The Kissinger Tapes

When one reads thousands of pages of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s phone conversations from his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, as I did, one gets a pretty good sense of his personality, temperament, and character. The man had an appealing sense of humor and a quick wit, which he sometimes used to break tension. One can even see his humor on display during pressure-packed crises (of which there were many). He could be charming and self-deprecating, and he was an inveterate flatterer. He heaped praise on President Nixon, who was aware that it was often phony and doubted Kissinger’s loyalty. He was invariably deferential to Nixon, always addressing him formally as “Mr. President.” His standing with Nixon was always a paramount concern.

Kissinger often affected intimacy with people (“I’m talking to you as a friend”), particularly with journalists, as if he were taking them into his confidence, which was one way he seduced them. Journalists tended to be deferential to him, and many sought his “guidance.” He had considerable powers of seduction through his charm, flattery, humor, feigned forthrightness, and sharing of intimacies. He was prone to flirting with female journalists, including Barbara Walters, who was upset by false news stories linking them, and he enjoyed his playboy reputation. Of course, his famously powerful and quick mind is evident in his phone transcripts.

Also evident is his impressive capacity to handle an enormous workload and withstand an endless series of headaches while working long hours. Kissinger seemed to have boundless stamina and to require little sleep. He was an extraordinarily hard worker. His days were long. He had superior diplomatic skills, aided by, among other things, his people skills, fortitude, brilliance, grasp of every conceivable issue, and bargaining acumen—not to mention his duplicity and double-dealing. And he was an adept bureaucratic infighter in Washington.

Kissinger could be impatient, sarcastic, and derisive with his aides, highly demanding and even abusive. He threatened firings when particularly upset. He was often arrogant, caustic about the “morons” and “lightweights” in the Nixon administration that he had to put up with, and contemptuous of them. He repeatedly threatened to resign, mainly over his difficulties with Secretary of State William Rogers, who he thought was an idiot and disliked intensely, and over his treatment by Nixon.

He was deceitful and a habitual liar; he appeared to have little hesitation about lying. Kissinger lied frequently to colleagues and journalists. A master, serial leaker, he told the journalist Mary McGrory “he does not leak anything,” and he might denounce to a colleague a news story that bore his fingerprints as “a disgrace.” And he lied repeatedly about his involvement in the Nixon administration’s secret wiretaps of officials and journalists, false-reporting system for the secret Cambodia bombing, and internal discussions about Watergate, and about his knowledge of the Plumbers extralegal investigations unit and his former aide David Young’s participation in it.

Kissinger was also a backstabber and two-faced. Not many colleagues escaped his barbed tongue behind their backs. And he was secretive and conspiratorial. It was not unusual for him to complain about people conspiring and waging campaigns against him. Like Nixon, he could appear paranoid about enemies. (He once remarked to his assistant Alexander Haig, half joking, that acute paranoia in Washington would be diagnosed as excessive complacency.)

He was strikingly callous to the deaths and suffering inflicted by his and Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. He can be found in his phone conversations exulting over all the dead Vietnamese bodies piled up following U.S. bombing strikes. He once threatened not to airlift imperiled and retreating South Vietnamese soldiers out of Laos during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos.

He placed great value on being “tough” and “strong,” and being willing to act “brutally” (he expressed disdain for “pansy” language). He could be ruthless and seemingly unimpeded by morality, secondary as it was to both America’s interests as he saw them and to his own interests.

Kissinger never intended for the transcripts of his phone conversations to be released publicly. He had claimed that they were his personal papers and donated them to the Library of Congress under an agreement that gave him control over them. But after the National Security Archive, an organization that fights to limit government secrecy and increase the public’s access to government records, contested Kissinger’s control of the transcripts with the National Archives and State Department and exerted legal pressure on them to recover them, the two agencies asked Kissinger to turn over the transcripts to them. Based on legal advice, Kissinger ultimately complied. It was a crowning achievement of the National Security Archive.

Kissinger was surely nervous about releasing his phone transcripts. He’d been worried about the release of Nixon’s own tapes, aware that they could be damaging to him; he had advised destroying them. But while he said that the tapes of his phone conversations had been destroyed after being transcribed, the transcripts were now out in the world, a great gift to history.

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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline] 

Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—featured as a “Wonder Woman of History” in a series produced by DC Comics—was a key figure in America’s settlement house movement. Throughout the early twentieth century, she spearheaded efforts to improve living conditions for immigrants and the disadvantaged in American cities. Her lifelong advocacy for public housing and urban reform remains urgently relevant almost seventy-five years after her death.

Discover Mary K. Simkhovitch’s extraordinary legacy with our interactive timeline below.

^{Featured image provided by Betty Boyd Caroli.}

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Centuries strong: Black history told through 10 essential Oxford Reads

African American history does not begin with the founding of the United States—its roots stretch centuries deep. Black experiences, intellectual traditions, resistance, and cultural innovation have shaped the story of America. This timeline brings together Oxford works that illuminate pivotal moments across over two hundred transformative years—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet Tubman to long-overlooked accounts from the later Civil Rights era. Explore the essential role of historically Black colleges and universities, and encounter richly drawn portraits of trailblazers like Louis Armstrong and Althea Gibson. Taken together, these books reveal a legacy of resilience, creativity, and influence that has defined American life from the colonial era through the 20th century.

Explore the depth and breadth of African American history with this curated selection of Oxford University Press titles—stories that predate 1776 and continue to shape the nation we know today.

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How do you write a comparative politics textbook for changing times?

When I studied comparative politics as an undergraduate in the 1990s, I was introduced to the field through static comparisons between national political systems. Each chapter in the textbook we read described a different country, and we learned about constitutions, legislatures, and parties as if they were fixed features of political life.

That approach has long since been overtaken by events. Today’s students live in a world where party systems are changing from election to election, new technologies are transforming political participation and communication, and authoritarian rulers are coming up with new ways of grabbing and holding on to power.

How should we teach comparative politics in this rapidly changing environment? That’s something I thought about when I sat down to write my new textbook, An Introduction to Comparative Politics. My answer has four parts.

1. Get to the key concepts and ideas right away

Scholars of comparative politics ask two big questions: why are political systems so different from one another, and how do those differences matter for people’s lives? If we help students understand why those two questions are so important and guide them as they learn about the main differences between political systems, we can put them on a life-long journey of discovery. Today’s students have easy access to reasonably accurate data on political systems via their computers and their phones, so it’s not factual information they need from us—they need concepts and ideas they can use to make sense of the information that is available to them.

2. Take a global view

The modern discipline of comparative politics developed in America and Europe in the nineteenth century, and it has long treated the institutions of North American and Western European democracies as the standard against which all other systems are measured. That attitude never made much sense, and it makes less sense today than ever, since many of today’s political challenges and conflicts have a global scope. Today’s students are eager to understand how the key concepts and ideas of comparative politics travel across continents—or, as is sometimes the case, they don’t.

3. Talk about historical change

The turn away from static comparisons between national political systems also requires that we pay attention to processes of historical change, continuities, and resurgences.

It is remarkable how much history has been repeating itself lately. Over the last two decades, leading comparativists have presented in-depth analyses of “electoral authoritarianism”—conducting multi-party elections in de facto authoritarian regimes. As Theodore Zeldin showed in the 1950s, Napoleon III’s regime in France in the 1850s and 1860s had all the hallmarks of electoral authoritarianism. Other comparativists have examined the rise of populism. Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States has a lot in common with Georges Boulanger’s meteoric political career in France in the 1880s.

4. Emphasize data and methods

For better or worse, we live in a data-driven world, and whatever our students choose to do when they’re done studying, they’re going to need basic data literacy skills. This makes it all the more important for us as teachers to emphasize that comparative politics isn’t just a set of facts to memorize—it is a way of thinking about the world. Students need to become familiar with the main methodological approaches in comparative politics right away, including both broad cross-national comparisons and focused case studies. I therefore deemed it essential, when writing An Introduction to Comparative Politics, to present students with up-to-date data and up-to-date empirical examples in all chapters.

By learning the key concepts and ideas, taking a global view, tracing processes of historical continuity and change, and using diverse comparative methods, students can gain the independence of mind they need to make sense of politics throughout their lifetimes.

