New Books in Political Science

Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Nicolas Guilhot, however, challenges us to see conspiracy theories as a sign of the public’s desperation in light of liberal democracy’s failures. Conspiracism is widespread across the political spectrum, as citizens struggle with their disenfranchisement. How are we to imagine the future at the purported “end of history”? And how might this impasse make us susceptible to hallucinations and paranoia?
Conspiracy shows that narratives of conspiracy historically gain popularity when politics ceases to offer hope and apocalyptic thinking becomes a last refuge. Taking the reader from Karl Popper’s coining of the term “conspiracy theory” in 1948 through the essential commentary of Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Koyré, Richard Hofstadter, and others, Dr. Guilhot reveals how the fear of conspiracies has always operated against a backdrop of antagonism between the powerful and the many, the rich and the poor, the oligarchy and the masses. Today’s fear of a grand plot is no exception.
Turning conventional wisdom on its head, Dr. Guilhot shows that society’s focus on truth and falsehood masks how conspiracy theories feed on the dysfunctions of liberal democracies that no longer offer credible pathways toward a better future. Conspiracy theories offer a ready-made explanation for the feeling that one lacks agency and freedom. Rather than the cause of the current crisis, they are one of its consequences.
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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What is Russia? For two centuries, observers inside and outside the country have tried to answer that question, and most of them have looked west. The familiar story holds that Peter the Great pulled a backward Muscovy toward Europe and that Catherine the Great finished the job by declaring Russia a European state.
In The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Michael Khodarkovsky looks south and east instead. He argues that Russia is best understood as a hybrid Eurasian empire, shaped as much by the steppe frontier as by Europe. He places Muscovite and Romanov practices alongside those of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Qing empires, all heirs in different ways to the political world the Mongols built.
Moving chapter by chapter, Khodarkovsky shows how these empires imagined their rulers as universal monarchs. He traces how they used treaties, hostages, and tribute to bind frontier peoples, often with each side understanding the relationship very differently. He also shows how they drew on elites from conquered peoples to govern, and how they took part in a vast Eurasian slave trade that until the eighteenth century was larger than the Atlantic one. He follows how they approached law, including how the Russian Empire governed the legal and religious lives of its Muslim subjects, and how all of these empires were built above all to wage war. Along the way, he argues that Russia's rulers were in some respects less restrained than their Ottoman or Qing counterparts, and that the deep structural break with the steppe inheritance came not with Peter but with the Great Reforms of the 1860s.
In our conversation, we talk about how the book grew out of Khodarkovsky's decades of work on Russia's frontiers, from the Kalmyk steppe to the North Caucasus. We also discuss what the comparison reveals that a Russia-only story cannot, and where the book sits in today's debates about Eurasianism and about Russia as a colonial empire.

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As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Fellow Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto López-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fundamental institutional change. They discuss Security Council reform, the veto, collective security and disarmament, UN financing, climate governance, artificial intelligence, and the role of the next Secretary-General. Rather than simply making the existing system more efficient, López-Claros argues for rethinking the institutions and structures needed to address the global challenges of the 21st century.

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Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?
In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order (Columbia UP, 2026) Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order.
Hosted by Sachin Nikarge

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Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?
So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.
Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.
Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

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