Sign up below to hear @juliango.bsky.social giving the next Racial Justice lecture on January 21st, 2026. Prof. Go will be asking 'How and why have the police in liberal democracies become militarized?'. The answer, he will argue, is to be found in imperialism past and present.

Dem gains in this week's elections erased the inroads Trump made with non-white, young, and low-income voters in 2024. In fact, the R-to-D shift from 24 to 25 is double Trump's gains from 20-24. Claims of a GOP political realignment have been highly exaggerated www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trumps-win...

We at 3CT are part of this multiyear project led by Judith Butler & others on authoritarianism. A series of events is planned starting with our event at the University of Chicago: “Authoritarian Imaginaries.” Everyone is welcome to attend. Follow the link. ccct.uchicago.edu/events/power...

Why are today’s police forces so militarized, and what does empire have to do with it? Sociologist @juliango.bsky.social (University of Chicago) explored this in his AISSR Lecture on policing, imperialism & racialization 🎥 Full lecture & aftertalk with Rivke Jaffe ⬇️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXtO...

Puff Daddy, the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, knowledge hierarchies and the militarisation of policing... I am over the moon to see this essay published. Thank you so much to the Dublin Review of Books and to @juliango.bsky.social for writing such a thought-provoking book. drb.ie/articles/its...

How and why did police in liberal democracies become militarized? Drawing on colonial history, our video of the week shows how methods honed during empire were imported into domestic policing through an “imperial boomerang.” Feat. @juliango.bsky.social at @aissr.bsky.social buff.ly/pFAv0pr

Please consider submitting papers to our Network on “Postcolonialism and the Legacies of Empire” for the Annual Meeting of @sasemeeting.bsky.social, to be held in Bourdeaux, France, in July 2026. Deadline: December 12. sase.org/events/2026-.... Specify you are submitting to our Network

Amsterdam this Friday. On colonial fascism coming home. aissr.uva.nl/content/even...

I will say this ICE is asking for retaliation The ppl of Chicago will not sit back in silence A civil war is what #45 wants To declare martial law To stop future elections so we can't vote their asses out I hope the ppl see this for what it is

Powerful speech that everyone should give a few moments towards listening.

Excited to see this in print with Cambridge University Press. A fantastic new volume on Anticolonialism and Social thought (Ed’s): Julian Go and Anaheed Al-Hardan. My contribution includes an intellectual history of Zweledinga Pallo Jordan drawing from archival work and an oral history interview.

🚨 AISSR Lecture Series kick-off! 𝟭𝟳 𝗢𝗰𝘁 | 𝟭𝟰:𝟯𝟬-𝟭𝟲:𝟬𝟬 With @juliango.bsky.social on how imperialism & colonialism shaped today’s militarized policing in the US & UK. Aftertalk with Rivke Jaffe (Urban Geograhpy) Open to students, researchers & the public Register here: aissr.uva.nl/content/even...

More boomerang effect: Trump brings colonial fascism home, creating a new "specialized unit" in the NG: a national level SWAT unit under his direct command. Such units originate in America's early 20th century colonial wars & counterinsurgency campaigns www.npr.org/2025/08/26/n...

Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

And Chicago isn’t even in the top us cities in terms of violent crime rates. And even if it were, such a deployment would still be an abuse of power.

ICE used your taxpayer dollars to trick out a bunch of trucks in new livery, all painted black with "ICE" and a logo printed in gold on the side (and Trump's name in gold on the back window), then shoot a rap video in DC to post on social media. I am not making this up.

Don’t forget: “crime” by black and brown folks has long been the pretext for bringing the boomerang home, militarizing our streets, & deploying the tactics of colonial control on citizens.

AI is not inevitable. everyone is talking about it only cuz big tech invested billions and need to monetize it. It’s also why big tech turned on the dems and went for Trump: they hated Biden’s attempt to regulate it. Follow the $. And policy.

Just read this paper discussed in @chronicle.com reported by @EmmaJanePettit. It purports to show ideology in the classroom but is itself ideology masquerading as objective 1/11 www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

Of course Kirk doesn’t want sociology majors. He just wants laborers who he can hire to do labor for him and his rich friends and boss them around, not people trained to understand and call out wealth inequality or systems of control.