^{Feature image: photo by Bhabin Tamang via Pexels.}

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Meet the editors: what we do at conferences

For academics, stepping into the world of scholarly conferences for the first time can feel like crossing the Rubicon. After months (or sometimes years) of what is often a solitary research journey, scholars enter a dynamic ecosystem where subfields collide and converge, and colleagues at every career stage rub shoulders in line for coffee and conversation.

For Oxford’s two newest politics editors, Morgan Jones and Gabe Kachuck, the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada, was their first opportunity to experience the rush of new ideas and new faces firsthand. Below, Morgan and Gabe share their initial impressions, memorable moments, and key lessons—for themselves and for future conference delegates.

You were first time attendees at the APSA conference. Any highlights?

We were proud to represent Oxford University Press at one of the field’s largest gatherings. Having a good number of our books together at one booth really brought the list to life, and it was exciting to see old friends, new collaborators, and curious strangers leafing through the range of the categories we’re publishing in. Vancouver itself was a standout: the Convention Centre’s two glass-walled buildings stood handsomely against the cerulean harbor, framed by the mountains and dotted with sea planes taking off and landing. The fresh air was welcome amid back-to-back meetings and sobering discussions about the state of global affairs.

How are scholars responding to the political challenges of our time?

This is a poignant question, following the assassination of American political activist Charlie Kirk. The conference was just getting underway when the news landed; it quickly consumed everyone in attendance, as did the unrest that followed. Responses to the violence were myriad, but the constant was an ever-growing concern for the future of democratic norms. Scholars and researchers at APSA brought a wealth of expertise to this issue and so many others that define our current moment. We were moved by their commitment to asking good questions and developing grounded answers to inform the path forward.

How did you build your schedule?

Planning for the conference began a month or so prior to our flights to Vancouver. Because we are both new editors at OUP, we are still in the process of meeting all the authors we’ve inherited from our predecessor. In building our schedules, we aimed to strike a balance between chatting with these authors about their progress and connecting with others whose work is of interest, for a variety of different reasons. We met a mix of early-career researchers and experienced scholars who offered insights into trends and developments in any given subfield. We also left time in our schedules for panels and “down time” at the exhibition booth, where we enjoyed lively, organic conversations about Oxford’s list and what people are up to in the field.

Since you both acquire academic and trade titles for Oxford’s politics list, how did you approach conversations at APSA?

We start our conversations by working to understand what you aim to do and who you want your work to reach, whether that be fellow academics, students, policymakers, practitioners, or general readers. From there, we can offer feedback on whether your book project is set up to effectively meet those goals, and, if so, what might look like if you were to publish an academic, trade, or crossover work with us at OUP. Aligning your needs as author with ours as publisher is key to a successful partnership.

What kind of book proposals or research topics seemed especially compelling or timely?

Our first question when evaluating a proposal is: what’s novel here? That might mean unpublished interviews conducted during fieldwork abroad, newly uncovered census or survey data, or a fresh conceptual approach to understanding the structures that shape power and politics around the world. The proposals that stood out to us at APSA were those with a clear sense of their potential impact—whether on specific subfields or on broader public discourse. We’re always drawn to ambitious arguments or narratives that aim to tackle questions too expansive for a single journal article. Those are the kinds of projects that consistently make us lean in and want to learn more!

Did you attend any panels? If so, were there standout moments or recurring themes caught your attention?

Gabe was able to attend a few panels between meetings, including the Author Meets Critics session for When the Internet Meets Authoritarian Governance: China’s Digital Governance and a paper discussion on nuclear deterrence strategies. It was heartening to hear OUP books cited in both sessions—a reminder of our ongoing impact on the field. The panels offered sharp insights into how political science is engaging with questions of state power in digital and strategic contexts.

One recurring theme across panels and informal conversations was the role of AI in shaping research, scholarship, and teaching. Scholars are clearly grappling with how to integrate these tools into their work and classrooms, and there’s far from a consensus on how best to do so. It’s a space marked by both experimentation and uncertainty, and it’s likely to remain a live conversation for some time.

Now that you’ve attended your first academic conference, do you have any advice for scholars hoping to connect with you and other OUP editors?

Reach out early to request a meeting! Our emails can be found on OUP’s website under Find an Editor. Even if we aren’t able to connect with you during the conference, we’re open to setting up virtual meetings before or after events have wrapped. Or, come by the booth to say hello. We are often on the go, but we enjoy meet-and-greets and would be glad to listen to an elevator pitch of your research interests, works-in-progress, or forthcoming submissions.

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China’s state-led financialization for tech supremacy

The financialization of Western economies has unfolded as a prolonged systemic failure. What began as a mechanism to support productive enterprise has evolved into a structural dominance of finance over the real economy. Through deregulation, the proliferation of speculative activity, and successive asset bubbles, the sector has prioritized short-term gains over long-term investment. The 2008 financial crisis underscored these dynamics, transferring the burdens of systemic risk to the broader public while financial institutions were largely shielded from the consequences. This trajectory has entrenched income inequality and contributed to the political capture of regulatory institutions, inhibiting meaningful reform.

In contrast, China presents a divergent model. Its state-led financialization exemplifies a proactive deployment of financial mechanisms in service of national industrial objectives. Unlike the market-driven financialization typical of advanced Western economies, China’s approach is characterized by strategic state intervention and institutional design. The government not only participates in markets but reconfigures them—mobilizing state-owned enterprises as venture capital vehicles, directing bank lending toward emerging technologies, and leveraging local government financing platforms to support innovation. This model represents a deliberate recalibration of financial systems to prioritize long-term technological development over immediate capital returns.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs): from asset managers to venture capitalists

Chinese SOEs have increasingly transitioned from passive asset holders to active financial agents, functioning as quasi–venture capital entities with a targeted focus on high-technology sectors such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing. This transformation is rooted in the 2013 reforms under Xi Jinping, which marked a shift in state asset governance from a model of “managing assets” to one of “managing capital.” Central to this new framework are state-owned capital investment and operation companies (SCIOCs)—market-oriented entities tasked with allocating state capital in alignment with national strategic objectives.

Prominent SCIOCs such as Guoxin and Chengtong exemplify this model, channeling investments into key technological domains while retaining mechanisms of state oversight. Notably, their investment strategies increasingly resemble those of global institutional investors like BlackRock, characterized by portfolio diversification and minority equity stakes across a wide range of publicly listed firms. Over time, both Guoxin and Chengtong have reduced the size of their individual holdings while broadening the scope of their portfolios, mirroring BlackRock’s index-based approach. However, unlike BlackRock, whose investment logic is primarily driven by market signals and shareholder value maximization, these Chinese entities operate within a state-directed paradigm. Their capital allocation decisions are subordinated to broader industrial policy objectives, underscoring a distinctive model of “state-capital hybridization” wherein global financial practices are repurposed to advance national technological priorities.

Banks: from conservative lenders to investment partners

China’s banking sector has undergone a significant transformation from a traditionally conservative, loan-centric model—once governed by the “separation principle” that delineated clear boundaries between lending and investment—toward a more integrated, market-oriented system. Since 2015, mechanisms such as “investment and loan linkage” have enabled commercial banks to engage in equity-related activities, particularly in support of high-technology enterprises. Institutions like the Bank of China have introduced “green channel” loans that prioritize lending to startups with venture capital backing, and in some cases have experimented with convertible instruments such as “stock option models,” allowing for the conversion of debt into equity.

This evolution has been further institutionalized through the establishment of bank wealth management companies (BWMCs), which are permitted to make direct equity investments in high-tech firms. As of the end of 2022, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) had approved 29 such entities. One notable example is BOCOM International, affiliated with the Bank of Communications, which manages the BOCOM Science and Technology Innovation Fund—an investment vehicle explicitly oriented toward advancing technological innovation. These developments underscore a broader trend of financial re-engineering within the Chinese banking system, as state-affiliated financial institutions adopt quasi-investor roles to support national strategic priorities, reinforcing the architecture of state-led financialization.

