New Books in Political Science

The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and The Collapse of the Iron Curtain (Norton, 2024) is a truly fascinating narrative—exploring a little-known event that happened in the border area between Hungary and Austria in August of 1989, and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. This Pan-European Picnic, attended by Hungarian pro-democracy advocates and East German vacationers on one side, and Austrians on the other, took place in the shadow of the Iron Curtain that had cut through Europe since the onset of the Cold War. This Iron Curtain between East and West was militarized, dangerous, and, as the title makes clear, iron in quality. The border, during the Cold War, between the Eastern Bloc and the West was one that operated more to keep citizens inside as opposed to trying to keep others out. Longo’s work here is distinct from his previous work on the U.S./Mexico border and the way that borders are distinct wherever we encounter them. The Picnic is still exploring borders, but it is an examination of a particular event at this hardened and ideological border, and how that event, in the planning for it, and the repercussions from it, led to the opening of many borders, both real and mythical. Longo also takes a different approach to his writing and narrative in The Picnic, providing the reader with an understanding of all of these events from the words and experiences of those who lived through the events and some who had a hand in them as well.The thread that traces through the entire story in The Picnic is this more elusive and complex idea of freedom. Freedom was at the heart of the activities that were planned and took place in August 1989, since the Hungarians and the East Germans were hoping to push on the literal and figurative constraints under which they lived in these Eastern Bloc countries. The understanding of the Cold War, at least from many in the West, was the denial of individual freedom, liberty, and autonomy—to have one’s life circumscribed by the state. And as we consider what happened in 1989—in June in Tiananmen Square, at this picnic in the backwoods of Hungary in August, and in the streets of Berlin in November—we often consider these events as the human drive towards freedom and against confinement. Longo tells part of this story, but through the words of those who were advocating for these political and ideological changes. The narratives also reflect on what happened after the end of the Cold War in Europe, what freedom ushered in, some of which was just as had been imagined. But there is also the underbelly that came with these openings of borders—the inflow of predatory capital, the rocky shifts away from socialism that have led, in a variety of places including Hungary, to a different form of authoritarianism. The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain weaves together a variegated narrative telling a particular story from 1989 but also a longer, more complex consideration of the idea of freedom and liberty and the power of the state.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 (University Press of Kansas, 2022), 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 can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Power Structures in International Politics (Low 8, 2023) presents an original perspective on the dynamics underlying world events, approaching international relations through the lens of computational science. It explains how states accumulate political power and how this competition leads to resource conflict, coalition building, imperialism, the balance of power, and global instability. Written in an engaging and accessible style with over a hundred illustrations, the book will appeal to a wide audience interested in geopolitics, international relations, and quantitative science.Michael Poulshock is a lawyer, software engineer, and technology manager. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

