New Books in Political Science

Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia
(NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic
weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in
1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a
rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the
three bombs sent fallout over vast distances across the country. One of
the tests, Mosaic G2 in June 1956, the largest nuclear weapon test ever
held in Australia, sparked panic at the time that it had been a nuclear
accident. In both the Mosaic tests, the crew of a British ship was
deliberately positioned in the path of fallout. The biodiverse natural
environment of the islands was left contaminated and has never been
cleaned up.

The book explores the politics, the secrecy and the controversies,
including the true nature of Mosaic G2 and its role in the clandestine
development of the British hydrogen bomb.

Elizabeth Tynan
is professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University,
Townsville. She is a prominent writer and researcher of the era of
British atomic testing in Australia. Her book Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (NewSouth,
2016) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award (Australian History) and
the CHASS Australia Book Prize in 2017. Her follow-up book The Secret of Emu Field: Britain's Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia was published by NewSouth in 2022.

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.
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Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security
(Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the
first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have
intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of
international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO,
Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow
negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the
trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on
analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics,
agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four
different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
(SRRTF).

By
identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to
shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations
chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the
WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of
concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for
world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining
their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right
to food.

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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A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

This episode was originally published on April 10, 2024.
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Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026) is a rare and comprehensive examination of the structures, hierarchies, and methods of the military, police, and intelligence agencies. Drawing on meticulous research, it reveals the strategies deployed to suppress the revolutionary wave, from propaganda and surveillance to mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. El-Hamalawy traces the power dynamics within these institutions to show how their uneasy unity was both a response to the revolution and a determinant of its eventual fate.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organisers of the 2011 uprising. He has been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt. He holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and is the recipient of the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Journalism Award. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics at 3arabawy.substack.com.

Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.
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This is a really good book. Really good. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a fascinating, and perhaps unexpected, journey through Catholic hospitals, the expansion of the carceral state, and corporate and union access to the protections of First Amendment freedom of speech. All the while, Kathleen J. Frydl is rigorously constructing an understanding and positioning of the modern corporation within the governmental structures and protections of the American political system. This is a deeply and thoroughly researched book, with details and information coming from legal decisions, law review articles, political theory, congressional acts, federal government notices, historical data and understanding, medical information, and texts in political science, sociology, and economics. It is indeed a tour de force, but the reader doesn’t really notice because it is such a propulsive and captivating narrative about how modern private corporations learned to capture and implement the advocacy practices that the social movements of the postwar period were using to make gains for previously disadvantaged groups (like African Americans, women, those with disabilities, and more).

Frydl lays out the foundation for the analysis within the framework of liberalism, classical liberalism and modern liberalism. She takes pains to explain these distinctions and how our understanding of liberalism has also contributed to some of the shifts and adjustments that have transpired. What does become clear in all of the case studies and details is that this is really a story about the United States Congress—not the Judiciary—and that Congress has been responsible for many of these changes, even if these actions seem to elide public attention and scrutiny. In fact, it is very difficult to detect Congress’s role in these instances, where Congress acted to essentially remove the Judiciary’s powers to deliberate in these policy realms.

Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is about corporate identity politics, and the ways in which corporations worked to fend off regulatory reform, while not exactly using the expected pathways. Since corporations, unlike, say women or African Americans, do not have a history of exclusion or disadvantage within the American political or economic systems, the concept of corporate identity politics seems a bit odd, but Frydl makes a strong case for this understanding, through the case studies of Catholic hospitals and regulatory reform that provides an avenue towards allowing for more religious freedoms and protections for the hospitals themselves; the legislative reforms with regard to criminal codes in the 1970s and 1980s that instituted harsher sentencing guidelines for individuals but much more lax responses to corporate infractions; and finally in a comparative study of corporate speech regulation and speech regulation of labor unions in the United States. Frydl tells the story from all perspectives and dimensions, including who was working behind the scenes to move these protections forward over the past fifty years. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is a very important analysis of the strengthening of the position of corporate entities within the political, legal, and economic systems in the United States.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She is also author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not In My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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