Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules. 

As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of political science at Yale – points out to us, in many parts of the world, the question is not just whether the law will rule – it’s also which of many legal orders will prevail. In his recent book State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya, Egor studies a setting in which different legal systems have evolved over time and coexist side by side – with matters like marriage, divorce, and murder sometimes being adjudicated by state judges, sometimes by religious courts, and sometimes under customary rules.

Egor first gives us a helpful primer on the Chechnyan civil wars and their central role in the making of Putin’s Russia. We then talk with him about how customary law, Sharia law, and state law operate alongside each other in Chechnya and how those seeking the protection of the law decide which legal order to turn to. As Egor explains, Chechnya is far from unique in displaying what he calls “legal pluralism.” Scholars estimate, for instance, that over 60 countries formally recognize some form of customary or traditional law alongside state law.

For the most part, this is a conversation about two things. First, we might expect that government actors would do all they can to suppress competing legal systems and ensure the primacy of state law. Why, then, do we sometimes see state leaders doing exactly the opposite? Egor tells us about the strategic conditions under which government officials will choose to intentionally strengthen customary or religious law relative to state law – and why a strategy that looks like it would diminish the power of state actors can actually enhance their legitimacy and authority.

This is also a conversation about gender and the law. In his book, Egor argues that the core social divide at the center of legal pluralism is a gender cleavage. Many struggles over social control often revolve around the regulation of female sexuality, around marriage and divorce, property inheritance, and honor and shame – and the different legal orders handle these issues very differently. We talk with Egor about the gendered impacts of state, customary, and Sharia law and about why Chechen women – particularly in the wake of two brutal, socially disruptive civil wars – have been turning to the state judiciary far more than Chechen men.

We hope you enjoy this conversation. To stay informed about future episodes, follow us on Bluesky @scopeconditions and check out our website, scopeconditionspodcast.com, where you can also find references to all the academic works we discuss. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Now, here’s our conversation with Egor Lazarev.

Works cited in this episode

Desmond, M. (2012). Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty. The American Journal of Sociology, 118(1), 88-133. 

Gibson, E. L. (2013). Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Pachirat, T. (2011). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Wedeen, L. (2010). Reflections on ethnographic work in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13(1), 255-272. 

When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external, violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are engaging in the violence. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house.

Our guest today, Niloufer Siddiqui, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany - State University of New York, shares with us insights from her award-winning book Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan. Exploiting subnational variation within the country, Niloufer asks why Pakistani political parties use violence to achieve their goals in some political contexts but not in others. And when they do strategically decide to use violence, when do they take care of things “in house,” having party cadres carry out violent actions and when do they outsource their “dirty work” to other groups, like gangs and militias?

Examining the behavior of several political parties across multiple provinces, Niloufer explains how electoral and economic incentives, the structure of ethnic cleavages, and organizational strength factor into parties’ decisions about whether to use violence – and, if so, whether to outsource it or do it themselves. 

We talk with Niloufer about how she gets at these dynamics by triangulating among survey experiments conducted with voters and elected politicians; about 150 interviews with party officials, journalists, civil society, and police and intelligence officers; and focus groups with party members and voters. Niloufer also tells us how, in doing this work, her own identity as a Muhajir woman gave her special access to one of the major parties she writes about, the MQM party, particularly the female members of the party. 

Lastly, we take a step back and talk with Niloufer about the ethical implications of her study. We ask her whether, in a fragile democracy like Pakistan, there’s some risk in exposing and calling attention to the violent nature of political parties. Might doing so serve to undermine public confidence in the democratic project? Could one unintended consequence of research on democracy’s shortcomings be to give actors like the military a convenient excuse to sweep in and push elected politicians aside? 

Works cited in this episode

Brass, Paul R. The production of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India. University of Washington Press, 2011.

Brubaker, Rogers, and David D. Laitin. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452

Graham, Matthew H., and Milan W. Svolik. "Democracy in America? Partisanship, polarization, and the robustness of support for democracy in the United States." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 392-409.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. "The ontology of “political violence”: action and identity in civil wars." Perspectives on politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-494.

Milan W. Svolik (2020), "When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue: Partisan Conflict and the Subversion of Democracy by Incumbents", Quarterly Journal of Political Science: Vol. 15: No. 1, pp 3-31

Wilkinson, Steven. Votes and violence: Electoral competition and ethnic riots in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun.

But our guest today, Jessie Trudeau, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has spent years studying a different kind of relationship that can evolve between politicians and criminal gangs: candidates for office sometimes hire criminal organizations to be their brokers at election time -- essentially, paying gangs to help them corner the electoral market and mobilize votes. In an award-winning working paper and current book project, Jessie asks why it is that politicians in some parts of the world bring outlaws into their campaigns for office.