1/6 When these finance-tech oligarchs whine about universities’ ‘leftist’ indoctrination, they are not really whining about lack of political diversity in universities. They are simply speaking from their own narrow provincial self-interest. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Far from ending US imperialism, Trump reenacts it, using US financial power to bully democratic regimes & install right wing dictators. Typical us imperialism

Excited to read this brand new book on colonial surveillance in France by the impressive Vincent Bollenot! @vincentbollenot.bsky.social

Short article in the French newspaper, Le Monde, about the special issue on racial capitalism in Marronages (founded by @silyanelarcher.bsky.social and others) featuring my article and other wonderful contributions.

I'll be presenting some of my latest thinking on racial capitalism Monday.

we organized this conference to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of 3CT, keynote by Judith Butler. Also includes my colleagues and friends at 3CT & UC like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gabe Winant, Adom Getachew and Jodi Byrd. If you’re in Chicago do come over. ccct.uchicago.edu/events/theor...

Immanuel Wallerstein 3rd Open Lecture Race, Capital, Critique: For a Theory of Racial Capitalism Julian Go @juliango.bsky.social (University of Chicago) 28th April, 3:30pm BST The event will be streamed on the following YouTube channel: youtube.com/c/facultadde... #SocialTheory #Sociology

This is what happens when empires are in decline: they get desperate and rely on the only thing they have - the means of violence - to land grab and expropriate to try to reassert their dominance. It is what happened in the late 19th century, and it prefaced the World Wars. Beware.

Great to see that @juliango.bsky.social will be speaking at @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social on April 14th on 'Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US', based on his 2023 book. I hope to make it. Check it out below 👇 www.qub.ac.uk/events/whats...

The root that tears apart your foundation begins as a seed of distrust, hate, and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

Thank goodness for the American Medical Association. Here is their YouTube page. Please share far and wide. Right now bird flu is spreading throughout our country and most people have no clue. Please stay updated and bookmark this page for your health and well-being. www.youtube.com/@americanmed...

Loads of fun discussing the imperial boomerang in these troubled times with Pranay on the "Return To Bandung" podcast. open.spotify.com/episode/1Elk...

Delighted to have contributed an essay for and co-edited this volume on postcolonial sociologies for German audiences with @manuelaboatca.bsky.social and Tobias Werron. With essays from @ricardahammer.bsky.social among others. www.hamburger-edition.de/zeitschrift-...

This is the way

A reminder of how close Democrats were in 2024, thanks to Kamala Harris, vs. in 1984. And this was before all this craziness from Trump the past two weeks.

One small thing we can do for now, to help set up an infrastructure for organizing: join the @aaup.bsky.social. They have officially declared they will be more aggressive in defending academic rights

To “critique woke from the left” is a failed project not because class isn’t important but because it concedes the idea that “woke” is an actually existing social force outside the MAGA misrepresentation of it. Its not. What needs to be critiqued then is its misrepresentation

Funny how Republicans used to be the party of individual responsibility (think Reagan scolding unemployed people). Now if they fail to achieve the success they feel entitled to, they blame DEI, the Deep State or immigrants.

I’ll be discussing policing and the imperial boomerang Monday 1/27 at University California Santa Barbara. www.soc.ucsb.edu/news/event/599

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far right leader, died today. If you wonder how many French people feel about that, these are the scenes of celebration on the streets of Paris this evening. One sign reads “The dirty racist is dead”. (🎥 Luc Auffret)

Been a long time coming but finally this paper on “Vision and Method in Global Historical Sociology” with @georgelawson.bsky.social is published: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability" -Hannah Arendt www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

In the 90s tech capitalists desperately marked themselves from industrial capital by claiming to be innovative caring capitalists. now they’ve predictably proven to be nothing but destroyers of anything that might have been hopeful about the American project 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/o...

The inauguration of Trump does not signal the death of American democracy. It simply marks its apotheosis - manifesting the end of the American liberal fantasy while hastening capital's contradictions. How those contradictions resolve is up to us.

Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years. Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people. Good trade.

We must do everything possible to recover from calamities like the LA fires, and lessen vulnerability to climate shocks. But nothing—nothing—will do as much to protect people as abolishing carbon pollution. And through that process of abolition, we have the greatest chances of fighting inequality.

Empires in decline, as I showed in my 2011 book Patterns of Empire, tend to become MORE imperialistic and aggressive. Recolonization is a sign of weakness not power. Is Trump proving this theory right? www.cfr.org/blog/transit...

Die Hard: classic Xmas movie. The lesson: your wife may become a successful career woman making more money than you, and Japanese companies may make inroads into American markets, but at least America still has white male cops who can save us all.

Watching Elf yet again and I just realized: “Christmas cheer” is the ideology of false consciousness that maintains the North Pole system of elf slavery and reproduces Santa hegemony. How come I hadn’t seen it before?