In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss' book The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the Third UN: the ecology of supportive non-state actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN “think.”Dr. Tatiana Carayannis is director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF), Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program, and China-Africa Knowledge Project.Prof. Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. She was previously a Political Affairs Analyst at the UN Headquarters. Her most recent co-authored paper is “Proto-insurgencies, State Repression, and Civil War Onset.”

If you asked a passerby on the street what anarchism is, they may answer that it is an ideology based on chaos, disorder, and violence. But is this true? What exactly is anarchism?Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a new point of departure for our understanding of anarchism. Prichard describes anarchism as a lived set of practices, with a rich historical legacy, and shows how anarchists have inspired and criticised some of our most cherished values and concepts, from the ideals of freedom, participatory education, federalism, to important topics like climate change, and wider popular culture in science fiction. By locating the emergence and globalization of anarchist ideas in a history of colonialism and imperialism, the book links anarchism into struggles for freedom across the world and demonstrates that anarchism has much to offer anyone trying to envision a better future.Alex Prichard is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research on anarchism has shed new light on old problems of constitutional politics, order and anarchy in world order, and the history of international thought. He is the co-founder of the Political Studies Association specialist group for the study of anarchism, the Manchester University Press monograph series, Contemporary Anarchist Studies, and a trained chef.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.

In the modern age, some parts of the world are experiencing a long peace. Nuclear weapons, capitalism and the widespread adoption of democratic institutions have been credited with fostering this relatively peaceful period. Yet, these accounts overlook one of the most dramatic transformations of the 20th century: the massive redistribution of political power as millions of women around the world won the right to vote.The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Robert Trager and Dr. Joslyn Barnhart presents a deep and historical examination of how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped the course of war and peace.Through gripping history and careful reasoning, this book examines how the political influence of women at the ballot box has shaped war and peace. What would a world ruled by women look like? For more than a hundred years, conventional wisdom held that women's votes had little effect. That view is changing - it turns out that women voters had a profound effect on the world we know and in ways we hardly understand. A world ruled by women's voices is a world that is less willing to fall in love with war as a noble end in itself, less prone to lapse into violence for the sake of maintaining an image. In other words, it is the world we live in now, more so than we have ever realised.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing what she called "Do Everything" reform, Willard became a central figure in international movements in support of prohibition, women's suffrage, and Christian socialism. A devout Methodist, Willard helped to shape predominant religious currents of the late nineteenth century and was an important figure in the rise of the social gospel movement in American Protestantism.The first biography of Frances Willard to be published in over thirty-five years, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard (Oxford UP, 2022) explores Willard's life, her contributions as a reformer, and her broader legacy as a women's rights activist in the United States. In addition to chronicling Willard's life, historian Christopher H. Evans examines how Willard crafted a distinctive culture of women's leadership, emphasizing the importance of religious faith for understanding Willard's successes as a social reformer. Despite her enormous fame during her lifetime, Evans investigates the reasons why Willard's legacy has been eclipsed by subsequent generations of feminist reformers and assesses her importance for our time. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

