Stop, Look, and Listen #47
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: Genocide; Famine.
Five things to look at:
Matthias Goldmann wrote this piece for the EJIL: Talk! blog about the contest in the Global North between universalist and sovereigntist understandings of international law, and the need for the former – for all its hypocrisies – to win out to prevent the undermining of those states’ own domestic constitutional orders.
In this post for Opinio Juris, Kate May argued that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities highlights the lack of protection of educational rights under international law, but that conceptualising this scholasticide as part of a wider genocidal project raises obligations for third-party states to respond.
Parts I, II, and III of this series by Branko Milanovic for his Global Inequality and More 3.0 newsletter explored the emergence of a new ‘homoploutic’ capitalism in many developed economies, whereby a disproportionate share of income from capital but also labour accrue with the same small fraction of the population.
Ken Opalo concluded his recent series on Kenya for his An Africanist Perspective newsletter with this post on the country’s historical political economy, and how an uneven development model and increasingly personalistic business-state relations have seen living standards there fall behind those of its neighbours.
For his Chartbook newsletter, Adam Tooze emphasised the singularity of worsening famine conditions in Gaza, arising not from civil conflict or chronic poverty as in acute hunger risk hotspots elsewhere, but from a military campaign by a rich, fully sovereign state, and threatening the entirety of its population.
Five things to listen to:
On the In Bed with the Right podcast, Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub discussed the Unification Church from its foundation by Sun Myung Moon in Cold War South Korea, including its extreme theological approach to sex, the complex racial politics of its global spread, and the generational dynamics of its decline.
Jeff Hawn joined Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova on the Eurasian Knot podcast to talk about Russia’s 1993 constitutional crisis, its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how President Boris Yeltsin’s power grab was legitimised by his international partners and undermined nascent Russian democracy.
Alexandria Miller spoke to Eskor David Johnson on the Strictly Facts podcast about the Jamaat al-Muslimeen’s attempted coup in Trinidad in 1990, the political and economic discontent that drove recruitment to the group, and how a lack of consequences for the perpetrators has since harmed the rule of law there.
On the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, Adam Boswell and Sarra Majdoub explored the Rapid Support Forces’ shifting strategy since losing Khartoum in the Sudanese Civil War, including allying with other local political movements and consolidating its control over Darfur and Kordofan.
Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg interviewed Aarif Abraham, Christine Chinkin, and Ewelina Ochab on the Asymmetrical Haircuts podcast about the new Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes initiative to compel the UK to take a more coherent and consistent approach to upholding international law.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
12.12: The Day
This 1970s-set South Korean military thriller, based on real events, provides a conspiratorial, personalised, and masculinised vision of the workings of high politics.
Agency, Asymmetry, and Discourses on Global Politics
The ways in which the influence of other states, such as Israel and Russia, on Western politics is discussed frequently obscure more than they reveal.
Doubt (1991)
Jesus Jones’ breakthrough second album combines post-Cold War optimism, a rejection of moral certainties, and a multivalent response to postmodernity.