Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Inflation expectations – their formation, predictive accuracy, and influence on business price-setting and household consumption – remain one of the great macroeconomic puzzles and challenges to policymakers. As inflation returns to the developed world after a decade-long abeyance, understanding them matters more than ever. In The Behavioral Economics of Inflation Expectations: Macroeconomics Meets Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Tobias Rötheli has used two (relatively) new disciplines in the study of expectations: behavioral and experimental economics. Instead of applying a top-down version of rationality - like rational expectations - he uses a bottom-up model of rationality, studying individual behavior in the laboratory and then working up from the data. With some surprising results. Tobias Rötheli has been Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Erfurt since 2000. A graduate of the University of Bern, he has worked at the Swiss National Bank and been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He is the author of five other books and a string of papers; his 2020 paper on The 8½ Equations Version of the Quantity Theory of Money mentioned in the interview can be found at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/D... *The author's own book recommendations are A History of Economic Theory: Classic Contributions 1720-1980 by Jürg Niehans (JHUP, 1994) and Raymond Carver's Collected Stories (Library of America, 2009). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects).

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

In Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Dr. Megan Stewart argues that despite significant risks, some rebels undertake costly governance projects during wartime, to achieve transformational goals. Dr. Stewart explores the development of this model by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how its become a prototype ever since. Dr. Stewart uses different kinds of qualitative case studies as well as quantitative analysis to prove her theory, using archival data from six countries, primary rebel sources, and fieldwork. Miranda Melcher (Ph.D., Defense Studies, Kings College, London) studies post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, Henry Redwood argues in The Archival Politics of International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2021), these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department.

In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. Avner Wishnitzer's As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark (Cambridge University Press, 2021) gives a fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East. Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego

Lee B. Wilson is the author of Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Bonds of Empire explores how English law gave the institution of slavery its ability to thieve and grow. By looking at how law was practiced, instead of solely focusing on how it was written, Wilson follows the development of the institution of slavery in South Carolina and the English law of slavery in the colony. The day to day legal life of slavery in the colon shows just how much English law was crucial, and not opposed, to the enslavement of people. Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor at Clemson University. Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. In Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021), Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities. Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge UP, 2020) by Andrew Piper tackles the problem of generalization with respect to text-based evidence in the field of literary studies. When working with texts, how can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations to more general beliefs about the world? The onset of computational methods has highlighted major shortcomings of traditional approaches to texts when it comes to working with small samples of evidence. This Cambridge Element combines a machine learning-based approach to detect the prevalence and nature of generalization across tens of thousands of sentences from different disciplines alongside a robust discussion of potential solutions to the problem of the generalizability of textual evidence. It exemplifies the way mixed methods can be used in complementary fashion to develop nuanced, evidence-based arguments about complex disciplinary issues in a data-driven research environment. Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He directs .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill, and is editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

In Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity. Interview by Christian B. Long.

Most observers of Iran viewed the Green Uprisings of 2009 as a 'failed revolution', with many Iranians and those in neighboring Arab countries agreeing. In Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings (Cambridge UP, 2020), however, Pouya Alimagham re-examines this evaluation, deconstructing the conventional win-lose binary interpretations in a way which underscores the subtle but important victories on the ground, and reveals how Iran's modern history imbues those triumphs with consequential meaning. Focusing on the men and women who made this dynamic history, and who exist at the centre of these contentious politics, this 'history from below' brings to the fore the post-Islamist discursive assault on the government's symbols of legitimation. From powerful symbols rooted in Shiʿite Islam, Palestinian liberation, and the Iranian Revolution, Alimagham harnesses the wider history of Iran and the Middle East to highlight how activists contested the Islamic Republic's legitimacy to its very core. Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego.

