Political Science

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border that tells the story of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policy makers determining their fate--

A provocative, virtuosic inquiry that reveals how the valorization of times and migrations past are intimately linked to our exclusion and demonization of migrants in the present. When and how did migration become a crime? Why did Greek ideals become foundational to the West's idea of itself? How have our personal migration myths -and our nostalgia for a lost world of clear borders and values - shaped our troubling new realities? In 2020, Lauren Markham went to Greece to cover the burning of a refugee camp on Lesbos. Some said the refugees had done it, to destroy what had become their prison. Others said it was the island's fascists, or the government itself, enraged at the burden they bore for an overwhelming global problem. Soon - too soon - six young Afghan refugees were arrested. As she immersed herself in the reporting, Markham - an American of Greek heritage who had been working with and writing about migrants for more than a decade - saw that the story she was reporting was part of a larger tapestry, with roots not only in centuries of history but in the myths we tell ourselves about who we are. In this mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins makes us realize that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future--

Why did Rome fall - and what can it teach us about the decline of the West today? A historian and a political economist investigate. Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. In Why Empires Fall, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it. In this exceptional, transformative intervention, Heather and Rapley explore the uncanny parallels - and productive differences - between the two cases, moving beyond the familiar tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to learn new lessons from ancient history. From 399 to 1999, the life cycles of empires, they argue, sow the seeds of their inevitable destruction. The era of western global domination has reached its end - so what comes next?--Publisher's description.

Since its publication in 1651 Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident. Gray's book is a meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us? -- adapted from jacket

Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's long dictatorship was widely hailed as a success, ushering in three decades of unprecedented progress and prosperity. Yet over the past decade its political consensus has been under severe strain. A stable two-party system has splintered, with disruptive new parties on the far left and far right. No government has had a majority since 2015. Michael Reid overturns the stereotypical view of Spain as a country haunted by its Francoist past. From Catalan separatism and the indignados movement to the Spanish economy's overdependence on tourism and small business, Spain's challenges can often seem unique. But Reid is careful to emphasize the many pressures it faces in common with its European neighbors--such as austerity, populism, and increasing polarization. The result is a penetrating yet rounded portrait of a vibrant country--one that is more often visited than understood--

An eye-opening, revelatory account of the future of the Republican party as they unite working-class voters in a multi-racial, cross-generational populist coalition. Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election shocked the world. Yet his defeat in 2020 may have been even more surprising: he received 12 million more votes in 2020 than 2016 and his unexpectedly diverse coalition included millions of nonwhite voters, a rarity for the modern Republican party. In 2020, Trump defied expectations and few journalists, strategists, or politicians could explain why Trump had nearly won reelection. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and one of the country's leading experts on political targeting, technology, and demography, has the answers-and the explanation may surprise you. For all his apparent divisiveness, Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come. The shift is profound: seven in ten American voters belong to groups that have shifted right in the last two presidential elections, while under three in ten whites with a college degree belong to groups that are trending left. Together, this super-majority of right-trending voters forms a colorblind, populist coalition, largely united by its working-class roots, moderate to conservative views on policy, strong religious beliefs, and indifference to or outright rejection of the identity politics practiced by the left. Not all these voters are Republican, and in certain corners of the coalition, only a small minority are. But recent elections are pointing us towards a future where party allegiances have been utterly upended. The Party of the People demonstrates this data. Ruffini was as wrong as every pollster in 2016 and spent the intervening years figuring out why and developing better methods of analyzing voters in the digital age. Using robust data, he shifts you away from the complacent, widespread narrative that the Republican party is a party of white, rural voters. It is, but more importantly for its longevity, it's a party of non-college educated voters. And as fewer voters attend college, the Republican party shows no signs of stagnation. With rich data and clear analysis, Party of the People explains the present and future of the Republican party and American elections--

One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal. To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values. Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership. --

For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War (1754-63) as the world's most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes. As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony's economic and political subordination. Britain's turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire--authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant--over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists' reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.--Dust jacket.

In a sweeping reinterpretation of the history of disfranchisement, Steve Suitts illuminates how a century of political conflicts in Alabama came to shape both some of America's best achievements in voting rights and its continuing struggles over voter suppression. A War of Sections tells the unknown political history symbolized today by the annual pilgrimage of presidents and celebrities across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is the story of how that crucial, tragic day in Selma in 1965 was only the flashpoint of a much longer history of failures and successes involving conflicts not only between blacks and whites in Alabama but between white political factions warring in the state over voting rights. Suitts recasts the context and much of the content of disfranchisement in Alabama as an unremitting, decades-long sectional battle in white-only politics between the state's rural Black Belt and north Alabama counties. He uncovers important Black and white heroes and villains who collectively shaped the arc of voting rights in Alabama and ultimately across the nation. A War of Sections offers a new understanding of the political dynamics of resistance and change through which a southern state's long-standing democratic failures ironically provided motivation for and instruction to a reluctant nation regarding unmatched ways to advance universal voting. Along the way, the book introduces from this unheard past some prophetic voices that speak to the paramount issues of America's commitment to the universal right to vote -- then and now. --