Stop, Look, and Listen #51
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.
Five things to look at:
In New Lines Magazine, Jake Pitre traced the history of anti-Americanism as a frequently bland, often peripheral, but regularly recurring feature of Canadian politics, rendered salient by occasional threats of annexation, as well as fears of cultural imperialism, economic domination, and foreign policy adventurism.
Robin Douglas reflected in his Religion off the Beaten Track newsletter on the 1870 fall of the Papal States, whose fusion of clerical and secular governance had resulted in increasing political and religious repression and economic stagnation, facilitating the recently unified Kingdom of Italy’s successful capture of Rome.
Leila Sansour wrote for the LRB Blog about the decision of several Western states to recognise Palestinian statehood as an acknowledgement of the Palestinian people’s presence and political agency, and a route to supplanting the reigning politics of fear and chaos with a rules-based order and collective security.
Peter Geoghegan, May Bulman, and Lucas Amin examined Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s bankrolling of the Tony Blair Institute, in this post for Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale newsletter, the TBI’s resulting embrace of uncritical tech boosterism, and the influence of this in turn on the UK’s Labour government.
For the Journal of Historical Ideas Blog, Mayukh Chakrabarty explored the 19th-century emergence of India’s life insurance industry at the intersection between competing British ideological currents of free-market liberalism and colonial paternalism, as well as Indians’ own pursuit of respectability and security.
Five things to listen to:
Anna Arutunyan joined Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova on the Eurasian Knot podcast to discuss her book Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny, and how the myth of a strong Russian state and a docile population is undermined by the centrality of rebel figures and revolutions to its history.
On the Libero podcast, Jack Pitt-Brooke, Miguel Delaney, and Tariq Panja considered the recent dismissals of Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and Arsenal executive vice-chair Tim Lewis in the context of the transformation of English football through club ownership by sovereign wealth and private equity funds.
Reuben Silverman interviewed Selim Koru about his book New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country on the New Books Network podcast, and how far-right and Islamist strands in Turkey and an oppositional relationship with the West have reshaped its domestic and foreign policy.
Olga Oliker and Elissa Jobson welcomed Valery Kavaleuski onto the International Crisis Group’s War & Peace podcast to explain Belarus’s balancing act between its subservient relationship with Russia and efforts to improve relations with NATO states, and possible ramifications for the country’s repressive domestic politics.
Charlotte Lydia Riley talked about ‘Baby on Board!’ badges with hosts Kasia Tee and Dan Hancock on the Cursed Objects podcast, within the broader contexts of public service messaging, problematic discourses on pregnancy, and the paradoxical positions of pregnant people and of small children in public space.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
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.
The Making of the Political Economy of Post-War English Professional Football
English professional football had long functioned as a closed political economy, but changing circumstance after the Second World War resulted in its partial opening up.
New Labour on Desert Island Discs
Labour politicians who appeared on the Radio 4 show between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s used their musical choices to try and tell stories about their politics and personal lives.