PODCAST

New Books in European Politics

New Books Network

Interviews with scholars of modern European politics about their new books

government books

All Episodes

31:35

Bulent Gokay and Lily Hamourtziadou, "Human Costs of...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/28

Human Costs of War: 21st Century Human (In)Security from 2003 Iraq to 2022 Ukraine (Taylor & Francis, 2024) documents and analyses the direct and indirect toll that war takes on civilians and their livelihoods, taking a human security approach exploring personal, economic, political and community security in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, in the contexts of the War on Terror and the New Cold War. The book offers an understanding of war through the recording and comprehension of its civilian

72:02

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/26

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his

62:09

Peter Apps, "Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/18

The history of the world’s most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if the West’s democracies banded permanently together could they avoid a catastrophic global atomic conflict. Over the 75 years since, the alliance has indeed avoided war with Russia, also becoming a major political, strategic and diplomatic player well beyond its borders

54:12

Carl Rhodes, "Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/11

Billionaires are an ultra-elite social class whose numbers are growing alongside their obscene wealth while others struggle, suffer or even die.They represent a scourge of economic inequality, but how do they get away with it? A set of dangerous and deceptive inter-connected myths portrays them as a ‘force for good’: -the ‘heroic billionaire’ asserts they are gallant protagonists of the American Dream gone global -the ‘generous billionaire’ pretends that their philanthropic efforts and

71:26

J. McKenzie Alexander, "The Open Society as an Enemy:...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/04

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie AlexanderNearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the

58:33

Timothy Stacey, "Saving Liberalism from Itself: The...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/02

Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation Bristol UP, 2022) By Timothy StaceyIn the wake of populism, Timothy Stacey’s book critically reflects on what is missing from the liberal project with the aim of saving liberalism. It explains that populists have harnessed myth, ritual, magic and tradition to advance their ambitions, and why opponents need to embrace rather than eschew them. Using examples of liberally oriented activists in Vancouver, it presents an accessible

19:55

Malaysian-Nordic Relations

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/07/01

In the latest episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Professor Julie Yu-Wen Chen of the University of Helsinki speaks with Mr. Mohamed Ariff Bin Mohamed Ali, Chargé d’Affaires of the Malaysian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Their discussion centered on Malaysia's Foreign Policy, Malaysia’s current ASEAN 2025 Chairmanship, and the country’s engagement with Nordic nations moving forward. Mr. Ariff Ali, who is part of Malaysia’s diplomatic missions in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia for the past four years,

84:37

Yaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation"...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/25

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries.Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the

57:09

Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/25

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity

75:01

John H. Cochrane, Klaus Masuch, and Luis Garicano,...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/17

Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro (Princeton UP, 2025)John Cochrane Luis Garicano Klaus Masuch PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2025 Launched 26 years ago, the euro was never expected to have an easy life but it wasn't supposed to be this hard. A three-year solvency crisis, a string of bailouts, and a rescue by the European Central Bank (ECB) was followed by threats of deflation, negative interest rates, massive purchases of government debt, a global pandemic, a European

38:20

Johannes Karremans, "Between Voters and Eurocrats:...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/14

How do governments in Europe justify their budgets towards the national parliament? Are their socioeconomic policies shaped more by electoral pressures or by their commitments towards the European Union? In Between Voters and Eurocrats: How Do Governments Justify their Budgets (Oxford UP, 2024), Johannes Karremans presents a framework and methodology for studying these questions. Based on theories of democratic legitimacy, he argues that if governments temporarily pursue unpopular policies with the

52:10

Marlene Laruelle, "Ideology and Meaning-Making Under...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/12

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian

36:50

Ethnic minorities are good for democracy – Here is why

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/12

Democracy scholars often assume that ethnic homogeneity is good for democracy. Politically mobilised ethnic minorities, the assumption goes, stoke divisions and can destabilise democracy. In his latest book Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy: Circumstantial Liberals (Oxford UP 2024), Jan Rovny turns this assumption on its head and argues that not only minorities are not bad for democracy but in fact they can help strengthen and protect it. In this episode, he talks with host

40:01

Michelle Lynn Kahn, "Foreign in Two Homelands:...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/11

What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their

121:58

Charles J Esdaile, "The Spanish Civil War: A Military...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/08

The Spanish Civil War: A Military History takes a new, military approach to the conflict that tore Spain apart from 1936 to 1939.In many histories, the war has been treated as a primarily political event with the military narrative subsumed into a much broader picture of the Spain of 1936–9 in which the chief themes are revolution and counter-revolution. While remaining conscious of the politics of the struggle, this book looks at the war as above all a military event, and as one in whose outbreak

45:11

Stephan Kieninger, "Dynamic Détente: The United...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/07

This book examines the dynamic evolution of Western détente policies which sought to transform Europe and overcome its Cold War division through more communication and engagement. Kieninger challenges the traditional Cold War narrative that détente prolonged the division of Europe and precipitated America’s decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Rather, he argues that policymakers in the U.S. Department of State and in Western Europe envisaged the stability enabled by détente as a precondition

47:31

NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/07

Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell University Press, 2023), might be able to tell us about the quickly changing nature of US military alliances across the globe. We discuss the implications of Europe's burgeoning rearmament, the prospect of a collective defense pact in the Indo-Pacific, and how changing technologies and threats might affect burden-sharing in

63:37

Katarina Kušic, "Beyond International Intervention:...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/06/01

Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Katarina Kušic takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts

42:03

Thomas Mutch, "The Dogs of Mariupol: Russia's...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/05/29

In early 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, Tom Mutch, a freelance war reporter, took a trip to Mariupol to take the temperature of this (then) culturally vibrant port on the Sea of Azov. What stayed with him was the sound of the stray dogs and their "rhythmic and frantic barking, as if they were shouting a warning in unison". Within weeks, the city began a three-month siege and eventual fall but – to the surprise of many including Western powers – not just Kyiv but Mykolaiv, and

42:18

Keir Giles, "Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened...

New Books in European Politics ·

2025/05/28

Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend’. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and drawing down defence industries, Europe finds itself close to unprotected—while Russia is intent on continuing its war of expansion, and the US is distracted and divided. In Who Will

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