Stop, Look, and Listen #58
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: Death.
Five things to look at
Ezgi Basaran has written for her Angle, Anchor and Voice newsletter on how Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, has succeeded in alienating Turks, Kurds, and Arabs alike by evoking their various memories of betrayal, foreign interference, and authoritarianism through his neo-colonial rhetoric.
For Phenomenal World, María Teresa Zegada examined the recent eclipse of Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo and its statist extractivist economic model, the country’s fragmented party system and crisis of legitimacy in its constitutional order, and its resurgent social movements’ opposition to the government of President Rodrigo Paz.
Suzana Vuljevic explored for New Lines Magazine how Ibrahim Rugova’s career as a literary scholar shaped his subsequent trajectory into politics in the 1990s as Kosovo’s first ever president, including his translation of key academic works into Albanian, and theorisation of aesthetic refusal as response to late-Yugoslav ethnic conflict.
Aristides Hatzis wrote for his Liberal Illusions newsletter about how Crete’s religious composition and geographic location, as well as great power politics, prevented its integration into the new state of Greece in 1830, and yet how repeated insurgencies thereafter exposed and further weakened the Ottomans’ tenuous hold on the island.
For the Border Criminologies blog, Dominika Wanczyk and Marta Sánchez Dionis of humanitarian maritime organisation SOS MEDITERRANEE reflected on European states’ culpability for escalating refugee deaths in the Central Mediterranean, and on their work both filling the search-and-rescue void and identifying those killed at sea.
Five things to listen to
In Parts I and II of this episode of the This Day podcast, Jody Avirgnan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson revisited the 1980 Mariel Boat Lift of refugees from Cuba to the US in the context of contemporary Cold War and domestic politics, and the long-term ramifications it had for American attitudes to migration.
Eleonora Mattiacci interviewed Lawrence Douglas on the New Books Network about his book The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, and the incomplete shift in international criminal justice’s principal focus since the Second Worlds War from aggression between states to genocide and crimes against humanity.
On the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, host Alan Boswell and guest Samson Abebe Bezabeh discussed Djibouti’s place in its wider region, including its clan-dominated internal politics, its role as maritime and military base on the Red Sea for other, larger countries, and its shifting relations with neighbouring powers.
James Horncastle, Rory Smith, and Tariq Panja mused on the Libero podcast on veteran footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi’s presence at this summer’s World Cup, the absence of equivalent stars from the present generation of players, and the extension of playing careers in the sport and especially at international level.
Eoghan Gilmartin welcomed Juan José Ponce Vázquez onto The Sobremesa Podcast to reflect on Madrid’s right-wing regional premier Isabel Ayuso’s contentious veneration of the Conquistadors on a recent visit to Mexico, and how conflicting popular memory of the Spanish colonisation of Mexico plays out in both countries’ broader politics.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Do You Understand Where I’m Coming from?
Making sense of the way I do history necessarily involves shifting my gaze two thousand miles away from Britain to the small Mediterranean island where my grandparents were born.
‘This Is Going to Be Part of Soccer History’
American Samoa’s 2-1 win over Tonga in 2011 ended a lengthy losing streak and was portrayed by international media as completing a redemption arc from their 31-0 loss to Australia a decade earlier.
Refugee Narratives on The Reunion
Episodes of BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion have given refugees to Britain opportunities to narrate their stories in dialogue with each other, but within parameters it also set.