Local governments: trading land speculation for innovation funding

In recent years, Chinese local governments have transitioned away from reliance on Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs), traditionally used to support land-based urban development, toward the deployment of Government Guidance Funds (GGFs). This strategic reorientation marks a shift from speculative real estate-driven financing to a model of purposeful financialization aimed at fostering technological innovation. Rather than leveraging land assets to finance urban expansion, local authorities are increasingly channeling capital into science and technology sectors through state-backed investment vehicles.

A prominent example is the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (NICIIF), with a targeted fund size of approximately USD 95.8 billion, which supports enterprises in strategically vital sectors such as semiconductors. These funds operate not merely as instruments of capital allocation but as policy tools through which local governments execute central industrial strategies. According to the Zero2IPO database, as of 2023, there were 2,086 active GGFs across China, collectively managing assets exceeding USD 1.8 trillion. This proliferation underscores a broader recalibration of subnational fiscal behavior, whereby the objectives of economic development and industrial policy are fused within a state-directed financial architecture oriented toward national technological advancement.

A coordinated push for tech supremacy

This evolving model of state-led financialization reflects a deliberate integration of financial instruments with industrial policy, positioning the state as what we termed as “financial entrepreneur.” In this capacity, the state assumes a dual function: both as a strategic investor in capital markets and as a fund manager whose objectives are shaped through a hybrid of administrative directive and market logic. The recalibration of incentives across state institutions—ranging from banks and SOEs to local governments—facilitates the targeted allocation of financial resources toward sectors deemed essential for national technological leadership.

This coordinated mobilization contrasts sharply with earlier phases of development finance in China, which were heavily reliant on infrastructure-led investment through Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs). The current financial architecture instead orients capital toward innovation and industrial upgrading. As illustrated in the accompanying figure, this shift embodies a paradigmatic change in the underlying logic of state intervention. The empirical results are notable: according to a 2023 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), China now leads globally in 37 out of 44 critical technologies, including advanced batteries, quantum sensing, and 5G communications.

A growing network of state agencies in innovation finance ecosystem is to ensure ideological alignment and managerial oversight, forming a core feature of China’s model of state-led financialization. This system also serves as a reminder of the original rationale behind China’s economic reform process where the boundaries between public and private sectors, and between liberal market coordination and socialist planning, become increasingly blurred. Notwithstanding its strategic coherence, China’s model of state-led financialization faces a series of structural and operational challenges. One key risk lies in the emergence of overcapacity within state-targeted sectors such as photovoltaics and electric vehicles. In the absence of commensurate demand, excessive production may generate inefficiencies, underutilized assets, and financial losses. Furthermore, the expansive use of mechanisms like GGFs has the potential to inflate asset bubbles, as state-directed capital may push valuations beyond sustainable levels, raising concerns over long-term financial stability.

The persistence of so-called “zombie firms”—enterprises maintained through state support despite chronic unprofitability—also continues to divert capital from more productive uses, undermining allocative efficiency. Tensions emerge from the dual imperative to stimulate market-based innovation while retaining centralized Party and state control over capital flows. These competing logics often complicate investment decisions and diminish the responsiveness of the financial system. Additionally, fragmented coordination across state entities and growing international scrutiny or resistance to China’s state-capitalist practices further limit the replicability and effectiveness of this model.

For Western economies, the implications are profound. Initiatives such as the U.S. Stargate Project—reportedly valued at $500 billion over four years to support AI and semiconductor infrastructure—and the European Commission’s InvestAI scheme, backed by €20 billion in guarantees, signal a renewed policy interest in public–private coordination. However, these efforts remain constrained by political fragmentation and a reliance on market-led frameworks. China’s approach is characterized by a level of centralized state capacity and institutional discipline that would be difficult to replicate without foundational political transformation in the West.

Should China succeed in sustaining this model without triggering systemic instability, the result would extend beyond technological leadership. It would represent a paradigmatic shift in the global political economy—one that challenges prevailing liberal capitalist orthodoxy and compels a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship between the state, capital, and innovation. In this sense, China is not merely competing within existing rules but reshaping the terrain on which economic competition is conducted.

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The bordered logic behind the headlines

‘Where do you want to go today?’ served as the tagline for software giant Microsoft’s global marketing campaign running through the mid-1990s. The accompanying advertisements were replete with flashy images of people around the world of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds engaging in a diverse range of activities, including business, education, video games, artistic expression, socializing, and research, to name some of the most prominent examples. The slogan ‘Where do you want to go today?’ implied that people were largely free to travel where they wished, but, of course, Microsoft was selling the power of its software to facilitate the free flow of information and communication, and by extension greater connectivity and collaboration, among people around the world, rather than the actual movement of people.

Yet combined with rapid advances in hardware and software, the tagline captured something of a popular mood of the time. Within many Western societies, the end of the Cold War, the continued liberalization of international trade and travel through a variety of supranational institutions and international agreements, and the growing clout of transnational corporations and nongovernment organizations heralded the coming of a borderless world. The prospect of unprecedented, unfettered mobility and connectivity for an ever-growing number of people seemed imminent.

Looking back thirty years later, those expectations were overly optimistic. It is impossible to deny the truly remarkable technological advances—personal computers, the internet, mobile phones, and wireless communications—that compress space and bridge territories. Yet far from a borderless world, the first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a resurgence of borders with impacts on a variety of political, socioeconomic, environmental, technological, and human rights issues.

In fact, borders have been central to two of the most significant events of the 2020s, namely the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic saw governments, with varying degrees of severity and effectiveness, impose border controls, restrict domestic and international travel, and implement systems of confinement and quarantine. These measures disrupted global supply chains and confined millions of people to their homes as their freedom to attend school, go to work, gather for worship, or even simply shop for daily essentials was restricted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also disrupted global trade networks, while ravaging large swathes of Ukrainian territory, displacing millions of civilians, and prompting massive increases in defense spending far beyond the direct combatants.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of international and civil conflicts roiling the international scene. The attacks by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip into Israel in 2023 prompted Israeli retaliatory attacks and eventually a full-scale invasion into Gaza. This, in turn, gave rise to a series of broader, overlapping regional conflicts involving dozens of state and non-state combatants, including Hezbollah and Houthi militants in Lebanon and Yemen respectively and Iranian and Israeli attacks and counterattacks. That turmoil provided at least proximate triggers for the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in 2024, leaving that country divided among a mixture of forces representing a provisional government, various sectarian militias with unclear allegiances, and remnants of Islamic State forces. Syrian territory also hosts American, Russian, and Turkish armed forces, in some ways resembling the proxy conflicts of the Cold War.

While the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East have dominated headlines, other armed struggles have flared and persisted across the North African, Sahel, South Asian, and Central Asian regions. Afghanistan, Congo, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Yemen remain gripped, at least in part, by civil strife and border disputes stretching back years, if not decades. Beyond the battlefield death and destruction, these conflicts have broader consequences, including refugee flows, economic dislocation and poverty, and malnutrition and hunger, among other problems.

Looming menacingly in the background is the specter of renewed great power competition, primarily between the United States with its global alliance system and the burgeoning partnerships between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as well as other like-minded authoritarian regimes. After years of forging economic interdependencies, China has been increasingly assertive in projecting power across the Indo-Pacific realm, especially regarding its claims over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Himalayas. The United States has responded with calls to ‘pivot to Asia’ based on targeted sanctions and a general decoupling from China’s economy, strengthening alliances stretching from East Asia through Southeast Asia and Oceania into the Indian basin, and more robust and forward military deployments across the region. Ramifications of great power conflict across the Indo-Pacific realm would greatly exceed the calamities of other ongoing wars.

This blog has summarized, admittedly in broad strokes, the shift from relative optimism in the 1990s—characterized by aspirations for a more collaborative and interconnected global community—to a world confronted by profound challenges in which borders will play central roles through the coming decades. Beyond this focus on larger-scale geopolitics and hard international power, borders are central to a variety of other issues across multiple scales, including debates about trade and tariffs, citizenship and immigration, crime, surveillance and privacy, and cultural change and human rights, to name a few. Headlines on any day offer striking examples of issues and events involving borders.

