New Books in Political Science

New Books in Political Science

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New Books in Political Science episodes

  • Elizabeth Tynan, "Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia" (NewSouth, 2026)

    Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia

    (NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic
    weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in
    1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a
    rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the
    three bombs sent fallout over vast distances across the country. One of
    the tests, Mosaic G2 in June 1956, the largest nuclear weapon test ever
    held in Australia, sparked panic at the time that it had been a nuclear
    accident. In both the Mosaic tests, the crew of a British ship was
    deliberately positioned in the path of fallout. The biodiverse natural
    environment of the islands was left contaminated and has never been
    cleaned up.

    The book explores the politics, the secrecy and the controversies,

    including the true nature of Mosaic G2 and its role in the clandestine
    development of the British hydrogen bomb.

    Elizabeth Tynan

    is professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University,
    Townsville. She is a prominent writer and researcher of the era of
    British atomic testing in Australia. Her book Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (NewSouth,
    2016) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award (Australian History) and
    the CHASS Australia Book Prize in 2017. Her follow-up book The Secret of Emu Field: Britain's Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia was published by NewSouth in 2022.

    Morteza Hajizadeh

    is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
    Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
    Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
    18th
    and 19th Century British Literature.

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    58 min
  • Matias E. Margulis, "Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security" (Stanford UP, 2023)

    Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security

    (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the
    first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have
    intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of
    international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
    While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO,
    Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow
    negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the
    trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on
    analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics,
    agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four
    different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
    the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for
    Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
    (SRRTF).

    By

    identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to
    shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations
    chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the
    WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of
    concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for
    world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining
    their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right
    to food.

    This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

    focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
    negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
    analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
    Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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    51 min
  • Hossam el-Hamalawy, "Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026)

    Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026) is a rare and comprehensive examination of the structures, hierarchies, and methods of the military, police, and intelligence agencies. Drawing on meticulous research, it reveals the strategies deployed to suppress the revolutionary wave, from propaganda and surveillance to mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. El-Hamalawy traces the power dynamics within these institutions to show how their uneasy unity was both a response to the revolution and a determinant of its eventual fate.

    Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organisers of the 2011 uprising. He has been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt. He holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and is the recipient of the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Journalism Award. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics at 3arabawy.substack.com.

    Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.

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    1 hr 36 min
  • Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951): A Discussion with Jay Garfinkel

    A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

    Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

    When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

    This episode was originally published on April 10, 2024.

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    30 min
  • Kathleen J. Frydl, "Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    This is a really good book. Really good. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a fascinating, and perhaps unexpected, journey through Catholic hospitals, the expansion of the carceral state, and corporate and union access to the protections of First Amendment freedom of speech. All the while, Kathleen J. Frydl is rigorously constructing an understanding and positioning of the modern corporation within the governmental structures and protections of the American political system. This is a deeply and thoroughly researched book, with details and information coming from legal decisions, law review articles, political theory, congressional acts, federal government notices, historical data and understanding, medical information, and texts in political science, sociology, and economics. It is indeed a tour de force, but the reader doesn’t really notice because it is such a propulsive and captivating narrative about how modern private corporations learned to capture and implement the advocacy practices that the social movements of the postwar period were using to make gains for previously disadvantaged groups (like African Americans, women, those with disabilities, and more).

    Frydl lays out the foundation for the analysis within the framework of liberalism, classical liberalism and modern liberalism. She takes pains to explain these distinctions and how our understanding of liberalism has also contributed to some of the shifts and adjustments that have transpired. What does become clear in all of the case studies and details is that this is really a story about the United States Congress—not the Judiciary—and that Congress has been responsible for many of these changes, even if these actions seem to elide public attention and scrutiny. In fact, it is very difficult to detect Congress’s role in these instances, where Congress acted to essentially remove the Judiciary’s powers to deliberate in these policy realms.

    Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is about corporate identity politics, and the ways in which corporations worked to fend off regulatory reform, while not exactly using the expected pathways. Since corporations, unlike, say women or African Americans, do not have a history of exclusion or disadvantage within the American political or economic systems, the concept of corporate identity politics seems a bit odd, but Frydl makes a strong case for this understanding, through the case studies of Catholic hospitals and regulatory reform that provides an avenue towards allowing for more religious freedoms and protections for the hospitals themselves; the legislative reforms with regard to criminal codes in the 1970s and 1980s that instituted harsher sentencing guidelines for individuals but much more lax responses to corporate infractions; and finally in a comparative study of corporate speech regulation and speech regulation of labor unions in the United States. Frydl tells the story from all perspectives and dimensions, including who was working behind the scenes to move these protections forward over the past fifty years. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is a very important analysis of the strengthening of the position of corporate entities within the political, legal, and economic systems in the United States.

    Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She is also author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not In My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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    1 hr 2 min
  • Dalit Studies with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana and Sanal Mohan

    This episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We began with the significance of the 1990s as a point of departure for new work in this field and segued to the interventions made by their two edited volumes published in 2016 and 2025. We discussed the paths opened up by earlier radical historiographical paradigms, such as Subaltern Studies, which nonetheless failed to address the caste question. The guests noted three key emphases of contemporary Dalit Studies: one, centering Dalit historical agency and intellectual production; two, decentering the binary of colonialism and nationalism, and illuminating the colonial period as a complex terrain of maneuver; and three, foregrounding the importance of “the Dalit social” as a field of variegated power irreducible to the state. We ended with a discussion of the heterogeneity of Dalit sociopolitical formations, what makes “Dalit” cohere as a category, and future directions for the field of Dalit Studies.

