Earlier this week I took two of our amazing @astonpress.bsky.social students to a model COP climate negotiation organised by @mybisa.bsky.social at Chatham House. They did a great job representing the EU in the simulation, and learnt a great deal about international diplomacy and COP. #ClimateSim

Oh turns out it’s on preorder. Loving the blurbs from early readers: “Often laugh out loud”; “Monty Python meets le Carré”; Fun, fascinating and absurd; “Spy thrillers have nothing on Fakers” Can’t wait to share it! www.amazon.co.uk/Fakers-Top-S...

Had the pleasure of attending my second Graduation ceremony at Aston University yesterday with my wonderful colleagues. As ever, big congratulations to our PIR graduates! Also a big thanks to my colleagues for being so kind, generous and supportive in my second year here. It is a very good job!

In all clips of the young Reform Councillors they all do the little Farage bounce and string puppet arm movements while talking to camera. They’ve clearly watched no end of his videos and have tried to style their delivery on him. He’s their reference point of how to do political communication.

Increasingly certain of my opinion that “democracy” and “algorithmic social media” cannot coexist in the long term

New Publication Alert! Myself and @lesliewehner.bsky.social present our new paper: Policy, roles and domestic contestation: Germany and the United Kingdom as allies of Ukraine. Available in @irjournal.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1177/0047...

More @nottspolitics.bsky.social jobs. We are seeking to appoint 3 Teaching Associates in Politics and International Relations. These full-time, fixed-term posts are available from 1 September 2025 until 30 June 2026. 1/2

📖 Congratulations to @nottspolitics.bsky.social' Dr Dan Lomas @sandbaggerone.bsky.social on the publication of his new co-edited book 'Intelligence, Security and the State: Reviewing the British Intelligence Community' Read more here 👉 tinyurl.com/bddnkdas @uonresearch.bsky.social

👀 @NottsPolitics are looking for a fixed term Teaching Associate in Security Studies. Fancy joining us? Applications close on 28th April 2025. More details here ⏬️ www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMN031/t...

Finally hit the big time and got a review back that accused me of not engaging enough with my own work, or understanding what it did.

Not only is this crass, it is highly significant. Radosław Sikorski is perhaps the most Atlanticist major politician in Europe. And this is how he is now being publicly treated by US/Musk. They do not want us to be their friends, they do not want us to be their allies.

Tax rises will be unpopular, but I will keep arguing to the hilt that if you were going to do it, DO IT NOW. Trump dragging the US into appeasement and kleptocracy; Ukraine being abandoned, Europe on the edge. The case for tax rises and even radical reform is now, whilse these are at the forefront.

The US has a fascist government.

A lot of people are going to have to get used to the reality that America is no longer our closest ally.

Let’s start a bottom up movement on this - if you’re asked to be a discussant, either decline and say the panel will be better without it, or agree but then just go to Q&A on the day. No one wants to listen to what the discussant thinks about every paper on the already overrunning panel.

If this isn’t a humiliation for Britain and its decision to send troops and “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the United States in every war they’ve fought since 1990 then I don’t know what is.

Petition to scrap discussants from conference panels, just eats onto Q&A.

Come and join my research team at Aston University! We are hiring a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant for a new ESRC funded project on ‘Disaster Impact, Risk Reduction and Regime Type in Southeast Asia’. More details: jobs.ac.uk/job/DLV236/p...

Had a great time presenting our paper ‘Myth Diplomacy: Ukraine’s use of myth as a diplomatic tool following the Russian invasion’ at #ISA2025. Very happy it went down so well with the Public Diplomacy scholars. Will be around all week so if you see me do come over for a chat or drop me a message.

Yeah... I'm not sure the US is going to scramble F-35's and the 101st Airborne to defend their partial ownership stake in an as yet hypothetical Lithium mine that won't generate any minerals for at least a decade.

In Chicago for #ISA2025 and struck by two things: 1) While there is plenty of coverage, different news channels are not reporting on what happened between Zelenskyy and Trump as much as expected. 2) Different news channels all regularly platform the narrative that Zelenskyy was at fault.

A French nuclear deterrent for Europe (preferably with UK assistance) while Europe actually commits to rearmament, reindustrialization and a reduction in foreign dependence would be the best case scenario.

That sound you can hear is a state visit being booted hard and, one would hope, very far into the long grass.

The Ukrainian government has a list of places where you can donate to the war effort here. I personally just donated $100: war.ukraine.ua/donate/ Slava Ukraini.

