Political Science

"Lee Smith is a great American patriot who has understood, from the very beginning, that the radical left is the true THREAT TO DEMOCRACY."

—Donald Trump, former president of the United States 

From Lee Smith, bestselling author of, The Permanent Coup and The Plot Against the President, comes another riveting exposé of the secret war against President Trump and American democracy. 

Even before a would-be killer tried to murder President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a clique of political assassins set about eliminating him from public life entirely. 

In Disappearing the President, New York Times bestselling author Lee Smith exposes how a shadow network of powerful partisan activists has waged a years-long, scorched-earth war to eradicate President Trump and any vestige of his influence. 

Resorting to an unprecedented campaign of domestic spying, election rigging, brute-force censorship, and political violence, anti-Trump zealots have undermined the federal government and sabotaged countless other vital institutions in their relentless quest to crush the former president. 

In this alarming book, Lee Smith reveals: 

How U.S. intelligence services, trained to sabotage foreign governments and leaders, have turned their expertise against Americans. 

How the Shadow Network exploited Covid to censor dissidents and rig the 2020 election. 

Why Big Tech firms hired hundreds of former intelligence officials after 2018. 

How Barack Obama, widely viewed as a benign elder statesman, created and leads the anti-Trump operation.

Finally, Smith shows how censorship of Trump supporters has provoked a free-speech backlash. 

The hour is late, and the stakes are high. Including exclusive interviews with President Trump, Devin Nunes, Dan Bongino, and many others, Disappearing the President is an unsettling expose of a rogue cabal that will pay any price to annihilate the one man who threatens their agenda.

Exposes Arabella Advisors as a major "dark money" operation that channels billions into progressive causes through opaque networks and deceptive grassroots groups, revealing its significant influence on U.S. politics and its far-reaching impact on issues from Supreme Court nominations to election manipulation.

"Ever heard of Arabella Advisors? Probably not. And that’s strange, since they’ve done a lot to destroy the world you grew up in. You should know, so read this book."

—Tucker Carlson 

While billionaires like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett are well known as left-wing megadonors transforming the country’s politics, few Americans know about Arabella Advisors, a “dark money” operation that channels much of this money into particular causes via pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots outfits. Citizens across the spectrum will be shocked to learn how Arabella’s empire secretly operates using arrangements that produce the darkest of “dark money.” 

Thanks to the author and his colleagues at the Capital Research Center, which first exposed Arabella, even the mainstream press have begun to report on this scandalous story. As this book reveals, Arabella is a major player in battles over Supreme Court nominations, environmentalism, abortion, Medicare for All, fake local news outlets, “Zuck Bucks” that manipulate election offices, lawsuits brought by Democratic super-lawyer (and Steele dossier booster) Marc Elias, and much more.

The money is staggering. In the 2018 election cycle, Arabella’s nonprofits took in $1.2 billion, more than double the fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee combined. In the 2020 election cycle, Arabella’s fundraising spiked to $2.4 billion.

This mountain of money explains why the left-leaning major media are alarmed. Arabella is “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money,” warns the Atlantic. A “dark-money behemoth,” says Politico. An “opaque network,” says the New York Times, that funnels “hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes.” 

From 1994 to 2006, William F. Schulz headed Amnesty International USA. During this time, he and the organization confronted some of the greatest challenges to human rights, including genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan; controversies over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the use of torture by the United States after 9/11; as well as growing concern about inequities in the American justice system, from police misconduct to the death penalty. Drawing upon his encounters with tyrants, the inspiration of brave human rights heroes, and collaborations with celebrities ranging from Patrick Stewart to Salma Hayek, Schulz uses poignant narrative and amusing anecdotes to discuss the day-to-day realities of struggling with life-and-death human rights crises. In the process he ducks an assassination threat in Liberia; brings tears to the eyes of the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland; and bests America’s self-described “toughest sheriff” on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

Full of reflection as well as action, Reversing the Rivers provides Schulz with the opportunity to address profound philosophical questions, such as “What is the nature of evil?”; “How do we foster the ‘better angels of our nature’?” “When may we use force to stop people from using force?” “Is the prohibition on torture as simple as it seems?” and “What’s wrong with an eye for an eye?” Most important, in an eloquent concluding chapter, he answers the quandary most frequently posed to him during his years at Amnesty, “Given all the horrors in the world you see day after day, how do you retain any hope at all in humanity?”

An inside look at how police officers are trained to perpetuate state violence

Michael Brown. Philando Castile. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. As the names of those killed by the police became cemented into public memory, the American public took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to mourn, organize, and demand changes to the current system of policing. In response, police departments across the country committed themselves to change, pledging to hire more women and people of color, incorporate diversity training, and instruct officers to verbally de-escalate interactions with the public.

These reform efforts tend to rely on a “bad apple” argument, focusing the nature and scope of the problem on the behavior of specific individuals and rarely considering the broader organizational process that determines who is allowed to patrol the public and how they learn to do their jobs. In Before the Badge, Samantha J. Simon provides a firsthand look into how police officers are selected and trained, describing every stage of the process, including recruitment, classroom instruction, and tactical training.

Simon spent a year at police academies participating in the training alongside cadets, giving her a visceral, hands-on understanding of how police training operates. Using rich and detailed examples, she reveals that the process does more than test a cadet’s physical or intellectual abilities. Instead, it socializes cadets into a system of state violence. As training progresses, cadets are expected to see themselves as warriors and to view Black and Latino/a members of the public as their enemies. Cadets who cannot or will not uphold this approach end up washing out. In Before the Badge, Simon explains how this training creates a context in which patterns of police violence persist and implores readers to re-envision the future of policing in the United States.

A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences.

  Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures.

  In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing.

  Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance—what they call planetary subsidiarity—designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.

Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. This is its untold story.

In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true.

Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don’t see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways.

The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state—all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.

We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out.

The civilian role in managing the military has never been more important. Today, civilian leadership of defense policy is challenged by the blurring line between war and competition and the speed of machine decision-making on the battlefield. Moreover, the legitimacy of political leaders and civil servants has been undermined by a succession of foreign policy failures and by imbalances of public faith in the military on the one hand and disapproval of civilian institutions on the other. A central question emerges: What does appropriate and effective civilian control of the military look like?

Combining scholarly expertise and firsthand civilian experience in the Department of Defense, Friend argues that civilians combine authoritative status, institutional functions, and political expertise to ensure that democratic preferences over the use of force prevail. Friend focuses on the ways political context shapes whether and how civilian controllers—the civilians in professional and institutional positions with the responsibility for defense matters—exercise control over the military and each other. Mightier Than the Sword provides insights that enrich civil-military relations scholarship, as well as lessons aimed at revitalizing American democracy.

In Equality and the City, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño draws on his experience as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, as well as his many years of international work as a lecturer and consultant, to share his perspective on the issues facing developing cities, especially sustainable transportation and equal access to public space.

As mayor of Bogotá, Peñalosa Londoño initiated development of the TransMilenio Rapid Bus Transit system, among the largest and most comprehensive public transit systems in the Global South, which carries 2.5 million passengers a day along dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, and a rapid metro line. The system emphasizes accessibility for the entire population. Peñalosa Londoño’s efforts to create public space were similarly ambitious: over the course of his two terms, more than a thousand public parks were created or improved. Underlying these policies was a conviction of how cities should be—a compelling humanistic philosophy of sustainable urbanism. For Peñalosa Londoño, city design is not just engineering; it defines human happiness, dignity, and equality. “An advanced city is not one where the poor own a car,” Peñalosa writes, “but one where the rich use public transport.”

Equality and the City provides practical criteria for conceiving and constructing different and better cities, describes the obstacles that are confronted when doing so, and identifies ways to overcome them.

Former CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc. Andrew F. Puzder exposes how the secretive consolidation of financial power under the guise of "ESG" represents a new collectivist threat to the free market.

Over the last thirty-five years, asset manager mega-giants BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have accumulated unprecedented levels of stock ownership in virtually every major US company. Voting the shares they hold for clients allows these companies to force their own “environmental, social, and governance” or “ESG” agenda on the American corporate sector and, by extension, on all of us.

An asset manager’s traditional duty is to maximize returns for its investors, but these financial elites expand their duties through “stakeholder capitalism,” the idea that a company is responsible not only for its actual shareholders, but for everyone who is affected by the company—which translates to everyone in the community.  Thus, they can impose their preferred ESG goals under the guise of benefitting an amorphous group of non-investors—a group that has no say over whether ESG goals actually “benefit” them.

This elite-dominated economic system is nothing more than socialism in sheep’s clothing. “ESG” defines the champagne socialist agenda that would devastate the working and middle classes globally. Now, in the face of rising opposition, these financial elites are suddenly rebranding—shifting their terminology to conceal their intent.

A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims exposes how, although they may abandon the acronym “ESG,” these elites have pursued—and will continue to pursue—their ESG goals: to transform our consumer-driven free-market economy into one that is subject to their elitist demands, overriding the will of the people whom they deem incapable of self-government.

Uncovers the political, ideological, and bureaucratic forces that shaped the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 and its legacy across the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 formally established the promotion of religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and national security priority. Tracing its origins and passage, Prioritizing Faith shows how the legislation was made possible by the convergence of growing evangelical and Jewish advocacy, the expanding international human rights movement, and a broader search for post–Cold War purpose. Yet implementation across administrations has been uneven, shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics and internal institutional constraints.

Relying on expert interviews and rich archival analysis, Ashlyn W. Hand traces how Clinton, Bush, and Obama each wove international religious freedom into their foreign policy visions while navigating competing priorities and evolving strategic interests. Through case studies in China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, Hand reveals the inner workings and persistent challenges of American religious freedom policy on the global stage.

Timely, insightful, and deeply researched, Prioritizing Faith offers an incisive assessment of the United States’ efforts to promote religious freedom abroad, highlighting the enduring tensions between normative aspirations and the complexities of foreign policy practice.

This stunning whistleblower account reveals how the Deep State weaponizes federal powers against its political enemies and explores the disastrous reality of the Obama Doctrine, which seeks to create a global balance of power by weakening American preeminence and strengthening America's foreign adversaries.

During his eight-year reign, Barack Obama transformed the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies as no other president in history has done, advancing a policy of U.S. diminishment that has undermined our global primacy to this day.

In The Insider Threat, Adam Lovinger draws on more than ten years of experience at the Pentagon to explain how the Obama administration orchestrated this coup.

Obama spent his first year in office persuading Americans that the U.S. should step back from its global leadership role to create a new world order based on “balance of power” politics. But what he never said out loud was that this meant Washington would transfer power to its enemies. When his 2009 worldwide “apology tour” proved a debacle, Obama changed tack—to subversion by bureaucratic fiat.

He spent the next eight years staging a stealth revolution inside America’s most sensitive government agencies, using ideological infighters to replace America’s strategic objectives with those of China, Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In return, through a range of acts and omissions described in this book, America’s adversaries helped Obama and Joe Biden win elections, wealth, and prestige.  

