New Books in Political Science

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly.

Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Meghan Garrity examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

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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Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) tackles a critical question. Why has the world struggled so much to coordinate policy to address climate change, despite political and scientific consensus? Despite landmark agreements and expanding knowledge, emissions have fallen unevenly and progress has repeatedly stalled or reversed. Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy? explains that failure by focusing on domestic politics: how institutions distribute power, how interest groups exploit “access points,” and why countries with similar wealth and technology diverge. Moving beyond arguments about mere political will, it situates energy and climate outcomes within the institutional architectures of industrialized oil super-producers: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Norway. Shum advances a neopluralist theory of climate politics, arguing that policy is shaped by the strategic capture of institutional venues by carbon-intensive interests. He shows how separation of powers, federalism, party systems, and electoral rules configure opportunities for a de facto carbon oligarchy. By mapping where binding decisions are made and who can reach them, the book offers a generalizable framework for diagnosing blockages, explaining cross-national variation, and identifying leverage points for sustaining ambitious climate policy over time.
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What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries.

Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale UP, 2026). She draws on in-depth interviews with North Korean elite escapees—from senior party cadres and diplomats to military officers and wealthy, politically connected figures—to explore a group often assumed to be secure, influential, and loyal.

She finds that even those with access to better housing, education, overseas postings, and material comforts remain subject to a political system in which one misstep can have devastating consequences—not only for themselves, but for their families. We talk about what it means to be an elite in North Korea, why some people defect while others stay, and what elite grievances can and can’t tell us about the country’s future.

Jieun Baek is an author and scholar specializing in authoritarian governance, regime stability, elite political behavior, and information access in closed societies, with a particular focus on North Korea and Burma. Her research draws on more than fifteen years of fieldwork and sustained engagement with hard-to-reach populations, including defectors, dissidents, diplomats, former officials, and individuals operating within and across tightly controlled political systems. She is also the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press: 2016).

She can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Privileged But Powerless. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets
(Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a
striking feature of today's global legal order: the use of foreign
courts by elites to settle domestic disputes. On the surface, the
"outsourcing" of disputes by elites from countries with fragile
judiciaries looks like a search for fair treatment unavailable at home.
Yet extraterritorial dispute resolution varies across such countries.
Russian plutocrats, for instance, frequently litigate abroad, whereas
Chinese and South African ones rarely do.

Dr. Kalyanpur argues
that the pursuit of extraterritorial litigation depends on the balance
of power between a state and its plutocracy. In contexts of state
capture or state control, the transparency costs associated with
transnational law deter plutocrats from seeking resolution abroad. But
when the state and the plutocracy have relatively equal power, competing
interests can lead to political clashes, with different actors
asserting themselves. "Losers" of these clashes, locked out of their
institutions, now have less to lose from those transparency costs and so
seek resolution abroad. As these elites often escape with much of their
wealth abroad, "winners" respond by weaponizing transnational legal
institutions to seize rivals' offshore assets and ensure defeated rivals
stay defeated.

Through cases from Russia and elsewhere, Dr.
Kalyanpur unravels the connections between offshore finance,
transnational litigation, and intra-elite warfare. He exposes how
liberal courts serve as arenas for emerging market power struggles,
globalizing conflicts begun at home. As billionaires continue amassing
unprecedented power across democracies and autocracies alike, Legal Weapons of the Wealthy lays out how the architects of the liberal economic order defeated themselves by enabling rule by the rich.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in
which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself
is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expected
behavior, particularly in public spaces, and as a mechanism to manage
human interaction. But civility and the use of this idea often shape
hierarchical relationships within society and within politics and may
define who is to be included within the polis and who may be excluded.
Thus, the conversations that led to the new book, Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value,
interrogated the idea of civility in many of its facets and did not
necessarily settle on a simple definition or means of implementing
civility within contemporary society. Michael DiNiscia, Director of
Research and Strategic Initiatives at New York University’s Brademas
Center, and Ellyn Toscano, Director of the Hawthorndon Foundation,
edited this valuable exploration of the idea of civility within
democracy. In so doing, they brought together academics, politicians and
former politicians, activists, artists, and individuals from the
foundation world to discuss this controversial idea of civility,
unpacking the term, the way it is used, and how society may consider
civility within the realm of politics and public life.

I had the pleasure of discussing Civility Unbound
with Michael DiNiscia and Hussein Rashid, one of the contributing
authors. Our conversation covered the content of the book, tracing the
sections that include philosophy and political theory, democratic
institutions and politics, social justice and protest, media engagement,
and lessons from arts and culture. The chapters are fascinating and
accessible. As a reader, you feel as though you are part of the ongoing
conversation with the various authors, since the chapters are in
dialogue with each other and with the reader, without coming to a
consensus on the role and capacity of civility within democratic society
but with many paths to consider. The impetus for this book, and for
focusing on the idea of civility, grew out of the events of January 6,
2021, and an overarching question about whether the United States could
return to a state of civility in our politics, after we had witnessed
the violent insurrection that attempted to stymie the constitutional
process of tallying Electoral College votes. Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value brings many voices together to, in a way, respond to this violence, this incivility that had been demonstrated by a group of American
citizens.

The various contributing authors to Civility Unbound
take up the theory and practice of civility, trying to determine what it
actually means and the rules around civility and political engagement.
Across the chapters we find that there is a paradox around civility,
around who is asked to “remain civil” and who gets to define what
civility means. Civility may well reside within power relationships and
dynamics, with rules applied to some groups or individuals and not to
others. Invoking civility may well surface inequalities and the unequal
places and footing of those engaging in politics and society. This is
particularly important to consider in context of American democracy, and
the unequal distribution of power and state violence inherent in the
American state. Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value prompts the reader to consider how democratic engagement works and how we are to participate in attempts at self-rule.

We discussed the First America podcast during the conversation. Here is a link to the podcast website: First America Podcast

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 can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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