Stop, Look, and Listen #56
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. I also keep a record of my daily reading and listening on the ‘Notes’ section of this site.
Content warning: Murder; Genocide.
Five things to look at
Elma Hasanspahić wrote for Balkan Diskurs about the Osmica and Trusina memorials in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croat civilians killed by the Bosnian Army in 1993, ongoing campaigns to bring the perpetrators to justice, and the challenges of commemorating victims and building shared understanding of war crimes across ethnic boundaries.
For his Passing Political Time newsletter, Beau Baumann examined recent revelations about the US Supreme Court’s blocking of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016, as exemplary of the Court’s juristocratic tendency to consolidate its political power, underpinned by a narrowly pro-business understanding of its role.
In this post for Verfassungsblog, Rodrigo da Costa Sales reflected on Guatemala’s 2024 request for an Advisory Opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the legal status of democracy, as illustrative of an evolving jurisprudence centred on upholding a common entitlement to democracy, comprehensively understood.
Fiona Mullen discussed Cyprus’ application to join the European Union’s visa-free Schengen Area, in this post for her Sapienta Cyprus Reflections newsletter, and the risk that, without due consideration, its membership could intersect with the unresolved Cyprus Problems in ways that create an effective hard border through the island.
For his Archimedean Point newsletter, Cyril Hédoin considered Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the recent Hungarian parliamentary elections within the history of ‘The West’ as an intellectual project, for which Central Europe has been a key site of contestation, and the post-liberal deviation from that model pursued by the US under Donald Trump.
Five things to listen to
Natali Pearson interviewed Lia Kent about her book The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, on the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies podcast, and the ways in which those killed during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste continue to function as active participants in the country’s political and social life.
Andrew W. M. Smith was a guest on New Books with Miranda Melcher, discussing his book Make Cheese Not War: Transnational Resistance and the Larzac in Modern France, and the plateau’s transition from French military base to a site of resistance by local farmers, rooted in Catholicism, pacificism, and transnational solidarity networks.
Hosts Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Douglas Guilfoyle were joined by guests Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg and Emma Lush on the Called to the Bar podcast, to discuss states’ increasing usage of targeted killings, and how the practice muddies questions of what comprises an act of war and what constitutes legitimate conduct in conflict.
On New Lines Magazine’s The Lede podcast, host Faisal Al Yafa reflected on the legacies of the Bosnian War with guests Barbara Matejčić and Jasmin Mujanović, including the ethics of war reporting, the burden of living with the memory and consequences of genocidal violence, and the wider contemporary revival of Christian nationalism.
Kim Adams welcomed Ben Mangrum onto the High Theory podcast to discuss the role of genre in making sense of the world and as a paradigm for cultural experimentation, and the particular significance of comedy as a generic framework for our interaction with computers and their assimilation into different facets of everyday life.
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The Secret Agent
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