Equal parts George Orwell and Franz Kafka, The Insider Threat exposes—for the first time—the secret playbook that Lovinger discovered on his U.S. Department of Defense computer. This file reveals how corrupt senior officials enrich their patrons at taxpayer expense, advance the interests of America’s enemies, undermine core U.S. national interests from within, and make administrative reform impossible.

Even longtime Washington insiders will be shocked at the extent of lawlessness that now passes for normal in America’s administrative state.  

An exploration of the political thought of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and the foremost advocate for the Palestinian cause in the West

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said’s political thought.

Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.

Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation.

Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day.

A thorough analysis of the right-wing interests contributing to the downfall of American democracy

The war on American democracy is at a fever pitch. Such a corrosive state of affairs did not arise spontaneously up from the people but instead was pushed, top-down, by six private sector special interest groups—big business, the House Freedom Caucus, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militias. In American Apocalypse Rena Steinzor argues that these groups are nothing more than well-financed armies fighting a battle of attrition against the national government, with power, money, and fame as their central motivations.

The book begins at the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when the modern regulatory state was born. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration ensured that everything from our air to our medicine was safe. But efforts to thwart this "big government" agenda began swiftly, albeit in the shadows. Business leaders built a multi-billion dollar presence in the Capitol, and the rest of the six interest groups soon followed.

While the groups do not coordinate their attacks, and sometimes their short-term goals even conflict, their priorities fall within a surprisingly tight bullseye: the size and power of the administrative state. In the near-term, their campaigns will bring the crucial functions of government to a halt, which will lead to immediate suffering by the working classes, and a rapid deterioration of race relations. Over the long-term, as the prevalence of global pandemics and climate crises increase, an incapacitated national government will usher in unimaginable harm.

This book is the first to conceptualize these groups together, as one deconstructive and awe-inspiring force. Steinzor delves into each of their histories, mapping the strategies, tactics, and characteristics that make them so powerful. She offers the most comprehensive story available about the downfall of American democracy, reminding us that only by recognizing what we are up against can we hope to bring about change.

Honorable Mention, 2025 Joe Trotter First Book Award, given by the Urban History Association

Explores how concerns about poverty-induced Black crime cultivated by police, journalists, and city officials sparked a rise in tough-on-crime policing in Philadelphia

During the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, Philadelphia’s police department, journalists, and city officials used news media to create and reinforce narratives that criminalized Black people and led to police brutality, segregation, and other dehumanizing consequences for Black communities. Over time, city officials developed a system of racial capitalism in which City Council financially divested from social welfare programs and instead invested in the police department, promoting a “tough on crime” policing program that generated wealth for Philadelphia’s tax base in an attempt to halt white flight from the city.

Drawing from newspapers, census records, oral histories, interviews, police investigation reports, housing project pamphlets, maps, and more, Hope and Struggle in the Policed City draws the connective line between the racial bias African Americans faced as they sought opportunity in the North and the over-policing of their communities, of which the effects are still visible today. Menika B. Dirkson posits that the tough-on-crime framework of this time embedded itself within every aspect of society, leading to enduring systemic issues of hyper-surveillance, the use of excessive force, and mass incarceration.

Hope and Struggle in the Policed City makes important contributions to our understanding of how a city government’s budgetary strategy can function as racial capitalism that relies on criminal scapegoating. Most cogently, it illustrates how this perpetuates the cycle of poverty-induced crime, inflates rates of incarceration and police brutality, and marginalizes poor people of color.

An inside perspective of the federal bureaucracy, with personal intrigue and prescriptions for future administrations.

"In the United States you can elect any president you want, but a small group of people you’ve never heard of still run everything — year after year, administration after administration. That’s not democracy. It’s oligarchy, and Mark Moyar explains exactly how it works." 

—Tucker Carlson

This book tells a remarkable true story of bureaucratic assassination during the Trump presidency, revealing in vivid detail how career federal employees thwarted President Trump’s efforts to drain the swamp.

Mark Moyar, a senior political appointee at the US Agency for International Development, discovered evidence of corruption involving five career bureaucrats and reported it to agency officials in 2018. Senior bureaucrats orchestrated a sophisticated retaliatory plot, which began when a Special Operations general fraudulently accused Moyar of divulging classified information, and ended with the termination of Moyar's employment. 

The bureau that Moyar had been on track to lead, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, fell into the hands of one of his bureaucratic assassins. The leading perpetrator of the corruption exposed by Moyar subsequently escaped punishment by transferring to another federal agency.

A multi-agency cover-up followed. Moyar sought help from three Offices of the Inspector General—the government’s main bulwarks against whistleblower retaliation—but all three conducted flimsy investigations that absolved the bureaucracy. When Senator Charles Grassley demanded that agency officials fill the gaps in the government’s story, he was met with lies and evasions.

This suspense-filled drama provides an insider’s view of the federal bureaucracy’s corruption, its weaponization of bureaucratic procedures, and its failures to protect employees from retaliation. In telling his story, Moyar reveals how future administrations can drain the swamp and draws a roadmap for the restoration of integrity to the United States government.

"Paul has provided a vital piece to our understanding of modern liberalism’s origins."

—Ronald J. Pestritto, Author of America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism

Today’s political and cultural divisions leave many wondering how America could have arrived at its present state. This book traces the source to an unlikely historical accident.

The founding principles of the American Revolution—that all individuals have unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their labor, and that governments should exist only to protect these rights—were a singularity in human history. The nation’s failure to secure the slaves’ equal rights to self-ownership led to a civil war and the constitutional recognition of this vital principle. And yet, scarcely four decades later, social science faculties at the country’s top colleges and universities repudiated the country’s founding principles.

The cause of this startling change was the education that hundreds of American college students and graduates received in German universities in the late 19^th century. Germany’s professoriate was dominated by state socialists who taught that individuals had no natural rights, only privileges granted to them by the government. American students absorbed these beliefs and after their return, established this country’s first graduate-level programs, seeding the first generation of PhDs. Inventing the name “progressives” for themselves, their goal was to recast America’s governmental and economic institutions in the image of Germany’s authoritarian government and oligarchical society. Higher education was transformed with disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences. Generation after generation of students, including those who went on to teach, abandoned this country’s traditional relationship of the individual to the state.  

Over the next several decades, American politics, journalism, law, and education evolved in directions inimical to the nation’s founding principles, leaving the country increasingly fractured—not unlike the decades leading up to the first Civil War. This book traces those changes, offering ways to alter the trajectory of today’s political and educational culture. It includes a proposal to eliminate personal and corporate income and payroll taxes and raise today’s government revenues with a low (1%) universal sales tax. 

North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. How did this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progress from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of perhaps 50 such weapons in 2021?

Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to 2010. Hecker goes beyond the technical details—described in plain English from his on-the-ground experience at the North's nuclear center at Yongbyon—to put the nuclear program exactly where it belongs, in the context of decades of fateful foreign policy decisions in Pyongyang and Washington.

Describing these decisions as "hinge points," he traces the consequences of opportunities missed by both sides. The result has been that successive U.S. administrations have been unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that might target the United States with nuclear weapons. Hecker's unique ability to marry the technical with the diplomatic is well informed by his interactions with North Korean and U.S. officials over many years, while his years of working with Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear officials have given him an unmatched breadth of experience from which to view and interpret the thinking and perspective of the North Koreans.

A damning examination of how violence serves to maintain social order and elite power in the United States

The Violent Underpinnings of American Life boldly asserts that violence—far from going against American ideals—is as American as apple pie, central to the country’s social order and the dominance of its most powerful groups. Drawing from extensive research and analysis of key social, political, and cultural events, Liam Downey investigates the myriad ways violence maintains the American way of life. Through compelling case studies, Downey identifies four main ways in which violence produces and maintains the American social hierarchy: the creation of divisions among non-elite social groups; the reinforcement of dominant discourses in multiple social arenas; the aligning of marginalized group identities with dominant institutional practices; and the selective promotion of the interests of specific, non-elite groups.

This is the first book to argue that violence is both a negative, coercive power and a positive, productive one that helps produce not only social order but also consent, discipline, discourse, identity, subjectivity, and embodied knowledge, among other things. The Violent Underpinnings of American Life is an audacious work that argues violence is absolutely central to social life in America, and that Americans cannot effectively fight against the inequalities that surround them without accepting this reality.

How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help — and how to fix it

As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects, Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight. From First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the controversial city planner Robert Moses, many well-known historical figures made a convincing case for affordable housing in America.

Despite the movement’s lofty ideals, the creation of the Projects led to the destruction of low-income communities across the country. From the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Black Bottom in Detroit, predominantly Black neighborhoods were judged only by the quality of their housing. Husock looks beyond these neighborhoods’ physical conditions to their uncounted riches, from local artists like August Wilson to vital community institutions. As he shares residents’ stories, he honors what they crafted through their own plans, rather than those of city planners.

Husock traces the history of public housing to contemporary debates on the government’s role in the housing market. Through interviews with residents, he reveals how public housing transformed the lives of Americans and the physical faces of cities and towns. He ultimately critiques "repair and reform" efforts, making policy recommendations that address the core failings of public housing for the people it was once designed to help. Mapping out a better path for policy-makers, he lays a new foundation for upward mobility in America.

Reveals how corporate greed led to scandal, corruption, and the January 6th insurrection—and how we can stop it from happening again

Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and the violence of the Capitol riot have made it unavoidably clear that the future of American democracy is in peril. Unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence our elections, while anti-democratic rhetoric threatens a tilt towards authoritarianism.

In Corporatocracy, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy reveals the role corporations play in this dire state of political affairs, and explains why and how they should be held accountable by the courts, their shareholders, and citizens themselves. Drawing on key Supreme Court cases, Torres-Spelliscy explores how corporations have, more often than not, been on the wrong side of history by working to undermine democratic norms, practices, and laws. From bankrolling regressive politicians to funding ghost candidates with dark money, she shows us how corporations subvert the will of the American people, and how courts struggle to hold them and corrupt politicians accountable.

Corporations have existed far longer than democracies have. If voters, consumers, and investors are not careful, corporations may well outlive democracy. Corporatocracy brings all of these shadowy tactics to light and offers meaningful legal reforms that can strengthen and protect American democracy.

A harrowing political history of Kurdish Iraq told through the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of a childhood refugee

In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people, the Iraqi Kurds. Five thousand people died in what became known as the Halabja Massacre, which has been deemed the worst chemical attack in history. Nicole F. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives.

Republic of Dreams is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa’s story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide.

Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland.

Engineering Expansion examines the U.S. Army's role in U.S. economic development from the nation's founding to the eve of the Civil War. William D. Adler starts with a simple question: if the federal government was weak in its early years, how could the economy and the nation have grown so rapidly?

Adler answers this question by focusing on the strongest part of the early American state, the U.S. Army. The Army shaped the American economy through its coercive actions in conquering territory, expanding the nation's borders, and maintaining public order and the rule of law. It built roads, bridges, and railroads while Army engineers and ordnance officers developed new technologies, constructed forts that encouraged western settlement and nurtured nascent communities, cleared rivers, and created manufacturing innovations that spread throughout the private sector. Politicians fought for control of the Army, but War Department bureaucracies also contributed to their own development by shaping the preferences of elected officials.

