Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan R...
3 Aug 202543min
Philip Cunliffe, "The National Interest: Politics After Globalization" (Polity Press, 2025)
Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national inte...
2 Aug 202558min
Suruchi Mazumdar, "Divided Media: Politics and Mediated Movements in India" (Routledge, 2025)
Suruchi Mazumdar’s book addresses the complex relationship between India’s evolving, emerging media landscape, the political and economic interests of diverse media actors, and movements opposing cont...
1 Aug 20251h 10min
How Late-Stage Neoliberal Capitalism is Breaking Democracy
For a long time many (although by no means all) scholars saw the relationship between capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing: economic competition and growth were expected to sustain democra...
31 Juli 202533min
Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and...
30 Juli 20251h 6min
Hanno Sauer, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality " (Oxford UP, 2024)
In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good...
28 Juli 20251h 11min
Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in ...
26 Juli 202557min
Teo Ballvé, "The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly cont...
26 Juli 202541min