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. It demonstrates how congressional pressure led the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy centered on democracy promotion and anti-communism - a decision which would have profound implications for American attention to human rights. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard combines a comprehensive overview of human rights in American foreign relations with in-depth case studies of how human rights shaped US foreign policy toward Soviet Jewry, South African apartheid, and Nicaragua. Tracing the motivations behind human rights activism, this book demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas, ultimately contributing to the establishment of human rights as a core moral language in US foreign policy. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of Nazism? Based on hundreds of secret police case files, Enemies of the People explores the day-to-day reality of political policing under Hitler. Examining the Gestapo's policy of 'selective enforcement', J. Ryan Stackhouse challenges the abiding perception of the Gestapo as policing exclusively through terror. Instead, he reveals the complex system of enforcement that defined the relationship between state and society in the Third Reich and helps to explain the Germans' abiding support for Hitler and their complicity in the regime's crimes. Stories of everyday life in Nazi Germany paint the clearest picture yet of just how differently the Gestapo handled certain groups and actions, and the routine investigation, interrogation, and enforcement practices behind this system. Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers penetrating insights into just how reasonable selective enforcement appeared to Germans, and draws unavoidable parallels with the contemporary threat of authoritarianism. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizing its power to self-regulate. They also noted the elasticity of domestic demand and production, arguing in favour of ending long-standing rules against luxury consumption, an idea that emerged in Europe in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Zanasi challenges Eurocentric theories of economic modernization as well as the assumption that European Enlightenment thought was unique in its ability to produce innovative economic ideas. She instead establishes a direct connection between observations of local economic conditions and the formulation of new theories, revealing the unexpected flexibility of the Confucian tradition and its accommodation of seemingly unorthodox ideas. Margherita Zanasi is Professor of Chinese History at Louisiana State University. She has published widely on different aspects of modern China's history, including her first book Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2005). She also serves as the editor of the journal Twentieth Century China. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

When people think of the “Vietnam War” they usually think of the hugely devastating and divisive conflict between North Vietnam and a United States-backed South Vietnam that finally ended in 1975. We know much less about the earlier conflict, often referred to as the “First Indochina War”, from 1946 to 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule and brought about the division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In his new book, The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Shawn McHale examines this earlier conflict, focussing on the complex and diverse society of south Vietnam. The book begins with a provocative question: why did the communist-led resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam fail in the south? This is an exhaustively researched book which does a lot to change our understanding of how south Vietnam became independent, and helps explain what came after the end of the “first Vietnam War”. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Over the course of the twentieth century, campaigns to increase access to modern birth control methods spread across the globe and fundamentally altered the way people thought about and mobilized around reproduction. This book explores how a variety of actors translated this movement into practice on four islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Bermuda) from the 1930s-70s. The process of decolonization during this period led to heightened clashes over imperial and national policy and brought local class, race, and gender tensions to the surface, making debates over reproductive practices particularly evocative and illustrative of broader debates in the history of decolonization and international family planning. Nicole C. Bourbonnais' book Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970 (Cambridge UP, 2016) is at once a political history, a history of activism, and a social history, exploring the challenges faced by working class women as they tried to negotiate control over their reproductive lives. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

Following Tunisian independence in 1956, President Habib Bourguiba centered women’s liberation as part of the identity of the new nation. In Tunisia’s Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the 1960s (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Amy Aisen Kallander uses this political appropriation of women's rights to look at the importance of women to post-colonial state-building projects in Tunisia. She explores how the notion of modern womanhood was central to a range of issues from economic development and family planning to intellectual life and the growth of Tunisian academia. Looking at political discourse, popular culture, the women's press, fashion, and ideas about love, the book traces how this concept was reformulated by women through transnational organizing and in the press in ways that proposed alternatives to the dominant constructions of state feminism. Situating Tunisia within broader Afro-Asian networks and global Cold War politics, it highlights comparisons with other state-feminist projects, and how women served as symbolic envoys for the new Tunisian state in the international arena. Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory. The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

