For three years following the Russian Revolution, the small South Caucasian country of Georgia was a democracy, but Stalin later ordered the Red Army to invade and to bring the country back under Russian rule. Communist attacks on political opponents, trade unions, cooperatives, and even the church sparked resistance, and an armed uprising broke out across the nation in 1924. It was swiftly crushed, with massacres of thousands, including hostages. Social Democratic and Labor parties across Europe reacted with shock and indignation. Soviet opponents began to describe communism as “red fascism” and their own movement as “democratic socialism.” What followed—including Socialist support for the creation of NATO—resulted from the Georgian uprising and its aftermath. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine a century later, the long-forgotten Georgian experience examined in The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism (McFarland, 2025) seems more relevant than ever. The website for this book is here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 1932, the Pērkonkrusts ("Thunder Cross") was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto--"Latvia for Latvians!"--echoed the ultranationalist rhetoric of similar movements throughout Europe at the time. Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, however, the Pērkonkrusts never succeeded in seizing power. Nevertheless, in her book Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia (U Wisconsin Press, 2025) holocaust historian Paula A. Oppermann argues that the movement left an indelible mark on the country . The antisemitism at the core of the Pērkonkrusts' ideology remained a driving force for Latvian fascists throughout the twentieth century, persisting despite shifting historical and political contexts. Thunder Cross is the most comprehensive study of Latvia's fascist movement in English to date, and the only work that investigates the often neglected continuities of fascist antisemitism after World War II. Formulated as an empirical case study, this book draws on international and interdisciplinary secondary literature and sources in seven languages to broaden our understanding of fascism, antisemitism, and mass violence from Germany and Italy to the larger European context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy, Democratic Dialogues bridges academic research with real-world debates — from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence to civic resistance, renewal, and reform. We look at new books, groundbreaking articles, and the ideas reshaping how we understand and practice democracy today. Listen on YouTube, NBN, or wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 1 Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries This week, we feature an episode with Kenneth Roberts, Jennifer McCoy, and Murat Somer, joining co-hosts Rachel Riedl and Esam Boraey to discuss their collaborative article, “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Together, they unpack how democracies don’t collapse overnight, but instead erode through different pathways — from executive aggrandizement to elite collusion — and how societies can resist or even partially recover. The conversation examines how these dynamics unfold in contexts as varied as Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, and the United States, and what practical lessons citizens and policymakers can draw today. This is an essential conversation for understanding how democracies falter, and how collective action, civic mobilization, and institutional renewal can push them back from the brink. Books, Links, & Articles “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2025) Jennifer McCoy & Murat Somer, Pernicious Polarization and Its Global Impact Kenneth Roberts, Populism, Political Mobilization, and the Latin American Left Rachel Beatty Riedl, Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Institutions in Africa Upcoming Episodes Our next episode features Susan C. Stokes (University of Chicago) discussing her book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. Stay tuned for an in-depth conversation on why democratic leaders sometimes turn against the institutions that empower them — and what can be done to safeguard democracy in an era of uncertainty. Subscribe and follow us on YouTube and social media for new releases every month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why are illiberal governments able to retain support? How are they defeated at election time? And how do (and should) governments driven by a desire to undo illiberalism proceed? For all interested in elections, democracy, accountability and representation Poland provides much food for thought. We have seen two important elections in the country in the past couple of years with contrasting outcomes. Those two elections can be placed within a wider and deeper story of the fate of democracy in Poland and indeed a broader story about the challenges facing liberal democracy in Europe today. Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge and Ben Stanley is an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, SWPS University in Warsaw. Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a Deputy Director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham. 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. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in On Antisemitism: A Word in History (Penguin Press, 2025). More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn. Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination of the plots to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A riveting narrative of the organization, conspiracy, and sacrifices made by those who led the resistance against Hitler. Orbach deftly analyzes the mixed motives, moral ambiguities and organizational vulnerability that marked their work, while reminding us forcefully of their essential bravery and rightness. And he challenges us to ask whether we would have summoned the same courage. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.comor on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should "good" people work for authoritarians? Does their implicit endorsement do more harm than their replacement by someone potentially worse? This was a common debate during Donald Trump's first term in the White House. Less so, during his second as loyalists assume most top positions in the administration. A century ago, this was a central question for Italy's governing class as Benito Mussolini's fascist movement seized and consolidated power, evolving over three years from a mix of authoritarianism and democracy into full-blown dictatorship. Some chose retirement and some exile. Alberto Beneduce, who publicly denounced fascist violence in 1922 and called for police repression of Mussolini's movement, chose to stay. Over 15 years, this committed socialist leveraged the Duce's trust to build a network of economic agencies that outlasted Mussolini and provided the foundations of post-war Italian capitalism. At his zenith in the late-1930s, Beneduce was on the board of 26 corporations, chaired eight and was - in the words of Lorenzo Castellani, author of Alberto Beneduce, Mussolini’s Technocrat: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions in Fascist Italy (Routledge, 2025) - the head of a "state outside the state". Lorenzo Castellani is a tenure-track researcher and professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Tim Jones is a policy analyst at Medley Advisors and also writes and podcasts on European affairs at 242.news on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving. In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them. Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. 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. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics. Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America. 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. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How, for just over a century, Britain ensured it would not face another Napoleon Bonaparte--manipulating European powers while building a global maritime empire At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, a fragile peace emerged in Europe. The continent's borders were redrawn, and the French Empire, once a significant threat to British security, was for now cut down to size. But after decades of ceaseless conflict, Britain's economy was beset by a crippling debt. How could this small, insular seapower state secure order across the Channel? Andrew Lambert argues for a dynamic new understanding of the nineteenth century, showing how British policymakers shaped a stable European system that it could balance from offshore. Through judicious deployment of naval power against continental forces, and the defence strategy of statesmen such as the Duke of Wellington, Britain ensured that no single European state could rise to pose a threat, rebuilt its economy, and established naval and trade dominance across the globe. No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One (Yale UP, 2025) is the remarkable story of how Britain kept a whole continent in check--until the final collapse of this delicately balanced order at the outset of World War One. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To seek asylum, people often have to cross borders undocumented, embarking on perilous trajectories. Due to the war in Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban, and severe human rights violations, over the past decades thousands of people have risked their lives to seek safety. By what means do they make these journeys, especially when they lack money and passports?Over the course of three years, Hannah Pool accompanied a group of Afghan friends and families as they attempted "The Game" - Game zadan: the route to Europe to seek asylum. The resulting ethnography follows them across their entire trajectories: through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and along the so-called Balkan route. In each place, Pool details the economic interactions and social relationships essential for acquiring, saving, borrowing, spending, and exchanging money to facilitate their undocumented migration routes.The Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe (Oxford UP, 2025) bridges economic sociology and migration studies to illustrate how migrants decide to trust people to facilitate their movement along these routes, focusing particularly on debt, special monies, bribes, donations, and gift-giving. Throughout the migration trajectory, relationships with family, fellow migrants, smugglers, humanitarian actors, and border control officials shape and are shaped by access to financial resources.Ultimately, the book highlights the dangers in undocumented border-crossing and delves into the core of what it means to flee: Who has the means to escape dangerous conditions to seek asylum? Hannah Pool is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.  Why Democracies Fight Dictators (Oxford UP, 2025) takes up the question of why liberal democracies are so inclined to engage in conflict with personalist dictators. Building on research in political science, history, sociology, and psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analysis of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British perceptions during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies' understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Madison V. Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes. When conflicts of interest arise between the two types of states, Schramm argues, cognitive biases and social narratives predispose leaders in liberal democracies to perceive personalist dictators as particularly threatening and to respond with anger—an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. She also locates this tendency in the escalatory dynamics that precede open military conflict: coercion, covert action, and crisis bargaining. At all of these stages, the tendency toward anger and risk acceptance contributes to explosive outcomes between democratic and personalist regimes. Madison Schramm, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto 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. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A practical call to action against oppression. Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or lobbied their representatives with the aim of creating lasting social change, overturning repressive laws, or limiting environmental destruction. Yet very little seems to improve for those affected by rapacious governments. Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail (U Minnesota Press, 2025) brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means. Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, focuses on the strategies of movements, many of them Indigenous, that have occupied contested sites and demonstrated their effectiveness at managing or governing them. Including case studies of resistance to development on Indigenous lands in Hawai'i, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, he offers insight and direction for activists, students, academics, and others dedicated to protecting and improving the well-being of their communities and beyond. It would be easy to succumb to pessimism and political apathy in the face of governing institutions that are increasingly unresponsive to calls for change and repressive in response to protest, even as they violate human rights, ignore existential climate catastrophes, and concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Davis finds inspiration for genuine political change through social movements that are successfully "replacing the state" and taking over the day-to-day governance of threatened places. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these social movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers' movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left's forward march halt so abruptly?  The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford UP, 2025)shows how the left's defeats after the mid-1970s were not the inevitable result of de-industrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor. Choices that were made during a concentrated but decisive moment contributed to the left's lost battles. The British, French, and Italian left managed the shift to a new era by marginalising those groups of workers who had invested it with hopes of social and political transformation. Communist, socialist, and social democratic parties helped disempower the new components of the working class in workplaces, in society, in the political system, and successfully disciplined their traditional working-class supporters. The left encountered a crisis of purpose and identity, a sense of both defeat and lost opportunities, and the dissolution of the idea of a community of fate amongst workers. This book provides a comparative analysis of the left's fragmenting relationship with the working class and a 'feel' for the culture of three leading industrial countries during a traumatic transition of late twentieth-century history. It concludes that decisions taken by the left during the 1970s contributed to the tragic inversion of the expected outcome of that hopeful decade. Matt Myers