How Authoritarians Exploit Gender
Gender is becoming a central battleground in contemporary authoritarian politics, but how do autocrats manipulate these debates to their own advantage? Some regimes now pursue a double strategy of sim...
25 Mar 22min
Lucia Motolinia, "Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through P...
24 Mar 28min
Stephen G. Brooks, "The Political Economy of Security" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence secu...
22 Mar 49min
A Year of Autocratization: Steep Declines in Democracy Registered in 2025 V-Dem Report
This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl speaks with Kenneth Roberts and Paul Friesen, democracy experts at Cornell University, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released V-Dem 20...
22 Mar 43min
Sidra Hamidi, "After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomi...
21 Mar 56min
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani et al. eds., "The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected ...
20 Mar 1h 13min
Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)
The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But afte...
20 Mar 1h 10min
Our Age of War: A Discussion with Author Robert Pape
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has been writing about war for decades, including in his book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell University Press, ...
18 Mar 42min
