Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Politica...
31 Dec 202553min
Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)
What went wrong with Burma’s democratic experiment? How are we to understand the country’s turbulent politics in the wake of the 2021 coup? In this conversation with Duncan McCargo, Amitav Acharya tal...
30 Dec 202535min
Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that ...
30 Dec 202555min
Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)
After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike...
26 Dec 202549min
Paul Kelly, "Against Postliberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left" (Polity, 2025)
Post-liberalism is all the rage on the American right, finding a common cause between legal theorists like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and rising political stars like J.D. Vance, the serving vi...
26 Dec 202540min
Jonathan Sumption, "The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law" (Profile Books, 2026)
Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal norms. But how did this happen, and where...
26 Dec 202529min
Weila Gong, "Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities" (Oxford UP, 2025)
This episode explores what China’s subnational climate experiments tell us about the possibilities and limits of climate leadership in an era of intensified geopolitics. We discuss how China’s domesti...
24 Dec 202542min
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal rol...
20 Dec 202548min