Why have conservatives decried 'activist judges'? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts, but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent. Adam Bonica is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and JAMA Internal Medicine. Maya Sen is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics, and has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, National Public Radio, and other outlets. Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, gender, and community. The fact that there are indeed American survivors of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima & Nagasaki is not common knowledge. Even in Hiroshima & Nagasaki the existence of American survivors is not well known. American survivors, however, number in the thousands. This number, like that of survivors in general is dwindling fast. But they have a unique and important history. And, Naoko Wake have written this book almost at the last possible moment to capture it. Counterintuitively, American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Cambridge UP, 2021) argues that it the very marginality of this group that make American survivors important. As she writes, “If, indeed, it is ‘not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that ... determines the center,” US survivors’ history is a periphery that threatens to disassemble established meanings of the bomb that have not taken notice of it.’ (2). Based on oral testimonies and extensive documentation, American Survivors trace the history of American survivors from the interwar years to the present. American Survivors argues that Hiroshima, and to a lesser extent, Nagasaki (both of which were port towns) were cities of immigrants, and as such the attack on these cities was not just an attack on supposedly homogenous Japanese cities (as it is commonly understood) but on diverse communities. Wake traces the way immigration and re-migration between Hiroshima and the US, Korea, and other locations, as well as war time dislocations created the immigrant communities in Hiroshima. These trans-pacific connections, and what she terms “strengths of weak ties” in the history of immigration in the Pacific,” had an important impact on subsequent histories, which the b ook examines with great detail and deftness. Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating institutions that incorporate other elites into the inner circles of power, dictators create regimes that can outlast their founders. By creating clear lines of succession, they avoid disruptive power struggles that could bring down the regime. Anne Meng is a professor of political science at the University of Virginia who studies authoritarian institutions. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Host Peter Lorentzen is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.

In 1917, the adoption of the revolutionary Mexican Constitution and the October Revolution shook the foundations of international order in profound, unprecedented and lasting ways. These events posed fundamental challenges to international law, particularly to foundational concepts of property, statehood and non-intervention, and the role of law itself. Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) asks what we might learn about international law from analysing how its various sub-fields have remembered, forgotten, imagined, incorporated, rejected or sought to manage the revolutions of 1917. It shows that those revolutions had wide-ranging repercussions for the development of laws relating to intervention, human rights, investment, alien protection and state responsibility, and for the global economy subsequently enabled by international law and overseen by international institutions. The varied legacies of 1917 play an ongoing role in shaping political struggle, global anti-imperialist and anti-racism movements to this day. Listen in and see how these complex events shaped international law, human rights and anti-imperialist movements globally.

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain. Julie Ault is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015 before joining the faculty at Utah. She is currently a faculty fellow at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center with the goal of developing her second book project, tentatively entitled Solidarity & Socialist Riches: East German Diplomacy, Environment & Technology, 1949-1989. Her research interests include the environment, transnational networks, social movements, socialism, and the Cold War. Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at [email protected] or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

Islam's contributions to the natural sciences has long been recognized within the Euro-American academy, however, such studies tend to include one of a number of narrative tropes, either emphasizing the "Golden Age" model, focusing on scientific productions in Baghdad and other centers around the first millennium CE; emphasizing Islam's role in transmitting and preserving Greco-Roman learning, and enabling it to be re-translated into Latin around the time of the Renaissance; and the vast majority suggest that the majority of Islamic scientific output came to a halt around toward the end 16th century. In Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco (Cambridge UP, 2021), Justin K. Stearns argues that there is ample evidence that scientific production continued apace, if, in fact, we know where to look for it. Demonstrating the vibrancy of seventeenth century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how science flourished during this period, albeit in a different manner than that of Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions, Stearns uses numerous close readings of legal, biographical, and classificatory texts - alongside medical, astronomical, and alchemical works - to establish a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in the scholarly and educational landscapes of the early modern Maghreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Morocco and elsewhere. Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (2011), and an edition and translation of al-Hasan al-Yusi's The Discourses, Vol. I (2020). Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Dilek Kurban’s Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey's Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) engagement with Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict. Tracing the legal mobilization of Kurdish people alongside legal and political histories, Kurban’s work highlights the factors enabling ongoing violence in the Kurdish region. As Kurban argues, considering the effectiveness of supranational courts, like the ECtHR, in cases like that of Turkey invokes difficult questions about international human rights regimes. Limits of Supranational Justice contributes to studies of supranational courts and legal mobilization—as well as broader conversations about human rights—by pointing to new avenues of sociolegal inquiry alongside the broader sociohistoral context in the case of Turkey. Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief.

Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, The Impossible Office?: The History of the British Prime Minister (Cambridge UP, 2021) tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of our Prime Ministers have been most effective and why. He reveals the changing relationship between the Monarchy and the office of the Prime Minister in intimate detail, describing how the increasing power of the Prime Minister in becoming leader of Britain coincided with the steadily falling influence of the Monarchy. This book celebrates the humanity and frailty, work and achievement, of these 55 remarkable individuals, who averted revolution and civil war, leading the country through times of peace, crisis and war. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlights that a global elite benefit from marketised global justice whilst those who tend to be the 'faces' of global injustice - particularly victims of conflict - are instrumentalised and ultimately commodified. The book is an invitation to critically consider the predominance of market values in global justice, suggesting an 'occupying' of global justice as an avenue for drawing out social values. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department.

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history.

Professor Anna Spain Bradley "wrote this book to be accessible to anyone, because international law is for everyone." In this important book, Professor Anna Spain Bradley explores human choice in international law and political decision making. Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) investigates the neurobiological processes which shape human choice in the framework of international law and shows how human choice impacts decisions on peace and security. Professor Spain Bradley charts important decisions in the international human rights framework to show how human choice has affected decisions about genocide, international intervention into armed conflict and nuclear weapons, and human rights. This is an important book which has the potential to change the way we think about human choice in law, and the implications of human choice in the lives of all people, for whom decisions are made. Professor Spain Bradley calls for a rethink about how we understand human choice, especially in relation to what international law does and what it should do. Professor Anna Spain Bradley is Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an award-winning international law scholar, educator and expert specializing in international dispute resolution, international human rights and combatting global racism. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most successful foods. Daniela Gutierrez Flores is a PhD candidate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago Romance Languages and Literatures department. Follow her on Twitter @danielagtz.

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants. By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

In Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Richard J. A. McGregor, Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, offers a history of Islamic practice through the aesthetic reception of medieval religious objects. Elaborate parades in Cairo and Damascus included decorated objects of great value, destined for Mecca and Medina. Among these were the precious dress sewn yearly for the Ka'ba, and large colorful sedans mounted on camels, which mysteriously completed the Hajj without carrying a single passenger. Along with the brisk trade in Islamic relics, these objects and the variety of contested meanings attached to them, constituted material practices of religion that persisted into the colonial era, but were suppressed in the twentieth century. McGregor here recovers the biographies of religious objects, including relics, banners, public texts, and coverings for the Ka'ba. Reconstructing the premodern visual culture of Islamic Egypt and Syria, he follows the shifting meanings attached to objects of devotion, as well as the contingent nature of religious practice and experience. In our conversation we discuss aesthetic theory, material culture, processional objects, museum exhibition, relic typologies, devotional objects and religious landscapes, public celebrations, visual text and its illegibility, and the function of banners. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

Professor James Diggle, editor in chief of the Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge UP, 2021), joins us to explain the background to this extraordinary project. Setting out to provide a standard for students and professional readers of ancient Greek texts, Diggle's lexicon reflects a wider range of usage than Liddell and Scott, and provides translations that move significantly beyond the often modest, even coy, preferences of these Victorian editors. As the fruit of decades of team-work, this landmark publication will become the primary guide for readers of ancient Greek for decades to come. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it must be that Socrates is mortal. What could be more obvious? Well, sometimes obviousness serves to conceal philosophical difficulties. There’s more going on in this simple deduction than we tend to recognize. For one thing, we are not being asked to assess whether all men are, indeed, mortal. Nor are we asking whether Socrates is indeed a man. Instead, we’re focusing on the logical relation that obtains between those two claims and the third. We claim that the third statement “follows from” the combination of the first two, or that the third is “entailed by” them. But what, exactly, is that? Despite the obviousness of deduction, questions abound. In her new book, The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning (Cambridge University Press 2021), Catarina Dutilh Novaes argues that deduction arises out of social practices of dialogue.