The idea the US would be a backstop to a European tripe wire in Ukraine was always a non starter, events in the Oval Office show that Europe cannot rely on the US for defence. The US is not a reliable ally and any policy that is built on different assumptions is for a different word.

Agreed. Yesterday shows us the gulf between the US and Europe on Europe’s biggest security threat, there really is no way to bridge this. Starmer will need to drop this idea and start pushing narratives in favour of European integration as a national security issue. This is not 2016 or 2020.

Maybe I’m feeling depressed from the scenes yesterday, but the number of things the UK will need to radically change course on makes me very skeptical about the future.

Agreed. Building strategic independence from the US will be such a colossal activity that buying time to do it is a strategic imperative in itself. bsky.app/profile/robe...

The last panel of #ISA2025's 1st day is the traditional #EmergingScholar panel. Co-hosted by R.S. Zaharna & @zhaoalexhuang.bsky.social, discussed by Ilan Manor, the panel includes exciting works by @thomaseason.bsky.social , Keyu ,Glanz Maria Simaioforidou, Francisco Zepeda Trujillo, Rui Wang et al.

There are many mysteries and ambiguities in life but the nature of this gesture is not among them. It's a Nazi salute.

It looked set in stone that Kemi Badenoch was on this trajectory when she dedicated so much time to the far right podcasting space. These echo chambers melt brains and once people are in they almost always spiral. Im sure this is just the start of the slippery slope the Conservative’s are on.

Yes, but it also requires consciously challenging some of the ways in which the internet is currently changing society, and therefore being willing to upend some of the cultural, economic, and technological scripts by which we have come to live our lives

If Starmer is serious about upping defence spending, it seems now is the perfect time to commit to some unpopular moves to do it. Can easily build a narrative justifying tax rises and unpopular cuts to get defence spending up now without opposition parties having much room to attack.

America is quite obviously moving in an authoritarian direction. Fascist rhetoric, attack on judges & now this: ‘President Donald Trump on Thursday again raised the prospect of serving for an unconstitutional third term.’ www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Agreed. I think we are witnessing the end of the American ‘ally’. But this means that Europe has to now contend with a belligerent America alone. The ‘west’ is over. In the Trumpian era, Europe is on its own www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The shock the tankies must feel when they realise it was never about Nazis, both for the Russian dictator and the far right podcasters in the US

I’m not sure the world has seen a genuine supervillain until 2025. Of course there’ve been countless monsters: hitler, Stalin, pol pot. But a real life figure who fits the Gotham/Metropolis model. Plutocrat bigwig who is actually deeply evil & wants to run the world for cartoonishly stupid reasons.

I see a lot of people are coming back at the ‘is this the end of the special relationship?’ question with the off the shelf response that it goes deeper than leaders and is built on connections across government organisations. This is true, but I can’t help but feel this is short-term thinking.

Tomorrow Never Dies rapidly rewritten to be about a meddling civil servant's unjust persecution of a put-upon global media tycoon www.bbc.com/news/article...

In fact I’d describe it as completely & utterly inadequate to the moment.

As the US abandons, or even harms, European security, the UK has little choice but to make some unpopular spending decisions to direct money into the MoD. Vague and often poorly evidenced claims about UK international aid being essential to soft power and our global reputation don’t really cut it.

Let’s be honest. Does anyone think that this president would honour Article Five? Presence of US military & nuclear sharing still has value to Europe, but its deterrent value is significantly reduced & falling. This is reckless, dangerous behaviour by the Trump administration.

Anyone who uses the term 'DEI' in British politics is clearly importing their culture war labels from America. 'EDI' is the much more common version here in my experience. Going to start my campaign for British language for British culture wars.

Brief thoughts on a European force for Ukraine. I think there is a degree of requirements paralysis. It doesn’t have to be hundreds of thousands of troops, or cover a 1200km contact line. Where it is deployed, and in what role, is more important than the overall size. 1/

Went to a restaurant last night. With dread predictability the waitress' first words were: "Do you know how it works here?" And already then, at that precise moment, you know you're fucked.

What’s happening in the US is starting to feel more like a hacking than an election, with Trump basically cast as the idiot who clicked on the phishing email that let the ransomware guys in. Struck by how crucial tech not politics reporters are to us understanding it

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

attitude to banning TikTok is such a good litmus test for distinguishing between serious socialists and social democrats and the consumerist anti-bedtime left

We’re going to repeatedly see people do ‘Roman salutes’ or ‘my heart goes out to you gestures’ now aren’t we?