Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.

Roxanne L. Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge; Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman) Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (all Princeton).

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

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In Democracy on the Edge, leading political scientists John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel unravel the elections of 2020, 2022, and 2024 to show how each represented a flashpoint in the reordering of political priorities and electoral coalitions. The consequences have the potential to redefine our politics and shape our democracy for years to come. In 2020, American voters temporarily removed an authoritarian leader, only for this leader to instigate an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. The midterm election of 2022 broke with precedent on the basis of the public’s response to the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fallout from J6, as voters rejected election deniers and MAGA candidates across the board. In 2024, however, voters could not reject this threat to democracy a third time, and Trump’s return to the White House has instead left the country at a crossroads and a moment of peril.

In unpacking recent electoral cycles and placing them in broader historical context, White and Kerbel show that both major parties face unique difficulties. After Barack Obama’s election, Democrats believed they were on the cusp of securing a majority that heralded a new era of political realignment around their multiracial dominance. That majority has not yet materialized. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party has transformed the GOP into a party completely beholden to him, embracing election denialism, conspiracy theories, and policies that are far out of step with the country beyond his base. The efforts of Republicans and Democrats are buffeted by dramatic and unpredictable cultural and economic shifts. The generational divide between Baby Boomers and Gen X on one side and Millennials and Gen Z on the other has become a fault line of lived experiences, cultural values, financial realities, and political beliefs. This is all further complicated by chaotic realignments on lines of race and gender.

And underneath it all is a political system under unprecedented pressure. Our democracy faces its most severe test since the Civil War. The aspirations contained in the Declaration of Independence and the systems built by the Constitution are no longer universally accepted. The Republican Party, led by Trump, seeks to accelerate the accumulation of presidential power and limit the Constitution’s phraseology of “We, the People” to “We, the Wealthy” or “We, the Cultural Warriors.” The final denouement of this political saga has yet to be written, but Trump’s election leaves us with the possibility of two unfamiliar outcomes—a brand of American authoritarianism or the establishment of a multicultural republic.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a bystander what kind of government the framers had wrought. Franklin’s famous answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping the republic will depend on the fallout from the last three unprecedented election cycles. Ultimately, our future is up to us.

John Kenneth White is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of What Happened to the Republican Party? and Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Read his Substack.

Matthew R. Kerbel is professor of political science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine books, including Netroots and Next Generation Netroots, both about the emergence of internet politics and political engagement. Read his Substack.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention.

We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating cyber or biological attacks, and military systems accelerating a crisis towards nuclear war. What happens when a human still approves the decision, but no longer has the time or information to question the machine?

Can governments preserve meaningful control as technological competition intensifies—and who bears responsibility if they fail?

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Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education.

For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet?

In Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (U Chicago Press, 2025), Edward Baring seeks an answer by delving into debates over Marxism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He shows that this common phrase wasn’t aimed primarily at popular understandings of Marx. Rather, it was used to attack intellectuals for failing to teach Marx’s theory to the working masses correctly. His history of “vulgar Marxism” homes in on the project of mass worker education at a time when the project was both widely pursued and fiercely contested.

Worker education offered a mechanism through which Marxist theory was meant to promote large-scale social and political change, and it drew on a massive infrastructure of schools, publishing houses, and educational bureaus that stretched across Europe and reached millions. By centering this project, Baring radically recasts the history of Marxism from the Second International to World War II. He challenges classic oppositions between “economistic” and “cultural” versions of Marxism; rereads many of the most significant Marxist theorists of the time, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci; and offers new resources for understanding how Marxist ideas transformed as they traveled around Europe and then spread throughout the world.

Edward Baring is associate professor of history and human values at Princeton University. He is the author of Converts to the Real and The Young Derrida.

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.

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Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living near toxic industries often lose both jobs and the environment, how this takes different forms in different parts of the world, and how new solidarities can emerge that could save livelihoods and nature.

Guest:

Lorenzo Feltrin is a post-doctoral researcher at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, working on a Marie Curie Global Fellowship titled "Labour and Ecology in an International Perspective: Porto Marghera in the Phosphates Archipelago". Between 2021 and 2024 he worked at the University of Birmingham.

Presenter:

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of an upcoming research project on “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (funded by the EU under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).

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.

Transcript here

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Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?

In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order (Columbia UP, 2026) Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order.

Hosted by Sachin Nikarge

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Why do so many citizens continue to support politicians who undermine democracy? And why have nationalist appeals become such a powerful tool for democratic backsliding? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Filip Milačić about his new book, Abandoning Democracy for the Nation (Cambridge UP, 2026). Drawing on evidence from Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Israel and Turkey, Milačić argues that democratic erosion is often driven not simply by populism or polarization, but by political leaders convincing citizens that the nation itself is under threat. The discussion explores why democratically minded voters sometimes accept attacks on democratic institutions, whether this argument travels beyond the cases in the book, and what lessons it offers for those seeking to defend democracy.

Transcript here

Guest:

Filip Milačić is a Senior Researcher for Democracy and Society at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's Democracy of the Future officein Vienna, visiting professor at the Central European University and a Research Affiliate at CEU's Democracy Institute. His research focuses on nationalism, democratic backsliding and resistance, political identity and party politics, with a particular emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He is the author of Abandoning Democracy for the Nation, a new book exploring the relationship between nationalism and democratic erosion. Through his academic research and policy work, Milačić examines the forces shaping the future of democracy and the challenges facing democratic societies today.

Presenter:

Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

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 and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

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In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).

Drawing historical parallels to the American Progressive Era and the trust-busting of the early 20th century, Culpepper explains how corporate missteps act as catalysts for public action. The discussion delves into the concept of "latent opinion"—the submerged, widespread unease regarding corporate power, tech monopolies, and unchecked wealth that may be missed by conventional polling endeavors — and how high-profile scandals mobilize this sentiment into concrete regulatory reform. From the fiasco of Cambridge Analytica and controversies over AI data centers to the rising political tension surrounding billionaires, this conversation offers a nuanced, "possibilist" framework for how public outrage can revitalize democratic institutions and establish essential guardrails for modern capitalism.

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