Given the salience of borders to such an array of pressing issues, Oxford University Press has launched Oxford Intersections: Borders to provide the latest border research, highlighting this field’s broad relevance. Borders are shown to be simultaneously positive and negative, often in the same place and at the same time to different people. Borders remain a prime modality of defining and enacting power across multiple scales. This collection seeks to reveal how, where, why, by whom, and to what effect that power and aspiration of territorial control is exercised. We hope readers will engage Oxford Intersections: Borders to encounter new perspectives on a topic that is elemental to human experience and foundational to the form and function of power.

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Journey into Darkness: The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Basel, Switzerland

When you let me go
I barely stayed afloat
I’m floating all alone
Still holding on to hope

—JJ, Austria, “Wasted Love”
Winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025

Many waters
Cannot quench love
Neither can the floods
Drown it

—Yuval Raphael, Israel, “New Day Will Rise” (from the original Hebrew)
Second place, Eurovision Song Contest 2025

How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope. Darkness haunts both songs, filling the stage with the stark play of light against the ominous backdrop of black. If the two songs and their metaphors are consonant at many levels, they were also portentous of the larger dissonance of the largest song contest in the world and its turn toward the darkness that envelops Europe in 2025.

The signs of Eurovision’s turn in 2025 took many and varied forms, but it is the abundance and commonness that pose questions about Europe itself. In significantly larger numbers than previously, the lyrics of the competing Eurosongs were in languages other than English. Each of the Baltic states, for example, sang in languages other than English—Latvian and Lithuanian, and Estonia’s Tommy Cash sang “Espresso Macchiato” primarily in Italian and Spanish. Larger and smaller nations alike chose to sing in national languages. Germany and Iceland, for example, both with long histories of Eurosongs in English, sang in their native languages.

The lyrics of the 2025 Eurosongs tended in greater numbers toward serious subjects, further reflecting the darkening moment. Songs with the comical lyrics that often distinguish Eurosongs did not entirely disappear, but they did not place as well as they frequently do. Sweden’s “Bara bada bastu” (Just Take a Sauna), sung by the Finnish group KAJ and wackily staged in a sauna, was favored to win prior to the Grand Finale, but it placed a fairly distant fourth.

The field of competitors in 2025 was noticeably smaller: thirty-seven as opposed to as many as forty-three in previous years. Above all, the nations choosing not to compete were in Eastern Europe—Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia—while Russia and Belarus are banned from competing due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Despite the financial reasons for not competing, the result has been a realignment of European nations with political stakes that resemble an earlier division of Europe into East and West. Just as the first Eurovision Song Contest was a response to the Cold War in 1956, so too do recent Eurovisions reflect the East-West divide in the Europe of a New Cold War.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is responsible for organizing the participation of nations in its European media empire has long established rules meant to distance the Eurovision from politics. Over the contest’s historical longue durée these rules have been effective to varying degrees, often by requiring that Eurosongs with politically specific lyrics make changes that depoliticize them. Those changes are usually accommodated (e.g., in 2024 when Israel was required to change some lyrics and the title of its entry, from “October Rain” to “Hurricane”), but occasional rejections are not unknown (e.g., Georgia with its 2009 entry, “We Don’t Wanna Put In”).

In 2025, the dividing line between the political and apolitical collapsed, thereby releasing the flood waters of the political. The rules designed to prevent the political could no longer withstand the Realpolitik of a Europe in conflict with itself. At the center of the storm was Israel and the contradictions unleashed by its continued participation while at war in Gaza. Calls for banning Israel because of its conflicts with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been growing for years. Palestine has itself launched tentative efforts to participate in the Eurovision, but without luck because of the absence of a national broadcasting network. Protests of Israeli Eurovision participation coalesced in 2019, when the Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv. Palestinian musicians even went so far as to organize an alternative Gazavision in 2019.

In 2025, all forms of pro-Palestinian protest were banned in Basel. Palestinian flags were not allowed, and the negative response of audiences to Yuval Raphael’s performances (booing) were scrubbed from EBU broadcasts. When Raphael placed in the middle of the field after the professional-juries voted, she catapulted to first place after the Israeli government organized a massive popular-vote surge on social media. She led the field until the final announcement of popular voting nudged JJ ahead into first place. In the week following the Grand Finale in Basel, the critical response to the flood of politicking in the Eurovision had swollen to the point that many recognize it as an existential crisis for the Eurovision Song Contest. It either will or will not be a response to the political forces dividing Europe.

It is my custom each year to end this blog post by giving final voice to a song that has special meaning for me, often because it offers an alternative vision for what the Eurovision Song Contest has been and what it might become. I discover the meaning I seek in these final sonic epilogues through acts of return and remembrance, return to powerful and intimate Eurovision moments of the past, return also to the exquisite beauty afforded by song itself. Accordingly, I remind myself that it is song that lies at the heart of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is song, so the first great theorist of song, Johann Gottfried Herder, reminds us, that “loves the masses” and their humanity. In search of song, I return to Latvia, where the young Herder, living in Riga, may have experienced his first folk songs, and I look to this year’s Latvian Eurovision entry, Tautumeitas’s “Bur man laimi” (Chant of Happiness). To complete the rhetorical framing of this blogpost, I close with the bridge of a song from Latvian folk song tradition. I return to “Bur man laimi” to remember—and to remind us—that the journey into darkness can pave the way to new light.

I didn’t know my own happiness
I didn’t know my own happiness
Until I met my misery

_{Featured image: the stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 by MrSilesian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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How to speak truth (or a reasonable facsimile) to power

One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”

But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.

So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.

In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.

A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”

More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)

Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.

Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.

^{Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ by Raffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Spain 50 years after General Franco

Few countries in the world have changed as dramatically as Spain has since the death of General Franco 50 years ago. Following his victory in a three-year civil war, Franco ruled as dictator for nearly four decades. His successor, King Juan Carlos, whose appointment by Franco in 1969 restored the Bourbon monarchy, abolished in 1931when the Second Republic was declared, used the dictator’s immense powers to transition Spain to democracy, for which there was a crying need among the population.

Today the country is one of only 25 nations out of 167 ranked as a “full democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The economy has moved from being very protectionist to a high level of openness, as measured by foreign trade and direct foreign investment. Spain was a founding member of the eurozone. Socially it is one of the most progressive countries; same-sex marriage was legalized in 2005, euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2021, and paid menstrual leave in 2023.

But in 2025 the country faces a host of challenges, some of them not new but becoming ever more urgent. The unemployment rate has come down from a peak of 27% in 2013, following the 2008 global financial crisis and the bursting of Spain’s immense property bubble, but at 11% it is still double the EU average. The economy is heavily reliant on tourism (94 million international visitors in 2024, the second largest number after France), a seasonal industry; R&D spending, central for technological change and innovation is low (1.2% of GDP), and the state pension system in a country with a fast-ageing population and one of the world’s highest average life expectancies is coming under increasing pressure.

There is also an acute housing crisis, which is deepening the divide between the relatively poor living standards of young adults, unable to get on the property ladder, and the more comfortable life of the elderly. This crisis is aggravated by the influx of immigrants in recent years, who are needed to work in sectors, such as agriculture, construction, and to care for the elderly, and to keep the population growing. Spain’s fertility rate of 1.2 children is far below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Most of the 8 million increase in the population between 2000 and 2024 was due to immigration.

Other problems include the colonization by politicians of state institutions and companies; the government’s overuse of decree laws that obviate the need for parliamentary debate; corruption that is perceived to be relatively high; political pressure on the judiciary, and the closed party system list to elect MPs. Under this system, candidates are elected in the order in which they appear on the voting list. Since that order is decided by the party’s leadership, MPs are then beholden to the leadership–a system that fosters unquestioning obedience and stifles debate. A Pew survey showed close to 70% of respondents in Spain dissatisfied with the functioning of its democracy, the second highest level among the EU countries included in the survey.

As if these problems are not enough, resolving them is in the hands of a highly polarized and fragmented political class that is identified by the state pollster CIS as one of the country’s biggest problems. Tackling the problems and structural challenges for the greater good requires broad consensus across the political divide. More than 80% of Spaniards, according to the private pollster Metroscopia, would like to return to the spirit of compromise of the 1975-1978 transition to democracy.