Engineering Expansion synthesizes a wide range of historical material and will be of interest to those interested in early America, military history, and politics in the early United States.

A deep dive into the strategies and tactics used by the radical left in recent years to undermine the institutions of the United States, along with suggestions for how to counter their advances.

"Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka document the Left’s metamorphosis into a bastardized, racialized Marxism that is a threat to everything Americans hold dear. In this deeply insightful book, readers will understand the nature of the beast—and how to fight it in their communities."

— Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Many Americans believe that the United States is in decline. They see a country that has become unrecognizable: where individuals are reduced to their race, ethnicity, or sexual identity; where children are indoctrinated into radical ideologies; where anti-semitism has become widespread. This book explains how all of these ills are rooted in Marxism. To be sure, it is not Soviet Marxism, but a Marxism that was shaped by European intellectuals, adapted and refined by America’s student radicals of the 1960s, and diffused throughout the culture as those student radicals became professors, community organizers, and leaders.

The end goal of these NextGen Marxists is expropriation, redistribution, central planning, and collectivism. They are working toward nothing less than the cultural transformation of the United States—and they have partially succeeded.

But NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It is infused with optimism. It reveals the dark inner workings of the radical left’s destructive agenda in the United States in order to teach Americans how to fight back.

The authors share their conviction that the best days for the United States are still ahead of us if every day Americans can work together to restore sanity and make America the great beacon of freedom once again.

It has great seeds of wisdom. —Sen. J.D. Vance

The Conservative Establishment’s consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. Conservatism was unable to stop or even slow the Left’s rolling revolutions in nearly every sector of American society—from classrooms to boardrooms, from the military to the culture at large. The Left has successfully transformed the nation over the past few generations, racking up victory after victory, with no clear end in sight. This is not sustainable for the country or the constituency represented by the Republican Party. For the Right to have a serious future, it needs to rethink its positions and think more deeply about the essential policy questions which will define the future of the country: race, men and women, sexuality, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This collection of essays, written by some of the Right’s most interesting thinkers and practitioners, seeks to reframe the ideological and policy direction of the American Right.

With essays by Michael Anton, Richard Hanania, Carson Holloway, John Fonte, David Azerrad, Helen Andrews, Scott Yenor, Joshua Mitchell, Aaron Renn, Arthur Milikh, David P. Goldman, Matthew Peterson, James Poulos, Theo Wold, Robert Delahunty, Jesse Merriam, Jeremy Carl, Eric Kaufmann, and Roger Kimball.

Drawing on the model of John Quincy Adams’s career as statesman, Angelo Codevilla explores the foundations of America’s foreign policy, identifies where it went disastrously wrong in the last century, and asks what a truly ‘America First’ approach to statecraft would look like today.

"In his final work, Codevilla has left us a chilling analysis of how the radically egalitarian impulse of the elite does not just erode human freedom at home, but when nation building abroad ensures tragedies for almost everyone involved" —Victor Davis Hanson

Minding our own business, while leaving other peoples to mind theirs, was the basis of the United States’ successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the nineteenth century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. This policy also remains the commonsense philosophy of most Americans today. 

America’s Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original “America First” foreign policy with the principles and results of the following hundred years of “progressive” foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars—large and small—that followed Wilson's handling of World War I resulted in not only a failed peace, but also more conflicts abroad and at home. 

Finally, America’s Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams’s insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environments and exemplify what “America First” can mean in our time. They chart a clear path to escape America’s previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called “progressive” international relations.

In 2010, 60 states had a military drone program. Today at least 113 countries and 65 non-state actors now have access to weaponized drone technologies. Alongside this, established ‘drone powers’ – the U.S., China, Turkey, and Iran – have expanded their own use of military drones, increasing the sale and deployment of drones around the world. In the De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare, drone expert, policy adviser, and historian, Dr James Patton Rogers, brings together 37 of the world’s leading voices on the growing issues of commercial and military drone technologies.

From the origins of military drones in the early 1900s and the resurgence of drone use during the War on Terror, through to the global proliferation of drones across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, this handbook explores the moral, ethical, technological, legal, military, geopolitical, social, and strategic issues at the heart of drone warfare. The first handbook of its kind, the volume also addresses Russia’s offensive war against Ukraine, the rise of Iranian and Houthi drones, and provides a focused analysis of the future of drone warfare and the opportunities and perils of AI, autonomy, and swarming technologies in the coming Third Drone Age.

This spirited book traces the roots of liberalism through the noblest traditions, virtues, institutions and longings embedded in Western culture.

Liberalism is under attack from both left and right, but anti-liberals have failed to understand how the tradition defines our idea of civic virtue. Liberalism is not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, an inheritance of virtues, institutions, customs, and longings embedded in our culture and passed on through our memories and stories of moral heroes.

In this book, Buckley explains how we learned magnanimity from the Code of Chivalry and to avoid brutishness from the Code of the Gentleman; how, through the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the novels of Charles Dickens, kindness became a liberal virtue; how the republican virtue of the Founders can be traced back to fourteenth century Sienese merchants. From the stories that comprise the Western Tradition of liberalism, we learned the civic virtues that are the efficient secret of American constitutional government.

The anti-liberal cult of wokeness has attempted to cancel this tradition, but it will not long survive. It offers a creed of sin without absolution, of guilt without soul-easing joys, of frowns without laughter. It rejects the West’s high culture and offers nothing in its place. Without learning, art, industry, or anything that might attract a person, its emptiness will soon be seen by all, and liberalism will continue to inspire the civic virtues of our culture.

 You shall thank Alan Dershowitz for writing this [valuable] book.

—Stephen Breyer, Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

If reliable but uncertain intelligence predicted a mass casualty terrorist attack and indicated likely suspects,

what preventive actions would be constitutionally authorized? Detention? Interrogation? Torture? What if the attack involved a weaponized virus? Should the government compel widespread inoculation that might kill hundreds of people while saving millions? What if an article describing how to circumvent the inoculation mandate was about to be published? Should censorship of the article be authorized?

These are the sorts of questions Alan Dershowitz has been asking for more than 60 years, in his teaching, writing, and litigation. Now, at age 86, he has written his magnum opus. In it, he suggests an overarching jurisprudential framework that would set limits to the ballooning power of what he calls “the preventive state.”

This important book offers unprecedented insights into one of the most underexamined developments of our age: the growing magnitude and frequency of cataclysmic threats, coupled with the increasingly effective—but increasingly intrusive—tools intended to predict and prevent them.

Dershowitz responds to the urgent need for a jurisprudence that provides balance and accountability as both dangers and preventive capabilities increase, threatening our security and our liberties. This masterful analysis should be read by everyone who cares about security, liberty, and democracy.

In Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics, political scientists Anand Edward Sokhey and Paul A. Djupe bring together a wide range of scholars and writers to examine the relationship between former President Donald Trump and white American evangelical Christians. They argue that, while this relationship—which saw evangelicals supporting a famously unfaithful, materialistic, and irreligious candidate despite self-defining in opposition to these characteristics—prompted many to wonder if Trump himself transformed American evangelical religion in politics, this alliance reflected both change and the outcome of dynamics that were in place or building for decades.

Contributors contextualize the Trump presidency within the story of religious demographic change, the growth of politicized religion, nationalistic religious expression, and the ways religion and politics in the United States are enmeshed in the politics of race. These investigations find that the idea of religious “transformation” is not accurate. Instead, the years 2015 to 2022 saw mainly minor changes to the ways religion appeared in public life—but these changes ultimately complemented and advanced an existing white evangelical strategy to increase political and social power as they became a demographic minority in the United States. Taken together, this collection reveals new insights for readers seeking to understand the religious dimensions of Trump’s rise, the reasons evangelicals become political activists, and the multifaceted alliances between secular politicians and conservative religious subcultures.

Contributors: Abraham Barranca, Ruth Braunstein, Ryan P. Burge, David E. Campbell, Jeremiah J. Castle, Paul A. Djupe, John C. Green, Sarah Heise, Geoffrey C. Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Gerardo Martí, Eric L. McDaniel, Napp Nazworth, Shayla F. Olson, Enrique Quezada-Llanes, Kaylynn Sims, Anand Edward Sokhey, Hilde Løvdal Stephens, Kyla K. Stepp, Allan Tellis.

In Community Benefits, Jovanna P. Rosen explores a new pattern in urban development: local residents and community representatives leveraging large-scale development projects for agreements that promise dedicated local benefits, such as parks and jobs. In general, such development projects have not produced impactful benefits for local residents, and often have contributed to significant community harm, including gentrification and displacement. In response, community activists have launched a fight to control development, using benefits-sharing agreements to ensure that projects produced better outcomes for local residents. While such agreements now exist across the nation, the process of negotiating and enforcing them remains challenging. This book dives deep into four case studies—in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and Milwaukee—to answer the following questions: Who ultimately benefits from both the agreements and the projects in question? How do benefits get delivered, and who controls this process? What works for these agreements to successfully produce community outcomes?

Rosen shows that, without agreements that promote accountability, developers and other project proponents can walk away from the negotiating table once the agreement is signed and the development moves forward. This disregard for community benefits and priorities can leave community residents solely responsible for benefits delivery during implementation, but with few viable avenues to ensure that outcomes materialize. The cases reveal specific elements that agreements require to achieve success during implementation: community participation, managerial connections, effective partnerships, responsiveness, and vigorous oversight with accountability mechanisms. Although creating these conditions is difficult, sometimes impossible, and contingent on fragile processes, Rosen concludes the book with recommendations for both the agreement negotiation and implementation phases to ensure success.

Nation’s Metropolis describes how the national capital region functions as a metropolitan political economy. Its authors distinguish aspects of the Washington region that reflect its characteristics as a national capital from those common to most other metropolitan regions and to other capitals. To do so, they employ an interdisciplinary approach that draws from economics, political science, sociology, geography, and history.

Royce Hanson and Harold Wolman focus on four major themes: the federal government as the region’s basic industry and its role in economic, physical, and political development; race as a core force in the development of the metropolis; the mismatch of the governance and economy of the national capital region; and the conundrum of achieving fully democratic governance for Washington, DC. Critical regional issues and policy problems are analyzed in the context of these themes, including poverty, inequality, education, housing, transportation, water supply, and governance.

The authors conclude that the institutions and practices that accrued over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are inadequate for dealing effectively with the issues confronting the city and the region in the twenty-first. The accumulation of problems arising from the unique role of the federal government and the persistent problem of racial inequality has been compounded by failure to resolve the conundrum of governance for the District of Columbia. They recommend rethinking the governance of the entire region.

While many books are concerned with the city of Washington, DC, Nation’s Metropolis is the only book focused on the development and political economy of the metropolitan region as a whole. It will engage readers interested in the national capital, metropolitan development more generally, and the growing comparative literature on national capitals.

