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A qualified defense of authenticity claims in contemporary politics.

On both the Left and Right, we see a range of political claims cast in terms of authenticity, from transgender persons seeking recognition of who they truly are to religious business owners requesting exemptions from antidiscrimination laws. For claimants, what is often at stake is an inner self that would be harmed if changed or concealed. At the same time, many scholars are skeptical of authenticity claims, with some worrying that they are too nebulous and inward-looking and others fearing that they contain too much anti-democratic potential. There is also the added difficulty of determining when and on what grounds to accept a claim of authenticity.

Nina Hagel argues that while invoking authenticity has serious risks, it remains a crucial democratic resource. Through an engagement with canonical and contemporary political theorists, and an analysis of current political struggles centering on authenticity, Hagel advances a defense of authenticity’s democratic potential, alongside a practice for interpreting and invoking such claims. While one might assume that this perspective clashes with the post-modern view that there is no true self outside of politics and history, Hagel puts forward a non-essentialist understanding of authenticity that emphasizes subject formation and emancipation. Hagel argues that authenticity claims best support democracy when they collectively steward, rather than overcome, the social powers that shape our identities. We ignore authenticity claims at our peril, since the objects of such claims are the norms and practices that make us who we are.

2026 APSA Jeffrey Friedman Best Book on Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Award Winner

The Politics of Beginning traces the formation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), now the most authoritative private organization for forestry certification. It starts with recounting the highly politicized forest politics of the late 1980s, when activists protested human rights abuses and deforestation while experimenting with sustainable forestry practices. The book then follows the people who became the founding members of the Forest Stewardship Council. By using live audio recordings of the FSC founding assembly in 1993, this book provides an in-depth analysis of a constitutional moment for private authority in world politics.

To explore how timber merchants, Indigenous communities, and social and environmental NGOs engaged in private institution-making, Alejandro Esguerra works with the concept of translation developed in Actor-Network Theory—a process in which knowledge about governance is continuously recontextualized—and introduces it to International Relations theory. He develops a dramaturgical methodology with metaphors of theatre such as stage, script, and performance. This methodology can be used to analyze the ways in which activists and others translate knowledge about governance and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that appear during this process. The environmental crisis requires a transformation in the ways societies value and govern human–nature relations, and The Politics of Beginning reveals the conditions under which even formerly antagonistic actors start developing a common political project.

This book contradicts the dominant myth that incompetent, corrupt, and uncompromising Palestinian decision-makers are responsible for the lasting stalemate in the Middle-East Peace Process. It highlights recent political developments in Palestine that fundamentally redefine important parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Contrary to public perception, new political trends in the Palestinian Territories bolster prospects for the realisation of Palestinian national aspirations. Michael Bröning identifies key indicators which fundamentally question dominant Israeli narratives and pose an unprecedented strategic challenge to the Israeli leadership. These include the re-invention of Hamas, the reform of the Fatah movement, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building efforts and the surge of non-violent resistance against Israel.

This persuasive book forces us to reconsider the perceived wisdom that the Palestinians are powerless to influence events as they struggle for peace.

Examines the transformation of vernacular knowledge during a pivotal period of modern Chinese history, 1894 to 1954.
 
What did common readers read in the midst of the revolutions that punctuated China’s long Republic (1894–1954)? How did they manage the often-unprecedented challenges of the era? What did they know and how did they know it?
 
In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge traces the unfolding of a consequential politics of accommodation that engaged commoners as knowers rather than as an unenlightened mass. A response to the institutional failures of the era, this politics was enacted through an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national network. As yet unstudied, this infrastructure produced and circulated up to ten times the number of books as official, mainstream channels.
 
A corpus of some five hundred of these cheap collections of recipes and techniques serves as the basis for this book. Judge focuses on four challenges common readers faced: how to cure an opium addiction, avoid an electric shock, prevent a cholera infection, and graft a plant. She further draws on government, archival, periodical, and fiction materials in devising composites of individual common readers so that we can better know them: details of the crises they faced, the remedies they tried, and the knowledge they relied on as they decocted cures and applied technologies. She argues that the acts of conciliation and assemblage these readers engaged in shaped the broader epistemic terrain from which historical change was actualized in China’s century of revolution.

Bringing together the fields of sociology, political science, and management and organization studies, Ursula Mühle offers in this unique volume an authoritative overview of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Mühle first considers the origins of CSR during the 1970s, highlighting the various approaches to CSR and explaining its early shortcomings. She then turns to the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative to investigate why, since the mid-1990s, CSR has been on the rise. Finally, Mühle employs several case studies as well as interviews with business executives and politicians to illustrate why businesses worldwide now view CSR as a key component to their success. The Politics of Corporate Social Responsibility will be welcomed by scholars and CSR practitioners alike.

The Politics of Deafness embarks upon a post-modern examination of the search for identity in deafness and its relationship to the prevalent hearing culture that has marginalized Deaf people. Author Owen Wrigley plainly states his intention to disrupt “normal” thought about the popularly considered condition of deafness as a physical deficiency. From his decade of experience working and living in the Deaf community in Thailand, he uses wide-ranging examples to go beyond disputing conventional theorists for their interpretation of deafness as the lack of a sensory function. By calling attention to the different lingual potential created by the instant visual expression of cyberspace, he explodes orthodox conceptualization of the nature of language as serially ordered and dependent upon sound.

       In bold style, this provocative work poses the relationship of the bodies physical and mental of Deaf people as subject to a form of “colonialism” by the dominant Hearing culture. It proceeds to expose and attack presumptions and practices that derive from and descend upon deaf bodies. Related analysis also addresses tensions little noted in the current literature on deafness and on the popular move to reconstitute Deafness as a global culture.

       Through displacement of logistical anchors, ironic stances, and disconcerting perspectives, The Politics of Deafness practices a form of de-naturalization to demand space within and between the normalizing frames of daily lives. By doing so, it offers an insightful and intriguing perspective on the meanings of Deafness, the politics of Deaf identity, and what it costs to be “unusual.”

A thoughtful examination of how to recenter decency in politics and public life, told through conversations between long-time historian and public servant Peter Hennessy and influential friends, decision makers, and leaders. 

Having surveyed eighty years of the UK's political and constitutional journey, Hennessy prepares to bid farewell to public life. And he’s left with one thought: that the essential quality of decency needs to be placed—once again—back at the heart of public life and public discourse. But what does decency look like today, where does it spring from, and how might we all play a role in recentering it in public life? In The Politics of Decency, Hennessy considers such issues alongside a group of people who might pick up his baton. After inviting public servants, colleagues, and those he has long admired, along with younger voices from politics and public life, into his home for conversations about what decency means to them, he reflects on what they have shared with him. Hennessy’s interest in this question springs from a concern about constitutional proprieties, but these conversations range much further afield—from the constitution to service delivery, from schooling to social media. What he hears is both worrying and uplifting: a sense that there is a problem, a real commitment to tackle it, and ideas for how that might be done—and what role all of us can play in doing it.

The 1948 war ended in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and homes. Israeli settlers moved in to occupy their land and the Palestinian refugees found themselves in refugee camps, or in neighbouring Arab countries. Today there are nearly four million Palestinian refugees -- and they want the right to go home. Their problem is the greatest and most enduring refugee problem in the world.

Since 1948 Israeli refugee policy has become a classic case of denial: the denial that Zionist "transfer committees" had operated between 1937 and 1948; denial of any wrong-doing or any historical injustice; denial of the "right of return"; denial of restitution of property and compensation; and indeed denial of any moral responsibility or culpability for the creation of the refugee problem.

The aim of this book is to analyze Israeli policies towards the Palestinian refugees as they evolved from the 1948 catastrophe (or nakba) to the present. It is the first volume to look in detail at Israeli law and policy surrounding the refugee question. Drawing on extensive primary sources and previously classified archive material, Masalha discusses the 1948 exodus; Israeli resettlement schemes since 1948; Israeli approaches to compensation and restitution of property; Israeli refugee policies towards the internally displaced (‘present absentees’); and Israeli refugee policies during the Madrid and Oslo negotiations.

Masalha asks what rights Palestinians possess under international law? How can a refugee population be compensated, and will they ever be able to return to their homes? Masalha questions the official Israeli position that the only solution to the problem is resettlement of the refugees in Arab states or elsewhere. This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the subject that lies at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

The United States and Mexico trade many commodities, the most important of which are indispensable sources of energy—crude oil and agricultural labor. Mexican oil and workers provide cheap and reliable energy for the United States, while US petro dollars and agricultural jobs supply much-needed income for the Mexican economy. Mexico’s economic dependence on the United States is well-known, but The Politics of Dependency makes a compelling case that the United States is also economically dependent on Mexico.

Expanding dependency theory beyond the traditional premise that weak countries are dominated by powerful ones, Martha Menchaca investigates how the United States and Mexico have developed an asymmetrical codependency that disproportionally benefits the United States. In particular, she analyzes how US foreign policy was designed to enable the US government to help shape the development of Mexico’s oil industry, as well as how migration from Mexico to the United States has been regulated by the US Congress to ensure that American farmers have sufficient labor. This unprecedented dual study of energy sectors that are usually examined in isolation reveals the extent to which the United States has become economically dependent on Mexico, even as it remains the dominant partner in the relationship. It also exposes the long-term effects of the agricultural policies of NAFTA, which led to the unemployment of millions of agricultural workers in Mexico, a large percentage of whom relocated to the United States.

Winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award

Originally published in 1970, and now a classic in its field, The Politics of Fear traces the rise and fall of one of America’s most notorious political demagogues. Robert Griffith concludes that McCarthy’s enormous power owed less to the force of the senator’s unique personality than to the issues and symbols with which he identified and that McCarthy was the product, not the progenitor, of the postwar politics of anticommunism. For this edition, Griffith has provided a new introduction covering the recent literature on McCarthyism and the changing views on the topic.

Inside the Sioux Nation's pursuit of recognition and justice

This book is the powerful story of the ongoing struggle of indigenous Americans in the twentieth century United States and of its shift in focus from traditional battlefield and massacre sites to federal courtrooms and the halls of Congress.

The Politics of Hallowed Ground includes excerpts from the diary kept by Mario Gonzalez, the attorney for the Sioux Nation in its struggle for recognition of the Wounded Knee Massacre site as a national monument. Gonzalez's personal record of the struggle is coupled with commentary by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a Native American writer who places the work in its historical context. Together, the two voices will draw the reader into far more than the continuing struggle of the Sioux people to achieve justice.

The book covers Sioux history from before the Wounded Knee tragedy to modern times, through the Sioux Nation's long and often rancorous dialogue with the U.S. government over control of South Dakota's Black Hills, traditional Sioux lands recognized by treaty in 1877 and never forfeited or sold. After reading a 13-year-old survivor's narrative of what happened at Wounded Knee and the list of the dead and wounded, readers will find it difficult not to share the Sioux perspective.