We talk with Jessie about the particular qualities of certain criminal organizations that make them especially well suited to scaring up votes, like their control over territory and the relationships they've built with residents. Drawing on extensive interviews she conducted with politicians and gang members in Brazil, Jessie tells us in striking detail about the different forms that these politician-criminal collaborations can take -- from one-off deals to long-term partnerships -- and about the tactics that criminal organizations use -- how they keep competing politicians out and how they induce voters to show up and cast their ballot the "right" way.

Jessie also walks us through the natural experiment that she designed to estimate the electoral bonus that a candidate gets from working with a neighborhood gang. She talks about how she built an unusual over-time dataset tracking criminal group control over each of Rio de Janeiro's 1500 favelas and how she exploited the random assignment of voters to ballot boxes to help her identify the impact of criminal gangs on election outcomes.

Finally, we talk more broadly about the role of criminality in politics and its implications for policy and democratic accountability. What happens when criminal groups get involved in electoral politics not just to earn some extra cash as brokers but to get the kinds of policies they want? Why do criminals sometimes work with politicians as partners but in other places run for office themselves? And what happens to democratic accountability when criminal groups become so good at corralling votes that politicians no longer have to directly appeal to voters' hearts and minds?

Works cited in this episode

Barnes, Nicholas. "Criminal politics: An integrated approach to the study of organized crime, politics, and violence." Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 967-987.

Magaloni, Beatriz, Edgar Franco-Vivanco, and Vanessa Melo. "Killing in the slums: Social order, criminal governance, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro." American Political Science Review 114, no. 2 (2020): 552-572.

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us.

At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be fiction, but it’s actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-selection, people often end up in social environments that already fit with their pre-existing beliefs and traits.

For social scientists, what’s often called homophily – this tendency for like to attract like – can make it difficult to study the impact of social context itself. Do people tend to believe and act like those around them because they’re influenced by their surroundings, or because they’re drawn to places that already fit their pre-existing characteristics?

Our guest today, Dr. Joan Ricart-Huguet, found a real-world social setting that helps him untangle these possibilities. At East Africa’s oldest institution of higher education, Makerere University in Uganda, incoming students have for decades been allocated to their residence halls by lottery, rather than by personality type. For Joan, Makerere’s randomly assigned dorms have been the perfect laboratory for studying how the cultural characteristics of a social organization arise, endure, and shape people’s beliefs and habits over time. 

Joan is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, and we talk with him about a pair of recent articles he wrote on cultural emergence, persistence, and transmission. Joan tells us about the months of in-depth interviews and immersive fieldwork he conducted on the Makerere campus as well as the natural experiment afforded by random residential assignment that allowed him to test alternative theories of cultural differentiation, reproduction, and impact.

For example, Joan tells us the stories of how distinct hall cultures emerged historically at Makerere – how Livingston Hall came to be known as the residence of respectful gentlemen while Lumumba Hall earned a reputation for rowdy activism. And we learn about the short- and long-term causal effects of these distinct hall cultures on the young adults assigned by chance to live within them.

Works cited in this episode:
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Guiso, L., P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales. 2006. "Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?’" The Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2): 23-48.

Henrich, J. P. 2017. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

Mead, M. 1956. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation – Manus, 1928-1953. William Morrow and Company.

Paller, J. W. 2020. Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Ricart-Huguet, J. 2022. "Why Do Different Cultures Form and Persist? Learning from the Case of Makerere University." The Journal of Modern African Studies, 60(4): 429-456.

Ricart-Huguet, J. and E. L. Paluck. 2023. "When the Sorting Hat Sorts Randomly: A Natural Experiment on Culture." Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 18(1): 39-73.

Ross, M.H. 2000. “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis”. In Culture and Politics: A Reader, edited by Lane Crothers and Charles Lockhart. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sewell Jr., W. H. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Culture”. In Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. University of California Press.

Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentives of the central state?

Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, examines one way in which bureaucrats try to square this circle. In her recent book The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, Iza argues that state actors who need to respond but lack substantive capacity can instead choose to perform governance for public audiences. 

Iza explores the puzzling case of China’s Environmental Protection Bureau or the EPB, a bureaucratic agency set up to regulate polluting companies. This issue of polluted air became a national crisis during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when athletes were struggling to breathe let alone compete. Since then, Chinese citizens have been directing their pollution-related complaints to the EPB, which Iza found, has been given little power by the state to impose fines or shut down polluting factories.
But that doesn’t mean the civil servants working in this agency do nothing. Instead, Iza documents how and why they routinely deploy symbols, language, and theatrical gestures of good governance to give the appearance of dynamic action – all while leaving many environmental problems utterly unaddressed.

We talk with Iza about how she uncovered these performative dynamics through months of ethnographic research in which she was embedded within a Chinese environmental protection agency. She also tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, we talk about how her findings about performative governance in the environmental space translates to China’s COVID-19 response.


