We're excited to welcome Dr Matthew Ford @warmatters.bsky.social to Royal Holloway next week to talk on: 'War in the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity & the Crises at Our Fingertips' chaired by CVTRC Snr Fellow @benoloughlin.bsky.social 📆16 Oct, 5:15-6:30pm in Shilling Lecture Theatre

Time to delete your academia,edu account 👇

Oh yeah :-) Thanks @akilnawan.bsky.social for this amazing volume of work. Looking forward to diving in!

📣 The CVTRC is pleased to announce a 1-day Symposium on 'Popular Culture and World Politics: Portraying War, Conflict & Political Violence'. Full Programme below 📆 24/07/25 at Stewart House, London. If you would like to attend, please get in touch: [email protected]

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

The new book from @rikpeels.bsky.social and I comes out 19 August. The eager beavers among you can access it online now. More information, along with table of contents from our amazing contributors, available here: academic.oup.com/book/60542?s...

In the world Labour is creating you can be as enthusiastic as you like about genocide but it will be a criminal offence to express support for Palestine Action's attempts to stop it.

📣 Deadline extended📣 Due to popular request, the submission deadline for the Symposium on: 'Popular Culture and World Politics: Portraying War, Conflict, & Political Violence' has been extended to Wed 25 June. 📅 The symposium will be held on 24/07/25 at Stewart House, London

All the ways the Trump administration is going after colleges and universities www.npr.org/2025/06/10/n...

Registration for the @socterres.bsky.social 17th Intl Conference closes a week today! Join us at @royalholloway.bsky.social's beautiful Egham Campus, near LHR ✈️ for two days of cutting edge research on terrorism and political violence. 7-8 July. 🔜 👇 @akilnawan.bsky.social @dasilvajr.bsky.social

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1938 - 2025

Better late than never. 1100+ Israeli academics urge Heads of Israeli universities to "mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the war in Gaza", acknowledging "a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing." drive.google.com/file/d/1BeAn...

We are happy to announce that Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly has been confirmed as a closing Keynote Speaker for the 17th Annual International Conference of the Society for Terrorism Research at the School of Law & Social Sciences and the @CVTRC.bsky.social at @RoyalHolloway.bsky.social. 🧵 1/2

RAMAPHOSA: I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you TRUMP: I wish you did. I'd take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it RAMAPHOSA: Okay

HASSAN: What is habeas corpus? NOEM: Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country HASSAN: That's incorrect

Pedro Pascal at Cannes on the Trump regime’s war on migrants: “I want people to be safe and protected. I want to live on the right side of history. I am an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile.”

Israel's Finance Minister Smotrich: "We are destroying everything that remains in Gaza, the world isn't stopping us." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

🚨NEW🚨 @surajlakhani.bsky.social and my new edited collection is out! Hard copy available in a few months. academic.oup.com/book/60071

Grok has more self-awareness than its owner. 🤡 @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/g...

Here is the grad speech that NYU is now withholding the student's diploma for: "As I search my heart today in addressing you all…the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine."

An X USER, to Grok: “Why are you launching into conversations about white genocide, unprompted?” 🤡

The ICC’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen. American staffers at the court have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest. NGOs have stopped working with the ICC, the leader of one won’t even reply to ICC emails.

Justice Jackson nails where we are right now: “Your argument turns our justice system into a catch me if you can kind of regime from the standpoint of the Executive where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.” 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯

Today marks Nakba Day (Palestinian Catastrophe) commemorating the destruction of Palestinian society & homeland in 1948 when Zionist militias expelled 750k Palestinians & captured 78% of historic Palestine. A glimpse into Palestine before the Nakba, in 100 photos. www.aljazeera.com/news/longfor...

Mahmoud Khalil, who said, "Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place...in this movement [for Palestine]," and was specifically targeted for deportation, while a white Afrikaner and owner of a granite mine, who openly attacks Jews, has been given special refugee status.

Worth repeating that this woman AGREED TO LEAVE THE UNITED STATES. She said she would go back to Europe, where she held a valid visa that would allow her to temporarily stay. She just didn't want to go back to Russia, where she feared returning bc of her past persecution for political activities.

The plan to defund Planned Parenthood would cost taxpayers $300 million over the next decade, according to a leaked preliminary estimate compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

NYT: The US carried out 1100 strikes against the Houthis, burned through $1 billion in munitions & couldn't establish air superiority over one of the poorest countries in the world. Houthis meanwhile, shot down 7 MQ-9 drones & almost several F-16/F-35 jets & forced a ceasefire on favourable terms.

“The first night was like a walk with death. I feared they were disappearing me.” Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown professor currently incarcerated by ICE and threatened with deportation, writes today in @truthout.org about his ordeal and his continued support for Palestinian liberation.

The cost of Grok: "I can't breathe at home, it smells like gas outside. How come I can't breathe at home and y'all get to breathe at home?"

You’re allowed to argue that black people and women are genetically inferior. But you’re NOT allowed to argue they are NOT inferior because that’s divisive. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

A year ago, The Post documented the heartbreaking story of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and the paramedics who were killed trying to save her in Gaza (free link). Read this article (a Pulitzer finalist) and think of the children starving in Gaza today. www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tells @mehdirhasan.bsky.social about the harrowing conditions Tufts Uni student, Rümeysa Öztürk is facing in detention. Abducted by masked ICE thugs, she's been held for 6 weeks without charge, all for writing an op-ed on Palestine. @zeteo.com zeteo.com/p/hijab-was-...

NEW: Tulsi Gabbard, now the US director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts including a personal Gmail account and Dropbox over a period of years, leaked records reviewed by WIRED reveal.

Conservatives break ranks 👏 "An opportunity for Britain to show leadership, to be on the right side of history & to uphold the principles we claim to champion. More than 140 UN member states have already recognised Palestine – it is time for the UK to do the same” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

*uses time machine to burst into a room ten years ago* "I don't have much time, but for the love of god choose Chaos with Ed Miliband™ "

Amid all the other news, it's easy to become inured to the basic facts here. Öztürk: -Is not accused of committing any crime -Is nonviolent -Was in this country legally -Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to -Has been locked up for six weeks

EXCLUSIVE: A police officer questioned the legality of arresting peaceful student protesters without probable cause at a pro-Palestine demonstration at the University of Texas at Austin, audio from body camera footage provided to Rolling Stone shows.

Hopefully a couple of these 20+ AI fellowships will also go to AI ethicists and other scholars pointing a critical and skeptical lens on these new technologies and what they offer.

We hadn’t won World War II by May 8th. I know because my family and I were still in an internment camp in Tule Lake, California.

“The issue is that Khalil and the others who have been abducted in recent weeks are being jailed because they were dissident protesters, student organizers, op-ed authors, and anti-genocide activists. In other words, they have been targeted for their political views. They are political prisoners.”

Indoctrination.

keep coming back to this Hannah Arendt line from Origins of Totalitarianism:

The next time someone tells you some dumb-ass tech thing is "inevitable" even if a company has spent tens of billions of dollars on it

Sage advice! As a historian, I might be a tiny bit biased, but there's no doubt that chronic levels of historical illiteracy have played a big part in getting us into the mess we're in.

JUST IN: Judge HOWELL rules forcefully in favor of Perkins Coie against Trump's punitive executive order, comparing him to a Shakespearean character who famously called to "kill all the lawyers" in order to amass power. ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

The use of the term “settlers” to describe illegal occupiers is a devious distortion of language itself, evoking a fantasy of rugged pioneers surveying an untamed prairie rather than the reality of fundamentalist bigots pursuing a policy of land theft through ethnic cleansing.