NEW BOOK! I'm very happy to say that my new book, Utopia, co-written with Douglas Mao, has been published on-line academic.oup.com/book/62279

Only 10 days to go -- submit your abstracts before it's too late! #EISAPEC26 @europeanisa.bsky.social Our Standing Section on "Exploring World Politics Beyond the State System" (with @jkleinschmidt.bsky.social) examines non-state and societal dimensions of world politics. Deadline: 19 February

"By “unequivocally” rejecting all analogies, it [the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] has erected a fence around the Holocaust that ensures that its moral lessons will be forgotten." www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

Father-daughter relationships can be characterized by emotional distance, Isabel Woodford writes. She reports on what each side has to lose from a strained relationship, and how they can rebuild trust: theatln.tc/Z24T48bO

🧵Grim irony: boosters of Trump FP from his first term onwards have argued that, unlike this predecessors, he "gets" the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity. But the biggest part of that transition is the availability of alternative "goods providers" to the 🇺🇸 — which means reduced 🇺🇸leverage.

✅ WS B - The Eastern Mediterranean in International Society: Identifying the Challenges and Opportunities for Building a Regional Order 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS A - Between Fragmentation and Solidarity: Memory and Identity in Post-Communist Central Europe 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS NA - Navigating a Fractured World: UCD and the Current Conjuncture 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS CB - Hybrid Security in a Fractured World: The Red Sea and Beyond 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS H - Memory in World Politics: Forms, Claims, and Mediating Structures 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS T - The Emotional Architecture of Global Peace: Gratitude, Empathy, and Affective Justice 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

✅ WS WA - Second Atomic Youth? Middle Powers, Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Waning of the Liberal World Order 🔗 Find a full list of workshops and descriptions here: buff.ly/zIxO8WE

Believe your own eyes. Not lies. Witnesses coming forward, with courage, not state propaganda.

Check out the new Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power edited by Peter Niesen, Markus Patberg @mpatberg.bsky.social and Lucia Rubinelli @luxirubsi.bsky.social global.oup.com/academic/pro...

When we started working on Shifting Sovereignties, friends suggested that sovereignty would be an irrelevant issue and out-dated concept by the time the book is being published... we truly wish they had been right. 🤷‍♂️

China has had a purge of top military leaders. Most expect this to hobble Chinese preparations to invade Taiwan. However, I think it also increases the chances that the civilian political leadership wants a more ideologically committed military to do exactly that; perhaps with higher casualties.

Do better. Call your buddy George W. Bush and show up together in Minneapolis. Don’t just write statements. DO something with your megaphone.

This underestimates how far ICE and CBP's recruitment pool is among GWOT veterans who more professional American law enforcement institutions won't hire, and who are now bringing back to the US practices common among the least disciplined US infantry and SOF in Iraq and Afghanistan

ICE’s new policy directing agents to ignore the 4th Amendment is one of the most frightening things we’ve seen yet. And there’s no telling where it could end up. open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

We're halfway there! Submit your abstracts to our Standing Section on "Exploring World Politics Beyond the State System: Spaces, Relations, and Struggles" at #EISAPEC26 by 19 February! @jkleinschmidt.bsky.social and I are looking forward to seeing you in beautiful Lisbon! @europeanisa.bsky.social

William Whyte, The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood - @harvardpress.bsky.social, August 2026 www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

The EISA Standing Section "World Politics Beyond the State System" (chaired by @alexspalinska.bsky.social and yours truly) explores non-state and societal dimensions of world politics: e.g. heterarchy, multiplicity, and other novel ontological approaches in IR. Deadline: February 19 #EISAPEC26

Conflicts across Africa, such as in Sudan, the Horn of Africa or the Sahel, remain unresolved as international attention and mediation efforts are stretched or focused elsewhere.

A must-read about the tech oligarchs that support an imperialist approach to Greenland, motivated by its resources and large land mass for all manner of exploitation and experimentation, and not subject to European-style laws and regulations.

Of course Europeans understand the importance of regional identity in Europe, but they are often so focused on the pomp and circumstance of national American global power that they ignore how important sub-national identities are to American political culture

A really nice piece by Walt Frick on the AI as cultural and social technology argument that a bunch of us have been making. I should say that "cultural arithmetic" is based on something I _think_ that I read in @quantamagazine.bsky.social but can't now find ... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Interesting. This would fit the narrative of a Trump-Russia deal over Maduro. It does not explain the apparently complete lack of engagement from Cuban & Venezuelan forces, but then we're still lacking many data points here.

