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
Alex Powell, "Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration" (Bristol UP, 2026)
Utilizing critical legal methodologies, Alex Powell's Queering UK Refugee Law: Sexual Diversity and Asylum Administration (Bristol UP, 2026) gives a vital and needed analysis of migration and queer li...
17 Mar 1h
Lauren M. MacLean, "Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026)
In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly chan...
15 Mar 1h 20min
Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee, "Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Giant companies, launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But they are also seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and viol...
14 Mar 1h 7min