An original and eclectic view of cookbooks as political acts

Cookbooks are not political in conventional ways. They neither proclaim, as do manifestos, nor do they forbid, as do laws. They do not command agreement, as do arguments, and their stipulations often lack specificity — cook "until browned." Yet, as repositories of human taste, cookbooks transmit specific blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. Cookbooks both form and reflect who we are. In Cookbook Politics, Kennan Ferguson explores the sensual and political implications of these repositories, demonstrating how they create nations, establish ideologies, shape international relations, and structure communities.

Cookbook Politics argues that cookbooks highlight aspects of our lives we rarely recognize as political—taste, production, domesticity, collectivity, and imagination—and considers the ways in which cookbooks have or do politics, from the most overt to the most subtle. Cookbooks turn regional diversity into national unity, as Pellegrino Artusi's Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well did for Italy in 1891. Politically affiliated organizations compile and sell cookbooks—for example, the early United Nations published The World's Favorite Recipes. From the First Baptist Church of Midland, Tennessee's community cookbook, to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to the Italian Futurists' proto-fascist guide to food preparation, Ferguson demonstrates how cookbooks mark desires and reveal social commitments: your table becomes a representation of who you are.

Authoritative, yet flexible; collective, yet individualized; cooperative, yet personal—cookbooks invite participation, editing, and transformation. Created to convey flavor and taste across generations, communities, and nations, they enact the continuities and changes of social lives. Their functioning in the name of creativity and preparation—with readers happily consuming them in similar ways—makes cookbooks an exemplary model for democratic politics.

The two-state solution is doomed; the one-state reality is here to stay

Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In Paradigm Lost, Ian S. Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question and offers a provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no more success than would negotiations to establish a one-state solution.

Basing his argument on the decisiveness of unanticipated consequences, Lustick shows how the combination of Zionism's partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with what the author calls "Holocaustia," and the Israel lobby's dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet, he demonstrates, it has also unintentionally set the stage for new struggles and "better problems" for both Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on the history of scientific ideas that once seemed certain but were ultimately discarded, Lustick encourages shifting attention from two-state blueprints that provide no map for realistic action to the democratizing competition that arises when different subgroups, forced to be part of the same polity, redefine their interests and form new alliances to pursue them.

Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality.

Among urban designers and municipal officials, the term encroachment is defined as a deviation from the official master plan. But in cities today, such informal modifications to the urban fabric are deeply enmeshed with formal planning procedures. Master Plans and Encroachments examines informality in the high-modernist city of Islamabad as a strategic conformity to official schemes and regulations rather than as a deviation from them.

For the new administrative capital of Pakistan designed in 1959 by Greek architect and planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Islamabad’s master plan offers a clear template of formal urban design within which informal spaces and processes have been articulated. Drawing on deep archival research, wide-ranging interviews, and an array of visual material, including photographs, maps, and architectural drawings, Faiza Moatasim shows how Islamabad’s master plan is not simply a blueprint that guides future urban development or makes its violations apparent; it is used by both city officials and citizens to develop informal spaces that accommodate unfulfilled needs and desires of those living and working in the city.

Master Plans and Encroachments is the first book that examines the informal practices of both the privileged and the underprivileged. The book highlights how low-, middle-, and upper-income people do not randomly build informal spaces; they strategically use architectural techniques to support their informal claims to space, which are often met with the government’s tacit approval. By focusing on those spaces in Islamabad’s urban fabric that are not part of its official master plan, the book demonstrates how planning actually works in complex ways.

China turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. This book situates China’s urbanization in the interconnected forces of historical legacies, contemporary state interventions, and human and ecological conditions. It captures the complexity of the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It is also a book about China, in which the contributors provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change.

The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, achieve three interconnected aims. The first is to explore how the process of urbanization has shaped and been influenced by the social, economic, and physical interactions that take place in and beyond cities, and the state interventions intended to regulate such interactions. The second is to examine the shifts and evolutions emerging in urban China, such as the economic slowdown, population aging and low fertility rates, and how cities interact with the environment and planet given China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change. The third is to explore new sources of information for conducting research on urban China, such as satellite and street-level imagery data and online listings, to account for the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization.

Contributors: Juan Chen, Dean Curran, Deborah Davis, Peilei Fan, Qin Gao, Pierre F. Landry, Shi Li, Shiqi Ma, Justin Remais, Alan Smart, Shin Bin Tan, Jeremy Wallace, Sarah Williams, Binbin Wu, Weiping Wu, Guibin Xiong, Wenfei Xu.

Nationalism is on the rise across the Western world, serving as a rallying cry for voters angry at the unacknowledged failures of globalization that has dominated politics and economics since the end of the Cold War. In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman trains a sympathetic but skeptical eye on the trend, highlighting the deep challenges that face any contemporary effort to revive social cohesion at the national level.

Noting the obstacles standing in the way of basing any unifying political project on a singular vision of national identity, Goldman highlights three pillars of mid-twentieth-century nationalism, all of which are absent today: the social dominance of Protestant Christianity, the absorption of European immigrants in a broader white identity, and the defense of democracy abroad. Most of today's nationalists fail to recognize these necessary underpinnings of any renewed nationalism, or the potentially troubling consequences that they would engender.

To secure the general welfare in a new century, the future of American unity lies not in monolithic nationalism. Rather, Goldman suggests we move in the opposite direction: go small, embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and support political projects grounded in local communities.

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?

It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.

The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

China's rise and its importance to international relations as a discipline-defining phenomenon is well recognized. Yet when scholars analyze China's foreign relations, they typically focus on Beijing's military power, economic might, or political leaders. As a result, most traditional assessments miss a crucial factor: China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). In China's Rising Foreign Ministry, Dylan M.H Loh upends conventional understandings of Chinese diplomacy by underlining the importance of the ministry and its diplomats in contemporary Chinese foreign policy. Loh explains how MOFA gradually became the main interface of China's foreign policy and the primary vehicle through which the idea of 'China' is produced, articulated, and represented on the world stage. This theoretically innovative and ambitious book offers an original reading of Chinese foreign policy, with wide-ranging implications for international relations. By shedding light on the dynamics of Chinese diplomacy and how assertiveness is constructed, Loh provides readers with a comprehensive re-appraisal of China's foreign ministry and the role it performs in China's re-emergence.

How grassroots activism transforms contemporary urban politics in Philadelphia and beyond

Immigration, gentrification, and the rise of an innovation-based economy are altering American cities. In Mobilization Politics, Stephen J. McGovern offers a new approach to analyzing contemporary urban politics in light of these broad, societal changes. Redirecting the focus from the top-down orientation of regime theory toward a more bottom-up perspective, he contends that a striking upsurge in grassroots activism around issues such as policing and criminal justice reform, precarious labor, affordable housing, community development, and workforce diversity is transforming urban politics and policymaking.

Through a detailed analysis of political activity in Philadelphia over the past decade, McGovern elucidates the mechanisms and impacts of grassroots mobilization. Philadelphia is typical of many large American cities with a relatively prosperous downtown core surrounded by neighborhoods that continue to struggle, sometimes amidst grinding poverty and long-standing racial oppression. And yet, Philadelphia, as a site of substantial grassroots activism since the early 2010s, has made significant strides in combatting economic and racial inequality in several important policy realms.

Mobilization Politics expands the scope of the field of urban politics beyond the quiet, behind-the-scenes bargaining of regime partners and considers other key arenas of political contestation—such as electoral politics; policymaking by the mayor, administrative agencies, and the city council; and a wide range of activist groups operating at the grassroots. The book shows how bottom-up mobilization has been especially effective when activists engaging in street protests and demonstrations have joined with more established community-based organizations and issue-advocacy groups skilled in lobbying, litigation, and electioneering. By highlighting how this combination of insider/outsider activism has been a potent force for political change in contemporary Philadelphia, Mobilization Politics presents a more comprehensive, dynamic, and revealing way to look at power and politics in American cities today.

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone’s right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits” and to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.” This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.

The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of “post-truth” societies. “Dual use” and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.

The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.

Can human rights be claimed against agents other than states, such as transnational corporations and global governance institutions? Does the authority of human rights depend on international law-making, or do they have a moral status that must be honored even in the absence of legal structures? What obligations do human rights impose on states acting across borders? What does it mean that the international community must work together to bring about their universal realization? Do we have human rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and fully democratic government? What must individuals do for the human rights of others?

Although these questions may be essential for the future of global politics and international relations, human rights doctrine offers no conclusive answers for them. In Human Rights as Human Independence, Julio Montero develops an original theory of human rights that helps us think about these and similar issues. Montero argues that human rights regulate the conduct of sovereign political agents both within and beyond borders, and that the aim of human rights norms is to protect everyone's fundamental moral claim to enjoy an equal sphere of agency to develop their personality.

Human Rights as Human Independence offers a comprehensive, systematic, and complete account of the nature, sources, and scope of human rights that can be used to interpret international documents and make informed decisions about how human rights practice must be continued in the years to come. The book is thus of interest for a wide audience, ranging from philosophers and political theorists to lawyers, human rights scholars, and activists.

An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrine

In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law.

According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state.

Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed—and continue to manage—to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

A close look at innovations in policing and the law that should govern them

A host of technologies—among them digital cameras, drones, facial recognition devices, night-vision binoculars, automated license plate readers, GPS, geofencing, DNA matching, datamining, and artificial intelligence—have enabled police to carry out much of their work without leaving the office or squad car, in ways that do not easily fit the traditional physical search and seizure model envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Virtual Searches develops a useful typology for sorting through this bewildering array of old, new, and soon-to-arrive policing techniques. It then lays out a framework for regulating their use that expands the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections without blindly imposing its warrant requirement, and that prioritizes democratic over judicial policymaking.

The coherent regulatory regime developed in Virtual Searches ensures that police are held accountable for their use of technology without denying them the increased efficiency it provides in their efforts to protect the public. Whether policing agencies are pursuing an identified suspect, constructing profiles of likely perpetrators, trying to find matches with crime scene evidence, collecting data to help with these tasks, or using private companies to do so, Virtual Searches provides a template for ensuring their actions are constitutionally legitimate and responsive to the polity.

Reveals the possibilities and challenges of civic education in circumstances of extreme polarization, and how civic learning and political divisiveness can interact and influence each other

As fears about polarization—and its contribution to democratic crisis and corrosion—rise, many people have posited civic education as a possible remedy. In a time of increasing political polarization, what should the goals of civic education be, and how should they be implemented? In the latest installment of the NOMOS series, Eric Beerbohm and Elizabeth Beaumont bring together a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars across philosophy, politics, and law, inviting us to think deeply about the complex promises and pitfalls of civic education.

Contributors raise a variety of crucial considerations not only about how to educate citizens in a polarized era but also for a polarized era. What types of civic learning hold promise for preparing students to navigate their way through a political landscape of escalating hostile factions, distrust, truth decay, and disagreement about basic facts? Could or should civic education attempt to reduce or counteract polarization, or should it focus on other aims?

