The Future of the Chinese Military: A Discussion with James A. Siebens
For all the talk of China being a peaceful country with no aggressive intentions, it has behaved like most other rising powers – spending lots of money on its military. But what do we know of how that...
23 Feb 202437min
Michael Kimmage, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability" (Oxford UP, 2024)
One war, three collisions: Russia with Ukraine, Europe, and the US. On the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Michael Kimmage analyses the disparate factors that led to war in Collisions: ...
23 Feb 202443min
Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociol...
21 Feb 202440min
Kunal Purohit, "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" (HarperCollins, 2023)
Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietl...
20 Feb 202454min
Robert Louis Wilken, "Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom" (Yale UP, 2019)
Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of relig...
20 Feb 20241h 2min
Vytautas Jankauskas and Steffen Eckhard, "The Politics of Evaluation in International Organizations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Evaluation has become a key tool in assessing the performance of international organisations, in fostering learning, and in demonstrating accountability. Within the United Nations (UN) system, thousan...
19 Feb 202454min
Why is Right-Wing Extremism so Widespread in Italy?
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Marla Stone, a historian of Italian fascism at Occidental College, on the resurgence of the far right in Italy. The conve...
19 Feb 202436min
Can We Ever Unthink Linguistic Nationalism?
Ingrid Piller speaks with Aneta Pavlenko about multilingualism through the ages. We start from the question whether the world today is more multilingual than it was ever before. Spoiler alert: we quic...
19 Feb 20241h 12min
