Stop, Look, and Listen #61
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 a three-part series of posts for his Hypomnemata blog, Toby Bennett explored the significance and limitations of the dichotomous ‘hard/soft’ power, values, and skills as a framework for explaining and analysing contemporary British policy and cultural economy in the areas of diplomacy, technology, and industry and education.
William Davies has written for the London Review of Books on the twin crises of a cost of rising living costs for the population and borrowing costs for the state that have beset British government so far this decade, and the possible options for likely Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham to escape or navigate those constraints.
Alyx Vesey has reflected for her Feminist Music Geek newsletter on Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann’s 1990s status as Britpop’s power couple, their appeal as an object of bisexual desire, their awkward love triangle with Frischmann’s ex Brett Anderson, and the sexism that shaped the reception of Frischmann’s band, Elastica.
In this post for African Arguments, Hassan Ali Sanhori argued Sudanese agriculture must be viewed through a political economy framework to achieve a just, peaceable social contract in the country, requiring more equitable distribution of resources, prioritising of reconstruction over extraction, and a proportionate role for the state.
For Opinio Juris, Gustavo Leite Neves da Luz drew upon John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a prism for understanding international law’s loss of innocence in the contemporary world, the exclusions its claim to universalism rested on, the contested archive its interpreters draw upon, and the sober reflection required on its future possibilities.
Five things to listen to
Renata Segura and Elizabeth Dickinson joined host Richard Atwood on the International Crisis Group’s Hold Your Fire! podcast to discuss the failures of outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s policy of ‘Total Peace’ with Colombia’s armed groups, and a prospective return to a militarised approach under successor Abelardo de la Espriella.
Caleb Zakarin interviewed Thomas S. Mullaney on the New Books Network about his book How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, and the way technologies that seemingly promise a permanent record of our lives are in fact inherently inclined to obsolescence and loss, as illustrated by Mullaney’s research into his family history.
On the What’s Left of Philosophy podcast, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, Gil Morejón, and William Paris examined Johannes Althusius’s 1603 work Politica, its place in the transition between medieval and early modern political thought, and its pre-Hobbesian communitarian vision of the social contract.
Alan Boswell welcomed Federico Donelli onto Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast for a conversation about the Red Sea’s significance as a region, given the heightened involvement of states like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey in the Horn of Africa, and tensions between Ethiopia and its neighbours over its pursuit of Red Sea access.
Host Disha Karnad Jani spoke to Tony Wood on the Journal of the History of Ideas’ In Theory podcast about his book Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America, and the way radical leftists debated the status of different racialised groups, the role of the state, and revolutions in the Americas and beyond.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Double Jeopardy and Cold Cases
The murder of Stephen Lawrence inspired a rule change that eventually helped convict one of his killers; the process also revealed much about the British state’s relationship to historical injustice.
Is It Worth the Aggravation?
Oasis’s reunification this week is the latest development in Britpop’s long afterlife, its leading lights continuing to carve out careers in the music industry well after the 1990s ended.
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.