Beaumont and Beerbohm show us that the dynamics and circumstances of polarization do not stop at the schoolhouse gates, but bring new urgency together with added pressures and constraints to all civic education. As political polarization continues to intensify across the globe, this riveting volume illuminates the significance, the possibilities, and the challenges of civic education in the contemporary era.

In A Right to Lie?, legal scholar Catherine J. Ross addresses the urgent issue of whether the nation's highest officers, including the president, have a right to lie under the Speech Clause, no matter what damage their falsehoods cause. Does freedom of expression protect even factual falsehoods? If so, are lies by candidates and public officials protected? And is there a constitutional path, without violating the First Amendment, to stop a president whose persistent lies endanger our lives and our democracy?

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the general answer to each question is "yes." Drawing from dramatic court cases about defamers, proponents of birtherism, braggarts, and office holders, Ross reveals the almost insurmountable constitutional and practical obstacles to legal efforts to rein in public deception. She explains the rules that govern the treatment of lies, while also demonstrating the incalculable damage presidential mendacity may lead to, as revealed in President Trump's lies about the COVID-19 pandemic and the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Falsehoods have been at issue in every presidential impeachment proceeding from Nixon to Trump. But, until now, no one has analyzed why public lies might be impeachable offenses, and whether the First Amendment would provide a defense. Noting that speech by public employees does not receive the same First Amendment protection as the speech of ordinary citizens, Ross proposes the constitutionally viable solution of treating presidents as public employees who work for the people. Charged with oversight of the Executive, Congress may—and should—put future presidents on notice that material lies to the public on substantial matters will be deemed a "high crime and misdemeanor" subject to censure and even impeachment. A Right to Lie? explains how this approach could work if the political will were in place.

As the post-WWII liberal democratic consensus comes under increasing assault around the globe, Zachary R. Goldsmith investigates a timely topic: the reemergence of fanaticism. His book demonstrates how the concept of fanaticism, so often flippantly invoked with little forethought, actually has a long history stretching back to ancient times. Tracing this history through the Reformation and the Enlightenment to our present moment of political extremism run amok, Goldsmith offers a novel account of fanaticism, detailing its transformation from a primarily religious to a political concept around the time of the French Revolution. He draws on the work of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—all keen observers of fanaticism, and especially its political variant—in order to explore this crucial moment in the development of political fanaticism.

Examining conceptualizations of fanaticism from different geographical, political, temporal, and contextual backgrounds, Goldsmith reveals how the concept has changed over time and resists easy definition. Nevertheless, his analysis of the writings of key figures from the tradition of political thought regarding fanaticism yields a complex and nuanced understanding of the concept that allows us to productively identify and observe its most salient characteristics: irrationality, messianism, the embrace of abstraction, the desire for novelty, the pursuit of perfection, a lack of limits in politics, the embrace of violence, certainty, passion, and its perennial attraction to intellectuals. Goldsmith’s political-philosophical history of fanaticism offers us an argument and warning against fanaticism itself, demonstrating that fanaticism is antidemocratic, illiberal, antipolitical, and never necessary.

In many rapidly urbanizing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, local politics undermines the effectiveness of urban planning. Politicians have incentives to ignore formal urban plans and sideline planners, and instead provide urban land and services through informal channels in order to cultivate political constituencies (a form of what political scientists refer to as “clientelism”). This results in inequitable and environmentally damaging patterns of urban growth in some of the largest and most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world. The technocratic planning solutions often advocated by governments and international development organizations are not enough. To overcome this problem, urban planners must understand and adapt to the complex politics of urban informality.

In this book, Chandan Deuskar explores how politicians in developing democracies provide urban land and services to the urban poor in exchange for their political support, demonstrates how this impacts urban growth, and suggests innovative and practical ways in which urban planners can try to be more effective in this challenging political context. He draws on literature from multiple disciplines (urban planning, political science, sociology, anthropology, and others), statistical analysis of global data on urbanization, and an in-depth case study of urban Ghana.

Urban planners and international development experts working in the Global South, as well as researchers, educators, and students of global urbanization will find Urban Planning in a World of Informal Politics informative and thought-provoking.

Raphaël Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the word "genocide" in the winter of 1942 and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime, setting his sights on reimagining human rights institutions and humanitarian law after World War II. After the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin slipped into obscurity, and within a few short years many of the same governments that had agreed to outlaw genocide and draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights tried to undermine these principles.

This intellectual biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists and human rights figures sheds new light on the origins of the concept and word "genocide," contextualizing Lemkin's intellectual development in interwar Poland and exploring the evolving connection between his philosophical writings, juridical works, and politics over the following decades. The book presents Lemkin's childhood experience of anti-Jewish violence in imperial Russia; his youthful arguments to expand the laws of war to protect people from their own governments; his early scholarship on Soviet criminal law and nationalities violence; his work in the 1930s to advance a rights-based approach to international law; his efforts in the 1940s to outlaw genocide; and his forays in the 1950s into a social-scientific and historical study of genocide, which he left unfinished.

Revealing what the word "genocide" meant to people in the wake of World War II—as the USSR and Western powers sought to undermine the Genocide Convention at the UN, while delegations from small states and former colonies became the strongest supporters of Lemkin's law—Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide examines how the meaning of genocide changed over the decades and highlights the relevance of Lemkin's thought to our own time.

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK / TOP 10 RECOMMENDED READ

Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity.

In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children."

With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.

Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.

Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.

After the Democratic Party divided Americans along gender and racial lines, F.H. Buckley argues that the Republican Party can become the natural governing party again by uniting Americans around a return to their roots—championing the common good, liberty, and equality.

"Frank Buckley shakes conservatives by their lapels in this sharp-edged vision for a Republican Party. Progressivism Conservatism does what’s needed—disrupt received wisdom with pragmatic, innovative ideas."  —Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense

"F. H. Buckley shows us how a seeming contradiction can lead to the healing of a fractured country."  —Roger L. Simon, award-winning novelist and editor, Epoch Times

The Republican Party must return to its roots as a progressive conservative party that defends the American Dream, the idea that whoever you are, you can get ahead and know that your children will have it better than you did. It must show how the Democrats have become the party of inequality and immobility and that they created what structural racism exists through their unjust education, immigration, and job-killing policies.

Republicans must seek to drain the swamp by limiting the clout of lobbyists and interest groups. They must also be nationalists, and as American nationalism is defined by the liberal nationalism of our founders, the party must reject the illiberalism of extremists on the Left and Right. As progressives, Republicans must also recognize nationalism’s leftward gravitational force and the way in which it demands that the party serve the common good through policies that protect the less fortunate among our countrymen.

At a time when the Left asks us to scorn our country, Republicans must also be the conservative party that defends our families, the nobility of American ideals, and the founders’ republican virtues.

By championing these policies, the Republicans will retain the new voters Trump brought to the GOP as well as those who left the party because of him. And as progressive conservatives, the GOP will become America’s natural governing party.

The powerful story of how the War on Terror created the conditions for the emergence of a novel theory of jihad

On March 7th, 2007, three Muslim university students left their small city on the Canadian Prairies, seemingly without a trace. In the ensuing months, their disappearance raised fears among Canadian and US security agencies that the men had become “radicalized,” posing a grave threat to national security. From presidential briefings and targeted drone assassinations to a politically charged trial in a Brooklyn courtroom, the men’s story sheds new light not only on the figure of the “radical,” but also on the “moderate” Muslim, represented by a community forever changed by the men’s departure.

Homegrown Radicals offers a case study of the complex entanglements of the radical and moderate Muslim in post-9/11 North America. Youcef Soufi brings these figures together in uneasy tension, providing insight into how state violence has inextricably tied them together. Focusing on the radicalization of the three Muslim students, the book traces the general sense of affective injury among North American Muslims over the loss of Muslim life in Western military campaigns overseas.

In this context, a new theory of jihad rooted in a Muslim utopian imagination emerged, marking a significant rupture with premodern Islamic thought. The three “radicals” were among thousands of Anglophone Muslims who found this new theory compelling as both a diagnosis and a solution to the violence unleashed in the War on Terror. The book examines how and why this theory resonated, as well as its consequences for the men’s families, friends, and Muslim community.

Homegrown Radicals highlights how post-9/11 Islamophobia has operated through the conceptual blurring of the line between “moderate” and “radical” Muslims, and asks what alternative forms of solidarity may transcend the violent boundaries of the nation-state.

Energy is an enabler of – and a constraint on – military power. Operational Energy provides military officers with knowledge and skills to plan effectively for the operational energy needs of their forces. Operational energy is the energy used to train, move, and sustain military forces and weapons platforms for military operations.

Energy has always played a role in battlefield outcomes. Over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the importance of energy in warfighting has grown. Today, energy is a critical pillar of national defense and a major factor in military power. In modern warfare, attaining energy superiority over one’s adversaries is a critical condition for success on the battlefield. Operational energy planning is an integral part of all combat and regular operations.

Operational Energy is a valuable and extensive resource for students of US Department of Defense courses in military universities, colleges, and academic training programs; scholars of geopolitics, and researchers on US and global energy security.

Operational Energy is to date the only textbook on defense energy planning, analysis, and strategy. It examines in detail fuel types, geopolitical issues, energy supply risks, market economic factors, and technology, presenting topics for future research. It also includes chapter summaries, main points for study, and case studies.

In The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha Henry makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Henry shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies.

The book’s intersectional analysis of peacekeeping is based on data amassed through more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork on peacekeeping missions and training centers around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Henry demonstrates how focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping’s root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been sidelined within the field, she brings the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions.

Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, this book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist best known for The Revolt of the Masses, first translated into English in 1932. In it, Ortega critiques a populist deformation of democracy by the rise of a “mass mentality” characterized by selfishness, a lack of curiosity, and a general indifference to the opinions and attitudes of others. However, as Brendon Westler makes clear, we need to look beyond Ortega’s arguments about populism and democracy in his most famous work to recover the philosopher’s expansive political outlook and to identify his valuable contributions to the history and advancement of liberalism.

Westler’s book reconstructs Ortega’s political theory, underscoring its distinctive historical origins as well as the ways in which it might be instructive to us today. Through an exploration of works less familiar to an English-speaking audience, such as Concord and Liberty, “Vieja y nueva política,” “De Europa meditatio Quaedam,” and “Democracia morbosa,” combined with a sensitivity to larger social and political ideas circulating within Spain, The Revolting Masses traces the contours of Ortega’s approach to politics. Westler argues that reading texts written over the course of the philosopher’s entire career, in combination with The Revolt of the Masses, offers a more complete picture of Ortega’s political thought—one that advocates for a liberal ethos as an answer to populism and promotes both individual freedom and the preservation of community bonds.

As The Revolting Masses shows, Ortega was, above all, a philosopher who reflected on what it would take for people of differing beliefs to live together. His unique conception of liberalism, grounded in the Spanish tradition, not only emphasizes pluralism and diversity of thought and institutions but also serves as a potential antidote to the populism of our present moment.

