Edward Goldring, "Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Welcome to the New Books Network. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Mara Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Edward Goldring about a book just out from Cornell University Press in 2026 titled Purges how dictators fight to survive, which goes into interesting detail in terms of what is actually happening when a dictator removes people within the regime, not kind of everyone in the regime. We're not talking revolution here. We're talking the top person is still there. But there's specific people that get taken out. And we're going to discuss kind of the different reasons for doing that, the different methods for doing that, some of the different outcomes of doing that, um, in terms of what that means kind of for some countries today, maybe even looking ahead of the into the future of kind of what we might pay attention to going forward, and also of course understanding how this has happened historically to kind of pull all the pieces together. So we are going to be talking about purges and of course who better than um the author.

to tell us about the book. So uh Ed, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your research. Yeah, thanks very much, uh, for having me. Appreciate it. Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions motivated the whole project? Sure. Uh so my name, as you said, is Ed Goldring. Um I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. uh in Australia, although as people will likely be able to tell, I'm from the UK.

Um so I research uh autocratic politics, especially uh those relating to elites in dictatorships. Um So there were various reasons why I set about writing this book, which started off as my PhD dissertation. Um and I first settled on the topic back in

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