New Books in Political Science

What happens when an academic supervisor and their former student get together to write and edit a book on researching our social world? In How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers (Edward Elgar, 2025) readers have an answer to this question from two writers working by interpretivist lights: one, Colette Einfeld, an emerging new talent; the other, Helen Sullivan, a renowned public policy professor. On this the 26th episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, they discuss the motivations for the book, the various meanings of interpretive research for them and their contributors, messiness and emotions in social and political scientific work, how they identified their authors, and what they learned from one another while writing and editing together. 

Like this episode? You might also be interested in others in the series with co-authors talking about their work, including John Boswell and Jack Corbett, Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely, and way back at the start of the series, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow.

Looking for something else to read? Helen recommends Hossein Asgari’s novel, Desolation. 

This interview summary was not extruded by a machine. Unlike the makers and owners of those, the author accepts responsibility for its contents.
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Former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla joins us for a conversation on global democratic backsliding, the role of the international community, and youth civic engagement. As a distinguished leader with experience at the highest level of national and global political affairs, President Chinchilla brings distinctive viewpoints to our conversation to foster democracy through democratic practices, public policy, and civil discourse. She currently serves as co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank, the newly inducted president of Club de Madrid, an independent, non-partisan organization created to promote democracy, and member of international initiatives like the United Nations Human Development Report and the International Olympic Committee.
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NATO’s Meaning and Existence: Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity (Vernon Press, 2026) a forthcoming 2026 book by Yunus Emre Ozigci, offers a deep analysis of NATO's identity and role, suggesting it's stuck in bureaucratic inertia despite modern crises, aiming to redefine its purpose through exploring shared identity and transformation, particularly in the context of Russia's actions. This scholarly work uses intersubjectivity to understand how NATO's internal dynamics and external relations, especially concerning the Ukraine conflict, shape its meaning beyond mere military power, potentially moving beyond traditional IR theories to explore collective identity and systemic challenges.

In NATO’s Meaning and Existence: Within the Interstate Intersubjectivity (2026), Ozigci treats NATO as an intersubjective phenomenon rather than an objective entity. To him, NATO “does not exist objectively” but rather appears “meaningfully through intersubjective recognition.” His skillful integration of philosophical innovations from such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre supports his deep insights into Kenneth Waltz's structural interpretations of the balance of power, John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, and Robert Keohane's complex interdependence and invites readers to reconsider how alliances exist beyond the surface of policy and power. This work reminds us that NATO’s real strength does not necessarily come from being the most efficient military structure in the world, promoting those who excel at following orders, but rather from its ingenuity, resourcefulness, and unity of purpose. His study provides a rare synthesis of diplomatic experience and philosophical depth, inviting readers to reconsider how alliances exist beyond the surface of policy and power. This is an original, meticulously argued, and intellectually stimulating contribution to both NATO studies and the philosophy of international relations.

Piotr Pietrzak, Ph.D. -- In Statu Nascendi Think Tank

Yunus Emre Ozigci holds a PhD degree in Political Sciences from the Université catholique de Louvain. He graduated from the Galatasaray University (International relations) and completed his MA studies at the University of Ankara (International relations). His research interests and publications cover the IR theory and phenomenology. Since 2000, he has been working as a diplomat in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served, besides various departments of the Ministry, in Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland and Russia. Currently, he is the First Counsellor of the Turkish Embassy in Nairobi and Deputy Permanent Representative to UNON (UNEP and UN-Habitat). ORCID: 0000-0003-3388-7149

Please note: This publication is a personal work. It does not reflect the official views of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Duncan Kelly is a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politics and economics that were made, and remade, through wartime and revolution, by political and economic thinkers working across the globe, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Spanning continents, connecting networks of people, power, and possibilities, in new and often experimental ways, the worlds of wartime saw histories of modern politics and economics revised and updated, used as well as abused, in myriad attempts to interpret, explain, understand, explore, and indeed to win, the war. This book takes the measure of a great many of these overlapping visions, and it does so by trying to learn some of the lessons that literary and artistic modernism can teach us about the complexities of political and economic ideas, their contingency and uncertainty, and how they are fixed into focus only at very particular moments. Moving from the stylised narratives of European and American political theory and intellectual history, through to the futurist politics of revolutionaries in Ireland, India, Ottoman-Turkey, and Russia, this book also tracks arguments and strategies for Pan-African diasporic federation, alongside German and American debates about federal pasts and federal futures. From the invention of the world economy, to the reality of multiple war economies, from revolutionary conjunctures to ideas of democracy and climate catastrophe in the Anthropocene today, Worlds of Wartime tells the story of just how strongly modern politics in general, and modern ideas about political and economic possibility, were fixed by the intellectual turbulence wrought during the First World War.
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An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost? Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (U California Press, 2026) breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.

A. Mechele Dickerson is the Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches Remedies and Federal Civil Procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross-listed interdisciplinary graduate-level courses on the American middle-class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership and America's Financial Underclass: Flawed Premises, Broken Promises, New Prescriptions.
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