The Future of the State: A Discussion with Graeme Garrard
The Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era started the retreat of the state. Privatisation and deregulation meant power was handed over to corporations and markets. Now that neoliberalism has run its course, ...
4 Dec 202335min
Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)
The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Second Amendment, or the history of gun safety, duties, and...
4 Dec 20231h
Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
In Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023), political scientist Anna Grzymała-Busse corrects a long-standing distortion in the stu...
3 Dec 202355min
Tracy E. Perkins, "Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism" (U California Press, 2022)
Despite living and working in California, one of the county's most environmentally progressive states, environmental justice activists have spent decades fighting for clean air to breathe, clean water...
3 Dec 20231h 4min
Sinae Hyun, "Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist United States which sought to contain communism. And t...
1 Dec 20231h 2min
Russ Castronovo, "American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability" (Princeton UP, 2023)
An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy. For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of se...
30 Nov 20231h 13min
On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen
In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an int...
30 Nov 202359min
Sandra Destradi, "Reluctance in World Politics: Why States Fail to Act Decisively" (Bristol UP, 2023)
Why do international actors, including powerful states, often fail to develop clear foreign policies and instead adopt indecisive, ‘muddling-through’ approaches? In Reluctance in World Politics: Why S...
30 Nov 202351min