Works cited in this episode:

Beraja, Martin, et al. "AI-Tocracy." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 138, No. 3, 2023, pp. 1349-1402.

Dimitrov, Martin K. Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Fukuyama, Francis. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. London: Profile Books, 2017.

Goffman, Erving. “On Face-Work.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behav­ior, edited by Erving Goffman, pp. 5–45. Chicago: Aldine Transaction, 1967.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations [Book IV-V]. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin 2010.

Walder, Andrew G. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Weber, Max. “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping?

We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce resources.  When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is defusing tensions among neighbors – preventing local disputes from spiraling into widespread violence and derailing a larger peace process. 

Dr. William Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara. In his forthcoming book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, Will asks why peacekeepers sometimes manage, but other times fail, to keep a lid on communal violence. As he explains to us, the key to successful peacekeeping is being perceived by local populations as an impartial mediator among contending groups. 

But the thing is, a reputation for impartiality isn’t something that a peacekeeping force can manufacture overnight. Whether or not peacekeepers are seen as unbiased in a communal dispute is often shaped by experiences that long predate the contemporary conflict, such as the legacies of colonialism. It turns out that deployments by former colonizers – like French peacekeepers sent to Mali – have a pretty hard time tamping down local conflicts.

Will walks us through the micro-level logic of his theory of impartial peacekeeping, grounded in the psychology of group conflict. We then discuss his multi-pronged empirical strategy for testing the theory – using a novel, highly granular dataset on peacekeeping deployments; in-depth interviews with communal leaders; and lab-in-the-field experiments in Mali. 

And we talk about the policy implications of his findings: is the UN uniquely capable of generating perceptions of fairness and managing communal violence, or can NGOs or regional bodies also get the job done? 

How do revelations of abusive and exploitative behavior by some UN peacekeepers complicate the impartiality picture? 

And if the presence of neutral arbiters is crucial for keeping a lid on violence, then what’s the peacekeeper’s exit strategy?

Works cited in this episode:

Baldwin, Kate. The paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Blair, Robert A., Sabrina M. Karim, and Benjamin S. Morse. "Establishing the rule of law in weak and war-torn states: Evidence from a field experiment with the Liberian National Police." American Political Science Review 113, no. 3 (2019): 641-657.

Hunnicutt, Patrick and William G. Nomikos. 2020. “Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset.” International Peacekeeping 27(4):645–672

Russell, Kevin, and Nicholas Sambanis. "Stopping the violence but blocking the peace: dilemmas of foreign-imposed nation building after ethnic war." International Organization 76, no. 1 (2022): 126-163.

Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics?

Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status maps neatly onto patterns of political coalition-building. Consider, for instance, the lack of an enduring political alliance between African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in places like New York City or the absence before the 1970s of a Latino political identity encompassing Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans.

Dr. Jae Yeon Kim, a senior data scientist at Code for America, has been thinking a lot about the conditions under which groups with shared experiences of racialization and discrimination join forces politically, and when political action is organized instead around other social markers like class and ethnicity. In his article “Racism Is Not Enough: Minority Coalition Building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver,” published in Studies in American Political Development, Jae unpacks a revealing comparison in patterns of mobilization and alliance-formation across the Chinatowns in these three cities. 

These cities all shared a long history of pervasive and violent anti-Asian racism – which one might have thought would generate a collective race-based political identity. But while Asian coalitions formed to fend off the gentrification of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Vancouver’s ethnic-Chinese population allied with their southern European neighbors, rather than fellow Asian-Canadians, in their fight for affordable housing.

Jae tells us why that is by comparing patterns of residential segregation versus integration that shaped the logic of coalition-building in these three sites. We discuss how he gained analytical leverage for this comparison by looking at different exogenous shocks – natural disasters and duration of Japanese internment – that generated different patterns of settlement.

We also talk with Jae about his broader work on how the experience of racism affects political identities and behaviors. We discuss a study he conducted with Nathan Chan and Vivien Leung that shows how Donald Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric affected Asian-Americans’ partisan leanings. Jae also tells us about a paper with Reuel Rogers that problematizes the concept of “linked fate” and that analyzes the formation of race-based political identities as contingent processes that hinge heavily on elite strategies and historical dynamics.

Works discussed in the episode:

Chan, N., Kim, J., & Leung, V. (2022). COVID-19 and Asian Americans: How Elite Messaging and Social Exclusion Shape Partisan Attitudes. Perspectives on Politics, 20(2), 618-634. doi:10.1017/S1537592721003091

Dawson, Michael. A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics. Public Culture 1 January 1994; 7 (1): 195–223

Dawson, Michael. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton 1994).

