New Books in Public Policy

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of democracy and justice, also works on democratic reform and renovation at Partners in Democracy. Thus, Dr. Allen integrates both scholarship and democratic activism into her work as an academic and as an activist. Justice by Means of Democracy examines these different threads as well; what is justice, and how does democracy work towards achieving justice? And what is the role of the citizen in these pursuits?Allen opens up her discussion weaving together a number of threads, since politics, economics, civic engagement, and citizenship are all part of the whole when we consider both justice and democracy. Growing out of the ideal that democracy is a very good system for individuals to move forward together, and to achieve their full flourishing, complexities arise from issues like inequality, inequity, and how liberty is structured within the governmental system. Part of Allen’s framing comes from John Rawl’s Theory of Justice and his connection of justice and democracy—but she is pushing further in terms of the role of power and thinking about power and power sharing within democracies and democratic institutions. Justice by Means of Democracy also wrestles with the abstract ideas of negative and positive liberty, and what this actually means in practice, particularly in the United States. In fact, the book thinks about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and what that requires from each individual. Allen explained in our conversation that while we often discuss “work/life balance” in terms of our personal and professional lives, what we should be discussing and focusing on is our “work-life civic balance” – since being civically involved takes time, takes effort, but is required for democracy to function and to remain intact. We are living through some of the breakages within our democratic systems of government, not just in the United States, but in other democracies as well. And part of the reason for these breakages is the failure of democratic practice by the people themselves. Allen’s own activism is focused on restoring and reinvigorating democratic practice, so that citizens become more used to the “habit” of democracy and civic engagement.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book,Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Politics, however, are an overlooked contributor to confidence, or lack of confidence, in the American Dream. In Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025), political scientist Elizabeth Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans’ belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. Democratic Party leaders have increasingly questioned the fairness of the American economy, and, in effect, have called into question whether the American Dream is “real.” Republican Party leaders, by contrast, have consistently defended the fairness of the economy and the American Dream. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality. Suhay finds that both Democrats and Republicans tend to adhere to their party’s economic narratives when identifying the causes of inequality between rich and poor, White and Black and Latino Americans, and men and women. Democrats and liberals often attribute inequality between these groups to societal causes, such as lack of access to education and jobs or discrimination. Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely to blame individuals and lower income groups for their difficulties. However, Americans’ beliefs are less polarized when they consider socioeconomic inequalities rarely debated by politicians. For example, when asking Republicans and Democrats about the roots of rural-urban and White-Asian inequality, there is no clear unequal opportunity-individual responsibility partisan divide. Suhay argues that the availability of partisan “scripts” helps to explain differences in the public’s views on inequality between groups that have been politicized. These beliefs appear to bolster support for the two parties’ policy agendas among party supporters, driving a wedge between Democrats and Republicans in support for redistributive economic policy as well as the political candidates who support or oppose redistribution. Debating the American Dream provides fascinating insights into politics’ role in Americans’ beliefs and attitudes concerning inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this episode, Nick Caverly talks about his new book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (Stanford UP, 2025). For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them. As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures. Nick Caverly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Elena Sobrino is Lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.In A Thousand Ways to Die (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy. In this episode we discuss the work of Dana Tenille Weeks. You can hear her talk about the reimagination of future at Episode 22 of her podcast, The Rest of Us. Find Trymaine Lee at his website and on Instagram. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive. Celina Su is the inaugural Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies (with an appointment in Critical Social & Environmental Psychology) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. Her interests lie in civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is especially interested in how everyday citizens engage in policy-making—via deliberative democracy when inclusive institutions exist, and via protest and social movements when they do not. Celina received a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT and a B.A. Honors from Wesleyan University. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the United States, local law enforcement agencies are legally and organizationally independent entities from federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ICE. While local police enforce local, state and federal laws, they are not required to enforce civil immigration laws. On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State (NYU Press, 2025) examines the role of local police as voluntary, auxiliary reinforcements for ICE, focusing on the police force in New Jersey. It argues that even police in sanctuary jurisdictions, which explicitly label themselves as immigrant-friendly, are nonetheless still informally multiplying ICE’s forces through voluntary cooperation. While to date, the ethnography of policing has been produced from participant observation with the police in “ride-alongs” during patrol work and in jails and the examination of official documents like police reports, this book employs a novel method of transcribing police body worn camera (BWC) video footage to provide immersive, ethnographic thick description narratives of instances of local police officers assisting ICE. It makes the case that BWC ethnographic methods are better able to capture realistic interactions between the police and those they stop than when participant observers are on the scene. The volume thus not only reveals the ways in which local police function to assist ICE in enforcing federal civil immigration law, but also demonstrates the significance of using BWC-based ethnographies to examine how police exercise power. From police footage, internal records, and other materials, On the Side of ICE renders intimate, on-the-ground ethnographic narratives that illuminate what policing immigration looks like in contemporary America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race—and how we can make it change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Mirya Holman, a public policy professor at the University of Houston, explores the dynamics between appointed boards and local democracy. She reveals how cities create strong boards to consolidate power and benefit elite interests while maintaining weak boards that superficially address representation. Holman highlights the inequalities perpetuated by this dual system, illustrating how marginalized groups are often excluded from real power. The conversation dives into the need for reform to ensure meaningful representation and her ongoing research into local conflicts in school boards.