That spirit saw broad consensus between the Socialists and the conservative Popular Party (PP), the two main parties, to resolve issues for the good of the country as a whole. Since 2015, however, hard-right and hard-left parties have entered parliament, making consensus much more difficult. The combined share of the Socialists’ and the PP’s vote dropped from 73.4% in 2011 to 50.7% in 2015, and recovered to 65% in 2023.

Spain had five general elections between 2015 and 2023, but only 10 in the preceding 36 years.

The unwieldy Socialist-led minority coalition government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that emerged from the November 2019 and July 2023 elections, with a hard-left alliance as the junior partner, depends for its survival on parliamentary support from Basque nationalist and separatist parties and two Catalan separatist parties.

The movement for an independent Catalonia, which came to a head with an illegal referendum on secession in 2017, has ebbed but not lost its hold over national political life. The maximalist Together for Catalonia’s support for the current government came at the price of a broad and deeply controversial amnesty for some 400 people who faced charges for offences related to the referendum and the secession push.

Meanwhile, Spain’s public administration is still needlessly opaque. Franco’s archaic Official Secrets Law of 1968, which allows classified information to be kept secret forever, remains in force. It is very much out of line with other developed countries. In the 50^th anniversary year of the dictator’s death, now would be a good time to scrap it and agree to a new one. Spain has come a long way but, in some areas, needs to go further.

_{Header image: Photo by Sam Williams on Unsplash.}

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50 years after the fall of Saigon [reading list]

On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War came to a historic end with the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to North Vietnam forces, marking a significant turning point in world history. This day is remembered for the profound impact it had on the lives of millions, the geopolitical landscape, and the course of modern history. As we commemorate the anniversary of this pivotal event, we reflect on the sacrifices made, the lessons learned, and the enduring hope for peace and reconciliation.

Access the featured books and chapters on this reading list via your institution’s library or recommend to your librarian to gain access.

Fire and Rain by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger’s pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration’s relations with the Soviet Union and China vis-à-vis the war in Southeast Asia.

Read more.

Vietnam at War by Mark Philip Bradley

The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several wars in Vietnam, including an anticolonial war with France and a civil war between the North and South. Vietnam at War looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day.

Read more.

Death of a Generation by Howard Jones

For many historians and political observers, what John F. Kennedy would and would not have done in Vietnam has been a source of enduring controversy. Based on new evidence—including a revelation about the Kennedy administration’s involvement in the assassination of Premier Diem—Howard Jones argues in his book that Kennedy intended to withdraw the great bulk of American soldiers and pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Vietnam.

Read more.

Number One Realist by Nathaniel L. Moir

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926-67) staked a claim as the “Number One Realist” on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina.

Read more.

“Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy, 1954–1975” by Pierre Asselin

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies considers the strategies and tactics used by Vietnamese communist leaders to defeat the United States and its allies in the Vietnam War. It demonstrates that the guerrilla warfare that has come to define the war in the West was in fact only one aspect of a highly sophisticated campaign to “liberate” the Southern half of the country and bring about national reunification under communist aegis.

Read more.

“The Literature of Peace: A War Refugee’s ‘Orphaned Voice’ in The Sympathizer”by Pamela J. Rader

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Peace History considers The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese American refugee’s perspective on the war waged on Vietnamese soil. In the tradition of novels as vehicles for social change, the fictional confessional chronicles the lasting devastation of war, cultural imperialism, and nationalism through its eponymous, biracial, double-agent narrator who subscribes to the loyalty of two brothers instead of the two countries he serves.Art, specifically fiction, becomes an act of resistance to assert the loss of individualism and freedom of thought in promoting a culture of peace.

Read more.

The Dragon in the Jungle by Xiaobing Li

Western historians have long speculated about Chinese military intervention in the Vietnam War. It was not until recently, however, that newly available international archival materials, as well as documents from China, have indicated the true extent and level of Chinese participation in the conflict of Vietnam. For the first time in the English language, this book offers an overview of the operations and combat experience of more than 430,000 Chinese troops in Indochina from 1968-73.

Read more.

_{Feature image by USMC Photo by GySgt Russ Thurman. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Subversion: history’s greatest hits

Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. But most of what we know about the subject concerns the Cold War and focuses on big powers maliciously manipulating the domestic politics of small ones. To understand how subversion fits into the new epoch of great power rivalry, to know what’s really new and what’s old hat, we need a primer on great power subversive statecraft through the ages. And we need this history to look at all forms of subversive statecraft, not just conventional ones, such as election meddling or propaganda. 

A Measure Short of War provides just that, revealing that most of today’s fears and hopes surrounding subversion would have been familiar to the statesman of earlier ages. Check out highlights from some of the cases detailed in the book:

_{Featured image by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash.}

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What actually happened during the 1970s?

Working-class politics is back in vogue in the West, but for whom does it speak? An AfD candidate in Germany won over 14% of the vote after claiming the SPD was ‘no longer a workers’ party in the classic sense’ and that his organisation was ‘taking on this role’. The US Vice President, JD Vance, emphasises he is a ‘a working-class boy, born far from the halls of power’ and promises to reshore industrial jobs. Marine Le Pen claims to lead the ‘party of French workers’ and Fratelli d’Italia wins a majority of manual workers after asking if ‘the Left is now no longer in the factories and amongst the workers, where can you find it?’ (its answer: a Pride parade). These political visions define themselves against an identity politics of the urbane, the educated, and the socially liberal. They seek to reverse the impacts of deindustrialisation, globalisation, and social liberalisation which began in the mid twentieth century and rapidly accelerated after the 1970s.

Histories of contemporary Europe tend to argue that the defeat of a certain kind of industrial politics associated with the Left was both inevitable, permanent, and an event long in the making. Viewed from the year 2000, the dividends of adaption to broadened social bases, reformulated programmes, and a post-class image seemed self-evident to many. Twenty-five years later, this consensus has been challenged. The British Labour Party’s chief strategist believes winning back working-class voters is the fundamental test of power. Others stress the polarisation of values between graduates, professionals, and ethnic minorities and pensioners, school leavers, and workers. Though many trace the origins of contemporary uncertainty to the 1970s, fewer have concretely analysed what actually happened in that decade.

West Europeans experienced that decade differently to its retrospective representation. The trade unions and social democratic and Communist parties grew and a diverse new generation entered the labour movement. Marginalised young, female, and immigrant workers led strikes to gain rights. White-collar workers unionised and sections of a previously hostile middle class appeared to be switching allegiances. Immigration, women’s entry into the workforce, widening educational access, increasing service employment, and minority movements were believed to have expanded the reach and magnetism of the Left. Many on the other side of politics thought that this trajectory would continue. Successful strikebreaking movements, new automation technologies, and organisational recasting helped to interrupt this momentum. A generation of workers felt bewildered, unable to understand their predicament, and bereft of the means to resist the shift to a new era. Only under specific circumstances at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s did the old Left’s expanded coalition fracture with enduring and sometimes traumatic results. The reliance on ideas of decline has contributed to the flattening of a complex history.   

Asking different questions of the 1970s may require experimentation with methods, incorporation of neglected forms of evidence, and analysis of various cases within unitary frameworks. Archivally-driven accounts rooted in spaces of common deliberation and action can address the absence of a certain kind of working-class voice in existing narratives. Combining transnational and comparative approaches can provide insights on periods where the forces of change traverse states and delimited frameworks, institutions, and cultures channel their energies, manage their impact, and decide on priorities. Looking beyond that decade, it might be worth developing more granular accounts of the relations between technology and society, following the scholarship of David Edgerton and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and establishing a deeper understanding of how machines are used at work. The conditions of possibility of a moment when the Right seeks to occupy the space where classical working-class politics once stood merits further study.

_{Feature image by André Cros. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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We the Men

Amidst the flurry of headlines about the Trump administration’s first weeks in power, who will notice that the federal government’s largest agency no longer celebrates Black History Month or Women’s History Month? The Department of Defense’s January 31 guidance declaring “Identity Months Dead at DoD” may have been lost in the news cycle.