A impassioned defense of the European Union and a concise analysis of its present challenges and future

In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). In a new afterword written in the wake of the 2019 EU parliamentary elections, Krastev concludes that although the union is as fragile as ever, its chances of enduring are much better than they were just a few years ago.

Lethal autonomous weapons are weapon systems that can select and destroy targets without intervention by a human operator. Fighting Machines explores the relationship between lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), the concept of human dignity, and international law. Much of this analysis speaks to three fundamental and related problems: When a LAWS takes a human life, is that killing a violation of human dignity? Can states and non-state actors use LAWS in accordance with international law? And are there certain responsibilities of human decision-making during wartime that we should not delegate to machines?

In the book, Dan Saxon argues that the use of LAWS to take human life constitutes a violation of human dignity. Rather than concentrating on the victims of the use of lethal force, Saxon instead focuses on the technology and relevant legal principles and rules to advance several propositions. First, as LAWS operate at increasingly greater speeds, their use will undermine the opportunities for, and the value of, human reasoning and judgment. Second, by transferring responsibility for reasoning and judgment about the use of lethal force to computer software, the use of LAWS violates the dignity of the soldiers, commanders, and law enforcement officers who historically have made such decisions, and, therefore, breaches international law. Third, weapon designs that facilitate teamwork between humans and autonomous systems are necessary to ensure that humans and LAWS can operate interdependently so that individuals can fulfil their obligations under international law—including the preservation of their own dignity—and ensure that human reasoning and judgment are available for cognitive functions better suited to humans than machines.

Fighting Machines speaks to the fields of international humanitarian law, human rights, criminal law, and legal philosophy. It will also be of interest to non-lawyers, especially military officers, government policy makers, political scientists, and international relations scholars, as well as roboticists and ethicists.

A compelling account of politics and social philosophy in Levinas's Talmudic commentaries

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a French philosopher known for his radical ethics and for his contribution to Jewish thought in his commentaries on Talmudic sources. In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog confronts a major difficulty in Levinas's philosophy: the relationship between ethics and politics. Levinas's ethics describes the encounter with the other, that is, with any other human being. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is a relationship in which the ego is commanded by a transcendent and unquestionable order to take responsibility for the other person. Politics, on the other hand, presupposes at least three people: the ego, the other, and any third party. Among three people, nothing can be transcendent; on the contrary, everything must be negotiated.

Against the conventional view of Levinas's conception of the political as the interruption and collapse of the ethical, Herzog argues that in the Talmudic readings, Levinas constructed politics positively. She shows that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a pragmatism that complements, revises, and challenges the extreme ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works—Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, and Of God Who Comes to Mind. Her analysis illuminates Levinas's explanations of the relationship between ethics and politics: ethics is the foundation of justice; justice contains a necessary violence that must be moderated by mercy; and justice, general laws, and national aspirations must be linked in an attempt to "improve universality itself."

Advocates representing historically disadvantaged groups have long understood the need for strong public relations, effective fundraising, and robust channels of communication with the communities that they serve. Yet the neoliberal era and its infusion of money into the political arena have deepened these imperatives, thus adding new financial hurdles to the long list of obstacles facing minority communities. To respond to these challenges, a professionalized, nonprofit model of political advocacy has steadily gained traction. In many cases, advocacy organizations sought to harness and redirect the radical verve that characterized the protest movements of the 1960s into pragmatic, state-sanctioned approaches to political engagement.

In Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens, Matthew Dean Hindman looks at how and why contemporary political advocacy groups have transformed social movements and their participants. Looking to LGBT political movements as an exemplary case study, Hindman explores the advocacy explosion in the United States and its impact on how advocates encourage citizens to understand their role in the political process. He argues that current advocacy groups encourage members of the LGBT community to view themselves as stakeholders in a common struggle for political incorporation. In doing so, however, they often overshadow more imaginative and transformational approaches that could unsettle and challenge straight society and its prevailing political and sexual norms. Advocacy groups carved out a space within a neoliberalizing political process that enabled them to instruct their members, followers, and constituents on serving effectively as industrious political claimants. Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens thus sheds light on grassroots politics as it is practiced in present-day America and offers a compelling and original analysis of the ways in which neoliberalism challenges citizens to participate as consumers and investors in the advocacy marketplace.

An examination of the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s

Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape.

In True Blues, Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as "contentious institutions," Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization.

Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.

Transitional justice, commonly defined as the process of confronting the legacies of past human rights abuses and atrocities, often does not produce the kinds of results that are imagined. In multiethnic, divided societies like Uganda, people who have not been directly affected by harm, atrocity, and abuse go about their daily lives without ever confronting what happened in the past. When victims and survivors raise their voices to ask for help, or when plans are announced to address that harm, it is this unaffected population that see such plans as pointless. They complain about what they perceive as the "needless" time and money that will be spent to fix something that they see as unimportant and, ultimately, block any restorative processes.

Joanna R. Quinn spent twenty years working in Uganda and uses its particular case as a lens through which she examines the failure of deeply divided societies to acknowledge the past. She proposes that the needed remedy is the development of a very rudimentary understanding—what she calls "thin sympathy"—among individuals in each of the different factions and groups of the other's suffering prior to establishing any transitional justice process. Based on 440 extensive interviews with elites and other thought leaders in government, traditional institutions, faith groups, and NGOs, as well as with women and children throughout the country, Thin Sympathy argues that the acquisition of a basic understanding of what has taken place in the past will enable the development of a more durable transitional justice process.

The notion of corruption as a problem for politics spans many centuries and political, social, and cultural contexts. But it is incredibly difficult to define what we mean when we describe a regime or actor as corrupt: while corruption suggests a falling away from purity, health, or integrity, it flourishes today in an environment that is often inarticulate about its moral ideals and wary of perfectionist discourse. Providing a historical perspective on the idea, Robert Alan Sparling explores diverse visions of corruption that have been elucidated by thinkers across the modern philosophical tradition.

In a series of chronologically ordered philosophical portraits, Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thought of Erasmus, Étienne de La Boétie, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, Robespierre, Kant, and Weber, Sparling situates these thinkers in their historical contexts and argues that each of them offers a distinctive vision of corruption that has continuing relevance in contemporary political debates. He contrasts immoderate purists with impure moderates and reveals corruption to be a language of reaction and revolution. The book explores themes such as the nature of civic trust and distrust; the relationship of transparency to accountability; the integrity of leaders and the character of uncorrupted citizens; the division between public and private; the nature of dependency; and the relationship between regime and civic disposition.

Political Corruption examines how philosophers have conceived of public office and its abuse and how they have sought to insulate the public sphere from anticivic inclinations and interests. Sparling argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime and of the character of its citizens and officeholders.

From the University of California, Berkeley, to Middlebury College, institutions of higher learning increasingly find themselves on the front lines of cultural and political battles over free speech. Repeatedly, students, faculty, administrators, and politically polarizing invited guests square off against one another, assuming contrary positions on the limits of thought and expression, respect for differences, the boundaries of toleration, and protection from harm.

In Free Speech on Campus, political philosopher Sigal Ben-Porath examines the current state of the arguments, using real-world examples to explore the contexts in which conflicts erupt, as well as to assess the place of identity politics and concern with safety and dignity within them. She offers a useful framework for thinking about free-speech controversies both inside and outside the college classroom, shifting the focus away from disputes about legality and harm and toward democracy and inclusion. Ben-Porath provides readers with strategies to de-escalate tensions and negotiate highly charged debates surrounding trigger warnings, safe spaces, and speech that verges on hate. Everyone with a stake in campus controversies—professors, students, administrators, and informed members of the wider public—will find something valuable in Ben-Porath's illuminating discussion of these crucially important issues.

Misunderstanding Terrorism provides a striking reassessment of the scope and nature of the global neo-jihadi threat to the West. The post-9/11 decade experienced the emergence of new forms of political violence and new terrorist actors. More recently, Marc Sageman's understanding of how and why people have adopted fundamentalist ideologies and terrorist methods has evolved.

Author of the classic Understanding Terror Networks, Sageman has become only more critical of the U.S. government's approach to the problem. He argues that U.S. society has been transformed for the worse by an extreme overreaction to a limited threat—limited, he insists, despite spectacular recent incidents, which he takes fully into account. Indeed, his discussion of just how limited the threat is marks a major contribution to the discussion and debate over the best way to a measured and much more effective response.

How can citizens make sense of the complex mixture of durability and dynamism that animates American party politics? How should Americans understand—and come to terms with—contemporary partisan polarization and the democratic backsliding afflicting politics in the United States today? In this volume, contributors argue that the historical-institutionalist approach practiced by scholars of American Political Development (APD) offers enormous potential and can shed light on the paradoxical character of American party politics in general and the present conflicts plaguing the polity in particular.

Parties, Power, and Change draws together a broad range of contributions from a new generation of historically oriented social scientists for the first time, and foregrounds political parties in the study of APD. By doing so, the volume highlights the ways in which party development has both been shaped by, and contributed to, changes in governing institutions and the democratic polity. The essays illuminate the developments that gave rise to salient features of the contemporary political landscape that occupy both academic and public discourse today, including shifts in ideology, group affiliations, and issue positions of the parties; changes in party structures; and partisan-driven democratic backsliding. Finally, this volume argues that, by viewing American politics through the lens of the historical development of party politics, readers can better understand the essential role that parties play in American history and see how parties can be mediating institutions that both sustain and undermine democracy.

Contributors: Amel Ahmed, Gwendoline M. Alphonso, Julia Azari, Rachel M. Blum, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, Boris Heersink, Jessica Hejny, Adam Hilton, Daniel Klinghard, Didi Kuo, Matthew J. Lacombe, Verlan Lewis, Nicole Mellow, Sam Rosenfeld, Jeffrey S. Selinger, Daniel Schlozman.

Oil is an unusual commodity in that individual decisions can have an outsized effect on the market. OPEC+’s choice to increase production, for instance, might send prices falling, affecting both oil producers and consumers worldwide. What do the leading oil market players consider before making a fateful move?

Oil Leaders offers an unprecedented glimpse into the strategic thinking of top figures in the energy world from the 1980s through the recent past. Ibrahim AlMuhanna—a close adviser to four different Saudi oil ministers during that period—examines the role of individual and collective decision making in shaping market movements. He analyzes how powerful individuals made critical choices, tracking how they responded to the flow of information on pivotal market and political events and predicted reactions from allies and adversaries. AlMuhanna highlights how the media has played an increasingly important role as a conduit of information among multiple players in the oil market. Energy leaders have learned to manage the signals they send to the market and to other relevant players in order to avoid sending oil prices into a spiral.

AlMuhanna draws on personal familiarity with many of these individual decision makers as well as his participation in decades of closed-door sessions where crucial choices were made. Featuring revelatory behind-the-scenes perspective on pivotal oil market events and dynamics, this book is a must-read for practitioners and policy makers engaged with the global energy world.