“A lot of things become possible when [the nation state] is not the only framework,” Melissa Byrnes reminds us in this deeply intimate local history of North African migrants in France. In this conversation about her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024) we learn about how questions Byrnes had about how we live with difference in our own communities brought her to this research on the suburbs of French cities in the dwindling decades of French imperialism. Focusing on four French suburbs from the 1950s to the 1970s, Byrnes examines how local officials – from mayors and city councilors to religious leaders to those operating public housing units – talked about North African migrants and the problems and opportunities of migration. In tracing the motivations of these French officials and local leaders, Byrnes examines what she calls “locally lived migration policies” to see how communities tried to make space for their neighbors against the backdrop of a national housing crisis, divergent political ideologies, and decolonization. Melissa K. Byrnes is professor of modern European and world history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Her research focuses on migration and activism in the context of French imperialism and decolonization and she previously coedited a volume on the colonial politics of population. Her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon, is available now from Nebraska University Press, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world?  Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. The role of the state in supporting shifts towards a more sustainable society is receiving increasing academic and policy attention from interest in green (new) deals to planet politics through to more critical attention to the ecocidal and extractivist nature of states. Despite this, the focus often starts and (frequently) ends with the governance of transitions, where the state is merely one actor among many and the tensions and contradictions between the range of roles it simultaneously performs are often left under-analysed. The state is often caricatured variously in political debate as too big, too powerful, too small, too inefficient, too ineffective or too unsustainable. But the reality is more complex, nuanced and contingent on the historical and geographical context, prevailing social relations and the state function and issue in question. States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Transforming Society (Cambridge UP, 2025) takes a deep dive into the multiple roles states are playing in supporting transitions to a more sustainable world, exploring where there is scope for their transformation. Going beyond unhelpful binaries which cast the state as the central problem or the all-encompassing solution to ecological and social crises, it explores diverse current state practice across key domains from the military and democratic state to the welfare, entrepreneurial industrial and global state. To do this, it builds on theoretical resources from a range of disciplines, as befits the challenge of making sense of these diverse aspects of state power. It moves beyond existing analysis of the ‘environmental state’ and normative projections around the form a ‘green state’ might take, in order to explore scope for a ‘transition state’ to emerge, capable of corralling and transforming all aspects of state power behind the goal of responding to the existential threat of planetary collapse. Peter Newell is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is a specialist in the politics and political economy of environment and development. For more than 25 years he has conducted research, consultancy and advisory work on issues of climate change and energy, agricultural biotechnology, corporate accountability and trade policy working in a number of countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico and South Africa. In recent years his research has mainly focussed on the political economy of carbon markets and low carbon energy transitions. Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her research focuses on international climate diplomacy and the contestation of security in the context of climate change and international ordering. She currently holds a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Grant working on critical actuarial science and climate justice. Pauline has worked with and led international teams in conflict and post-conflict countries such as Ukraine and the Baltic States, leading on qualitative methods and strategic narrative analysis. She has been selected as an Emerging Scholar by the Milton Wolf Seminar on Public Diplomacy. Pauline has also been a climate diplomacy professional working in foreign policy, and an international climate think tank. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy