published in 2025 and now available from University of Edinburgh Press, is ideally suited for courses on international security, American foreign policy and contemporary world politics. Rubrick Biegon is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. Co-author Andrew Thomson, reader in peace and conflict studies at Queens University Belfast, joined historian and U.S. army veteran Jacob Hagstrom in a discussion about the book's major themes, sources, and theoretical underpinnings.   Jacob Hagstrom is a military historian and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I sat down with Lydia Sizer to chat about her experience developing applied history initiatives at the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian. We talked about what it’s like to collaborate with policymakers and what it means to negotiate productive tensions between political science and historical methodologies. Lydia talks about her doctoral dissertation, in which she drew on political science, history, and her own experience at the State Department’s Libya Desk to analyze how diplomats make high-stakes decisions with very limited information. We discuss how history can be useful for analyzing institutional memory in government and private organizations, and how #applied history initiatives can help mitigate some of the institutional memory loss that is built into democratic politics. We discuss Lydia’s positive experience using #AI in her work and talks about her ongoing efforts to anticipate policy trends rather than merely respond to them.  We also talk about the punk band The Clash and how their 1982 hit song “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” can help us understand practical approaches to history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in social and political theory. We discussed the need to move beyond frameworks emphasizing either subordination to the state or revolt against the state in order to better understand how marginalized and oppressed groups can use the state as a means to enact transformative justice aimed at greater social equality. As Lisa and Hari point out, this requires moving beyond theories of deliberative democracy that rest on conceptions of rational communication. Instead, they argue for the need to consider the role of embodied practices, such as pulling the emergency chain on trains or blocking road traffic, and instances of “positive coercion,” such as Reconstruction Era laws and the U.S. Civil Rights Act, in expanding the parameters of democratic participation. Through Lisa’s account of what she calls a “materialist genealogy of collective action” in India and in Hari’s readings of B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the NAACP’s legal brief on Brown v. Board of Education, we come to understand the state as a complex terrain of power with different pressure points that allows for novel forms of relationality and maneuver. In the process, we also see political collectives, not as fixed identity groups, but as the product of shifting coalitions.  Guests Lisa Mitchell: Professor or History and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Hari Ramesh: Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University References Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023) Hari Ramesh, Harnessing the State: Oppressed Groups and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2026) John Dewey: philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was one of the most prominent American scholars of the twentieth century.  B.R. Ambedkar, “States and Minorities” (1947) W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004) Jurgen Habermas: philosopher and social theorist whose work addressed notions of communicative rationality and the public sphere.  Adhaar card: 12-digit unique identification number tied to biometric data and demographic information issued to residents of India  Telengana movement: a decades-long political and social campaign for the creation of a separate state out of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh in India, which culminated in the formation of Telangana as India’s 29th state on June 2, 2014.  Iris Marion Young: political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference.  Sally Haslanger: philosopher and feminist theorist who work on the social construction of categories, especially of gender and race. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The national parks are loved by many Americans and visitors from around the world. Yet, few realize how often these landscapes and their history have been shaped by questions answered in the courts. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has shaped and defined the character of the parks. Litigation has determined how land can be added to national parks, answered questions about treaty and free speech rights on park land, and settled numerous other disputes that have helped determine what the parks look like today. In her new book National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (University of Nevada Press, 2026), Carla Chung Mattix examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks over the course of nearly a century. These cases provide readers with a new lens to understanding the parks and help them understand the role of the courts in the nation's public lands. In this episode, Mattix, who was an attorney for the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of the Solicitor for 25 years, discusses her new book and the Court's influence on the national parks.    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How has Yoweri Museveni remained in power for four decades – and what happens when he is gone? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Mesrob Vartavarian about three important books on Uganda and his argument that the country has become a "militarised family state". Their discussion explores whether Museveni's durability rests on coercion, patronage and political manipulation or negotiation with powerful social institutions; how far today's system reflects deeper patterns in Uganda's history – and whether a political order increasingly dependent on Museveni, his family and the military can survive him.                                                                                Mesrob Vartavarian is an independent scholar based in the United States whose research focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, state formation, nationalism and political change, with a particular interest in Africa and the Middle East. Mesrob’s work examines how political orders are constructed and maintained, and the relationship between formal institutions, social structures and political power. His recent review essay, "Coercion, co-optation and kinship: Uganda's militarised family state" in the Journal of Modern African Studies, brings together three major studies of contemporary Uganda to examine the durability and transformation of Yoweri Museveni's rule. Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Transcript here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.