New Books in Political Science

The War on Terror remained an enduring feature of American foreign policy for over two decades. The War on Terror(Agenda Publishing, 2025), by Professors Andrew Thomson and Rubrick Biegon, positions the War on Terror within the broader context of Cold War interventionism and the rise of various transnational threats to American (and global) security during the late twentieth century. It introduces readers to the main concepts, debates and theories which have been used to understand and make sense of the War on Terror. These include approaches that frame it as a disparate set of policies aimed at reducing the risk of terrorist attacks against American citizens at both home and aboard; as part of a project aimed at helping maintain the United States' dominant position within international politics; and as an idea intimately bound up with perceptions of American national identity and America's place in the world. In this way, the book aims to show how the War on Terror has changed global politics, as well as why it has been fought and proven so difficult to end despite multiple failed attempts at course correction. The book, published in 2025 and now available from University of Edinburgh Press, is ideally suited for courses on international security, American foreign policy and contemporary world politics.
Rubrick Biegon is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. Co-author Andrew Thomson, reader in peace and conflict studies at Queens University Belfast, joined historian and U.S. army veteran Jacob Hagstrom in a discussion about the book's major themes, sources, and theoretical underpinnings.
Jacob Hagstrom is a military historian and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026)

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Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 2026), by Ryan Jablonski, examines how democracy operates in countries dependent on foreign aid. Drawing on over six years of fieldwork, the book investigates the relationships between international donors and domestic politicians, exploring how aid dependency shapes policymaking and influences voters’ assessments of political performance. Challenging the assumption that voters simply reward politicians for attracting foreign aid, Jablonski demonstrates that electoral choices depend on citizens’ beliefs about how politicians influence the delivery of aid. This produces a ‘visibility-uncertainty’ paradox, whereby foreign aid can either strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. Combining surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, the book revisits conventional understandings of foreign aid and political behaviour, showing how aid can sometimes lead citizens to vote against their own interests and benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. By examining the political consequences of aid dependency, Jablonski offers important insights into the trade-offs between aid effectiveness, political capture, and state capacity-building. This research makes an important contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratic accountability, and the political economy of foreign aid.

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This is a special episode that we recorded a week after elections in both Brazil and Serbia saw the defeat of authoritarian forces. In this preview episode of the RESISTANCE research project, host Licia Cianetti is joined by Brazilian and Serbian colleagues Déborah Monte and Aleksrandra Krstić to talk about what happened in their respective countries and what made anti-authoritarian mobilisation successful against the odds. They talk about how, in both countries, online and offline mobilisation were combined to overcome skewed communication systems, the civic infrastructure that was needed to make that mobilisation possible, and their fears and hopes for the future.
RESISTANCE – Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions is a research project that aims to uncover how authoritarian ideas, practices, technologies, and policies are produced and spread in a thickly interconnected world, how they create local authoritarian ecosystems, and how they can be resisted. It is funded by European Union’s Horizon-Europe grant no. 101286676 for the years 2026-2029. To know more and sign up to the project newsletter visit here
Guests:
Aleksrandra Krstić is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication, in the Faculty of Political Sciences, at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is an expert in media and journalism studies, including on the role of local media in Serbian democracy. She co-leads the RESISTANCE project’s work stream on digital authoritarianism and surveillance technologies.
Déborah Monte is International Relations Professor at the Federal University da Grande Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She was Visiting Fellow at CEDAR/University of Birmingham in 2024-25 and co-hosted the People Power Politics Podcast episode on Militarization and Democracy in Contemporary Brazil. She recently started a new research project on “Autocratisation and democratic resilience: Brazil in global perspective” as the recipient of a CNPq/Fundect Research Productivity Fellow grant.
Presenter:
Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (2026-2029, funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Transcript for this episode here.

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What revolutionary disability politics look like today, with lessons for larger liberatory movements. In recent political times, disability identity has been mobilized in ways that paradoxically compound bodily injury and disability. This single-issue approach obscures the oppression of disabled people and prevents solidarity across difference. In Disability, Revolution (U California Press, 2026), Robert McRuer introduces alternatives to "one-dimensional disability," providing an accessible overview of disability justice movements and their relevance to larger emancipatory coalitions. Exploring the most prominent examples from the past several decades, the book focuses on the convergence of queer and crip movements, mad pride, intersectional disability justice work, neurodiversity, and the globalization of disability alliances. Essential for anyone interested in disability politics, this book shows how these multivalent movements help us imagine alternative disabled worlds.
Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. He is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally.
Clayton Jarrard is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer working at the nexus of queer and trans studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies.

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I sat down with Lydia Sizer to chat about her experience developing applied history initiatives at the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian. We talked about what it’s like to collaborate with policymakers and what it means to negotiate productive tensions between political science and historical methodologies.
Lydia talks about her doctoral dissertation, in which she drew on political science, history, and her own experience at the State Department’s Libya Desk to analyze how diplomats make high-stakes decisions with very limited information. We discuss how history can be useful for analyzing institutional memory in government and private organizations, and how #applied history initiatives can help mitigate some of the institutional memory loss that is built into democratic politics.
We discuss Lydia’s positive experience using #AI in her work and talks about her ongoing efforts to anticipate policy trends rather than merely respond to them. We also talk about the punk band The Clash and how their 1982 hit song “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” can help us understand practical approaches to history.

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