RADIKAAL

My guest is Katherine Cramer. Kathy is a Professor of Political Science and the Natalie H. Holton Chair of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their place in it. In 2016 she published The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker with the University of Chicago Press. This excellent book won several awards and has become one of the key texts for people to help understand the Trump phenomenon in the US. You can follow her on Twitter at @KathyJCramer.

 My guest today is Simon Kuper. Simon is a columnist with the Financial Times and an award-winning author on football, or if you will soccer. Among his many excellent books are Football against the Enemy, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, Soccernomics (with Stefan Szymanski), and Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. His new book is Barca: The Inside Story of the World’s Greatest Football Club, published by Short Books in Europe and as The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making – and Unmaking – of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club by Penguin in the US. You can follow him on Twitter at @KuperSimon.

My guest is Toni Haastrup, a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research broadly explores the nature of global power hierarchies in knowledge and practice between the Global North and South. She has researched topics such as the African Union, EU relations with Africa, feminist foreign policy, and the women, peace and security agenda. I discuss most of these issues with her in this episode. You can follow Toni on Twitter at @ToniHaastrup.

My guest today is Matt Duss. Matt is the foreign policy advisor of Senator Bernie Sanders and one of the most prominent protagonists of a progressive US foreign policy. Before joining the Sanders team, he was president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress. He tweets at @mattduss.

We talk about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the US foreign policy establishment, and the challenge of creating a progressive US foreign policy.

My guest today is Amy Erica Smith. Amy is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Professor at Iowa State University in the US. In the 2020-22 academic years, she is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. The key focus of her research is, in her own words, how ordinary people understand and engage in politics. Her key topical foci are public opinion and religion and politics and her primary regional expertise is Latin America, in particular Brazil. In 2019 she published Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God with Cambridge University Press, which is also the key focus of this conversation.

If you want to know more about Amy Smith, you can check out her website at www.amyericasmith.org and you can also follow her on Twitter at @AmyEricaSmith. 

This episode is the third installment of the Special Elections Series and will focus on the German federal election of September 26. My guest is Kai Arzheimer, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Mainz in Germany. Kai is one of the foremost scholars of elections and the far right in Europe, and Germany in particular. He also curates the "The Eclectic, Erratic Bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe". Kai is active all over social media, from Twitter to YouTube.

My guest is my friend Airo Hino. Airo is a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Japan. His main work in on electoral behavior and party politics in Western Europe, on which he has published many articles and books, includingNew Challenger Parties in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, by Routledge in 2012. However, more recently, he has also been working on populism in Japan, which will be topic of our conversation today.

My guest today is my colleague and friend, Anders Ravik Jupskås. Anders is a senior researcher and the deputy director of the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo – where I also hold an affiliation. As probably the foremost scholar of Norwegian party politics, he is the perfect guest for this second Special Election Edition of RADIKAAL, which focuses on the Norwegian election of September, 13, 2021. Anders Jupskås is on Twitter, although reluctantly, where you can follow him at @arjupskas.

My guest today is Marlene Laruelle. Marlene is a Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she also holds various administrative functions, including Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales in her native France and a prolific writer on Russian and Central Asian history and politics. This year alone she has two new books out: “Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West”, with Cornell University Press, and “Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia”, with UCL Press.

We talk about all things Russia: nationalism, Eurasianism, illiberalism, disinformation, and, of course, Vladimir Putin.

My guest today is Eva Önnudóttir. Eva is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, the country’s capitol. Her main work is in the fields of electoral studies and public opinion in Iceland and beyond and she has published several pieces about the so-called “pots and pans protests” in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008-9, which hit Iceland early and hard. We talk about the effect of the Great Recession, Jon Gnarr and the Best Party, and the absence of radic al politics in Iceland.