A particular dark triumph of modern nationalism has been its
ability to persuade citizens to sacrifice their lives for a political vision
forged by emotional ties to a common identity. Both men and women can respond to nationalistic calls to fight that
portray muscular warriors defending their nation against an easily recognizable
enemy. This “us versus them” mentality can be seen in sectarian violence
between Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalas, Serbs and Kosovars, and
Protestants and Catholics. In Muscular
Nationalism, Sikata Banerjee takes a comparative look at India
and Ireland and
the relationship among gender, violence, and nationalism. Exploring key texts
and events from 1914-2004, Banerjee explores how women negotiate “muscular
nationalisms” as they seek to be recognized as legitimate nationalists and
equal stakeholders in their national struggles.

Banerjee argues that the gendered manner in which dominant
nationalism has been imagined in most states in the world has had important
implications for women’s lived experiences. Drawing on a specific intersection of gender and nationalism, she
discusses the manner in which women negotiate a political and social terrain
infused with a masculinized dream of nation-building. India and Ireland—two states shaped by the
legacy of British imperialism and forced to deal with modern political/social
conflict centering on competing nationalisms—provide two provocative case
studies that illuminate the complex interaction between gender and nation.

An in-depth political, legal, and philosophical study into the implications of wealth inequality in modern societies.

Wealth, and specifically its distribution, has been a topic of great debate in recent years. Calls for justice against corporations implicated in the 2008 financial crash; populist rallying against “the one percent”; distrust of the influence of wealthy donors on elections and policy—all of these issues have their roots in a larger discussion of how wealth operates in American economic and political life.

In Wealth a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars in political science, law and philosophy address the complex set of questions that relate to economic wealth and its implications for social and political life in modern societies. The volume thus brings together a range of perspectives on wealth, inequality, capitalism, oligarchy, and democracy. The essays also cover a number of more specific topics including limitarianism, US Constitutional history, the wealth defense industry, slavery, and tax policy.

Wealth offers analysis and prescription including original assessment of existing forms of economic wealth and creative policy responses for the negative implications of wealth inequality. Economic wealth and its distribution is a pressing issue and this latest installment in the NOMOS series offers new and thought provoking insights.

Features contributions that respond to deep challenges to social cohesion from racial injustice

In the latest installment of the NOMOS series, a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars explore the erosion—and potential rebuilding—of civic bonds in response to injustice, wrongdoing, and betrayal. Contributors address the possibility of reconciliation and repair, drawing on cutting-edge insights from the fields of political science, philosophy, and law. Nine timely essays explore our pivotal moment in history, from the question of reparations for slavery to the from the art—and impact—of the public apology.

The editors of this volume encourage us to not only examine the roots of mistrust, but also to imagine a collective way forward, particularly as we face the continuing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reconciliation and Repair provides thought-provoking perspectives in an age where they are desperately needed.

This book examines republicanism in an Anglo-American and European context from the execution Charles I to the publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense. t gives weight not only to the thought of the theorists of republicanism but also the practical experience of republican governments in England, Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

The first six chapters of the book, along with David Wootton's Introduction, consider the meaning of republicanism and its historiography. From its theoretical conception to its historical development, contributors examine how thinkers the likes of Hobbes and Montesquieu discussed the key issues of virtue, commerce, and liberty in conjunction with republicanism, and to what extent republicanism was an inheritor of or departure from classical ideals.

In the latter chapters of the book, contributors turn their attention from theory to application, turning to look at the experiences of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republics such as Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

One of the central pillars of US counterterrorism policy is that capturing or killing a terrorist group's leader is effective. Yet this pillar rests more on a foundation of faith than facts. In Leadership Decapitation, Jenna Jordan examines over a thousand instances of leadership targeting—involving groups such as Hamas, al Qaeda, Shining Path, and ISIS—to identify the successes, failures, and unintended consequences of this strategy. As Jordan demonstrates, group infrastructure, ideology, and popular support all play a role in determining how and why leadership decapitation succeeds or fails. Taking heed of these conditions is essential to an effective counterterrorism policy going forward.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system.

China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation.

Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack describes the distinct aims of the movements they represent and weighs their consequences for the American republic.

Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state, but there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each sought to overturn what came before.  

Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers. The administrative state became a global American empire, but the neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the “great awokening” that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. 

Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire. 

Americans across the political spectrum have turned away from free market capitalism, calling for more government intervention into the economy. This optimistic book explains how a dynamic, Commercial Republic that benefits all Americans is still possible.

"Will someone intent on changing the direction of America’s economy seize on this text and send it far and wide?”
—Hugh Hewitt, author, attorney, and national host of The Hugh Hewitt Show

“Markets grounded in a commercial republic are what America needs. Gregg shows why.” 
—Vernon L. Smith, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Business Economics and Law at Chapman University

One of America’s greatest success stories is its economy. For over a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American.

Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Many have lost confidence in the country’s commitment to economic liberty. Across the political spectrum, many want the government to play an even greater role in the economy via protectionism, industrial policy, stakeholder capitalism, or even quasi-socialist policies. Numerous American political and business leaders are embracing these ideas, and traditional defenders of markets have struggled to respond to these challenges in fresh ways. Then there is a resurgent China bent on eclipsing the United States’s place in the world. At stake is not only the future of the world’s biggest economy, but the economic liberty that remains central to America’s identity as a nation.

But managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices, let alone its destiny. For this book insists that there is an alternative. And that is a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness, but embedded in what America’s founding generation envisaged as the United States’s future: a dynamic Commercial Republic that takes freedom, commerce, and the common good of all Americans seriously, and allows America as a sovereign-nation to pursue and defend its interests in a dangerous world without compromising its belief in the power of economic freedom.

Examines Black Americans’ suspicion about the potential political harassment of Black elected officials

In Marked Men, Nyron N. Crawford offers a novel perspective on political scandal, corruption, and racial politics in the United States. Contrary to traditional beliefs that politicians are forgiven for their transgressions because of the benefits they provide their constituents, Crawford argues that Black Americans view political misdeeds by Black elected officials through a lens of suspicion towards the criminal legal system.

Crawford’s work reveals that Black Americans often question the motivations behind investigations and indictments of Black politicians, expressing concern that such actions by the state are intended to undermine, embarrass, and harass Black leaders. Through a mixed-method approach including experiments, case studies, and survey data, Crawford illustrates that racialized suspicion shapes the way Black voters rally to protect their embattled Black political representatives.

The book challenges conventional wisdom by highlighting how a tolerance of corruption is not the driving force behind the support for wayward politicians. Instead, racialized mistrust of the criminal justice system plays a pivotal role. By shedding light on this dynamic, Marked Men examines the complexities of political scandals and the intricate interplay between race and politics in contemporary America. The study calls for a deeper understanding of the motivations and attitudes of Black voters, prompting readers to reconsider prevailing assumptions about political accountability and forgiveness in the context of race.

Dennis Unkovic asserts that China is, contrary to popular belief, not poised to take over from the United States as the world's pre-eminent superpower.

Chinese President Xi Jinping believes his country is destined to displace the United States as the world’s top military and economic power. Every policy that Xi has put forth since assuming power in 2013 has been carefully crafted with this end goal in mind. 

 Nearly four decades of meteoric economic growth have convinced many in the West that modern China is indeed an invincible regime, and that Xi’s grand plan will come to fruition. Closer examination reveals that China is not invulnerable, but in fact is far more fragile than it outwardly appears.

 In this book, Dennis Unkovic coins the term MaxTrends® to identify critical factors and developments that have the potential to derail Xi’s aggressive ambitions for China. These MaxTrends® include alarming demographic shifts, cracks in the global supply chain, an accelerating global arms race, and the Taiwan conundrum, all of which indicate that China’s strength may be more illusion than reality. Unkovic warns that the world’s democracies must take increasingly aggressive steps to exploit China’s vulnerabilities if they hope to blunt Xi’s ambitions. 

 Right now China and the United States find themselves competing in a tight race to the top. In today’s unprecedented arena of economic, military, and political challenges, the nation that acts more quickly and prudently will win.

Exposes the threats to our personal and political identity in the age of surveillance

It has become alarmingly clear that our online actions are less private than we’re led to believe. Our data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell us something, political actors who want to analyze our behavior, and law enforcement who seek to limit our actions.

The Private is Political explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect our online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Ray Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. This will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and even shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Beyond merely identifying the harms to individuals from privacy violations, Brescia furthers our understanding of privacy by identifying and naming political privacy and the integrity of identity as central to democracy. The Private is Political empowers consumers by outlining a roadmap for a comprehensive privacy regime, leveraging various institutions to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

THE TERRORIST MASSACRE COMMITTED BY HAMAS AGAINST INNOCENT ISRAELIS ON OCTOBER 7, 2023 BROUGHT GREAT TRAUMA TO THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

BUT IT ALSO HAS BROUGHT GREAT CLARITY. 

It is this clarity that tells us we must try something NEW. 

It is this clarity that tells us Israel must plan its future on its own and not obsess about what others think. 

And it is this clarity that compels us to go back to basics — to return to the biblical values and divine covenants that unite the Jewish people.

It is this clarity that has inspired David Friedman, former US Ambassador to Israel and bestselling author of SLEDGEHAMMER, to write and lead a new movement: 

ONE JEWISH STATE

The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

One of the leading architects of the historic Abraham Accords, David Friedman explains why in these turbulent and dangerous times, the simple phrase of three words – ONE JEWISH STATE – must be the guideline for Israel and the world’s collective future.

Each word of ONE JEWISH STATE is deeply instilled with meaning:

ONE: There is only ONE country earmarked for the Jewish people; ONE. There are 49 Muslim countries, and many Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu countries, but only ONE Jewish State.         

JEWISH: This Jewish State is exactly that – JEWISH. It is the place where Jewish history was born, where Jewish values were created and where more Jews live than anywhere else. It is situated on the land given to the Jewish people by God in the words of the Holy Bible.

STATE: Israel is not just a place; it is a country with sovereignty over its land and responsibility for its inhabitants. Today that sovereignty has been called into question by the nations of the world and even by some within Israel. But Israel cannot be Jewish without sovereignty over the places that make it Jewish. 

Friedman proposes a goal and a path, with God’s help, for Israel to have complete sovereignty over all its biblical homeland – in a just manner that brings peace, prosperity, and essential human dignity to ALL of Israel’s inhabitants. In ONE JEWISH STATE he will explore:

• The History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• The True History of Jews and Muslims in the Disputed Territories
• Past, Present & Future Legal Issues
• Prior Proposals, Peace Plans and So-Called “Solutions,” and Why They ALL Failed
• Why Israel has Succeeded as a Regional Superpower While its Arab Neighbors Have Failed
• Palestinian Tribalism and the Creation of a Nationalist Movement
• Religious and Biblical Issues, Conflict and Agreement
• Palestinian and Muslim Leaders and Goals for Their Peoples
• Geographic and Security Considerations for ALL
• Hamas and the Gaza Strip – Insoluble for Now
• American Evangelicals and Their Influence

Ambassador Friedman's book persuasively explains the many reasons why  in this massive world there MUST remain room for ONE JEWISH STATE.

