Podcast Episodes

Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths, "Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Today’s international system is made up of states: Territorial entities with defined borders, with exclusive control within those borders, diplomatic…

7 months ago

George Papaconstantinou and Jean Pisani-Ferry, "New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries" (Agenda, 2024)

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global govern…

7 months ago

When Should the Majority Rule – and is it time to resign democracy?

When do limits on majorities enhance democratic rule, and when do they undermine it? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zib…

7 months ago

Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global…

7 months ago

“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm

In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracu…

7 months ago

Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025)

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll se…

7 months ago

Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national…

7 months, 1 week ago

Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice

Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich…

7 months, 1 week ago

Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying s…

7 months, 1 week ago

Ariel Colonomos, "Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing li…

7 months, 1 week ago