Stop, Look, and Listen #45
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 warning: Anti-Blackness.
Five things to look at:
In this post for The Political Economy Blog,
explored the ideological roots of Labour’s malaise since last year’s UK General Election victory, including its statist focus, its difficulty engaging directly with questions of class conflict, and its lack of engagement with intellectual traditions beyond social democracy.Sean Williams has written in New Lines Magazine on the divided Filipino response to the International Criminal Court’s arrest of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, in the context of his brutal war on drugs as mayor of Davao and then nationwide, and of the rivalry between the kleptocratic Duterte and Marcos dynasties.
On the London School of Economics’ EUROPP Blog, Marika Djolai discussed the warrant issued in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik, his escalation of tensions by responding with new separatist legislation, and the fragility of his support that these moves have revealed.
For New Lines Magazine, Anna Adima revisited the brief episode of Polish refugee settlement in Uganda during the Second World War, and their uneasy place in the colony’s racial order, as they experienced chauvinism from British administrators while themselves exhibiting anti-Blackness towards the African majority.
- wrote for his newsletter about the different potential frames for analysing Donald Trump’s chaos-inducing presidency to date, including authoritarianism, patrimonialism, kleptocracy, and ideology, the insights each of these approaches offer, and their explanatory shortcomings.
Five things to listen to:
- reflected on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay programme upon how changes in Britain’s National Health Service, driven by new ideas of medical expertise and the pursuit of efficiencies, have eroded the recognition of mothers’ care work and need for rest that was once integral to maternity wards.
On this episode of the
podcast, Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova interviewed Serhiy Kudelia about his book Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine, and the interaction between the Russian state, separatist militias, and local officials in the outbreak of the war in Donbas.- and guests discussed the history of print journalism through to its hollowing out in the digital era, in the first and second instalments of a two-part episode of the , the role of social media in malign parallel news-making structures, and the possible futures of print and institutional media.
Kornel Chang joined Nicholas Gordon on the
’s Asian Review of Books podcast to discuss Chang’s book A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation, and how American military administrators’ narrowly anti-communist focus facilitated the establishment of an authoritarian South Korean regime.On the Called to the Bar podcast, Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Imogen Saunders revisited Slovakia’s dispute with Hungary over a joint dam-building project on the Danube, and why the significance of the International Court of Justice’s 1997 ruling on the case goes well beyond environmental law.
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