Stop, Look, and Listen #33
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 that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warnings: Antisemitism.
Five things to look at:
Doga Ozturk has written for his A Few Thoughts On... newsletter about Selim III’s efforts to centralise and modernise the Ottoman Empire in response to damaging military defeats and increasing influence of local elites in its peripheries, and how this came to an end with his deposition in 1807.
In this post for her unintended consequences newsletter, Prof. Victoria Sutton reflects upon the varying conceptions of evidence that legal systems and academic disciplines use, and on how their narrow parameters are exposed by considering indigenous American cultures’ very different notions of evidence.
Shannon Brincat has written for The Conversation about the significance of Pope Francis’s visit to Timor-Leste, given the key role that the Catholic Church played in defending its inhabitants’ rights during Indonesia’s brutal military occupation of the country, as well as its broader contemporary political contexts.
Branko Milanovic has written this piece for his Global Inequality and More 3.0 newsletter on the poor prospects for the current global economic order when the world’s most powerful states no longer adhere to the ostensibly apolitical, neoliberal rules that govern it and that they previously advocated for.
For his Chartbook newsletter, Adam Tooze has written this post arguing that conceptions of climate change as a direct result of capitalism fail to recognise the range of political economies of fuel extraction and energy production operating, and the significance of China especially to emissions levels and reduction.
Five things to listen to:
On the Called to the Bar podcast, Douglas Guilfoyle and Ntina Tzouvala discussed the place of international law in the statecraft of small states, and the extent to which it enables them to make claims about the broader applicability of certain agreed rules in ways that can mitigate the power politics of larger states.
Matt Dawson interviewed Lise Butler on New Books Network about her book Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970, and how Young as an influential figure in the Labour Party, as a high-profile sociologist, and as a social innovator sought to remake social democracy and social policymaking.
Maria Margaronis presented this episode of the BBC World Service’s Assignment programme about the Cypriot resort of Varosha, abandoned following the 1974 conflict on the island, and the desire of its Greek Cypriot former residents to return and rebuild it with their Turkish Cypriot counterparts.
On the Know Your Enemy podcast, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell spoke to Vinson Cunningham about his novel Great Expectations, which depicts a young Black staffer on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, as well as about the roles of theatre and of race in contemporary American politics more broadly.
Arielle Angel interviewed Shane Burley and Ben Lorber on the On the Nose podcast about contemporary antisemitism and the role that combating it plays in broader struggles for social and racial justice, without giving credence to more tenuous accusations of antisemitism used to discredit criticism of Israel.
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