Stop, Look, and Listen #22
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.
Content warning: Homophobia; Genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Victims, perpetrators, and justice
This instalment of the BBC Radio 4’s Seriously… documentary series revisits the 1999 homophobic nail bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in London’s Soho district with photographer Chris Taylor and survivor Jonathan Cash, exploring their memories of the event, their subsequent bouts of PTSD, and the ethics of photography.
On the Asymmetrical Haircuts podcast, hosts Janet Anderson and Stephanie Van Den Berg talk to Alette Smeulers about war crimes perpetrators, exploring the relationship between context and individual agency, and the different types of perpetrators including habitually violent criminals, ideologues, careerists, and followers.
Lauren Dempster interviews Nisan Alıcı about her doctoral research into victim mobilisation and transitional justice in Türkiye’s Kurdish conflict on Queen University Belfast’s Lawpod podcast. They discuss how the justice process has unfolded since the conflict was at its height in the 1990s, the impact of the increasing authoritarianism of the Turkish state, and the reasons for its recent shift to a more accommodating approach.
Writing for Opinio Juris, Shadi Sadr argues that the assumed superiority of formal transitional justice processes over informal people’s tribunals is a false one. She argues that the former often shares many of the latter’s alleged shortcomings (such as being non-binding), while highlighting people’s tribunals’ frequent capacity for innovation and for compelling us to think more deeply about what ‘justice’ means.
Britta Redwood addresses the question of states’ frequent recalcitrance to issue apologies for historical injustice, when these would not make them liable under contemporary international law, in this piece for Opinio Juris. She explains that this is because such apologies are often accompanied by individual and collective demands for reparations, as well as becoming objects of domestic political conflict and requiring difficult internal reflection and re-evaluations of their histories and identities.
The ‘new Cold War’
writes for The Conversation about how worsening geopolitical tensions are raising the risk of nuclear confrontation, citing Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in the battlefield in its war in Ukraine, tensions in both the Middle East and East Asia around potential proliferation, and Britain and the US’s own escalation of their military preparedness in response.On Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, host John Dickerson talks to author David E. Sanger about his new book New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. They look at the role of both intelligence failings and wishful thinking in hindering the US from coming to terms with a period of renewed superpower rivalry, against the backdrop of the War on Terror and American cooperation and economic integration with both Russia and China. They also discuss the role of cyberattacks and security in confrontation between the superpowers, and the risk of a new Chinese-Russian alignment.
Host
talks to David Klion on The Nation’s Time of Monsters podcast about Klion’s recent review of Alexander Ward’s book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump. They discuss the revived ‘Cold War liberalism’ of the Biden administration’s foreign and domestic policy agenda, and its relationship with the American foreign policy establishment. They also debate what the US may have gotten right or wrong in both the build-up to and its response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and how and why its response to Israel’s assault on Gaza has been so dreadful.Writing for his Drezner’s World newsletter,
reflects upon Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson’s crucial role in getting a military aid package for Ukraine through Congress. Drezner explains the reasons for Johnson’s change of heart on the issue and why he was successfully able to convince some other Republicans to back the measures. He also considers the impact it could have on Johnson’s own political future, given the divide between more pragmatic and ideological Congressional Republicans, as well as the potential responses they receive from their own Republican constituents.Elizabeth O'Brien Ingleson writes for London School of Economics’ USAPP– American Politics and Policy blog about why the contraction in American industrial employment is not the product of Chinese industrial ‘overcapacity’, but rather the neoliberal policies pursued by American governments and capital since the 1970s.
The Caucasus in its regional context
Sean Guillory interviews Sara Brinegar about her book Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound, 1920-29 on
podcast. They discuss the way Baku’s development as an oil town and as a regional economic hub, ethnic melting pot, and centre for radical politics prior to the Revolution. They also explore the specific Soviet Azerbaijani identity that developed in the city thereafter, the importance of its oil to Soviet economic reconstruction and diplomacy, and the way its shaped the particular centre-periphery dynamics of its relationship with Russia.Reuben Silverman interviews Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky about his book Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State on
’s Middle Eastern Studies channel. Hamed-Troyansky explains how Muslim communities expelled from the Northern Caucasus by 19th-century Russian imperial expansion were resettled in villages throughout the Ottoman Empire, as part of a project of internal colonialism targeted against both Christian and nomadic populations. They also discuss the local variations in their experiences and relations with both the Ottoman state and other ethnic groups, and the evolution of collective North Caucasian Muslim diasporic identities prior to and after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.Writing for The Nation, Ronald Grigor Suny reflects upon the Armenian Genocide, and its parallels with Israel’s current assault on Gaza. He highlights how the Ottoman Empire deported and massacred its Armenian population in 1915 on grounds of wartime security, and how Israel is behaving in a similar fashion against Palestinian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank today likewise constitute a genocide. Suny also argues that the US, which only belatedly recognised the treatment of the Ottoman Armenians as a genocide, remains wholly complicit in a contemporary one.
Grigor Atanesian reports for BBC World Service’s Assignment programme on the aftermath of last year’s rapid mass departure of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population following an Azerbaijani military incursion. The programme explores interviewees’ experiences of displacement in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, and their efforts to reconstitute their community and its institutions in a new setting. Atanesian also situates this event within a broader history of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the region, dating back to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and highlights the different responses it provokes from this latest wave of refugees, from irridentist nationalism to recognition of common experience with Azerbaijani victims.
Screen aesthetics, genre, and politics
Jamelle Bouie and
examine the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic on the Unclear and Present Danger podcast. They consider how the film’s limitations reflect the challenge of transferring the cyberpunk genre to the screen, and how it reflects a certain psychological and political hollowness of postmodern art. They also reflect on how Johnny Mnemonic and other 1990s visions of the internet age failed to anticipate its banality and homogeneity.Mark Kermode and Ellen E. Jones examine the way gym culture and bodybuilding have been depicted on-screen on this episode of BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot. They explore the history of cinema’s fascination with idealised athletic bodies and their capacity for action, and the way bodybuilding has been integrated into different genres from documentary via comedy to thrillers. They also consider how screen depictions of bodybuilding have treated themes of masculinity and more latterly femininity, as well as reflecting both the increasing inclusivity and continuing toxicity of aspects of gym culture.
Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant discuss Pixar’s 1995 film Toy Story with guest Lucy Fife Donaldson on the Fantasy/Animation podcast, with a particular emphasis on its visual texture and the way this is used to convey both a space of play and the qualities of different characters within it. They also explore the shifting division of labour involved in creating texture in digitally animated films, and the question of the ‘realness’ of that texture in the wake of digitisation.
reviews two recent Netflix reality competition shows, Don’t Hate the Player and Surviving Paradise, for her The Stories newsletter. She argues that these programmes, with their deliberately obscure rules, function almost as social experiments, and the ways in which racism, sexism, and queerphobia manifest among the contestants in the absence of knowledge and trust.Basque politics and culture
Eoghan Gilmartin talks to journalist Ben Wray on The Sobremesa Podcast about the left-wing Basque nationalist EH Bildu party’s strong showing in the recent Basque regional elections. They discuss the reasons for its rise at the expense of both the more centre-right, governing Basque Nationalist Party and the badly split confederal left, as well as the relationship between Basque regional politics and the increasingly polarised national picture.
Host Rory Bryce is joined by Chris Evans, Aitor Salinas-Armendariz, and Beñat Gutiérrez to talk about about Athletic Bilbao on the Forgotten Football podcast, in the wake of its recent victory in the final of the Copa Del Rey. They discuss the regional complexity of the Basque Country and the vexed question of how much right Athletic as a club has to claim to represent it. They also consider the uniqueness of its policy of only signing players born or raised in the Basque Country, the way it has enabled the club to help integrate waves of migrants to the region, and the question of whether it should be opened up to the Basque diaspora as well.
In this piece for The Guardian,
writes about the Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation, currently the world’s largest industrial co-operative. Balch explores Mondragón’s worker democracy-oriented mission, rooted in local identity and Catholic social teaching, and the pride it inspires among its members. He also highlights the challenges and hard choices it faces in the context of global capitalism, including around outsourcing and the risks posed to workers, but also the broader spread of the co-operativist ideas it embodies to other organisations and countries.If you want to support my work, please consider becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. A paid subscription is, at time of writing, available at a standard rate of just £3.50 per month, or £35 for a full year. Paid subscribers receive additional posts in regular series, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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