With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Daniel Larsen tells the full story for the first time of how Asquith and his supporters secretly sought to end the war. He shows how they supported President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to convene a peace conference and how British intelligence, clandestinely breaking American codes, aimed to sabotage these peace efforts and aided Asquith's rivals. With Britain reading and decrypting all US diplomatic telegrams between Europe and Washington, these decrypts were used in a battle between the Treasury, which was terrified of looming financial catastrophe, and Lloyd George and the generals. This book's findings transform our understanding of British strategy and international diplomacy during the war. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Rakugo, a popular form of comic storytelling, has played a major role in Japanese culture and society. Developed during the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods, it is still popular today, with many contemporary Japanese comedians having originally trained as rakugo artists. Rakugo is divided into two distinct strands, the Tokyo tradition and the Osaka tradition, with the latter having previously been largely overlooked. This pioneering study of the Kamigata (Osaka) rakugo tradition presents the first complete English translation of five classic rakugo stories, and offers a history of comic storytelling in Kamigata (modern Kansai, Kinki) from the seventeenth century to the present day. Considering the art in terms of gender, literature, performance, and society, The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo (Cambridge UP, 2021) grounds Kamigata rakugo in its distinct cultural context and sheds light on the 'other' rakugo for students and scholars of Japanese culture and history. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist's Personal Battle against Alzheimer's Disease (Cambridge UP, 2021), Dr Gibbs documents the effect his diagnosis has had on his life and explains his advocacy for improving early recognition of Alzheimer's. Weaving clinical knowledge from decades caring for dementia patients with his personal experience of the disease, this is an optimistic tale of one man's journey with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

As governments and corporations mine our “entrenched culture of sharing” to invade privacy (down to Target creating an algorithm to figure out which shoppers are in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy) what happens to democracy? Can democracy survive with no (or very little privacy)? What if the citizenry cares little about privacy and or is unwilling to protect it? If surveillance is here to stay what are the prospects for individual autonomy? citizenship? democratic discussion and deliberation? Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society (Cambridge UP, 2020) argues that we should not focus on protecting individual privacy; privacy is NOT “our best hope” for ensuring a “democratic future.” Instead, we should channel Hannah Arendt and focus on the public realm and how it supports political freedom. Dr. Firmin DeBrabander is a Professor of Philosophy at Maryland Institute College of Art and the author of two previous books: Do Guns Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society (Yale University Press, 2015), and Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions (Bloomsbury Press, 2007). He writes social and political commentary for the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Salon, The Atlantic and The New Republic. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Ori Yehudai's erudite examination of Jewish emigration from Israel in the early years of the state presents a fascinating study of the lived experiences of Israeli refugees from Israel. This book makes a precious contribution to the migration history of Israel. The story of Israel's foundation has often been told from the perspective of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II (Cambridge UP, 2020) turns this historical narrative on its head, focusing on Jewish out-migration from Palestine and Israel between 1945 and the late 1950s. Based on previously unexamined primary sources collected from twenty-two archives in six countries, Ori Yehudai demonstrates that despite the dominant view that displaced Jews should settle in the Jewish homeland, many Jews instead saw the country as a site of displacement or a way-station to more desirable lands. Weaving together the perspectives of governments, aid organizations, Jewish communities and the personal stories of individual migrants, Yehudai brings to light the ideological, political and social tensions surrounding emigration. Covering events in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, this study provides a fresh transnational perspective on the critical period surrounding the birth of Israel and the post-Holocaust reconstruction of the Jewish world. Ari Barbalat holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of California in Los Angeles. He lives in Toronto with his family.