is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Oxford 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. YouTube Channel here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director, Eli Karetny talks with Richard Wolin (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center) about the intellectual roots of today’s anti-liberal right. Tracing a line from Germany’s “conservative revolutionaries” (Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Heidegger) to France’s nouvelle droite and “great replacement” rhetoric, Wolin shows how cultural critiques of egalitarianism and “decadence” resurface in contemporary movements—from the manosphere and Bronze Age Pervert to tech-elite flirtations with political theology and the “state of exception.” The conversation connects these currents to U.S. figures like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, exploring why myths of decline, warrior brotherhoods, and friend-enemy politics have regained appeal—and what that means for liberal democracy now. A bracing tour through ideas shaping our moment, and a call to understand them clearly before they reshape our institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Turkey is among a league of revisionist powers who are challenging the world order. Erdogan and his Islamist movement have aimed to create the “New Turkey”, preparing for a future that is less dependent on Western treaty allies and with an alliance structure of its own. In New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country (I. B. Tauris, 2025), Selim Koru discusses the political ideas driving Turkey's regime change and foreign policy. It de-exceptionalizes Turkish politics, arguing that the “New Turkey” is part of a global trend of far-right nationalist movements like that of Donald Trump in the United States or Narendra Modi in India. In particular, the book reveals how far-right nationalist strands in Turkey have been nurtured by an existential resentment of the West, similar to those we are seeing in Russia. In tracing this resentment and its historical roots, the book invites policymakers and experts to better understand the new relationships Turkey is building with fellow revisionists including China and Russia, as well as Turkey's involvement in the wars in Syria and Ukraine and Erdogan's grand strategy for expansion. The book is based on interviews with senior politicians and civil servants from across the country's political spectrum. It also benefits from the author's personal knowledge of Turkey's far-right and Islamist traditions. His work can be regularly found at his Substack, Kulturkampf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures.This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others (deemed not-quite- or non-human) that do not. For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a revolutionary violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies. Whereas Fanon begins his challenge to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe's destructive imperialist procedures before proceeding to “stretch” Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, to account for the crushing (neo)colonial situation, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek together offer a powerful and multifaceted assessment of the liberal anti-racist paradigm whose propensity for identity politics and aversion to class struggle silence the cry of the dispossessed and foreclose radical change. Avoiding contemporary separatist temptations (decoloniality and Afropessimism), and breaking with a non-violent, sentimentalist futurology that announces more of the same, Fanon and Žižek point in a different direction, one that eschews identitarian thought in favor of a collective struggle for freedom and equality. Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College 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. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 9 October 1934, terrorists murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in a Marseille street. The Croatian ultranationalist Ustashe was behind the attack. The Ustashe hoped that the king’s death would cause the collapse of Yugoslavia and the liberation of the Croat people. Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe (Manchester UP, 2025) examines the circumstances, processes, and trajectories that shaped the Ustashe terrorists and their attack in Marseille. It brings questions about contemporary terrorism to bear on a historical attack: what prompts people to join terrorist organisations? How are these people ‘radicalised’ to commit violence? What roles do women play in terrorism? Murder in Marseille bridges the scholarly gap between historical and contemporary terrorism, paying attention to, and often guided by, current concerns, ideas, theories, and notions about terrorist violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exploring why, when and under which circumstances individuals decide to take up arms mobilizing for pro-government militias, Huseyn Aliyev's Who Fights for Governments? Paramilitary Mobilization in Ukraine and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) draws on insights from long-standing ethnographic fieldwork among former and active members of Ukraine's pro-government volunteer battalions, and an original database of militias' obituaries, to offer this complex and in-depth explanation of the phenomenon of pro-government mobilization. Revealing the patterns and dynamics of individual mobilization into pro-government militias, this study is critical to understanding how the Ukrainian nation succeeded in repelling Russian aggression both in 2014-15 and in 2022, but also essential to explaining how and why hundreds of pro-government militias emerge in the context of armed conflicts in different parts of the world. Huseyn Aliyev is a Lecturer of Central & East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The German-American relationship is the decisive transatlantic dynamic of our time. Long seen as one of the most stable connections between Europe and America thanks to its well-defined Cold War structure and hierarchy, relations between Washington and Berlin have become much more volatile in the twenty-first century-- and are playing an increasingly pivotal role in determining the degree to which Europe and the United States will be able to shape a rapidly changing world order. Stabilizing this uniquely complicated relationship will be no easy feat. At times more closely aligned politically, and more intertwined economically, than any other transatlantic pair, since the end of the Cold War these republics have seen their relations characterized by frequent diplomatic, cultural and philosophical clashes and misunderstandings, and a trail of disappointed expectations. In No Better Friend? The United States and Germany Since 1945 (Hurst, 2024) Peter Sparding examines the long history between the two countries and their peoples; the narratives and perceptions harbored by each nation concerning the other; and the evolution of diplomatic, economic and security ties. Appraising the complicated interplay between Germany and the United States vis-a-vis a rising China, and the domestic challenges facing both countries, his book offers an outlook on how this all-important relationship might function going forward. Guest: Peter Sparding (he/him) is the Senior Vice President and Director of Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) in Washington DC. He has written about and analyzed US-Germany relations and transatlantic economic and foreign policy for two decades. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke here Linktree here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices