Just in time for the holidays, check out our Conversations piece @paulcinnamon.bsky.social “Unhappy Birthday! Women, Peace and Security at 25” 👉 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... ✨⭐ Featuring a stellar line up of WPS scholars & practitioners👇👇👇

The system works.

remember, every threat is also an opportunity. specifically, for the person threatening you

Look a lot of people were at the Lucifer Foundation's annual Billionaire Vision Brunch in 2011. I didn't talk to all of them. Some of us just find the work the Lucifer Foundation does to be interesting.

RFK Jr. is funding a $1.6 million study where placebos will be given to babies. But let’s all talk some more about that Malibu narcissist and her shittily-written book.

Huge well done to Jed and team, outrageous that this application was ever refused on good character grounds because of illegal entry. Many will be in the same or similar situation and unable to bring such a challenge. The guidance needs to change.

So, El Fasher looks like one of the worst single event atrocities to happen this century so far, but the evidence has come in such a trickle it seems to only now be getting verified

Tomorrow's front page 📰 'The UK is letting these people die'

What a life. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/u...

as I've remarked before, cyberpunk isn't 'I glitch into the webframe and draw my katana', it's 'the life of a man working for a criminal syndicate in Myanmar who spends his days pretending to be different women online to steal from the elderly'

Who has made this 🤣

Only 27% of union members voting for strike action, plus a turnout 10% below the required threshold. Zero sugar-coating. At no small cost to funds, branch morale, or negotiating heft. What counts now is the quality of the explanation, critically an ability to say what events could prove you wrong.

Good stuff. renewal.org.uk/blog/corbyns...

Ah @ng1978.bsky.social has unearthed the press release and fancy that, the media are indeed parping out the Home Office’s attempts to blame asylum seekers for a mess of its own creation

It is unfathomable that the USG lawyers would sign off on a no-survivors boat strike (no get of jail free card). There's clear precedent dating back to World War II trial of Germans for that very act, which lawyers know well. The Peleus World War II War Crimes Trial www.usni.org/magazines/na...

A depiction of the ‘faculty lounge’ so alien to my experience that I guffawed and rewound twice.

Complaints that Labour is doing Reform’s work for them often seem pitched at the level of electoral calculus, media discourse or the harms to non-citizens (increasingly the ‘wrong’ citizens). But anti-migrant triangulation will tank the economy as well as poison our culture!

Every business with a toilet must navigate the distinction between “an individual's physique or physical appearance, [or] behaviour" (❌) and “clothes or other forms of presentation conventionally associated with one or other sex” (✅) without discriminating against transfolk. Dangerously absurd.

This level of institutional commitment to reputational self-harm is intriguing, sociologically speaking. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

An intelligence great enough to have memory-holed Liz Truss.

Elon Musk donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history.

I for one welcome our new crybaby god emperor.

Welcome to the machine slop arms race. How dare my lecturers use AI! Why shouldn't I use AI for lectures no one pays attention to? Why shouldn't I get help on my assignments? Why should I waste my time marking when 90% of students are using AI for essays? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

We're going to see more stories like this until universities wake up and comprehend the financial and reputational implications, only then will they suddenly and massively crack down on the very same things they're heavily pushing on us right this instant.

It’s obvious what Trump gains from further debasing the UN Security Council. Less obvious what champions of liberal multilateralism France and Britain think they’re up to in authorising use of force by an unknown military body in a fiefdom ruled by the President of the United States and Tony Blair.

Is there even a mainstream political journalist who would think to ask? Or, while we’re at, to have prepared a follow-up on the relative prevalence of genocide and civil war in different periods to test the inevitable reply that such danger no longer exists?

it's so funny that alex jones was totally right about everything, the government is a bunch of drug-addled pedophiles and masked regime thugs are grabbing people off the streets, and now he has to pretend it's all a hoax

what i have learned from the email dump: the most pretentious, snobby, aloof academic will gladly entertain the theories and thoughts of an ignoramus if they happen to be a very wealthy, well-connected sex trafficker

"UK no longer sharing intel with US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes & believes the attacks are illegal..." edition.cnn.com/2025/11/11/p... Good. www.internationalaffairsfornormalpeople.eu/trumps-marin...

“What some Democrats would prefer is a centrist manosphere of their own. (One imagines a podcast studio attached to a well-appointed gym where a bunch of white guys are discussing Abundance over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to Pod Save America.)” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Cognitive offloading pass-the-parcel.

Gender-affirming healthcare, but bad. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

AI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points

Easily missed: the decision not to fund a more expansive atrocity prevention effort was taken *before* the cuts to the aid budget. Sudan is on paper a remaining priority, but is nevertheless scheduled for an 18% cut in funding this year alone (with worse to come). www.bond.org.uk/news/2025/07...

David Lammy, Aug 2025: “It grates that there isn’t more interest in the war in Sudan, which affects him personally. Privately, he’ll say it’s because those dying are African and black.” FCDO, Oct 2024: chooses least ambitious option for atrocity prevention. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

Just in terms of admin, all HEIs will scramble post 'pause'. Many/most will scramble while shrinking PS and/or academic staff. An important but exceptionally tricky time to change/enhance institutional cultures. The most important thing the REF2029 pause can do is not to set us all up to fail. 2/2

Awful: Pentagon officials told lawmakers Trump now claims authority to bomb people merely “affiliated” with “narco-terrorist" groups, Rep Adam Smith tells me. But under questioning, they wouldn't say what “affiliated” even means! Lots of fresh info in my new piece: newrepublic.com/article/2025...

Darfur genocide took place at peak early 2000s American primacy, current Sudan genocide being done by forces backed by top US ally UAE, but sure let’s blame it on “post-American world” SMDH

Unbearable. yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/10...

An excellent 1325 Anniversary reflection from @paulcinnamon.bsky.social and @drljshepherd.bsky.social reminding us that a unified Women, Peace & Security agenda is illusory. The WPS community/ecosystem is inherently pluralist: theglobalobservatory.org/2025/10/forg...

These reports must be mistaken. I distinctly remember the former foreign secretary saying that unlike those exercised over Gaza, he cared about all human suffering, with Sudan at the fore of his mind. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

It's useful to recognise that, just 3 years ago, the UK government made it a specific CRIMINAL OFFENCE to procure a live person to complete university coursework for a student, but that government, and all major institutions, are now saying the use of a machine to complete such work is inevitable.

The Portuguese have entered the chat. See also 'cousin'.

For reference, there were 23 British military deaths a year in Afghanistan from 2001-2021. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

With @drljshepherd.bsky.social, revisiting our plea to 'forget' Women, Peace and Security in light of the governments currently trying to make it disappear. theglobalobservatory.org/2025/10/forg...

Another parable from George Osborne's Britain

“an investment strategy whereby donors, aided by university administrators and regents, circumvent faculty governance in order to treat universities like incubators or, worse, as click-farms to inflate the user data seemingly keeping the AI investment machine humming.” defector.com/higher-eds-r...

A hard lesson getting front-page coverage: survivors don’t always agree. As seriously as we might take standpoint and experience, there’s no magic hatch out of political choices.