Political Scientist Ursula Hackett’s new book, America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge UP, 2020), is the winner of the APSA 2021 Education Policy and Politics Section Best Book Award. America’s Voucher Politics examines the way that the approach to vouchers, as a policy design and as a point of advocacy, has evolved over the past decades, and, in the process, this policy area has shifted strategic losses into strategic and growing wins. School vouchers, essentially the central case study in Hackett’s book, are a perfect example of what Hackett describes as “attenuated governance.” Attenuated governance is the form that a particular policy design and often the associated rhetoric with that policy take in an effort to disconnect the policy itself from the state, so as to avoid or elide constitutional conflicts that may strike down the policy that was passed by state or national legislative bodies. Attenuated governance is the umbrella concept that includes both the attenuated delivery of the goods or services and the rhetoric to accompany the policy design and delivery. As Hackett notes, school vouchers are the perfect lens for this exploration of American political development and examining the shifting approaches that courts and judges have taken to how the policies work within public and private institutions. As the subtitle of the book indicates, the story of school vouchers is the tale of hiding the role of the state in shifting funds from public schools to private and parochial schools and doing so in such a way so that the courts would decide in favor of the constitutionality of these new policy designs. Many of the initial attempts at this form of attenuated governance were unsuccessfully made in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and other moves to desegregate schools, and other public entities and spaces. But these early failures in court provided the blueprint for subsequent successes, not just in designing policy that would be more attenuated or disconnected from the state itself, but also in the way that these policies were publicly discussed and argued. America’s Voucher Politics is a fascinating study not only of this particular policy area as it developed over the past 70 years, but also of this concept of attenuated governance, which builds on America’s foundational identity struggles around religion, race and racism, and civic institutions. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

In Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Cambridge UP, 2021), Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agricultural sciences in shaping the history of tea plantations in British Colonial India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India.

Herbert “Bert” Kritzer, the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, has a new book that explores the process for reform of judicial selection across the fifty states. This is a fascinating examination of the different approaches that state legislatures, governors, partisans, and citizens have pursued in reforming the process, within each state, of judicial selection at all levels. With a brief historical overview of how this process was initially pursued in the early days of the republic, Kritzer moves to the central time period of the book, which is examining the state systems that were in place in the mid-20th century and the moves across the country to modernize court systems and how those moves unfolded. The main period that Kritzer focuses on is between 1980 and 2020, and he carefully reviews the reform efforts that succeeded as well as those that failed Judicial Selection in the States: Politics and the Struggle for Reform (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines the legal and democratic subcultures as a way to frame and understand the reasons behind the move towards reforms. But the heart of the book is diving into various states to see what they tried to change, who tried to change it, and if they were at all successful in these reform efforts. One of the more popular plans for state-level judicial selection is the “Missouri Plan”, which was designed to improve the quality of judges by establishing a kind of review board/nominating commission that made recommendations to the governor of the state. Many states, between 1960 and 1980, moved towards adopting the Missouri plan as the method for judicial selection. But following this, states continued to reform with an eye towards more legal professionalism as the guiding tenet behind judicial selection. According to Kritzer’s research, this was very much the case between 1980 and 1999, and this was in concert with the overhauling of state constitutions as well. Around 2000 there is a bit of a shift, as partisan politics now starts to be more of the driver behind the moves to reform or change the selection of state judges. Judicial Selection in the States is an interesting exploration of the various forms of judicial selection, the moves towards reform over the decades, the shifting role of partisanship as well as the impetus towards more professional and merit-based outcomes. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we, so we reached across our mentor network to bring you these podcasts. Wish we’d include a specific topic? DM suggestions on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how Black women contributed to America’s first freedom war, reading against the grain, rival geographies, fugitivity as an act of resistance, why we must center Black women’s voices, and a discussion of the book Running from Bondage. Our guest is: Dr. Karen Cook Bell, who is Associate Professor of History. Her areas of specialization include slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History; Georgia Historical Quarterly; Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations; Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians; Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora; and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah. She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award; and Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. She is editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and a contributor for Black Perspectives. She is a former AAUW Dissertation Fellow. Today’s book is: Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, which tells how enslaved women comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Dr. Cook Bell's contribution to the study of slave resistance explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls, and details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there two wars waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage emphasizes the chances taken by these Black founding mothers and the important contributions they made to the cause of liberty. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts, and a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia, by Karen Cook Bell Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, by Stephanie Camp “What Can We Learn from a Digital Database of Runaway Slave Advertisements,” International Social Science Review vol 76 no. (2001), by Tom Costa Never Caught, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar This interview on reclaiming lost voices with Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar This interview about the social constructions of race with Dr. Brigette Fielder

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations. Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy.

