New Books in Public Policy

Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge UP, 2026) emerges from the fact of anti-trafficking interventions having led to newer forms of oppressions and entanglements of bureaucracy. Situating the lives of sex workers and daily-wage earning labourers through a multi-sited ethnography in India, this book opens up an examination of the rescue industry alongside migration and informality, and how the lived reality of the workers is crowded with sociopolitical unfairness, individual and state-sponsored violence, informal debt, gender and caste-based hierarchies, and limited livelihood options. It aims to offer a critical lens into the practices, modalities, and contestations through which freedom is lived and asserted in India. The book is open access here.

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As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival (U California Press, 2026) offers a crucial on-the-ground perspective pointing to a humane future.
Finding a vein is difficult. As veins collapse and scar over, it becomes almost impossible. For millions of Americans who inject drugs and can’t do it alone, the solution is to find someone who can. Enter the “hit doctor.” Though uncredentialed, hit doctors develop expertise through necessity, providing injection assistance and addressing needs that dominant medical systems exclude or criminalize. They share the same conditions as the people they serve: sleeping in encampments and alleys, living in cramped single-room-occupancy hotels, suffering from untreated illness and trauma, and grieving friends who keep dying. Sarah Brothers spent more than seven years observing and interviewing hit doctors and their clients across San Francisco. Hit Doctors is an intimate portrait of the daily lives, relationships, and ethical worlds of people managing extraordinary hardship at a pivotal moment, when fentanyl arrived and thousands began dying annually. Brothers’s long-term ethnography yields critical insights. People seeking help strongly prefer women hit doctors, perceived as more careful and less likely to turn violent. But even as their expertise is valued, hit doctors are targets for abuse, and they suffer as the people they care for decline and die. That is the cost of trying to keep each other alive when formal systems of support have failed.
Brothers joins host Emily Dufton to discuss the years of work behind her new book, the people she studied and the relationships she built with them.
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, was released in 2026.

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Social media giants like Meta and transnational regulators such as the European Union are transforming private governance by creatively emulating public law frameworks. Drawing on exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis of Meta's Oversight Board and the EU's Digital Services Act, Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how these approaches blend European and American perspectives, bridging distinct legal traditions to address the challenges of platform governance. Analysis of content moderation practices and their implications uncovers a critical pattern in the evolution of governance for industries that will define the future, from digital platforms to emerging technologies. Combining public and private law in innovative ways, the book sheds light on bold governance experiments that will shape the digital world-for better or worse. This study offers crucial insights for understanding the next chapter of global governance in an increasingly interconnected and privatized world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Find Moritz here

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Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. In Civil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advocacy, and bury groups in paperwork, to name just a few examples. Because the measures look like routine regulation, they rarely make headlines. Democracies have become as skilled at using them as dictatorships.
We discuss how the fading liberal international order has given governments more freedom to act. We also talk about why urgent threats draw violence while long-term ones draw bureaucracy, and how lawmakers copy each other's anti-NGO laws word for word. We then look at why China tolerates Greenpeace, how one Ethiopian law closed nearly 90 percent of the country's human rights groups, and what shrinking aid budgets mean for the sector.
Our guest is Suparna Chaudhry, an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Most international organisations today-from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the World Health Organisation-present themselves as technical institutions separate from political concerns. And yet they are frequently accused, whether by the public or by governments, of hiding behind this technocratic veil only to privilege a few rich and powerful nations. Experts appear as guardians of stability and protectors of an unequal status quo. Scholars of International Relations (IR) and international law have illuminated the production and contestation of expertise. But its historical emergence and distinctiveness remain under-explored. The Technocratic International: Experts and the Making of a World from Nowhere (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Jan Eijking is the first book to historically examine and comprehensively theorise the role of experts in the institutionalisation of modern international order.

How exactly did technical expertise come to be a central tenet to the work of international organisations? Based on archival material from Paris, London, and Geneva, The Technocratic International reconstructs the neglected history of expert mobilisation at early moments of institutionalised international cooperation in the nineteenth century. To understand how expertise works at the international level, examining how expert status and knowledge are produced is not enough. Instead, we must bring into view how expertise relates to claims about the very domain in which it operates. Historically, experts were not merely-as institutionalist and functionalist accounts assume - mobilised to epistemically optimise international policymaking. Instead, technocratic elites constructed “the international” through Eurocentric performances of expert approval.

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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