New Books in Political Science

In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how various economic variables affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined. 

Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoretical foundation for guiding future research on the economics-security interaction.

Drawing on Adam Smith, he provides a more complete range of answers to the three key conceptual questions analysts must consider: how economic goals relate to security goals; what economic factors to focus on; and how economic actors influence security policies.Combining an innovative theoretical understanding with empirical rigor, Brooks’s account will reshape our understanding of the political economy of security.

Our guest is Professor Stephen Brooks, a Professor of Government at Dartmouth.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl speaks with Kenneth Roberts and Paul Friesen, democracy experts at Cornell University, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released V-Dem 2025 Report “ 25 Years of Autocratization.” Drawing on the survey’s global measure of changes in regime status across the world, we discuss the dramatic decline of democracy in the United States, and what dimensions are driving that erosion. We also discuss other big moves, from declines in India and Indonesia, to improvements in Poland and Guatemala. We conclude with an analysis of some signs of hope and what to anticipate in the year ahead for ongoing contestation in the US around democratic rights and institutional sites of contention.

Links:

V-Dem Democracy Report 2025: here
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Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Sidra Hamidi reveals how states contest their nuclear status in the atomic age. By examining the legal structure of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, technical ambiguities surrounding nuclear testing, and debates over rights and responsibilities in the global nuclear regime, Dr. Hamidi argues that a state's nuclear status is not simply a function of technical capability. Instead, states actively contest the way they want their nuclear status to be presented to the world, and powerful states like the US, either recognize or reject these formulations.

By analysing key diplomatic junctures in Indian, Israeli, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear history, this book presents a theory of when and how states contest their nuclear status which has key policy implications for negotiating with ostensible “rogues” such as Iran and North Korea.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multiple futures. In representing the experiences and hopes of those affected by political violence in El Salvador and Argentina, environmental harm in Guatemala and Peru, and colonial dispossession in Chile and Bolivia, reparations are built upon conflictive forms of future imagination, translation of harm and new forms of belonging to and beyond the nation state, which reifies as much as challenges state authority over the promises of actual repair. In today’s Latin American political debate, hopes for justice and democracy remain anchored to the question of the kinds of future that can be imagined through and after reparation. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Helene Risør, and Karine Vanthuyne discuss their edited volume, The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the aut0hor of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and co-editor of Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America.

Helene Risør is a teaching associate professor in anthropology and visiting research fellow at Copenhagen University. Professor Risør is also a senior researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research on Violence and Democracy based in Chile.

Professor Karine Vanthuyne is professor in Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. Professor Vanthuyne is the author of La presence d’un passé de violences: mémoires et identités autochtones dans le Guatemala postgénocide, as well as co-editor of Power through Testimony: Residential schools in the age of reconciliation in Canada.

Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Her research explores demands for reparations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Website here
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The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.

Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.

Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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