Wrapping up two weeks in Britain, today at the ASEN conference for a fantastic panel on AI and Nationalism Studies. I've been looking forward to this opportunity to revisit the hypotheses in my 2021 article AI and nationalism. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Grateful to Vera Tolz and the @m-deceit.bsky.social project for hosting my talk today on Russian media portrayals of international sanctions. Great to be back among the worker bees in Manchester!

Look, I know that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer before he even owned a computer, but I kinda feel like the inability to manage powerpoint slides should disqualify you from making authoritative statements on information warfare.

New in Advance Articles: We Are All Netnographers Now? Fieldwork in an Age of Participatory Warfare by Jethro Norman doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

Making waves on the official website of the Republic of Belarus.

ICYMI

Look me up if you want to chat at BASEES about publishing your research in CPCS!

Recently published: The Defending “Defenders”: Framing Public Actions in Contemporary Russian Political Opportunity Structures by Marina Bezenkova Free access for one week: doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

Recently published: Transformations in Russian Activism: Navigating Identity and Solidarity in Russia’s Anti-War Movement by Vlada Baranova Free access for one week: doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

This is a very stubborn myth, indeed, despite a lot of insightful and nuanced scholarship produced over the last couple of years covering the efforts of war-induced migrants in Europe and elsewhere. I work with one such group in Canada and their energy is not matched by their visibility.

One of Schulmann's more interesting observations from yesterday: Belarus is now freer than Russia in terms of access to information.

Ekaterina Schulmann and Maksim Kurnikov, recording today’s episode of “Status” live in Ottawa!

Happy to have contributed to this BBC story examining patriotic education in Russia, following on the success of Talankin's Oscar-winning documentary "Mr Nobody Against Putin." Linking to the more substantial Russian version (English version is linked in the next post): www.bbc.com/russian/arti...

Finally officially published 🔆Open Access🔆: my article on the normalizing of war and occupation on Russian television in @nationalitiesp.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/nps....

If only someone studied these kinds of questions...

Recently published: Introduction: New Research on Russian Women’s Anti-War Activism after February 2022 by: Regina Smyth & Veronica Kostenko Free access for one week: doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

A fantastic collection of articles in this issue!

The science says that White House is unlikely to benefit from a rally-around-the-flag effect, nor is this likely to work as a diversionary war. And, as we all know, the Trump administration is all about the science. oxfordre.com/politics/dis...

No immediate threat to national security. No congressional authorization. No constitution.

The Trump administration has become the greatest force for the spread of nuclear weapons. Near threshold adversaries now must get them to prevent an attack a la North Korea. America's "allies" need them since the nuclear umbrella is now in tatters.l

A process begun already in 2014 with the state takeover of the Perm-36 gulag museum and its conversion into a museum honoring the prison guards. I interviewed the original directors of Perm-36 as well as the advisor for its replacement and wrote about it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happening tomorrow! Still time to register.

Well that was fun. Bluesky is pretty much X now with a coat of paint.

As a citizen, I’m all for this. As a comparativist, name one time that telling authoritarian incumbents you’ll throw them in prison has worked out. If you thought J6 was bad…

The truth is that no AI company wants you to run a local AI, most consumers and enterprise will keep paying for subs, and the niche group of AI developers need hardware with gobs of memory not useless NPUs. There is no actual market for "AI PCs."

An appropriate way to start the new year!

Teaching graduate-level "Russian Domestic Politics" for the first time since... (checks notes) 2019?! Yikes. Time to start a new syllabus from scratch. Topics and readings attached for the morbidly curious.

Took some time off for the holidays, returned to my inbox to find another senior scholar throwing a tantrum because I desk rejected their screed. To be clear, by saying that I'm "obsessed with theory," this author was referring to my suggestion that, you now, they should have one.

Today I had the honor and privilege of talking to students of Invisible University for Ukraine about everyday nationalism. Many thanks to Viktoriya Sereda for the kind invitation and to her fantastic students who raised some fascinating questions.

Getting ready for another morning making the rounds on CBC radio to talk Ukraine-US-Russia: Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Quebec City, Cornerbrook/Gander, Moncton, Saskatoon, Whitehorse, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver.

Go home, Wiley. You're drunk.

Going back on CBC Radio's Just Asking this afternoon together with Robert English to talk about Russia and Ukraine: www.cbc.ca/radio/justas...

Waiting for the inevitable picture of Trump standing in a wheatfield.

Personally, I kinda think it looks more like the FIFA Zombie Apocalypse Prize.

Great to see this issue is finally online. We're getting a lot of excellent research so we tried to cram as many articles as we could into the last issue before the holidays. Check it out: online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/issue/5...

Making the rounds on CBC radio this morning to talk about Witkoff, Russia, Ukraine, and back channel diplomacy. Three interviews down, eleven to go!

Find me on the ASEEES conference program or shoot me a note if you’d like to chat!

Free to access for one week: Russian Business and the Authoritarian Welfare State: Corporate Social Programs as Legitimation for Companies and the State by Ulla Pape 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs... #Russia #authoritarianism #welfare #legitimation

13 years ago, shortly after announcing that he would run for a 3rd term as president, Putin was booed live on national television. The booing was edited out of re-broadcasts, but censors couldn't edit out the nervous glances of the people on the stage with him. youtu.be/nS48UuVXbjQ?...

New in Advance Articles: Melting Points: Furnace Technology at the Crossroads of Socialist and Georgian Imaginaries by Tamar Qeburia 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

As a professor, the most common advice to grad students is to identify a gap in the existing scholarship for your research. Not once did I ever think the gap was "the role of fungi and, specifically, the entheogenic mukhomor," and now I'm insanely jealous. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Free to access for one week: Witnessing the Crisis: The Political and Ethical Challenges of Migration Regime Activist Research at the Polish-Belarusian Border by Justyna Straczuk From the new issue's themed section Emergency Response Research and Documentation. doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

I'm guessing Harvard alumni in the GOP view this as a genius move to increase the perceived value of their degrees by leveraging scarcity. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Free to access for one week: Multiple Positionalities of a Researcher: The Case of Polish Researchers Interviewing Ukrainian War Refugees in Poland by Elżbieta Kwiecińska & Małgorzata Łukianow From the themed section on Emergency Response Research and Documentation. doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

Oh I remember this. Gorby was surrounded by profs who wanted him to sign their books (Alex Pravda had a stack of them). Gorby finally lost patience and burst out, "Where are the young people?!" And so our lowly MPhil cohort was allowed to come forward and meet him. www.sant.ox.ac.uk/anniversary/...

Still time to register for tomorrow's workshop!

Free for one week! The next article in Emergency Response Research and Documentation in Comparative Perspective: Ukrainian Researchers in a War Documentation Project: Intertwined Experiences and Methodologies by Natalia Otrishchenko, Artem Kharchenko, Valentyna Shevchenko doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

ICYMI: join us next Friday! The workshop schedule and speakers are now on the registration page.

All in the name of objective rankings for the sake of rankings, apparently.

Free to access for one week: Introduction to the Special Section on "Emergency Response Research and Documentation in a Comparative Perspective" by Natalia Otrishchenko & Anna Wylegała 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...