Rising prosperity was supposed to bring democracy to China, yet the Communist Party’s political monopoly endures. How? Minxin Pei looks to the surveillance state. Though renowned for high-tech repression, China’s surveillance system is above all a labor-intensive project. Pei delves into the human sources of coercion at the foundation of CCP power, examining the historical development of China's surveillance state, its relationship to economic modernization and political liberalization, and what might destabilize it in the future.

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Human rights are among our most pressing issues today. But rights promoters have reached an impasse in their effort to achieve rights for all. Human Rights for Pragmatists (Princeton University Press, 2022) explains why: activists prioritize universal legal and moral norms, backed by the public shaming of violators, but in fact, rights prevail only when they serve the interests of powerful local constituencies. Jack Snyder demonstrates that where local power and politics lead, rights follow. He presents an innovative roadmap for addressing a broad agenda of human rights concerns: impunity for atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, entrenched abuses of women’s rights, and more.
Exploring the historical development of human rights around the globe, Snyder shows that liberal rights–based states have experienced a competitive edge over authoritarian regimes in the modern era. He focuses on the role of power, the interests of individuals and the groups they form, and the dynamics of bargaining and coalitions among those groups. The path to human rights entails transitioning from a social order grounded in patronage and favoritism to one dedicated to equal treatment under impersonal rules. Rights flourish when they benefit dominant local actors with the clout to persuade ambivalent peers. Activists, policymakers, and others attempting to advance rights should embrace a tailored strategy, one that acknowledges local power structures and cultural practices.
Constructively turning the mainstream framework of human rights advocacy on its head, Human Rights for Pragmatists offers tangible steps that all advocates can take to move the rights project forward.

Our guest is Jack Snyder, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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About the Book

Over the last decade, election campaigns in India have undergone a dramatic shift. Political parties increasingly rely on political consulting firms, social media volunteers, pollsters, data-driven insights, and hashtag wars to mobilize voters. What is driving these changes in the landscape of electioneering? The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them (Cambridge UP, 2024) takes readers to the hidden arena of strategizing and deliberations that takes place between politicians and a new cabal of political professionals as they organize election campaigns in India. The book argues that this change is not reducible to a story of technological innovations alone. Rather, it is indicative of a new political culture where ideas of political expertise, the distribution of power within parties, and citizens' attitudes towards political participation have undergone a profound change. Marshalling an eclectic range of data sources, the book breaks new ground on how we understand the workings of India's electoral and party politics.

About the Author

Amogh Dhar Sharma is Departmental Lecturer in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. After receiving his PhD from the University of Oxford, he was awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellowship. His research explores the interface between politics and technology, political communication and histories of science and technology.

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The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement.

Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state.

Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party.

Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Globally, the liberal international order has been under pressure for quite some time, but we often tend to discuss this in relation to big international players such as the United States and China. But how do small states like Singapore navigate and shape this increasingly contested space? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Dylan Loh about Singapore’s understanding of the liberal international order, its position on liberal democratic values and human rights, its relations with big international players, and the ways in which this small city state seeks to uphold and modify the liberal international order, so it better aligns with its own interests.

Read Dylan’s article ‘Singapore's conception of the liberal international order as a small state’ in International Affairs.

*** This episode was originally recorded in November 2024. ***

Dylan Loh is an Assistant Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He studies China’s foreign policy, international diplomacy, and ASEAN regionalism. He is the author of a recently published book ‘China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy’ which was published by Stanford University Press (2024).

Petra Alderman is a researcher, CEDAR affiliate, and a manager of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.

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Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.
This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all―human as well as nonhuman―earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life (Columbia UP, 2024) provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

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Today’s episode focuses on the mid-term elections in the Philippines which were held in May of this year, including all local elected positions, all seats in the House of Representatives, and twelve of the twenty-four seats in the Senate. The elections have been viewed as a reflection on the administration of President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr. and as especially consequential for the future of Vice-President Sara Duterte. She was impeached by the House of Representatives in February 2025, setting the stage for a trial by the Senate, but with her continuing popularity making her a serious contender for the presidency in 2028.

To interpret the mid-term elections, Dialogues on Southeast Asia has turned to Dr. Sharmila Parmanand, an Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and also an Associate and member of the Management Committee of the LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Dr. Parmanand’s research focuses on the intersection of gender and politics in the Philippines, ranging from sex work and migration policies to the connections between gender, nationalism, and democracy. She is currently working on her first book, titled Saving Our Sisters: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and Sex Work in the Philippines, but she is also busy conducting research, writing, and publishing on other fronts, including a new collaborative project on queer activism across Southeast Asia.

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries.

Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation.

Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

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Nicole F. Watts's Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan (NYU Press, 2025) is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives.Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa’s story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide.
Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland.

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Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit.

At just 80 pages, On Bullshit became a favorite of readers, selling over 1 million copies and spending 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a work of philosophy breaks through to the mainstream, but readers of On Bullshit quickly discover why. Harry’s meditation on the meaning of bullshit can be read in one sitting, but the ideas have staying power. After you read Harry’s book, you start to see bullshit everywhere and recognize it’s uniquely pernicious effects on whatever’s left of the public square. Harry wrote his book long before modern social media and AI-generated slop. He was unbelievably prescient, making On Bullshit required reading for today. Harry sadly passed in 2023 at 94 years old, but his ideas live on. In this series, we’ll speak with scholars whose lives and work have been influenced by Harry and his seminal book.

To kick things off, I’ll be speaking with Pamela Hieronymi, one of Harry’s former students. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA and a leading scholar in the field of moral philosophy. Like Harry, her work has resonated outside the academy. She served as an advisor on the sitcom, The Good Place, which brought philosophical concepts like the trolley problem to a mainstream audience. For the first episode in the series, Pamela will introduce readers to both the book and the man who wrote it. In subsequent episodes, I’ll speak with other scholars who explore Harry’s notion of bullshit in politics, science, and more. If you haven’t read On Bullshit, you should preorder the anniversary edition, which is set to release on August 5th. Now, let’s have ourselves a bull session.

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Watch her lecture on the blame game.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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