Lots of anxiety over the illegal annexation of Greenland by the US, and I feel it, but we shouldn't forget the indigenous peoples who live there. It's their land, their nation; they've made it clear they aren't interested in being a part of the US. Self-determination is not just a concept.

The Netherlands and some Nordics have restricted US access because they were finding intel on Russia they’d shared with the US turning up in Russia.

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

The number of ways this is unconstitutional lunacy is…a lot

what in the personalist authoritarianism is this

5-year anniversary of sending this email. Reader, I did not make it to the writing retreat that day.

and in fact I see another poster brought in plato to curbstomp this line of thinking. that's how unoriginal miller's arguments are, they have literally been refuted for thousands of years

The invocation of the Take Care Clause is ironic. As I explained in this law review article, the Take Care Clause constrains presidential war powers, including because the "laws" to be faithfully executed include Article 2(4) of the UN Charter—which the US flagrantly violated by invading VZ. 4/n

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

Are you worried things can’t get stupider? I assure you they can and will

fwiw, I think the best way to think of this is not really as "trump is the worst ever" so much as "trump takes all the worst aspects of american history and speed runs them all at once"

NYT: At least 40 people were killed in the US attack on Venezuela, including military personnel and civilians.

9/10 The relationship with Latin America is being reshaped and history matters here (Guatemala '54, Chile '73, Panama '89). The U.S. track record of "liberation" producing democracy is... not strong. Latin Americans remember. The neo-imperialist tone may fuel resentment and undermine US legitimacy.

I’ll respond to this disingenuous question exactly one time. Maduro’s rule does is immaterial to the violation of sovereignty and international law that this strike represents. Go bother someone else with this nonsense.

he’s monologuing his crimes like a pixar villain—it’s not even that he can’t help himself, it’s that he has no conception of lawfulness, it’s like explaining cold fission to a sea cucumber

Dammit Hegseth is crowing about the glory of the military action (yes he actually used that word) when the rest of us think more officers should have resigned instead of carrying put manifestly illegal orders

French Foreign Ministry: “The removal of Maduro from power and the violation of sovereignty constitute a serious act of aggression against the dignity of the Venezuelan people and their right to determine their own future.

This entire speech is completely insane

In case you were wondering, none of this is OK.

fwiw it’s been about six weeks since Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of trafficking drugs into the US

There is no plan, there is only id.

If this is true, the closest comparison for the Venezuela operation isn't Iraq but Panama. In both cases, the invasion was portrayed as a police action to capture a head of state to stand trial in the US for drug trafficking...

I fear we are going to have to say this a lot again: Int law prohibits bombing countries for the sake of democracy. FOR VERY GOOD REASON. It tends not to work. Attacking a country because its leader lacks legitimacy - whether as pretext or sincerely held rationale - is still just an aggression.

That, and also I have to keep reminding myself that for however monumentally bleak it was/is, the year showed a ton of meaningful solidarity and support from ordinary, everyday, working people from all kinds of backgrounds, showing up and fighting for one another even in the face of actual violence…

Enshittification of an already overhyped app is on its way. I wish universities understood how corrupted these tools are from the jump.

I use this to prevent overwork and track how long admin tasks actually take. I usually only last a few months with the diligence, but it sure helps my mental health to know that no, I'm not bad at it, there really is just too much to do.

The Academic Work Tracker spreadsheet is now updated with 2026 dates! If you don't already, 2026 is a great time to start treating your academic work like the wage job where you are paid to work a certain amount of hours that it actually is: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A corollary to this principle is that finding a single hallucinated citation should lead to an automatic rejection. Automatic. This should be a matter of policy. And this is one of easier AI-related problems for our journals!

Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified.

concentration camps.

No one gets to complain about falling standards in education without acknowledging that institutions will fire you for trying to enforce them.

Bunches of google scholar alerts for new articles AND new citations: There must be a new Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations!

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

Sudan topped a watchlist of global humanitarian crises released Tuesday by an international aid group for the third year in a row as a devastating war grips the northeastern African country. apnews.com/article/sudan-war-...

It's finally here! The Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations. It's a (very useful) beast of a book, with Section 8 (Complexity, Interactions and Dynamics) co-edited by yours truly, including my chapter (49) on 'Norm Interactions, Systemic Change and World Order.'

NEW: Humanitarian officials staged a last-minute plea to Trump officials at their fancy hotel to re-start food aid $ for a huge refugee camp in Kenya. The Trumpers blew it off and babies starved. @annamaria.bsky.social & Brett Murphy www.propublica.org/article/keny...

I'm traveling so no menorah, and weirdly there are no good windowsills in this place, so this post will have to do. This first night of Chanukah, let there be light.

Guys, they actually did it.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

PhD opportunity at the University of Oxford. The Morelli scholarship funds a doctoral student to work with me on on democratic backsliding, strategies of democratic defense and regeneration, or the rise of illiberalism. Deadline Jan 9. More information at users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0073/

So rather than sue OpenAI for copyright infringement and win lots of money/shut down the stealing, Disney...buys a huge stake in a business that's never run a profit and isn't likely to for years? All so we can scroll past badly-made Elsa fan fiction videos on our way to the real art?

New from Amnesty re: October 7th. www.amnestyusa.org/reports/targ...

I'm very excited to share this new article with an all-star cast of coauthors on the dangers of ignoring domestic causes in public-facing IR! @lanoszka.bsky.social @seva.bsky.social @profpaulpoast.bsky.social @joannaszostek.bsky.social @bohdanakurylo.bsky.social

This is the second time a visit to Aus prisons from a UN Human Rights Council oversight process has been blocked by state authorities. It puts us in very poor company indeed. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

One year after the fall of Assad, the landscape of justice for atrocities in Syria has transformed. Some transitional justice institutions have been established in Syria & there have never been so many active Syrian cases under universal jurisdiction. A primer: www.justiceinfo.net/en/153370-ju...

Amnesty International released findings from its investigation into the Everglades Concentration Camp (Alligator Alcatraz), which was built by the Florida Division of Emergency Management. They found evidence of torture, among other human rights violations. www.amnesty.org/en/documents...

NEW— DC Metropolitan Police just shared a tiny bit more body cam footage from the March US Institute of Peace raid in response to my FOIA lawsuit w/ @rcfp.org One clip shows USIP President George Moose being escorted out. Moose: You know we're gonna see you all in court. MPD: Yea we figured that.

My brain says I should read this, but my heart and stomach say I should really not

it's not his Institute. It's certainly not his building.

Reminder that "firing on the shipwrecked" is literally THE example used in the DoD War Manual of "a clearly illegal order"