How did democratic developing countries open their economies during the late-twentieth century? Since labor unions opposed free trade, democratic governments often used labor repression to ease the process of trade liberalization. Some democracies brazenly jailed union leaders and used police brutality to break the strikes that unions launched against such reforms. Others weakened labor union opposition through subtler tactics, such as banning strikes and retaliating against striking workers. Either way, this book argues that democratic developing countries were more likely to open their economies if they violated labor rights.Opening Up by Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries (Cambridge University Press 2022) draws on fieldwork interviews and archival research on Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Turkey, and India, as well as quantitative analysis of data from over one hundred developing countries to places labor unions and labor repression at the heart of the debate over democracy and trade liberalization in developing countries.Adam Dean is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.Eleonora Mattiacci is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of Volatile States in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2023).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions where the state is otherwise scarce can have outsize, long-lasting effects on society. The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Noah Nathan reframes our understanding of the political economy of hinterlands through a multi-method study of Northern Ghana alongside shadow cases from other world regions. Drawing on a historical natural experiment, the book shows how the contemporary economic and political elite emerged in Ghana's hinterland, linking interventions by an ostensibly weak state to new socio-economic inequality and grassroots efforts to reimagine traditional institutions. The book demonstrates how these state-generated societal changes reshaped access to political power, producing dynastic politics, clientelism, and violence.The Scarce State challenges common claims about state-building and state weakness, provides new evidence on the historical origins of inequality, and reconsiders the mechanisms linking historical institutions to contemporary politics.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This is an ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism over the 20th century. In Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire (U Chicago Press, 2023), Alvita Akiboh, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. Akiboh argues that these symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the American empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of power, and how their original intent was changed. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the United States, whose presence announced itself through localized fights over the predominant currency, stamps, and flags. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Empires are one of the most common forms of political structure in history—yet no empire is alike. We have our “standard” view of empire: perhaps the Romans, or the China of the Qin and Han Dynasties—vast polities that cover numerous different people, knit together by strong institutions from a political center.But where do, say, the empires of the steppe, like the Xiongnu or the Mongols, fit into our understanding of empire? Or the Portuguese empire, which got its start as an array of ports and forts in South and Southeast Asia? Or the Manchus, who waltzed into a collapsing Ming China and rapidly re-established its governing structures–with themselves at the head?These are just a handful of what Thomas Barfield calls exogenous, or “shadow” empires, which grow on the frontiers of larger, wealth-growing polities, in his most recent book Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History (Princeton University Press, 2023).Shadow empires cannot exist without their hosts, extracting wealth from them—and yet, the most successful of them grow to become wealth creators in their own right, becoming what Barfield terms “endogenous empires.”In this interview, Thomas and I talk about empires—both the commonly-accepted kind and their shadow variants—and how we can differentiate between the many different kinds of empire throughout history.Thomas Barfield is professor of anthropology at Boston University. His books include Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton University Press: 2010) and The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1992).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shadow Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Ryan Wolfson-Ford’s provocative new book, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (U Wisconsin Press, 2024), is an intellectual history of Laos during the Cold War. The book challenges the established view that Cold War Laos was a plaything of foreign powers, particularly France, the United States, and North Vietnam. It does so by mining the writings of the Lao intellectual elite to produce a revisionist history of Laos that clearly shows the Lao as agents of their own history. The book also reveals a little-known fact of history that for much of the period from 1945 to the communist Pathet Lao’s seizure of power in 1975, Laos had one of the most flourishing multi-party democracies in Southeast Asia. Lao nationalism, anti-communism, and democracy thrived, and these political ideas were largely homegrown.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The focus of the research on populism as a category of political analysis has mostly been on domestic politics and can be traced back to the 1960s. Only in the last two decades this field of inquiry taken a more focused and specialized hue, involving systematic attempts to investigate populist governments’ behavior in the international arena. ...While some scholars understand populism as a threat to the institutions of liberal democracy and even of the liberal international order, others consider the populist potential to enhance democracy—understood as popular rule—and promote a fairer global governance.– Introduction to Populist Foreign Policy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)This edited volume, Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene, explores the global phenomenon of populism in relation to states' foreign policy, addressing two key questions: How do populists mold their foreign policies? What are the domestic and external factors that enable and constrain it? To this end, Professors Giurlando and Wajner’s book brings together a diverse group of scholars who have already researched on populist foreign policies (PFP) in specific countries to contribute shared chapters that examine their drivers, patterns, and effects according to distinctive regions: North America, Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central-Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Africa.The empirical analysis sheds new light on how populists’ distinctive conception of a world divided antagonistically between “the people” and “the elites” influences behavior towards multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, and regional or global hegemonic powers like the United States, Germany, Russia, and China. The book also shows how ideas related to identity, ideology, status and emotions, impinge on populists’ conduct vis-à-vis other international actors, and how national and international structures affect the implementation of populist foreign policies in the regional, interregional, and global arenas. The wide geographical diversity and regional representation are also valuable in identifying cultural similarities and differences. Hence, the findings contribute to lively debates on whether there is a unified and coherent foreign policy among populist leaderships, and whether populism leads to a gradual “corrective” of transnational trends in contemporary politics or, conversely, to a more radical, structural shift in the liberal international order.Philip Giurlando is Assistant Professor of International Relations in the International Studies Department at Xian-Jiao Tong Livermore University. His research interests include the formation and consequences of inter-state hierarchies, and populist foreign policies. His first book, Eurozone Politics: Perception and Reality in Italy, the UK, and Germany (2016) lays the foundation for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Dave McCormick *96 has enjoyed incredible success in a wide variety of arenas: after graduating from West Point, where he competed as a varsity wrestler, he served in the Gulf War before going on to earn his PhD here at Princeton in International Relations in 1996. He went on to prominent positions in both the private and public sectors, most notable as CEO of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, and as Under Secretary of Treasury and as Deputy National Security Advisor under President George W. Bush. Now, he's running for Senate in Pennsylvania. Here, he discusses his recent book: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America (Center Street, 2023) and his Keystone Plan. Along the way, he goes into not only leadership lessons learned from his career across government, business, and athletics, but also America's role in world affairs, her global competition with China, and the importance of American innovation.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

What can airports, busses, and submarine internet cables tell us about the local and national politics in the Philippines? And how do they position the country within the broader regional and global geopolitical struggles over economic development and political influence? Listen to John Sidel as he talks to Petra Alderman about the political economy of transport, telecommunications, and infrastructure in the Philippines, the different monopolies, oligopolies and cartels that characterise them, and their geopolitical significance to China, Japan and the United States.John Sidel is Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He is a specialist on Southeast Asia and has conducted extensive research in Indonesia and the Philippines on a range of topics, including local power, subnational authoritarianism, the political role of Islam, reform advocacy campaigns and coalitions.Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science