How does gender make war, and how does war make gender? In Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press, 2014), Laura Sjoberg (University of Florida) analyzes war and conflict through a gendered lens, arguing for the need for “gender mainstreaming” in…

For much of the last 50 years, there has been a consensus that restrictions on political money would improve politics and government. Federal and state campaign finance reforms aimed to do just that. In their recent book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner reach a surprising and contradictory conclusion. Examining state-level data over several decades, they find that restrictions on campaign finance are associated with a more polarized legislatures and more money steered to groups outside mainstream politics. Restrictions empower the purists and weaken the pragmatists. Instead, the authors suggest that political parties might be strengthened if certain campaign finance restrictions were loosened, and party pragmatists could then provide the moderating influence on politics that they have in the past.

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In her shining new book Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Hina Azam, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, explores the diversity and complexity of pre-modern Muslim legal discourses on rape and sexual violation. The reader of this book is treated to a thorough and delightful analysis of the range of attitudes, assumptions, and hermeneutical operations that mark the Muslim legal tradition on the question of sexual violation. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of this book is the way it showcases the staggering range and diversity of approaches to defining and adjudicating rape that populate the Muslim legal tradition. Focusing primarily on the Maliki and Hanafi schools of law, Azam convincingly demonstrates that Muslim legal discourses on rape were animated and informed by competing ways of imagining broader categories such as sovereignty, agency, property, and rights. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using the category of rape in relation to pre-modern discursive archives, proprietary and theocentric approaches to sexual ethics in medieval Islam, the differences between the Maliki and Hanafi school on defining and punishing male-female rape, and the implications and significance of this study to the contemporary legal landscape in Muslim societies. This meticulously researched and lucidly written book will be of much interest to students of Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and Muslim intellectual history. It will also make a great contribution to upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars on these topics.

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Washington University and a member of the faculty of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Administration.

After decades of deindustrialization and population loss, the revitalization of cities has paid scant attention to empowering neighborhoods and neighborhood leaders to move ahead. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto), recasts the debate about the future of cities as one about neighborhoods, rather than downtown development.

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For people and governments in the west the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 were happy events, and as the twentieth anniversary of those events rolled around they were to be celebrated once again with historical reviews in newsmagazines and tv news shows. For the peoples of Eastern Europe they were always political events that went beyond the thrill of no longer being systematically harassed for being too openly religious or public about political views not in line with the party line. There were big questions about how to deal with the legacy of communist rule and how to redirect the country, which have shaped politics in those countries ever since. In Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik‘s collection Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford University Press, 2015), then, it should come as no surprise that the celebration and commemoration of 1989 looks quite different. As such, it provides an interesting means to explore the political landscape in Eastern Europe revealing a variety of different directions politics have taken since 1989, and provides insights into how and why 1989 is remembered differently in these countries. I invite you to listen to my talk with Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik to learn more about their findings and their book.

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In Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Ilan Baron, Lecturer in International Political Theory in the School of Government and International Affairs and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham University, explores the transnational political obligation of Diaspora Jewry to have a relationship with Israel, including one of critique.

The book, featuring Baron’s interviews about the Israel-Diaspora relationship with key figures and community leaders in North America, the UK, and Israel, combines empirical work with political theory.

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While “fundamentalism” and “authoritarian secularism” are commonly perceived as the two mutually exclusive paradigms available to Muslim majority countries Naser Ghobadzadeh‘s new book Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (Oxford UP, 2014) highlights the recent political developments that challenge this binary perception. Ghobadzadeh examines the case of Iran which has been subject to both authoritarian secularization and authoritarian Islamization over the last nine decades. While politico-religious discourse in Iran is articulated in response to the Islamic state, it also bears signs of a third discourse. Ghobadzadeh conceptualizes this politico-religious discourse as religious secularity. He uses this apparent oxymoronic term to describe the Islamic quest for a democratic secular state.

Naser Ghobadzadeh is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, the Australian Catholic University (ACU).

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Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph have written the alliteratively titled Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is professor of political science at Vanderbilt University; Rudolph is professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Who do you trust? According to Why Washington Won’t Work, you definitely do not trust the government, especially if you are a Republican. Today, more than in the past, political trust divides the country. Hetherington and Rudolph argue that a profound, and historically high, lack of trust among the public reduces the likelihood of compromise in Congress. In an increasingly polarized political environment that is already pre-disposed to gridlock, this finding on public trust helps to further explain the inability of Washington to govern, effectively legislate, and work.

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From Ronald Reagan through Gilberto Gil to Donald Trump, our media channels are filled with celebrities vying for the highest political posts. In A Genre Approach to Celebrity Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), cultural historian Nahuel Ribke explores the historical trajectory that led to the current mass movement of celebrities into electoral politics. The book is a comparative project made up of short case studies. The range is impressive; it begins with the transition of Israeli models into the Israeli parliament, the meteoric rise of a charismatic journalist to the head of the treasury in Israel, goes on to Gilberto Gil’s tenure as minister of culture in Brazil and explores the contrasting political paths of the previously successful salsa partnership of the musicians Ruben Blades and Willie Colon. The book then moves on to North America to explore the American pattern of celebrity politics. The book ends with a return to Brazil and Argentina to look at two fascinating stories of ‘ordinary’ people-turned celebrities-turned politicians.

In addition to its contribution to the fields of celebrity and genre studies, this book is a vibrant narrative, bristling with the energy of its subjects.

Nahuel Ribke is a lecturer at the University of Tel Aviv, The Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture and Seminar Hakibutzim College, Depatment of Film and Communication.

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Elisabeth (Libby) Anker has recently published Orgies of Feeling: Melodramatic Politics and the Pursuit of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014). Anker is an associate professor of American Studies and political science at The George Washington University. Joining the conversation as guest host is, Lilly Goren. She is professor of political science at Carroll University and editor of Madmen and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury, 2015).

How does melodrama advance a political narrative? In Orgies of Feeling, Anker reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama in contemporary politics. Based on her reading melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory, she argues that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power.

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