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the time to make this change because commemorations are important. They shape how Americans understand the past, think about the present, and envision the future. That is why the Trump administration has already launched its plans for marking America’s semiquincentennial in 2026. President Donald Trump himself chairs the task force.

Although the Trump administration is unlikely to acknowledge it, America’s commemorative landscape remains starkly uneven. Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed “that all men are created equal,” only three women made a recent list of the 50 most frequently commemorated people in America’s public monuments. In comparison, the list includes 44 white men, many of them slaveholders. Congress has never designated a legal public holiday—the kind that closes federal offices—to celebrate an important woman in American history.

Reformers have been fighting for generations to expand America’s commemorations. Decades after the creation of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, efforts to include all Americans in the nation’s commemorations have had limited success—largely because these efforts continue to face vehement opposition.

Trump joined that opposition long before his current presidential term, speaking out against placing Harriet Tubman’s image on the $20 bill.

Only two women have ever appeared on America’s paper currency. Martha Washington graced the front of a $1 silver certificate that the United States first issued in 1886. Pocahontas knelt for baptism on the back of a $20 bill first issued in 1863.

Many Americans have noticed women’s absence. After years of activism from women in and out of Congress, the Obama administration announced a plan in 2016 to redesign the $20 bill, with Tubman replacing President Andrew Jackson on the front.

At the time, Trump was pursuing the Republican nomination for President. He immediately denounced the decision to place Tubman on the twenty as “pure political correctness,” as if Tubman did not merit such prominent recognition. In contrast, Trump insisted that Jackson had “a great history.”

To put Trump’s claims in context: Jackson was a slaveholder who removed Native American tribes from their lands. Tubman was an abolitionist and suffragist who freed herself and hundreds of others from bondage before becoming a Union scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War. Each historical figure foregrounds different aspects of America’s past. To my mind, Tubman’s record is far worthier of celebration.

Trump, however, declared in 2016 that “it would be more appropriate” to have Tubman’s image on “another denomination,” suggesting “maybe we do the two dollar bill or we do another bill.” If you have rarely seen a $2 bill, there is a reason for that. The two is the least-used bill.

After Trump became President in 2017, his Treasury Department delayed introduction of the new $20 bill and spent years repeatedly refusing to indicate whether the redesigned twenty would feature Tubman.

One of Trump’s former White House staffers published a tell-all memoir in 2018. She recounted Trump’s reaction when she gave him a memo in 2017 about placing Tubman on the twenty. Trump reportedly looked at a photograph of Tubman and asked: “You want to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?” The question implied that Tubman did not look like someone who belonged in that place of honor, or did not look like someone Trump found physically attractive, or both.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, the Biden administration reported that it was committed to placing Tubman’s portrait on the front of the twenty. However, Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election has made that commemoration uncertain again.

America’s Constitution purports to speak for “We the People.” But too many of our commemorations include only We the Men. That usually means white men. Amidst the many other struggles that will mark the Trump presidency, it is well worth fighting to include all of us in the stories America tells about itself. The celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States are just one year away.

_{Featured image by Ben Mater via Unsplash.}

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<em>Moby-Dick</em> and the United States of Aggrievement

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III.

The first Trump administration cultivated comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose election proclaimed the rise of the self-determined white man. Look behind the myths of Jacksonian democracy, however, and you will find a nation of teeming resentments. A nineteenth-century visitor observed that Americans had an unusual fondness for lawsuits and cheerfully took each other to court. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans were initially difficult to insult, their resentments, once ignited, took a long time to burn out. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously begrudged every dollar he gave to charity as an infringement on his “manhood” and individuality.

Against this backdrop Melville imagined Captain Ahab’s ruinous quest. The feeling of perpetual grievance animates the captain’s violent path through the world. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck, warning the First Mate that power resides in collecting real and imagined wounds. Ahab seems so difficult to resist because the crew believe that in seeking retribution for his injuries, they will get justice for their own. Historian Timothy Snyder has used the phrase “anticipatory obedience” to describe the way populations capitulated to twentieth-century authoritarians without being asked or forced. Melville depicted this phenomenon a decade before the Civil War. Starbuck openly challenges Ahab’s desire for revenge, but with profound dread, he feels himself already succumbing to the captain’s “lurid woe.”

It is hardly surprising that the authoritarian-loving Trump employs the language of vengeance that Moby-Dick so brilliantly explores: “I am your justice,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Trying to explain Trump’s appeal, pundits have identified multiple resentments among the white working class, but they should look deeper into his supporters’ belief that, long before the assassination attempts, he had been flagrantly wronged. Trump is a convicted felon, an accused sexual predator, a billionaire who ignores bills, accountability, and the most basic laws. For decades, he has ruined people’s lives with relish rather than remorse. And yet, from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to the sycophants of Fox News, our politics seems addicted to the idea that Trump has been persecuted, cheated, and dispossessed.

Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Achilles, whose damaged pride leaves him sulking in his tent and refusing to join the Greek siege of Troy. For all his self-pity, though, Achilles does not convince his fellow warriors to withdraw their armies from the fight. His resentments remain his own. Melville recognized that in the turbulent world of American democracy, aggrievement was a powerful political tool. Seconds before he throws his final harpoon, Ahab exclaims what we might regard as a recipe for the “irresistible dictatorship” he exerts over the crew: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” 

Let me be clear: Ahab is too elevated, expressive, and philosophically self-aware to be explained by the MAGA movement. And yet, amid all his heroic complexity, the seeds of American aggrievement appear throughout his quest. When he inspires the harpooners, humiliates Starbuck, or tricks his crew, he revels in his own autocratic powers. Think of Trump nursing his bruises as he denies protection to his critics, threatens journalists with lawsuits, and fires the government workers who once held him to account. And think of all those accomplices lining up behind him, shamelessly claiming that he has been victimized by a deep state hoax. 

The recent bans on DEI remind us that the grievances that count for this administration—and for too many administrations before it—primarily concern Christian nationalists and conservative white men. Moving further into the second Trump presidency, we need to interrogate the power the nation gives to their perceived injuries.

Ahab dies when he is strangled by the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick. The whale sinks his ship, and every crew member dies but one. I trust that Trump will come to a more peaceful, gilded end, but what happens to the rest of us? From Canada and Panama to Gaza, Greenland, and Ukraine (the list grows daily), the world seems stuck on an American ship bent on avenging the president’s wounded psyche. 

A wreck seems inevitable. Surviving that wreck does not.

_{Featured image by Matthew Gonzalez on Unsplash.}

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“My fellow Americans” [timeline]

Every four years, the incoming president of the United States delivers an inaugural address in a tradition that dates back to 1789, with the first inauguration of George Washington. The address reiterates to Americans—and peoples around the world—what the country has been and what it has the potential to become. In a speech freighted with importance, the presidents express their fears, their hopes, and their most personal aspirations for the nation and for democracy.

As we enter a new presidential term, explore the timeline below to revisit some past inaugural addresses that capture snapshots of America at unique points in time:

_{Featured image by acaben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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Beyond the paycheck

In the age of gig economy, remote work, and juggling multiple jobs, unpaid labour is no longer confined only to the domestic sphere or volunteerism. It is now an insidious undercurrent in paid employment, eroding worker rights and deepening inequality. From the creative freelancer logging extra hours to secure their next project, to the care worker stretching beyond paid duties to ensure a client’s wellbeing, unpaid labour permeates contemporary work. But why does it persist, and how can we confront the structural inequities it perpetuates?

This question lies at the heart of today’s most pressing debates on work and labour. The phenomenon of unpaid labour—work performed without direct or low compensation—is not merely a byproduct of precarious work; it can actively sustain and exacerbate it. It is time to unmask the political and structural forces behind this unpaid toil and demand systemic change.

Who benefits from unpaid labour?

Unpaid labour operates as a hidden subsidy to employers. In many industries, workers are compelled to extend their working day without additional pay to meet deadlines, maintain job security, or adhere to “ideal worker” norms. Internships, unpaid overtime, and tight employer control over schedules are just a few examples. This trend is especially pronounced in gig and platform work, where freelancers compete in a global marketplace, often shouldering risks and costs previously borne by employers.