Why did the United States invade Iraq, setting off a chain of events that profoundly changed the Middle East and the US global position? In The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Joseph Stieb offers a compelling look at how the United States pivoted from a policy of containment to regime change in Iraq after September 11, 2001. Starting with the Persian Gulf War, the book traces how a coalition of political actors argued with increasing success that the totalitarian nature of Saddam Hussein's regime and the untrustworthy behavior of the international coalition behind sanctions meant that containment was a doomed policy. By the end of the 1990s, a consensus belief emerged that only regime change and democratization could fully address the Iraqi threat. Through careful examination, Stieb expands our understanding of the origins of the Iraq War while also explaining why so many politicians and policymakers rejected containment after 9/11 and embraced regime change. Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

American society is rapidly secularizing – a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. Secular Surge: A New Faultline in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the former chairperson of the political science department. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with a particular focus on religion (and secularism) and young people. Geoff Layman serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and is the co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. His research focuses on political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on long-term changes in the parties and their electoral coalitions. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on American Political Development (APD), federalism, education, and religion and politics. Her award-winning book America's Voucher Politics is out now with Cambridge University Press, and her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills.

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice interventions against animal abusers. More prosecutions and longer sentences, it is argued, will advance the status of animals in law and society. In Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment (Cambridge UP, 2019), Professor Justin Marceau demonstrates that a focus on 'carceral animal law' puts the animal rights movement at odds with other social justice movements, and may be bad for humans and animals alike. Animal protection efforts need to move beyond cages and towards systemic solutions if the movement hopes to be true to its own defining ethos of increased empathy and resistance to social oppression. Providing new insights into how the lessons of criminal justice reform should be imported into the animal abuse context, Beyond Cages is a valuable contribution to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights law. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Despite the proliferation of scientific ecology in the second half of the 20th C emphasizing the interconnection between environment and humanity, Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the intersection of ecology with the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This intellectual/literary history considers altered forms of the American wilderness narrative influenced by the ideas and vocabulary taken from psychoanalysis and various identity-based social movements that emerged in this chaotic moment. By deep reading the works of Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakuer, among others, Dr. Menrisky demonstrates how these authors either dramatized or undermined concepts of ecological authenticity within the identity politics of ecology, or IPE. In this framework, IPE represents a story of oscillation: a back-and-forth between writers attempting to shore up a narrative of ecological authenticity and those willing to question it. IPE’s legacy remains within contemporary environmental conversations highlighted by concepts such as #liveauthentic.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), challenges the current legal landscape of mental capacity law and human rights legislation, arguing that assessments of mental capacity should take account the role of relationships in the decision-making capacity of individuals with impairments and mental disorders. Dr. Camillia Kong's is an interdisciplinary exploration, combining philosophy, legal analysis on the law of England and Wales, the European Convention of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity, but one which at times provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships. The implications of Kong's hypothesis are groundbreaking; she provides a framework which articulates the practice of capacity assessments to help to better situate, interpret, and understand the decisions and actions of people with impairments. This monograph is the basis of another publication (co-written with Alex Ruck Keene) Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley, 2018). You can listen to that interview with Dr. Kong and Ruck-Keene here. Dr Camillia Kong is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice, Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the Principal Investigator of Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space, and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Nivi Manchanda, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies, and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and under-theorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicizes and de-mythologizes the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present. In our conversation we discussed Afghanistan as a discursive regime, the imperial politics of knowledge production, modern myths about Afghanistan, the narratives of the “Great Game” and the “Graveyard of Empires,” the role of the native informant, the failed state, the “War on Terror,” the representation of the “Afghan woman” and Afghan masculinities, and a genealogy of the term “tribe.” Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].