The Disputed Territory: Fundamental Controversies in Political Science
Political science is not a discipline of settled answers - it is one of enduring, necessary argument. This book gathers the field's most fundamental controversies and engages them head-on: the normative status of liberal democracy, the nature and limits of state legitimacy, the gap between democratic ideals and democratic reality, and the distribution of power in systems that claim to diffuse it. From sovereignty and judicial review to just war theory and human rights, each question is reconstructed in its strongest competing forms, with its intellectual origins traced and its real-world stakes made plain.
The scope is deliberately wide. Chapters move through state theory, institutional design, democratic backsliding, identity and nationalism, political economy, and international order - before turning to the emerging challenges of digital governance, artificial intelligence, and climate change. Running through all of them is a common thread: that beneath every empirical dispute lies a set of ethical premises, and that honest political analysis requires confronting those premises rather than concealing them behind the language of scientific neutrality.
This is a book for readers who want to understand not just what political scientists study, but why the discipline's deepest questions remain unresolved - and why that irresolution is a sign of intellectual seriousness rather than failure. It does not offer closure. It offers something rarer: a rigorous account of what is genuinely at stake, written at a moment when the tensions between liberty and equality, authority and accountability, universality and particularity, have never felt more urgent.
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