In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of
transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of
the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet
the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us
at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its
demise.

Based on a combination of cultural analysis of historical
writings and—most strikingly—deep immersion in often very spicy Chinese
social media fora, Chenchen Zhang’s new book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China (Oxford
University Press, 2026) theorises the shifting significations ascribed
to ‘the West’ in China since the late-imperial collision with European
empires. Whether imagined as a source of modernity, a colonial
exploiter, geopolitical rival or—most recently—a civilisation sunk into
decadence and decay, ‘the West’—Zhang shows—is a foil for China-based
worldviews which, whatever their anticolonial or anti-Western
sentiments, are also entangled with Eurocentric hierarchies of race,
nation and gender whose patriarchal and civilisational histories are
rooted at least partly that very same ‘West’.

Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-operationalize Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy. The core of our reflection centered on how one theorizes through such an intense archive. The book avoids abstract distance, relying instead on a rigorous post-2019 archive built from ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in interdisciplinary feminist studies. It demonstrates that theorizing is not a passive intellectual exercise, instead, it is an active, grounded practice of mapping power where it is felt most directly. Through intersectional analyses of space, home, time, and storytelling, the text reveals how militarized control operates via spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Reflecting on this book serves as a vital reminder that critical theorizing must remain tethered to the grounded realities of resistance.

Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford
University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the
small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime
state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its rulers built
authority, not only through war and seafaring raids but also by
connecting Denia to wider Mediterranean trade, diplomacy, and culture.

The rise and evolution of the taifa
of Denia is a powerful case study for understanding the construction of
medieval maritime states in the Mediterranean. Dr. Bruce situates Denia
within the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate and explores how its rulers
forged legitimacy through identity formation, maritime violence, and
regional connectivity. Denia's identity was negotiated through
rulership, unfreedom, and cultural hybridity, and violence —
particularly predatory warfare and maritime jihad — functioned as both
statecraft and economic extraction. At the same time, Denia's
entanglement in commercial, diplomatic, and intellectual networks
positioned it as a key node linking the Islamic Mediterranean and the
Latin West. The state's trajectory cannot be reduced to narratives of
decline or simple religious conflict but instead reveals a process of
negotiation shaped by mobility, interdependence, and the fluid
boundaries between public and private power. This narrative reframes
Mediterranean history beyond Eurocentric paradigms and underscores the
significance of Islamic maritime states within the wider medieval world.

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.

Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedānta (Oxford UP, 2026) presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Śaṅkara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture. While modern portraits of Śaṅkara often cast him as a mystic or a religious reformer, the book paints a more complex portrait of the historical Śaṅkara. As a theologian of liberation, Śaṅkara was a maverick within the prevailing Brahmanical ideology of his time. In an intellectual landscape dominated by Mīmāṁsā ritualists and Vedāntic practitioners of meditation, Śaṅkara introduced a radical claim: that the paraṁ śreyas ("highest good") is attained not through action, ritual, or prolonged meditation, but through the immediate, intellectual understanding of the Upaniṣadic identity statements. Uskokov shows that the birth of the mahā-vākya or "great statement"--such as tat tvam asi ("You are That")--was not the work of Śaṅkara himself, but rather his tenth-century follower Sarvajñātman who used the structural logic of the Mīmāṁsā school. The book meticulously traces the evolution of this soteriological model, exploring how early Advaitins navigated complex debates over language, ritual causality, and the nature of the Self. In doing so, it argues that Śaṅkara's most significant contribution was his intervention against Vedic theologians who viewed scripture as a guide for action and meditation rather than primarily informative.

Open Access here

Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly what's at stake when we allow leaders to legitimate violence and the mob to rule.

For much of American history, members of the majority population of the United States indiscriminately attacked and terrorized minority communities. In some parts of the country, mob violence seemed a near-constant part of the region's history, while in others it was a brief, horrific spasm that perpetrators--but not victims--quickly forgot.

In American Pogroms, terrorism expert Daniel Byman argues that there is a word for this type of communal violence: pogrom. Although pogroms are historically associated with the orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence in Tsarist Russia, Byman asserts that pogroms have been an all-too-frequent feature of American history. Tracing two centuries of communal violence, Byman recounts cases of attacks against American religious minorities such as Catholics and Mormons, the killing of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the murder and wholesale expulsion of Chinese workers from the American West, and the repeated attacks on the Black community that killed thousands and enabled decades of brutal discrimination. In all these cases, pogroms helped cement a system of injustice that left religious, ethnic, and racial minorities politically and economically marginalized. While the idea of mob violence now strikes most Americans as unthinkable, Byman warns that increased polarization and selective news consumption in recent years has coarsened discourse and legitimized violence, raising the risk that at least some violence will return.

A broad-ranging synthesis of how and why majorities have so frequently resorted to community-level violence to restore or cement their power, American Pogroms illustrates the outsized role of violence in U.S. history and how it shapes the country today.

Daniel Byman is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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