The irony is glaring: while unpaid labour generates profits for employers and value for markets, it disproportionately harms workers. Financial insecurity, job unpredictability, and the erosion of social benefits are direct consequences. The concept of “wage theft” and “income theft” captures this injustice aptly: workers are denied the full value of their effort, trapped in a cycle of intensifying precarity.

Precarity as a process, not just a condition

To understand the entrenchment of unpaid labour, we must shift from viewing precarity as an isolated economic condition to recognizing it as a process shaped by systemic power imbalances. Neoliberal labour policies have deregulated employment, weakened unions, and heightened employer control over workers. These dynamics enable employers to extract unpaid labour under the guise of norms, even underpinning career advancements.

For instance, in care work—an industry already strained by privatization and cost-cutting measures—unpaid labour often takes the form of emotional labour and unpaid overtime to meet ethical or relational commitments to clients. Similarly, in creative sectors like dance or art, unpaid labour masquerades as “investment” in one’s career, pushing workers to accept unpaid gigs for visibility or future opportunities. Platform workers, on the other hand, endure unpredictable schedules and unpaid “waiting time” between tasks. Across these sectors, the pattern is clear: unpaid labour sustains an unequal distribution of risk and reward.

The inequities of unpaid labour

The ability to endure unpaid labour hinges on access to resources—financial, institutional, and social. Workers with familial wealth, spousal support, or robust welfare systems can buffer its impact, creating a divide between those who can afford to subsidize their work and those who cannot. This dynamic perpetuates inequality not only between individuals but also across class and identity lines, such as gender and race, as marginalized groups often lack the resources needed to sustain unpaid labour without severe consequences.

Treating unpaid labour as a personal sacrifice or a stepping stone to success obscures its broader societal harm. Instead, we must recognize it as a structural issue demanding systemic change.

Demanding systemic change: power redistribution

Unpaid labour is not an individual failing or just a symptom of precarity but a result of the ways systemic forces—like policies, cultural norms, or economic structures—create and maintain unequal power relations. This approach highlights the interconnectedness of unpaid labour and structural conditions, moving beyond individual experiences to address the root causes. Within this context, unpaid labour is a symptom of deeper structural inequalities. Tackling it requires us to rethink the politics of work, from labour laws to norms and narratives. By exposing the hidden costs of unpaid labour and advocating for systemic change, we can create a fairer, more equitable world where work is dignified, compensated, and sustainable. It is time to reclaim the ‘value’ of labour and demand justice for all workers. If unpaid labour is a political issue, then addressing it requires political solutions.

Here are four concrete steps to counter its corrosive effects:

1. Make collective bargaining effective by including workers with insecure, irregular, and informal connections to paid work.

An inclusive approach should ensure that collective agreements apply across entire sectors, covering even small or informal businesses. This would prevent companies on the fringes of the formal economy from exploiting gaps in worker protections. It also requires trade unions to mobilize and organize across traditional divides by forging alliances with grassroots organizations that have strong connections to disadvantaged workers. For example, in Germany, migrant care workers fought to have their qualifications recognized, a struggle that could benefit from union support.

2. Reduce working time in paid employment for waged labour to give workers more time to manage personal and family responsibilities, reducing their reliance on unpaid labour to meet these needs.

This approach is particularly impactful for caregivers and those juggling multiple jobs, who often bear the brunt of unpaid work. By redistributing work across more employees, reduced working hours can also create formal employment opportunities for those in precarious or informal arrangements. To ensure this policy is effective, wage adjustments and income protections must accompany shorter hours to prevent workers from losing income or facing increased workloads within reduced timeframes.

3. Introduce government policies which subsidize reduced working hours through tax incentives or direct wage supplements.

For instance, caregivers taking on fewer paid hours could receive compensatory support to ensure financial stability. Employment laws must also prevent employers from imposing unreasonable productivity targets during shorter work periods, protecting workers from intensified labour demands. Additionally, investment in public services like affordable childcare, eldercare, and healthcare can alleviate the unpaid labour burden that disproportionately falls on women and marginalized groups.

4. Promote educational initiatives and public campaigns that challenge the narratives normalizing unpaid labour.

The myth of the “ideal worker”—endlessly available, self-sacrificing, and driven by passion—legitimizes exploitation and reinforces gendered divisions of labour, where unpaid work is disproportionately carried out by women. By questioning these harmful narratives and recognizing the social and economic value of all forms of labour, we can foster a culture that values humanity and sociality over mere productivity.

_{Featured image by Eric Muhr via Unsplash.}

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Theories of Global Politics meet International Relations theories

The study of world politics developed via a series of famous encounters, sometimes called the ‘great debates’. The first major encounter, dating to the early twentieth-century, was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism.

These encounters have always been emphasized among those who teach world politics: they provide a mental map of the way the academic subject has developed over the past century. But they are also substantially important. They have enriched the discipline because they have forced theorists of different stripes to further sharpen their arguments and, occasionally, to try to synthesize insights from other theories and approaches. The most recent encounter is between established International Relations (IR) theories and what we term theories of Global Politics (GP). This is where the action is in the study of world politics today.

The GP challenge

GP theorists raise both methodological and substantial issues in their criticism of established theories and approaches. They argue against positivist methodology with its focus on observable facts and measurable data and its ambition to scientifically explain the world of international relations. GP theorists emphasize that IR theorists (like all other theorists of human affairs) are an integrated part of the world they study. There is no objective truth, no ‘gods-eye view’ standing above all other views.

GP theorists echo the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who famously argued that truth and power cannot be separated; indeed, the main task of these dissident approaches is to unmask that intimate relationship between truth and power. ‘Truth claims’ are always linked to historical context and especially to power. The broader task is to examine the world from a large variety of political, social, cultural, economic, and other perspectives.

The radicalness of this criticism can be illustrated by a brief comparison with one of the established IR approaches, social constructivism. Social constructivists argue that the international system is constituted by ideas, not material power. This focus on ideas and discourse is something constructivists share with post-structuralism, a GP theory. But for post-structuralists, it is ideas and discourse all the way down; there is not a world out there we can study independently of the observer.

When this is the case, general theories are not possible, because concrete, historical context is always decisive. Yet IR theories purport to be general theories about international relations. GP theorists find that a misleading claim; there are competing views about how the world hangs together and what makes it tick. Since there is no objective reality, say post-structuralists, knowledge cannot be neutral. Therefore, language and discourse must be in focus; they are essential for the construction of reality. The dominant theories of IR must be exposed for what they are; stories from a certain point of view that must be confronted with other, alternative stories.  

On this basis, GP theorists have revisited some of the founding moments of the study of world politics, to expose what they see as myths and to show how very different stories can be told. A case in point is early liberalism, part of the first encounter mentioned above. This has traditionally been seen as a progressive approach to world politics, with the noble aim of making ‘a world safe for democracy’, in the words of the US president Woodrow Wilson, a key voice in early liberal thought.

Postcolonial scholars point out how Wilson was a staunch defender of racial hierarchy in the United States and that he did not press for self-determination for non-European peoples. They argue more generally that imperialism and race played a very significant role in the early study of IR. The discipline’s first journal, founded in 1910, is what we know today as Foreign Affairs; but its original name was the Journal of Race Development. The early liberal hopes for peace and democracy, then, were confined to the ‘civilized’ West. From early on, they were combined with considerations of imperial domination and racist supremacy in other parts of the world. This shows how there are always different stories to tell, and how even well-established points of consensus can be challenged by these alternative readings.

In this pursuit, the substantial emphasis of GP-theorists differs: post-structuralists emphasize power and discourse, postcolonial scholars emphasize voices of the Global South, feminist and queer theory emphasize gender and sexuality, and green theory emphasizes the environment.

Making the encounter productive

For more than a century, the study of world politics has benefited from the different encounters between theories and approaches. Students of world politics should thus not lament or grieve over the many different, sometimes puzzling, approaches that have emerged in the discipline. Together, they create a vast and diverse field of opportunities for a better understanding of world politics.

However, to get a productive dialogue between different perspectives, it is important that the participants in the debates keep an open mind. The present intense and sometimes explosive debate between IR and GP theories has frequently not moved in that direction. There has often been a tendency to move towards confrontation in ways that belittle the opponent, creating strawmen which are easy to destroy.

