Stop, Look, and Listen #16
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
The ‘Axis of Resistance’
Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is fuelling a broader regional confrontation between Israel and its Western allies on the one hand, and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ comprising Iran and allied non-state militias on the other.
On the Global Dispatches podcast,
spoke to journalist Negar Mortozavi about Iran’s role in the conflict, and the motivations underpinning it. Mortozavi placed the Iranian regime’s appetite for asymmetric proxy warfare in the context of the country’s hard-liners consolidating power within its political system and effectively suppressing the domestic protests that had garnered much international attention. She highlighted the continuing caution of both Iran and the US, but also the centrality of events in Gaza in escalating the conflict regardless, exacerbated by a lack of American appetite for pursuing diplomatic alternatives.Meanwhile, on the International Crisis Group’s Hold Your Fire podcast, host Richard Atwood talked to the group’s Senior Iraq Analyst Lahib Higel about the ramifications of the conflict in Iraq. After a drone attack by Kata’ib Hizbollah, the leading militia within the Iran-backed ‘Islamic Resistance’ coalition operating in Iraq and Syria, killed three American soldiers at a base in Jordan in January, the US responded with a strike on Baghdad that killed Abu Baqir al Saadi, the senior commander believed to have orchestrated that original attack.
Atwood and Higel discussed the complex, loose alignment of the militias operating in Iraq and in the Middle East more broadly, and their relationship with Iran. Higel argued that Islamic Resistance attacks on American positions since October have been a primarily symbolic show of support for Hamas and opposition to continued US presence in Iraq, but have been met with a disproportionately aggressive and indiscriminate response by the US. They also explored the options available to the US, including the risks involved in ramping up its response to Iran, as well as in retaining or withdrawing its military presence from Iraq.
American law and politics
In December, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump be excluded from the ballot in the state for the forthcoming American presidential election. They did so on the grounds that his role in the January 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection rendered him ineligible under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The case was heard before the US Supreme Court earlier this month.
Hosts Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw, and Leah Litman discussed the hearing on the Strict Scrutiny podcast. They remarked on how the Court’s justices seemed to wholly ignore the arguments made by Trump’s legal team in favour of their own reasoning for probably overturning Colorado’s decision, on the grounds that this is a national matter, and one for Congress to decide upon, rather than individual states. This was, they noted, inconsistent with the way the Court has prioritised states’ rights over central government direction on other issues that could similarly decide a national election, and also demonstrated a lack of consideration of what the implications of rejecting Colorado’s case are.
Law professor Aaron Tang, however, is critical of the way Americans rely on the Constitution to resolve contemporary political crises. He made this case as Celeste Headlee’s guest on Slate’s Hear Me Out podcast, arguing that the Supreme Court, rather than acting on the guidance of a document written over two centuries ago, would do better to focus on harm minimisation. Tang instead advocated for using grassroots organising and democratic institutions such as Congress to pursue progressive goals, rather than relying on legal channels.
Anarchism
A series of events were held across London last week to mark the 130th anniversary of the ‘Greenwich Outrage’, in which French anarchist Martial Bourdin accidentally blew himself up with explosives he likely intended to use in an attack on the Greenwich Observatory. Host Marybeth Hamilton discussed the incident and its commemoration with two of the events’ co-organisers,
and Thomas Jones, on the History Workshop Podcast. Jones situated the ‘Greenwich Outrage’ within the longer tradition of anarchist communities coalescing in London, aided by Britain’s then relatively liberal asylum policies, subsequently tightened up during the First World War. McInerney meanwhile highlighted the wider impact of the incident on the contemporary imagination, including the representation of anarchists in late Victorian and Edwardian art and culture.While anarchists then and now have been deeply embroiled with anticolonial movements, some Western anarchists have nonetheless dismissed national liberal struggles in the Global South as not properly anarchist, precisely because of their focus on the nation. This is an error,
argued on the Anarchist Essays podcast, distinguishing between national identity and nationalism. He rather characterised the state as constraining national flourishing and internal diversity, and stressed the need for anticolonial movements to escape the statist paradigm that undermines their liberatory potential and reinforces colonial structures.Sport and the far right
The budding romance between singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and American footballer Travis Kelce has sparked what might seem, on the surface, a great deal of inexplicable opprobrium on the American right.
and unpacked this controversy on their In Bed with the Right podcast. They explored Swift’s status as Swift as both a global star and vaguely liberal figure, as well as the way she and Kelce have formed a fairly conventional heterosexual coupling, except that she is the much more successful of the two. This relationship, they concluded, jarred not so much with the conventionally masculine space of the National Football League, as with a wider right-wing ecosystem that trades on male grievance, exhibiting a subcultural fascistic attitude to women that lacks resonance with the wider population.Journalist
has done vital work in highlighting the growth of these types of far right subculture around certain sports, particularly mixed martial arts. He previously drew attention the rabid Islamophobia of Israeli MMA fighter Haim Gozali, who etched the names of rival Muslim fighters on shells bound for Gaza. As Zidan writes about for his Sports Politika newsletter, Gozali responded by adding Zidan’s name to one of the shells – part of a wider ongoing pattern of the fighter expressing anti-Muslim racism and glorifying in violence against Palestinians.Writing for a public audience
As someone trying to straddle the gap between writing for academic and public audiences, I want to highlight two recent accounts of this process that I found particularly enlightening. On the Drafting the Past podcast, host Kate Carpenter interviewed historian Grace Elizabeth Hale about her writing process. Hale emphasised the importance of writing to her as a creative act in itself, during which many of her ideas take shape. She also discussed the integral role that imagining a broader audience for her work has played in shaping her writing, and the importance of practices such as pacing and scene setting in rendering academic writing attractive to a wider readership.
Meanwhile, sociologist Sevasti-Melissa Nolas has written for her newsletter about the transformative experience of producing a catalogue for an exhibition of photographs taken by children for an ethnographic project she was leading. Nolas recounted how this task compelled her to write in a far freer, more accessible way than the dryly technical conventions of academic writing, centred around the images the catalogue showcased. She remarked on how the experience subsequently transformed her academic writing, encouraging her to take a far more essayistic and photo-heavy approach.
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