What links Vajrayana Buddhism and Vajrayogini to Alistair Crowley and the neo-Platonists? A topic of speculation, desire and imagination, the Subtle Body, also known as the energy body, is an odd phenomena with deep roots in Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, but many are unaware that it has a rich history in European thought too.Simon Cox traces its roots in his recent work entitled The Subtle Body: A Geneology (Oxford UP, 2021). In our conversation we tackle multiple themes. Is it real or merely imaginary? Is it a feature of non-dual ontologies, or is more complex than that? Does Buddhism innovate the technology and practices of the subtle body? What happens to the subtle body in the New Age? Panpsychism, Monosomatic Normativity, Henri Bergson, Nietzsche, and much more.Simon Paul Cox, PhD, is an independent scholar and translator who works primarily in Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek. His research focuses on mysticism and the body. He is also a teacher of Chinese Martial Arts and collaborator at the Esalan Institute. He also has something common with me. Listen to the end to find out.Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate the political and social structures that incarcerate and degrade? In Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Farah Godrej explores the tension between narratives of quiet contemplation and social or political liberation in meditative and yogic practice that the carceral condition exacerbates or exposes. Godrej resists the impulse to treat personal wellbeing and systemic critique as if they are in a binary relationship. By leveraging her own knowledge of yogic philosophy and practice of yoga, and drawing on Gandhian political theory, she offers an account of how incarcerated people in the United States can and do sometimes practice meditation or yoga subversively by going beyond the palliative logics of prison officials and the organisations that train and bring volunteers to teach them. The meaningful question, she shows, is not whether meditation and yoga should be taught inside, but how they are taught. By describing how, her book reveals the contingent possibilities that meditation and yoga provide incarcerated people to cope with degrading coercive conditions and also sometimes hinder mass incarceration, while deferring or foreclosing other possible freedoms.Farah Godrej joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss access, ethics and risk in prisons research; ethnographic observation and scholarly activism inside; the character of resistance to physical and structural violence in the carceral state; the nexus between activism and academic work; joys of co-authorship with research participants; the delicacy of checking research participants’ meanings; and the importance of self-care in research on violent and opaque institutions.Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He is also a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association.

Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despite persistent territorial disputes, regime instability, and interstate rivalries, both regions have avoided large-scale war for decades. What accounts for the lack of war in these regions, and importantly, how are conflicts managed?In Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Aarie Glas offers a comparative regional perspective on conflict management and diplomacy in Southeast Asia and South America. Dr. Glas finds that regional interstate relations are shaped by particular habitual dispositions—discrete sets of processual and substantive qualities of relations understood and enacted by diplomatic communities of practice. Different habitual dispositions in each case shape conflict management and regionalism in important ways, and lead to a tolerance of limited regional violence. Dr. Glas expands on new developments in social International Relations theory to develop a practice-oriented and interpretive account of regional relations and explores the existence of habitual dispositions across crucial cases of regional conflict management, including the Southeast Asian response to the Preah Vihear dispute in 2011 and the South American response to the Cenepa conflict in 1995.Drawing on novel research methods and detailed interviews with regional practitioners, Practicing Peace challenges existing scholarly claims of peace in Southeast Asia and South America. Instead, Dr. Glas argues that officials successfully manage pervasive conflict short of war in both regions. He provides an in-depth look into how diplomacy unfolds and peace is practiced within diplomatic communities, from government actors to organizational officials, as they attempt to respond to and resolve territorial disputes.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics (Oxford UP, 2021) explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft,Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice.Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the international arena. Organizations such as MoveOn, GetUp, and Campact derive power and influence from their ability to rapidly mobilize members on-line and off-line and are shaping public opinion on many issues including climate change, trade, and refugees. Research in international relations (IR) has highlighted the influence of non-governmental organizations, which wield power through their expertise and long-term, moral commitment to an issue. However, no IR scholars have explored the spread and power of digital advocacy organizations. Nina Hall provides a detailed investigation of how these organizations have harnessed digitally networked power and can quickly respond to the most salient issues of the day, and mobilize large memberships, to put pressure on politicians. She finds that these organizations operate in a globalized world but tackle transnational problems by focusing on national targets. This new generation of activists have formed a strong transnational network, but still see the state as the locus of power.Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organizations in international relations. Her first book explored how international organizations have adapted to climate change: Displacement, Development and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? (Routledge, 2016). Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance.Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair.We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis to help us understand fear as a relational practice so that we can see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, what fear feels like, how we identify and understand our fears, and how we cope with them.Growing as moral agents involves coming to grips with what kinds of fearers we want to be and become, and with what we owe each other when facing what we cannot control. At the heart of this book are the moral quandaries and complexities of relational fearing: the ethics of fearing together.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.