Kim, Jae Yeon. "Racism is not enough: Minority coalition building in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver." Studies in American Political Development (2020): 195-215.

Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies?

Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and its antidotes comes from the US and other Western contexts – places with notably high rates of formal education and internet exposure, where most of the misinformation is on public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But these are contexts that, to put it simply, don’t look like most of the world.

Our guest today – Dr. Sumitra Badrinathan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at American University’s School of International Service – turns our attention to India – the world’s largest democracy. As in much of the Global South, internet access in India is expanding in leaps and bounds, and misinformation travels more on encrypted chat services like WhatsApp than on Facebook. Over the last few years, Sumitra has been running innovative field experiments testing the effectiveness of misinformation antidotes tailored to the Indian context.

We talk with Sumitra about one of these studies, recently published in the American Political Science Review. As Sumitra explains to us, citizens in India were awash in misinformation during the crucial 2019 election battle, a dynamic exacerbated by increased partisanship in the era of Modi’s BJP and Hindu nationalism. Carried out during the election, Sumitra’s study examines whether Indian citizens can get better at telling truth from lies if you teach them how to do their own online fact-checking.

We find out whether the treatment actually worked – which turns out to be a complicated story. We also dig into Sumitra’s research process – how she was able to get 95% uptake from participants (spoiler: it involved lots of tea) and how she had to change parts of the study on the fly when bringing tablets into the field turned out to be unsafe. And we talk with Sumitra about how her own identity made some parts of the fieldwork more challenging, brought down some barriers, and most of all was something that she had to constantly be aware of as she navigated the complex terrain of running a field experiment.

By the way, this conversation is about just one of the many misinformation antidotes Sumitra has been investigating. If you want to learn about her work on the effects of religious messaging or of peer corrections in combating deception, check out the links to her other papers on the episode webpage.

Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword.

Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness, even though in reality, the fix is in. On this view, the show trial helps to legitimize arbitrary rule.

Our guest today, Dr. Fiona Shen-Bayh, an assistant professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, tells us that this common understanding of political trials gets things only half right. Sure, the outcome of a show trial is pretty much pre-ordained. But political trials aren’t concessions to norms of legal fairness. Rather, Fiona argues, the trial – the ritual, storytelling, and publicness of a judicial process – is itself a key tool of repression and power-maintenance, especially for rulers facing threats that they can’t see.

We have a terrific conversation with Fiona about her new book, Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts, an analysis of the political logic of show trials in post-independence Anglophone Africa. Fiona explains to us how the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom helps undermine coordination among the dictator’s enemies. We also talk about how autocrats choose between assassinating their opponents and putting them on trial, and about how African dictators find judges who are both competent enough to run a good trial and compliant enough to rig the outcome.

Fiona also tells us how she painstakingly dug through archives to construct an original dataset of coup plots and repressive responses.  We learn how Fiona dealt with the challenge of identifying unsuccessful coup plots and what happened to the plotters – over many decades in seven African countries. Records inside these countries were sparse, so she immersed herself instead in the shadow archives. And if you don’t know what a shadow archive is, you’ll want to listen to find out. We also talk with Fiona about how she managed the inevitable uncertainties of deep archival work – of not knowing whether your months of digging through the files will turn up anything useful.

This is a conversation about courts as political institutions. And we close it out by asking Fiona to reflect on whether this is just an autocratic dynamic, or one that afflicts democracies too. At the end of the day, what is it that keeps courts in liberal democracies from merely serving political ends?

Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it?

When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion.

In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor of political science at Brown, uses an innovative set of field experiments to test an alternative possibility: that the native-born perceive migrants as a threat to longstanding civic norms.

Could anti-immigrant bias be shaped by fears – often unjustified – that newcomers don’t share the same ideas about the meaning and practice of citizenship? Can misperceptions about norm-divergence be corrected? And are there interventions that can actually lead native-born citizens to adopt more cooperative behaviors across ethnic and cultural divides?

In their book Native Bias, Danny and his coauthors try to get at these questions using a wonderfully creative set of experiments, carried out across Germany shortly after the arrival of over a million Syrian refugees. You’ll have to listen to find out how the experiments worked – but for now we’ll just say that they involved dropping thousands of lemons on train platforms. 

We talk with Danny about how the team came up with their experimental designs, how they carried them out, and what they found. One of their most interesting findings is that native German women tend to be more accepting of Muslim female migrants who signal that they hold progressive gender norms. But we also push Danny on the implications of the book’s findings. The treatments in the experiments involve immigrants demonstrably signaling their adherence to dominant German values. Even if this signaling works to dampen discrimination, we wondered how exactly this kind of intervention can be scaled up to the societal level. We also talk with Danny about who the book is saying bears the onus of reducing discrimination: is it up to immigrants to “fit in” better or up to natives to examine their own prejudices?