"Indeed, Europe’s new militarist politics already undermines its democratic institutions and laws." @almutrochowanski.bsky.social responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-defen...

We need a "military revival" like a hole in the head. It's throwing good money after bad. We need a revival of diplomacy and democratic participation in foreign policy. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

In my mental landscape of allies and leaders in the cause of peace in Europe, Wolfgang Sporrer was a mountain. He passed away unexpectedly this week. I tried to summarize his work and ideas in this eulogy. responsiblestatecraft.org/wolfgang-spo...

Wir trauern um unseren Autor und Freund, Wolfgang Sporrer. Sein Leben und Wirken waren geleitet von der Maxime, dass Frieden die Grundlage ist, auf der eine bessere Welt erst möglich wird. jacobin.de/autoren/wolf...

Amen!

"These numbers are so remarkable that anyone serious about making peace cannot afford to ignore them." About inclusive, people-centered peacemaking, Ukraine and Wolfgang Sporrer, an outstanding diplomat and peace activist, who passed away this week. responsiblestatecraft.org/wolfgang-spo...

"Peace has to deliver for the people who suffered from war. [...] Ordinary people at the table and bread-and-butter issues on the agenda make the atmosphere calmer and more constructive overall." @almutrochowanski.bsky.social ⬇️ responsiblestatecraft.org/wolfgang-spo...

Late-night grant proposal editing with Ukrainian activists: "You know why this next project will be about violence against women? This is hard to say: very soon, all the veterans will return home. We remember from 2015 what will happen in those families, the horror of it."

@meduzaproject.bsky.social has now published a translation of the interview with Benyash. I have heard activists express similar sentiments dozens of times over the years, but only ever at their kitchen table. This is an important record. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

The #USAID story is opening the flood gates. Mikhail Benyash, once a leading Russian human rights lawyer, now a plumber in Lithuania, gives voice to the revulsion, dysfunction and toxicity plaguing foreign-funded NGOs in this epic, caustic interview with @meduzaproject.bsky.social. ⬇️

Rarely taught media literacy lesson: if a news website has no advertising, no paywall and maybe just an unobtrusive "donate here" button, it is funded (to a large extent, if not exclusively) by grants from powerful institutions (governments, foundations, corporations).

Great stuff by @almutrochowanski.bsky.social on @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social about foreign funding, NGOs and civil society jacobin.com/2025/02/west...

In post-Cold War CEE/Eurasia, there hasn't been a popular protest movement as important as the current one in Serbia that wasn't cultivated and coopted by outside powers. Which explains why the latter are literally speechless about it. By @lilylynch.bsky.social newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

"In reality, deploying NGOs for explicitly political action has long been viewed as the pinnacle of foreign grant-making — the most exalted discipline for the most eminent players, yielding the biggest bang for their buck." jacobin.com/2025/02/west...

In time for the #USAID story, ideas on civil society, money, power, freedom I've been chewing on for a very long time. Thanks, @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social for suggesting the original German version and @jacobinmag.bsky.social for editing the extended English version. jacobin.com/2025/02/west...

Some of my early experiences in this line of work were in eastern Bosnia—investigating mass graves and interviewing the survivors of massacres perpetrated during ethnic cleansing. Did not expect to hear in 2025 a US official extolling the benefits of ethnic cleansing.

If you're interested not in the lurid hype around #USAID (coups, Russiagate, rainbow flags etc), but the much greater and much more complicated story of how and why foreign aid fails or succeeds, this, by @jakobjohnston.bsky.social for @ceprdc.bsky.social, is a must-read. cepr.net/publications...

Very serious Democratic strategists advise the party to allow Trump to illegally dismantle USAID -- a decision that will result in the unnecessary deaths of people around the world. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Young white men who strut around newly freed from DEI, using the R-word, celebrating the return of the meritocracy then ask for extra time at exams because they have anxiety, turn their homework in late because their parents are mean to them and take plenty of mental health days

Ukraine's populist-dissident (and very successful) streamers express disdain for the 90% of Ukrainian media who had USAID funding: "they call us sell-outs, but it turns out they cannot find an audience that would support them, so they have to depend on foreigners".

Seeing a lot of "USAID's money - shock! horror! - causes corruption in poor countries and is wasteful" swirling about. Calm down. This happens with all foreign aid agencies, from any donor country. It's no secret. They've been teaching that in "foreign aid 101" for decades.

Weekend chat with Ukrainian activist: "there are soldiers at the front who have been fighting since the beginning of the war. Many of them are from the territories that are now occupied. They have nowhere to go home to. They will be demobilized into homelessness." ⬇️

22 days before Germany's elections, there's sudden panic/hope that the party leading in the polls will have to switch its candidate for chancellor. Not because he was discovered to be senile, but because he couldn't help reveal himself for the awful person and politician he is.

#Poltava If I have memories of encounters with people and places burnt into my heart, so deeply I will never forget them, after spending a just a few days there years ago, how infinitely more painful must today's attack feel for the people of the city. I can't even imagine it.

I've lived through several iterations of Trump-style mass firings (for the sin of holding a job under a previous govt). In Ukraine, Georgia etc. We called it "lustrations" and applauded when bright-eyed activists said it was imperative to rid their country of the ancien régime.