"Read everything Ambassador Friedman writes about Israel and Gaza. He knows his stuff."—HUGH HEWITT

This book is an early warning to public officials, policymakers, and procurement practitioners on the impact of AI on the public sector. Many governments have established national AI strategies and set ambitious goals to incorporate AI into the public infrastructure, while lacking AI-specific procurement guidelines. AI is not traditional software, and traditional processes are not sufficient to meet the challenges AI brings. Today’s decisions to embed AI and algorithmic systems into public system infrastructure can – and will – have serious repercussions in the future.
The promise of AI systems is to make the public sector more efficient, effective, fair, and sustainable.
However, AI systems also bring new and emerging risks which can impact rights and freedoms. Therefore, guardrails are necessary to consider the socio-technical dimensions and impact on individuals, communities, and society at large.
It is crucial that public sector decision-makers understand the emerging risks of AI systems, the impact on the agency and the wider public infrastructure, and have the means to independently validate vendor claims. This book is a result of interviews with more than 20 public procurement professionals across countries, offering an in-depth analysis of the risks, incidents, governance practices, and emerging good practices around the world, and provides valuable procurement policy and process recommendations to address and mitigate these risks.

How race and capitalism shape education

School choice programs—such as vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credit scholarships—are surrounded by controversy, raising questions about their impact on student diversity and inequality. In this book, Ryane McAuliffe Straus takes up a core part of this divisive debate, exploring why charter schools are reshaping America’s education system—and democracy—for the worse.

Drawing on interviews with elected officials, policy entrepreneurs, parents, and activists in Albany, NY, Straus argues that charter schools are a poor alternative to failing public schools, ultimately worsening racial segregation under the guise of providing underprivileged students with access to better education. Taking a wide-ranging view, the author explores why parents, elected officials, and community activists may or may not choose to leave the public education system by enrolling their children in charter schools.

Straus finds that when families of color leave public schools in favor of charter schools this removes their democratic voice and participation, diminishing their political power in a high-stakes area of public policy. Divided by Choice highlights the fundamental flaws of one solution to public education inequalities, at a time when racial tensions are at an all-time high.

This book examines how participants in governance and public affairs use data and information in defining public problems and their solutions. It is based on 18 in depth interviews with various kinds of participants in the public realm in Canada and the UK, from legislators, interest group representatives, journalists and civil servants. Responses are examined against the backdrop of two classical perspectives on decision making. It explores the types of data respondents emphasized in their work and what model of decision-making best reflected the realities of defining problems and selecting solutions in governance. The book demonstrates how there is a significant interplay between the long- and short-term aspects of governance. Narratives and data are inextricably intertwined in governance. The book explores the role of narratives in linking portrayals of the public good to problem definition and solution creation. It presents practical insights on how to approach generating and using data for the guidance of governing decisions, the implications of various kinds of research designs and for the normative practice of governance.

A contemporary look at Albert Einstein's classic call for socialism

First published more than seventy-five years ago in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” is an unheralded classic. Written during the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the United States, it constituted an act of defiance, making a case for socialism unrivaled in its time or ours. Yet, its very existence has been an embarrassment to an establishment which has continually sought to downplay the significance of his iconoclastic essay, together with Einstein’s socialism itself.

This slim, elegant volume includes Einstein’s essay along with a detailed commentary on his essay by Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster. Foster’s introduction tells the story of Einstein’s life-long commitment to socialism and the events leading to the publication of “Why Socialism?” and contextualizes the importance of his essay as we enter a time of planetary crisis and new threats of world war. Over the three-quarters of century since its publication, “Why Socialism?” is one of those rare statements whose power has only grown, reaching untold numbers of readers over the years. It is of crucial importance that—for the sake of the future of humanity—Einstein’s message continues to proliferate.

Vast fortunes grew out of the party system during the Gilded Age. In New York, party leaders experimented with novel ways to accumulate capital for political competition and personal business. Partisans established banks. They drove a speculative frenzy in finance, real estate, and railroads. And they built empires that stretched from mining to steamboats, and from liquor distilleries to newspapers. Control over political property—party organizations, public charters, taxpayer subsidies, and political offices—served to form governing coalitions, and to mobilize voting blocs.

In Electoral Capitalism, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer reappraises the controversy over wealth inequality, and why this period was so combustible. As ranks of the dispossessed swelled, an outpouring of claims transformed the old spoils system into relief for the politically connected poor. A vibrant but scorned culture of petty officeholding thus emerged. By the turn of the century, an upsurge of grassroots protest sought to dislodge political bosses from their apex by severing the link between party and capital.

Examining New York, and its outsized role in national affairs, Broxmeyer demonstrates that electoral capitalism was a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of wealth were mutually reinforcing. The book uncovers hidden economic ties that wove together presidents, senators, and mayors with business allies, spoilsmen, and voters. Today, great political fortunes have dramatically returned. As current public debates invite parallels with the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer offers historical and theoretical tools to make sense of how politics begets wealth.

"To the superficial observer there would seem never to have been an age less propitious for the birth of a new nation. The tendency of the times was altogether for the aggrandizement of big states and the consolidation of their territory at the expense of the little ones, for the extinction of the weaker nations and governments rather than for the creation of new ones. Nevertheless it was this bitter cut-throat international rivalry which was to make American independence possible."

On April 15th, 1783, the Articles of Peace between the United States and Great Britain went into effect proclaiming that “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States…to be free Sovereign and independent States.” That recognition, the origins of which began almost seven years earlier in Philadelphia, the fate of which was uncertain at Valley Forge and ultimately vindicated at Yorktown, represented a monumental achievement for the new American nation. It also, as Samuel Flagg Bemis shows us, marked the end of a world war. 

This book explains the ambitions and interests of European powers during the American Revolution. France’s search for revenge against Britain after the French and Indian War, Spain’s attempt to retake Gibraltar, the complicated trade interests of the Netherlands and Russia, Austria’s fears of a two-front war – each of these saw America’s struggle for independence as an event that affected their own strategies. And, as Bemis shows us, it is through that prism that we should consider the actions of those who supported America and Great Britain. 

How elected officials, think tanks, and interest groups form partisan policy networks to advance their agendas

Partisan Policy Networks explores how policy research in the United States became deeply intertwined with partisan politics in today’s polarized era. It challenges the notion that policy research is an objective search for optimal solutions. Instead, political scientist Zachary Albert argues that policy research is heavily influenced by partisan and ideological incentives. Central to this argument is the concept of partisan policy networks, which consist of elected officials, think tanks, and interest groups working together to achieve shared goals. These networks have strong partisan ties and they work to advance shared agendas through collaborative efforts. The actors within these networks help to collectively define a party’s agenda and advance it through policy research and political advocacy.

The policy research organizations, or PROs, within these networks often produce research that supports shared partisan objectives rather than independent, objective analyses. Many PROs provide elected officials with research and talking points that support partisan goals, and these PROs effectively become trusted party allies. Some also push for policy change through direct political advocacy, cementing their place within the network. Because partisan officials rely on these subsidies to develop and pass policy, PROs that embed themselves within a particular partisan network have greater influence over modern policymaking.

Using case studies and original data, the book traces the advent of partisan PROs and their ascendance in American politics, documents the many ways in which partisan policy networks are created and sustained, and shows how partisan PROs within these networks have privileged access to and influence over their preferred party in Congress. These dynamics shape policy outcomes, undermine democratic representation, and contribute to growing partisan polarization. Ultimately, Partisan Policy Networks reveals the worrisome implications of these trends, including poorly designed policies and reduced prospects for bipartisan cooperation, while pointing to potential reforms to address these challenges.

In Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy, political philosopher Adam Lovett argues that when it comes to democratic ideals, the United States is a failed democracy. Specifically, he contends that American democracy has failed to advance equality and self-rule for its citizens—qualities he identifies as essential components of democracy’s intrinsic value. Drawing on rich empirical research, Lovett applies original philosophical analysis to reveal real-world democratic failures and evaluate their philosophical and ethical consequences.

His research locates democratic failures at both the level of political elites and at the level of the masses. At the elite level, elected officials shape policy to prioritize the interests of their supporters, where wealthy individuals and corporations are the most influential. At the mass level, ordinary citizens are motivated to vote not to introduce specific policies but by party identification. By mapping how these failures erode equality and self-rule, he demonstrates that they in fact undermine the ethics of democracy itself. After all, Lovett argues, when a state fails to represent ordinary citizens, those ordinary citizens are not morally obligated to follow the laws of the state.

Because the state fails to achieve democratic values in any meaningful way, its claim to political authority and legitimacy is diminished. However, Lovett does not conclude that American democracy is doomed—he instead proposes solutions from voting only on referendums to delegating aspects of public policy to unelected experts without partisan obligation. These reforms are vital for compelling the state to act on behalf of all citizens, not just the partisan or the powerful. Of interest to political scientists and political philosophers alike, Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy sheds light on an increasingly troubled democratic ethos and proposes solutions for how ordinary citizens can work to save it.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is one of the most important and debated sociopolitical documents of the twentieth century. A leading authority on the UDHR, Johannes Morsink is the author of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (2000) and Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (2009). With this new book, Morsink has now written a volume for a new generation of human rights students and activists, one that presents an article-by-article account of the formulation of each article in the UDHR. The author comments perceptively on how they have been argued, argued over, and used in a wide range of political discourses. Comprised of short essays on each of the Declaration's thirty articles, this book constitutes the most accessible and comprehensive approach to this document and explicates the UDHR's continued relevance in contemporary times.

Throughout the book, Morsink explains how this 1948 iconic text can help us in the twenty-first century. He shows us the high moral ground we need to fight evils perpetuated during and after World War II that now present themselves in new garb and does so in a clear and concise manner.

Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life—and make life artificial—through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The questions that animate this volume focus attention on the relationships between liberal conceptions of citizenship and democracy on one hand, and sex, race, and gender on the other. Who "counts" as a citizen in today's world, and what are the mechanisms through which the rights, benefits, and protections of liberal citizenship are differentially bestowed upon diverse groups? What are the relationships between global economic processes and political and legal empowerment? What forms of violence emerge in order to defend and define these rights, benefits, and protections, and how do these forms of violence reflect long histories? How might we recognize and account for the various avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects?

Citizenship on the Edge approaches these questions from multiple disciplines, including Africana Studies, anthropology, disability studies, film studies, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology. Contributors explore the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to the conditions and expressions of citizenship in the U.S. and throughout the world. They give a sense of the breathtaking range of the ways that citizenship is controlled, repressed, undercut, and denied at the same time as they outline people's attempts to claim citizenship in ways that are meaningful to them. From university speech policies, to labor and immigration policies, to a rethinking of the security theatre, to women's empowerment in the family and economy and a rethinking of marriage and the family, we see slivers of possibility for a more inclusive and less hostile world, in which citizenship is no longer so in doubt, so on the edge, for so many. As a whole, the volume argues that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle.

Contributors: Erez Aloni, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Samantha Majic, Valentine M. Moghadam, Michael Rembis, Tracy Robinson, Ellen Samuels, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah A. Thomas.