    Read the transcript here

    References

    Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana eds. Dalit Studies (Duke University Press, 2016)

    Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan eds. Dalit Journeys for Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste (SUNY Press, 2025)

    Rajni Kothari, “Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on Caste.” In State and

    Politics in India, edited by Partha Chatterjee, 439–58 (New Delhi: Oxford University

    Press, 1998).

    Gopal Guru, “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” In Dalit Identity and

    Politics, edited by Ghanshyam Shah, 96–107 (New Delhi: Sage, 2001).

    Baburao Bagul, Dalit Sahitya ajache Kranti Vidynana (Nagpur: Buddhist Publishing

    House, 1978).

    Belcchi: village in Patna district of Bihar where eight Dalits and three Backward Caste men were killed by members of the landowning Kurmi caste in 1977.

    Keezhvenmani: hamlet in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu where upper caste landlords burnt alive 44 Dalit agricultural laborers in 1968.

    Karamchedu: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Kamma landholding caste murdered six Dalit men, raped three Dalit women, and displaced hundreds of Dalit families in 1985.

    Vempenta: village in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh where, in response to the killing of a village official by the People’s War Group, landholders killed more than thirty Dalits and burned more than 100 of their houses in 1998.

    Chundur: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Reddy landholding caste killed eight Dalit men in 1991.

    Mandal Commission:

    Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue

    B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

    Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.

    NTR: Indian actor and politician who served as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh for four terms between 1983 and 1995.

    Mahad Satyagraha: mass mobilization by B.R. Ambedkar to claim Dalit access to a public water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra.

    Ayyankali: Indian social reformer and lawmaker who worked for the advancemetnt of Dalits in the princely state of Travancore.

    Ad Dharm: an anticaste movement in the 1920s that claimed a distinct identity for Dalits separate from Hinduism and Sikhism.

    Adi Hindu Mahasabha: sociopolitical organization founded in 1923 by Dalit leader Swami Achhutanand in Uttar Pradesh that claimed for Dalits the identity of originary Hindus.

    IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology

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    1 hr 7 min
  • Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought

    Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought.

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    57 min
  • Ka-ming Wu, "Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations" (Leiden UP, 2026)

    Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations (Leiden University Press, 2026) examines

    how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban
    spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight
    surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens
    connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and
    leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research,
    Ka-ming Wu investigates how citizens conduct volunteer activities that
    not only promote party-state campaigns and engage with new urban spaces
    and services, but also experiment with political, social, and cultural
    rights, including advocating for the rights of people with disabilities
    and promoting unofficial interpretations of national history.

    The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice

    through which citizens navigate existing hierarchies of urban and rural
    status, gender, age, and ability, while contesting top-down,
    mega-event-driven urbanization. It situates Chinese everyday urbanism
    within the context of China's hosting of multiple international events,
    its expanding public and digital infrastructures, heightened party-state
    control, and burgeoning digital activism. The book contributes to the
    infrastructural turn in urban anthropology and the field of China
    studies, offering a new understanding of urban rights and public access
    in contemporary China.

    NOTE: The book Ka-ming Wu mentioned in the interview is Stephen Graham’s Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

    (Verso, 2010).

    Wu Ka-ming is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and

    Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with courtesy
    appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for China
    Studies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her work is
    interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of cultural studies,
    anthropology, China studies, and environmental humanities. She is the
    author of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism
    (UIP 2015) and the co-author of Living with Waste (CUP 2017).

    Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of

    Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his
    scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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    54 min
  • Giulio Boccaletti, "The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in

    history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances
    individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World (Princeton
    University Press, 2026) reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining
    our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to
    the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican
    foundation.
    Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom
    and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the
    environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in
    technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric
    of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests.
    Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the
    facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper
    failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and
    real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that
    places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we
    exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development
    itself.
    Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic
    challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human
    freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both
    sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

    Giulio Boccaletti

    is an author whose writings on natural resources security have been
    translated into several languages. He has held international leadership
    positions in the private and not-for-profit sectors. He is the
    scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change,
    one of Europe’s largest research institutions focused on Earth science
    and transition economics, and cofounder of Chloris Geospatial, a
    space-tech company specializing in Earth observations. His books include
    Water: A Biography, and his work has been featured in acclaimed PBS series such as H2O: The Molecule That Made Us, Human Footprint, and The Future of Nature.

    Morteza Hajizadeh

    is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
    Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
    Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
    18th
    and 19th Century British Literature.

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    1 hr 21 min
  • Georgia Kernell, "Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Georgia Kernell examines how party rules determine how parties select candidates, nominate leaders, and set policy goals. Most research on party organisation pays very little attention to what happens within political parties; this book addresses this gap by examining how internal party rules and procedures shape party membership and political responsiveness. Drawing on an original dataset of party statutes covering 65 political parties across 20 parliamentary democracies, the book offers one of the most comprehensive studies of party organisation to date. The book develops a formal model of party membership and tests these hypotheses using cross-national surveys, member studies, experiments, and computer simulations of projected vote shares. The book finds that a party's level of decentralisation - the degree to which it incorporates rank and file members into decision making - determines which voters it best represents. Decentralised parties may attract more members to campaign for the party, but they do so at the cost of adopting more extreme positions that pull them away from moderate voters. The book challenges our understanding of inner-party democracy, it reveals that Parties that are more internally democratic don't necessarily end up being more representative or responsive to the electorate as a whole. This novel and comprehensive research is an indispensable resource not only for party scholars but also for anyone working on comparative politics and multi-method research. And for anyone who wants to sneak a peek into the "secret garden" of party organisation. 

    Satyaki Barua is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His research focuses on party organisation, party institutionalisation, and political mobilisation, particularly examining the interactions between the state, society, and political parties in India and South Asia. Outside of academia, Satyaki enjoys watching and discussing movies, as well as practising Hindustani classical music.

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    49 min

About New Books in Political Science

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.