New Books in Politics and Polemics

What happens to foreign aid (and to women’s status) when the global development landscape shifts away from U.S. dominance? In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with sociologist Mary-Collier Wilks about her book Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia (Stanford UP, 2026). They discuss the contrasting approaches of U.S., Japanese, South Korean, an...

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Dr. Matthew Warner Osbor...

What can democracies in different parts of the Global South learn from one another - and what can democracies in the Global North learn from them? The Democracy Exchange: South to South is a new mini-series from the People, Power, Politics podcast, bringing together researchers and activists from across the Global South to exchange ideas and experiences of democratic resilience. Produced as part of the Southern-led Approaches to De...

Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. InCivil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs(Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advo...

Kevin Galvin's Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing Of 1976(Brandeis UP, 2026), interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to explore the roots and unintended consequences of political violence. 1976. The Vietnam War had ended, but radical political groups still operated clandestinely throughout the United States. Nowhere was the threat of civil unrest greater than in Boston. Racial tensions had been b...

The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, milita...

In this episode, I spoke with Jacob Ware, co-author, with Bruce Hoffman, of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press, and winner of the 2025 Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize.

Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, att...

Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped.

Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterpar...

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?"

In this profound response to that question,Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem.Zalloua argues that today's anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rathe...

Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Nicolas Guilhot, however, challenges us to see conspiracy theories as a sign of the public’s desperation in light of liberal democracy’s failures. Conspiracism is widespread across the political spectrum, as citiz...

In our increasingly distrusting and polarized world, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy may backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. In his book The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives (MIT Press, 2026) Hallsworth shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed mo...

Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most discussed and most misunderstood topic today. Even to the experts and captains of industry, the frontier large language models are essentially black boxes. AI poses many reasons to be bo...

As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fun...

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?

In Rhetorical Powers: How Ris...

Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living n...

From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan’s empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, Great Power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on t...

When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government?

Alex Noyes has spent nearly two decades asking whether that reflex works. Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa out in 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania Press, draws on more than 120 interviews with senior politicians and stakeholders in Kenya, Zimbabwe, an...

A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment. In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Game and much of reality TV are cultural reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, where each of us must become a...

Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education.

For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet?