Stop, Look, and Listen #23
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: Genocide; Antisemitism; The Holocaust; Rape.
Universities, solidarity, and protest
discusses the political economy of university protests with on Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, with a particular focus on Tooze’s own institution, Columbia University in New York. Tooze explains the vast, complex economic asset holdings of American elite private American universities, including sizeable endowments, and the relatively small scale of investments linked to the Israeli state that students are demanding divestment from, principally for symbolic reasons. He also criticises university management for their high-handed refusal to concede to demands and their conflation of unease around the protests with threat of violence, while highlighting why Columbia’s especially poor record of asset management has rendered it especially vulnerable to high profile alumni withholding donations for political reasons.Writing for his
newsletter, critiques centrist misrepresentations of student protests past and present, arguing that their tendency to draw a straight line between the protests of 1969 and 2024 fails to appreciate the substance of either. He notes that whereas student protestors then and now have legitimately recognised the nature of the university as a potential site for transformation, centrist critics instead hark back to a falsely imagined, non-ideological university of the past, which ignores the dominant Cold War constraints of the time). Zimmer ads that these critics also draw false conclusions about the hegemony of radical ideas today, and that their aversion to identity politics, desire to turn back the clock on challenges to the authority of traditional elites, and drawing of false analogies ultimately places centrists in the same ideological space as far right actors such as Chris Rufo. and are joined by Samuel Caitlin to discuss the place of the university campus in right-wing discourse on the Clayman Institute for Gender Research’s In Bed with the Right podcast. They examine the contrast between the diversity of campus life across different types of institution on the one hand, and the campus as an imagined liminal space in reactionary fantasies, simultaneously holding mutually contradictory ideas about age, gender, sexuality, and class, on the other. They also explore the reasons why older people with little ongoing connection to universities have been so over-invested in what happens there, including a particular fixation on relatively marginal disciplines, and an apparent lack of due deference to established canons.On The Nation’s The Time of Monsters podcast, host
and Yousef Munayyer reflect upon how Joe Biden’s policy on Israel has pitted him against much of party’s younger base. Munayyer highlights the scale of Palestinian solidarity movements on American university campuses and the willingness of students to take significant personal and professional risks in participating, building upon previous extensive work activists have put into creating awareness of and support for the Palestinian struggle. They also discuss why Biden has continually failed to draw effective red lines in America’s relationship with Israel, in contrast with predecessors such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and the risk his course of action poses of fragmenting his electoral bloc, particularly given the importance of university students in some swing states.Ideas and forces of reaction
joins co-hosts Gil Morejón, , Owen Glyn-Williams, and William Paris to talk about late fascism on the What’s Left of Philosophy podcast. Toscana explains how his work draws upon that of Black and anticolonial writers in widening our understanding of fascism, beyond a narrow focus on just analogies with Nazi Germany, to seeing it as a tendency also present in liberal democracies. They discuss the way fascism fulfils particular functions and has a certain psychological appeal, the difficulty in defining it as a phenomenon, and the challenges these tendencies pose to antifascists.Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert welcome Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon onto Novara Media’s ACFM podcast to discuss reactionary democracy. Winter and Mondon highlight the contrasts and relationship between illiberal and liberal forms of racism, and the way the latter relies on the ideas of both having overcome but also functioning as the sole bulwark against the far right ,while enacting many of its ideas. They also criticise the indiscriminate use of populism as a term for describing and legitimising the far right, while debating the question of how valuable a prism fascism is instead for understanding contemporary developments.
Host David Runciman and guest Christopher Clark explore the history of antisemitism on the Past Present Future podcast. Clark explains how antisemitism developed in the medieval era in response to the Jews’ ambiguous position in Christian thought, as both originators of Christianity and as contemporary heretics, who should be but could not be wholly converted, and in European economies, in which they were coerced into vital but unpopular economic roles through their exclusion from other trades. They also discuss how the eschatological and existentialist nature of premodern antisemitism fed into the more quasi-scientific forms seen in Nazi Germany in particular, and the factors that made antisemitism so virulent in some nineteenth- and twentieth-century societies, but less so in others.
Civil conflict and outside actors in African politics
Host Erik Voeten discusses the recent series of coups in Africa with
and on the Good Authority podcast. They examine the prominence of such coups in Francophone Africa especially due to the particular insecurity of these states against the threat of insurgencies, a situation exacerbated by the heavy-handed and unpopular approach of the US and France to combatting them. They also look at how a strong appetite for democracy in most African societies is tempered by a lack of economic security, and further threatened by populist autocrats who fail to deliver on their promises, as well as the inability of both regional organisations and the United States to effectively discourage coups. is in discussion with Mutasim Ali, from the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, on the Global Dispatches podcast about the looming possibility of genocide in Darfur, as the Rapid Support Forces prepare to target the regional city of El Fasher. Ali explains that this is a highly credible risk given the RSF’s origin in the Janjaweed militia that carried out genocide against Darfur’s non-Arab populations in the early 2000s, and its tactic of besieging cities and using looting, rape, and violence against civilians to inhibit their resistance. He also highlights the role of the United Arab Emirates as the RSF’s principal backer in enabling its war against the Sudanese Armed Forces and the possibility of going through the International Court of Justice to compel the UAE to pull the plug on this support.Cultural heritage
Nicola Witcombe interviews Saara Mildeberg about her research into the tangible and intangible heritagescape of northeastern Estonia on Aarhus University’s Knowledge on the Nordics podcast. Mildeberg explains how Ida-Viru County’s economy was reshaped in the Soviet era by a focus on shale oil production, which is now integral to Estonia’s economic independence and local incomes, but also causes considerable environmental damage through both extraction and emissions. She also discusses how the region’s industrial heritage has become an integral component of its tourism sector, and how the resulting focus on its Soviet history is contested especially between its Russian-speaking minority and ethnic Estonian majority, as well as the tensions between this form of heritage and other aspects of its tourism economy, and between the needs of tourism and residents more generally.
On The Greek Current podcast, host
talks to Alexander Kitroeff about the history of the Greek-American diner. Kitroeff explains that Greeks became especially associated with American diners in the post-Second World War period amid the increasing popularity of diners as leisure venues and rising immigration from Cyprus and Greece, moving into this industry because of the existing presence of earlier waves of Greek migrants, and the relative unfamiliarity of Americans with Greek food. He argues that Greeks’ success in the sector was rooted in their prior experiences of hardship and famine, the centrality of food and hospitality to their culture, and their employment of the whole family in these businesses. Kitroeff also reflects upon the declining numbers but also evolving nature of Greek-owned diners amid economic, urban, and cultural change.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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