If Trump's freeze of US foreign aid spending has got you interested in what our money does in other countries' civil societies and whether there is a better way (better than Trump's and the default foreign aid industry's), here's my writing since 2012: discomfortzone.substack.com/p/list-of-pu...

@macktubs.bsky.social has written what looks like, on the surface, a straight reported piece on the impact of Trump's foreign aid freeze on Russian and Ukrainian civil society and media, but he's a sly one and has packed it with poignant and revealing observations. Like this (1/7)

An elderly Chechen woman, fleeing Chechnya after publicly decrying Russia's war against Ukraine and facing persecution for it, has been denied asylum in the EU. Reason given by the asylum officer: "nobody in Chechnya cares about what 1. old and 2. women say"

Biggest putsch against the rule of law as such I've ever lived through (and I've been around for a lot of color revolutions etc). Really makes you wonder where these people draw their ideological inspiration from.

When DEI first became a thing, I was deep into feminist activist/philanthropic circles and there was this hiring frenzy for "DEI consultants" and guess what, none of the women who had been fighting the patriarchy for real applied for those lucrative jobs. They all went to hacks.

The sense of panic and existential threat reverberating through US charities after the Trump freeze on domestic grants reminds me of the mood among Russian NGOs in winter 2012/13, when Russia had passed its first foreign agent law. Except this feels so much bigger, and worse.

A spectacular account by @leonidragozin.bsky.social. Decades from now, when the history of how the post-Cold War era ended in the nadir of the Russia-Ukraine war will be written, it will follow the bold outlines Leonid sketches here, I have no doubt. Powerful. www.theideasletter.org/essay/darkne...

A very smart colleague just pointed out the grim truth that the U.S. leaving the WHO may ultimately be a win for the rest of the world. Why? Because without a vote, “the US can't block WHO actions like vaccine programs, disease surveillance, contraception, etc”. Man, that is daaaark, but accurate.

The worst thing that could happen to the EU's reputation in Georgia is actual EU membership right now. Not throwing shade at the EU (that's a different conversation). The EU is what it is, but that is a very different thing from what so many Georgians think it is and can do for them.

About #Georgia: the protests and the unusually violent turn they are taking are symptoms of a protracted political crisis with its origins in the "geopolitization" of Georgia's domestic political arrangements. A crisis of our own making. responsiblestatecraft.org/georgia-eu-p...

Going over some old notes to find the internal EU document about then-associated countries I was shown that said "we give them those long, detailed lists of laws to copy/paste, but then they lack POLITICAL WILL to implement them. It's a puzzle. What is wrong with them?"

Shockingly bad reporting. Basic fact-checking would show that nothing is "scrapped", that no "efforts to join" are suspended and that Georgia still does "seek to join" the EU. I get it, legalistic-diplomatic language is a bore, but try just a little. www.politico.eu/article/unpr...

Every time I say this, I get slapped down, but it needs saying: - the number of women in IR/security analysis has been growing👍 - the percentage of women experts with critical, anti-militarist, anti-primacist, realist/restraint views is far lower than among their male peers 🤔

Judging from what Ivanishvili says about Kavelashvili, he's Georgian boomers' beau idéal of 20th century Georgian masculinity: athlete, rakish Latin lover equivalent to Soviet women, well-preserved in middle age, brutalist around other men and in politics www.interpressnews.ge/en/article/1...

For a thoughtful, sensible, soothingly hype-free take on what just happened in #Georgia (and as a bonus, in #Abkhazia), listen to @joshuakucera.bsky.social on @crisisgroup.org's War and Peace podcast, with @olyaoliker.bsky.social www.crisisgroup.org/europe-centr...

Cri de cœur from @vanjackson.bsky.social, echoing in my own heart www.un-diplomatic.com/p/how-pentag...

Also, just so you have a clear idea of this: the intersection of criminal law and immigration law is so complex that I often send people to a specialist who does both. That shoplifting charge might get you deported. Possession of paraphernalia might get you deported.

Remember #Moldova's elections? I interviewed two of the sharpest, wisest, bravest women in that country, about what it feels like to have your politics "geopoliticized", about development, democracy, feminism. In German, but auto-translate does a good job. www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1186...

Pakistan's former national security adviser, about what his Global North counterparts told him on 02/24/2022, when his prime minister visited Moscow: "This is not a normal war. EUROPE has been attacked!"

3-hour(!!!) conversation with Ukrainian activist this weekend: "My grandmother used to tell me about the years after the war [World War II]. She used to call it ‘the time of women’s tears’: first women cried because their men had been killed in the war [...]" 1/x

The Swedish government distributes an anxiety-inducing 32(!)-page pamphlet to citizens to prepare them for war. I read it so you don't have to, and there's nothing in it on the security dilemma. You know, play a stupid game, win a stupid prize. responsiblestatecraft.org/sweden-prepa...

Western politicians' offense and incomprehension at a "democratically elected" peer being indicted is so revealing. They really thought they had conceived the ICC as a tool to police and dominate the "other", the world's great unwashed. That they were above the law by definition.

German retired general: "I hear German politicians saying 'Ukraine will win, because Ukraine MUST win'. That sort of thing reminds me of another period in our history."

I wasn't sure which "international principles" he meant, but then I remembered the Berlin Conference

Absurd moral grandstanding. Bring back Realism, İR dudes, please. Contain, confront, coalition (verb) but spare us the high horsing.