NATO is a voluntary, mutually beneficial alliance, not a protection racket or extortion scheme. If it’s forfeit land as tribute or no NATO, that effectively means no NATO. The threat itself, even if not acted upon, undermines the trust and credibility that makes the alliance function.

Entirely as literally everyone predicted.

Winter wonderland in Warsaw ❄️🌨️🩵🩵

The leftist group “Vulkangruppe” which claims to have sabotaged Berlin’s power supply is oddly bad at proper German. One detail suggests it was translated from Russian with AI or some such. www.berlinstory.de/news/stromau...

Clear, cold and bright Christmas Day sky in the Polish countryside ❄️☀️ Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄🎁 Joy, peace, serenity and hope.

New article by Taimur Reza on "Vicarious Sovereignty: The Place of Extraterritorial Turkey in the Vision of Bengali Muslims (1890–1917)" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New book by Ivan Lee on "Extradition and Empire Sovereignty and Subjecthood in Hong Kong" www.cambridge.org/core/books/e...

Sign up now for one of our first events of 2026! 🎉 14 January Online workshop 'Teaching ethics in dark times' with Ethics and World Politics WG asking how we prepare students to engage ethically with complex global issues 🌟 Find the event here 👉 https://ow.ly/uvI850XK5GP Dr Anna Plunkett

Now the call is open! Our Standing Section (with @jkleinschmidt.bsky.social) explores non-state and societal dimensions of world politics: non-state actors, limited statehood, channels for foreign influence, policies and practices at the intersection of hierarchy and anarchy. #EISAPEC26

We are truly honoured to be one of ten titles on @iajournal.bsky.social's Christmas reading list 2025. 🎅🎄

Top 10 books: The International Affairs Christmas reading list 2025 📚🎄 Ahead of the holidays, Book Reviews Editor Mariana Vieira has curated a list of books that reflects our commitments to covering the whole of the International Relations discipline. Check them out 👇 medium.com/internationa...

Many thanks to @alexspalinska.bsky.social for her generous review in @iajournal.bsky.social! She writes: "Another notable strength is the book’s interdisciplinary and transhistorical orientation. ... The combination of analytical rigour with empirical detail strengthens the book’s relevance...

Please check out this fantastic review of @shiftingsovs.bsky.social by @alexspalinska.bsky.social in @iajournal.bsky.social 🥳

This year the Standing Section on World Politics Beyond the State System (co-chaired with @jkleinschmidt.bsky.social) has 12 sessions, including two RTs! Panels cover heterarchy, societal multiplicity, the New Cold War, private and substate actors, and insurgency!  See you in Bologna! #EISAPEC25

My new article on “Conceptual Entrapment” is out online-first with @EuroJournIR! Proud of this one: critical concept studies, autoethnography & soft power all come together to reflect on the researcher–concept relationship. Take a look here! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

This year the Standing Section on World Politics Beyond the State System (co-chaired with @jkleinschmidt.bsky.social) has 12 sessions, including two RTs! Panels cover heterarchy, societal multiplicity, the New Cold War, private and substate actors, and insurgency!  See you in Bologna! #EISAPEC25

Mam gdzieś obu prezydentów i tego byłego i tym bardziej przyszłego . Za to wieczór dzisiaj był cudny

☀️ The wait is over: our summer reading list 2025 is here! Explore our recommended selection of books, reviewed in International Affairs, to keep you company this summer: medium.com/internationa...

No bigger concepts than "Great Power" and "multipolarity". This piece highlights how the two intersect...to disastrous results www.worldpoliticsreview.com/us-trump-rus...

Great Power stupidity might be unavoidable, simply because the international system is complex. Even when it is "rational", it can still not result in "smart" decisions. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/foreign-poli...

With the holiday, no new column this week. Instead, here's a 🧵 highlighting some of the @wpr.bsky.social pieces I've written so far this year and how they can be used to teach International Relations concepts.

Looking forward to hearing you, indeed on a powerful panel on planting, eating and resisting together with Mariia Banko speaking on cooking, solidarity and resistance, Saltanat Shoshanova on the queeering of traditional food rituals and Maya Hayda on artistic engagements with seeds and displacement