New Books Network

In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power.
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.
Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press.

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Wartime leaders should understand the link between violent means and political ends. They should also have a sense of how strategic decisions will affect the post-war peace. Yet they often fail to make these connections. Mistaking strategy for grand strategy, or misunderstanding the relationship between them, can frustrate soldiers and statesmen alike. Sometimes it can lead to national ruin. In this Adelphi book Strategy and Grand Strategy (Routledge, 2025), Joshua Rovner offers a lucid analysis of strategy (a theory of victory) and grand strategy (a theory of security). He demonstrates vividly how these concepts interact in case studies from antiquity to the present, and he describes the implications for war and peace at a time of extraordinary technological change. Rovner’s work will prove indispensable to policymakers, scholars and anyone seeking to grasp these essential but often misunderstood concepts.

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Caught between wars raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Greece is an island of relative stability. Popularly considered the cradle of Western civilisation, this is a Christian Orthodox state on the edge of the Islamic world. And, after a half-century of integration into NATO and the EU, Greece is now reabsorbing into the Near East, as the West fractures and new Middle Eastern powers rise. The country’s importance as a cultural and geopolitical hybrid is growing.
Travelling through the region, Sean Mathews explores at ground level the tectonic shifts reshaping Europe and the Middle East. He meets the last Greek merchants in Cairo, and hears from Istanbul’s remaining Greeks about Turkey’s break with the West. In Jerusalem, he discovers a budding alliance between Greece and Israel; and in a faded Ottoman port, he encounters football hooligans loyal to a Russian oligarch.
The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst, 2025) is a bold reappraisal of Greece as a Near Eastern nation uncovers its Byzantine and Ottoman past as a key to survival in today’s chaotic, shrinking world.

Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others. He calls Athens home and travels often in the region. This is his first book.

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. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. He is also a host on the Thinking Global podcast for E-International Relations.

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Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) by Professor Susan L. Burns explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period.
Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Professor Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Dr. Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.
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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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agi Bodis speaks with Dr Carly Steele (Curtin University, Perth) about researching education with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and how to enable culturally and linguistically responsive teaching. They discuss the importance of positionality when working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context, and why it matters in collaborative work with communities.
Through her professional experience in the On-Country Teacher Education program in Western Australia, Carly reflects on the way educational scholarship is rooted in community engagement. The conversation provides insights into the needs of teacher education to better prepare graduate teachers and an example for an innovative pedagogical approach co-created with community and one that reflects the local language, culture and Country.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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