Stop, Look, and Listen #44
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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 warning: Ethnic cleansing.
Five things to look at:
Lucía Cholakian Herrera wrote for New Lines Magazine about the ascendancy of the Conservative Political Action Conference as a new form of right-wing diplomacy animated by a sense of civilisational mission, albeit whose US-oriented culture war politics translate uneasily across different national contexts.
In this piece for her
newsletter, drew connections between Donald Trump’s proposals for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and population transfer projects in the former Ottoman Empire during the interwar period, and the danger of such an approach being renormalised.- argued in this post for his newsletter that forecasts of a potential US slide into competitive authoritarianism under Trump’s presidency have underestimated this risk, given Elon Musk’s heightened role and the weakness of institutional resistance since the inauguration.
- , Eric Schliesser () reflected upon J. A. Hobson’s realist rather than moralising liberal critique of imperialism, which Hobson viewed as a distorted manifestation of nationalism that harmed even its practitioners by destabilising the international order.
In this post for his
newsletter, discussed the protest movement in Serbia against the authoritarianism and corruption of President Aleksandar Vučić’s administration, and how its avowed apoliticism broadens its support but also limits its capacity to oppose him.
Five things to listen to:
On the
podcast, Eric Paglia spoke to Christian Prip and Gosia Smieszek-Rice about the Kingdom of Denmark’s coming chairship of the Arctic Council, the balance of authority between Nuuk and Copenhagen in this role, and outgoing chair Norway’s handling of geopolitical tensions between members.1Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Alex Kane discussed the detention of Palestinian former student activist Mahmoud Khalil in the US, on Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast, the role of establishment and new reactionary Jewish organisations in instigating his arrest, and liberal and left-wing Jewish groups’ opposition to it.
On the Called to the Bar podcast, Douglas Guilfoyle and Imogen Saunders considered the legacy of the ‘Caroline Case’, when British forces sank steamer the Caroline near the US-Canada border in 1837, and its frequent misapplication to justify the dubious principle of ‘anticipatory self-defence’ in international law.
Geraldine Gudefin interviewed Simon Rabinovitch on the
podcast about his book Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History, and the ways in which in different times and locations, diasporic Jewish communities utilised their legal rights and status as minorities to practice greater autonomy.Also on
, Stephen Satkiewicz spoke to Daniela Richterova about her book Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, and Czechoslovakia’s complex relationships with violent non-state Middle Eastern actors, operating partly independently of the Soviet Union.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.
You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