We find the tendency towards confrontation to be unproductive. The major dividing line in the discipline, in our view, is not between IR and GP. It is between, on the one hand, scholars on both sides who seek confrontation, often combined with reductionism and myopia, and, on the other hand, scholars on both sides who want to pursue cooperation which promises to advance our grasp and comprehension of what is going in the world and how we can understand it. Therefore, we should avoid an overemphasis on dividing lines between different approaches. Instead, we should look for possibilities of cooperation that promise to advance our knowledge and understanding of the world.

*Some sections of this blog post are taken from the chapters of Introduction to International Relations and Global Politics.

_{Featured image by Lara Jameson via Pexels.}

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A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

Oxford editors from across our press submit books for catalog consideration; our sales team evaluates forecasts and sales patterns to determine the market for each title; and the trade marketing and publicity teams coordinate, plan, and pitch to get these titles in front of readers. Each year, when December rolls around, we excitedly wait to see which titles will be featured in the year end “Best Books” lists put out by the major media outlets including The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New Yorker, TLS, and more. Inclusion on these lists serves as yet another seal of approval, highlighting the quality of the content, wide appeal, accessibility, and novelty of the books we publish. Being featured in such reputable lists and selected by the top critics and thinkers reinforces the press’s reputation for publishing high-quality, impactful work.

This year’s list includes the first ever history of the transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts by a Professor at the University of Oxford; the final book by the prolific writer John L. Heilbron—the definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate; a collection of nine tales of romance and wonder from early Irish literature; and a deep dive into the mysterious origins of words by arguably the greatest living English word-hunter.

As the world’s oldest and largest university press, OUP holds an important place in the publishing landscape. The press’s mission is an extension of the university’s—we strive for excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our global publishing program. A crucial aspect of the trade team’s role is making sure that the work of Oxford’s academics and scholars isn’t kept solely within the confines of academia, but instead is shared with the wider population. Through the use of accessible and engaging writing, OUP’s trade books share the expertise of highly qualified researchers with the general public, allowing new ideas to spread and reshape our knowledge of the world.

The ‘Best Books’ lists which numerous major media outlets share annually represent the capstone of yearly book coverage. All year, publicists submit books to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and other outlets for review, excerpt, author interviews and news coverage. In the last 12 months, the New York Times (with its 153 million reported unique visitors per month) covered 18 of OUP’s titles—including a review of Making the Presidency which drew comparisons between John Adams and Kamala Harris’s legacy, and an Op-Ed by the authors of Wreckonomicswhich asked when liberals became so comfortable with war.

Beyond the Times, in the last year 11 books were featured or reviewed on the BBC, 19 in the Wall Street Journal, 15 in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 in the Financial Times, 8 in the London Review of Books, another 11 in Time Magazine, and to the delight of the author, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was recommended on Oprah Daily. These reviews are truly just the tip of the iceberg in publicity campaigns that also include hundreds of podcasts, local media coverage, and events that bring authors directly into communities. The additional visibility a book receives when it is reviewed in major outlets often translates to significant boosts in sales and allows authors to extend the size of their audience and the reach of their message. This visibility is also many authors’ first exposure to OUP’s range of publishing and can be instrumental in attracting future authors that help the program grow and diversify.

Each year’s list of best book serves as a distillation of our collective questions and priorities as a society. Trade publishing must be more agile than traditional academic publishing because every title has to tap in to at least a certain portion of the zeitgeist. As a reflection of preoccupying questions, last year’s list was topped by Kirkus’s selection of Trans Children in Today’s Schools, as well as both Defectors and The Ruble from our Russian and Soviet history lists. This year, different trends have clearly risen to the top of readers’ consciousness. The New Statesman (in their seasonal lists released throughout the year) have selected not one but two Oxford books on AI. The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor—a former AI ethicist at Google—offers advice on reclaiming our humanity in the approaching age of machine thinking. AI Morality edited by David Edmonds is a collection of essays from leading philosophers exploring some of the nearly endless questions about our changing relationship with AI.

Similarly, this year’s list includes two titles about China. The former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd’s book On Xi Jinping and Oriana Sklyar Mastro’s Upstart both provide informed perspectives on China’s role in the global world. When asked why she chose to write her second book for a general audience, Dr. Mastro points out that China’s power has impact far outside of academia and she wanted to make sure her work could reach readers in all walks of life.

The support that the trade marketing and publicity teams provides authors is crucial to strengthening their careers. Debut authors utilize our platform to both benefit their scholarly careers through the academic prestige the Oxford brand provides while simultaneously developing their presence as a noted subject matter expert in the media. This recognition grows in tandem with the author’s career, allowing the Oxford trade program to retain successful authors as well as attract well-established authors who haven’t previously published with us.

This year, COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black was selected as one of The New Yorker’s recommended titles and among The Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. Dr. Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves after the Battle of Port Royal and joined the 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman. Only her second book, and her first written for a wide audience, it was essential to Dr. Fields-Black that she had an opportunity to share both her research and also her family’s story.

On the other end of the spectrum, the trade team works with many authors and scholars who are well-established in their careers and come to OUP with ample experience and high expectations of the publishing process. Our team was honored to have the opportunity to work with Noel Malcolm on his 12^th book Forbidden Desire which was named by both The Times Literary Supplement and History Today as one of the best books of 2024. Malcolm has published across academic and trade publishing houses during his long career, and it was important that we be able to provide him with the highest level of marketing and publicity possible.

All of the books published by Oxford are the culmination of years of work on the part of the authors, research assistants, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists. Each one is an accomplishment that has the potential to move knowledge forward. The books in our trade program—with their potential to speak to all readers—represent a unique opportunity to inform, illuminate, and entertain. Join us in celebrating the best books of 2024.

_{Featured image by clu, Getty Images via Canva. Image modified in Canva.}

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What does democracy look like?

“This is what democracy looks like!” is a popular rallying cry of engaged democratic citizens across the globe. It refers to outbreaks of mass political action, episodes where large numbers of citizens gather in a public space to communicate a shared political message.

That we associate democracy with political demonstration is no surprise. After all, democracy is the rule of the people, and collective public action is a central way for citizens to make their voices heard. As it is often said, democracy happens “in the streets.”

Yet there’s more to democracy than meets the eye. Although democracy indeed involves collective action, it is also a matter of what goes on inside of us—the dispositions and values we bring to it.

To see what I mean, conduct an internet search of the phrase “this is what democracy looks like.” Select your favorite of the pictures. Now imagine discovering that the people in the photo are all paid actors who were given political signs, taught chants, and sent into a public space to enact a political demonstration. Suppose further that but for the pay, none of them would have shown up.

Notice how your attitude to the image shifts. The photo depicts citizens gathered in a public space to communicate a political message, yet something’s amiss. Democracy isn’t acting. Citizenship isn’t a paying gig. Astroturfed political engagement isn’t what democracy looks like.

From this, we might say that mass public action depicts democracy only when the participants are sincere about the message their group activity aims to communicate. They must be advocates who are engaged in the demonstration for the purpose of communicating that message.

Now consider another example. Return to the image you selected. But instead of imagining the participants to be actors motivated by a paycheck, suppose that they are fundamentally mistaken about the political message they are conveying. Let’s assume they’re carrying signs supporting a policy that they believe will make certain medications more affordable, but which actually proposes to make them more expensive.

Notice that according to democracy’s historical opponents, this is exactly what democracy looks like: mobilized but ignorant mobs demanding political results they do not comprehend. But one need not embrace this negative assessment of democracy to recognize that certain brazen forms of ignorance sully the democratic character of a demonstration. We might conclude, then, that mass public action manifests democracy only when citizens are informed (or at least not wildly misinformed).

Putting the two examples together, we can say that in order for an instance of mass public political action to depict democracy in any laudable sense, the participants must be both motivated by their message and adequately informed about what their message means. The notable feature of these two requirements is that neither can be captured in a picture. We can’t discern a person’s motives or degree of informedness simply by looking. Democracy can’t be depicted in a photograph. It has largely to do with the attitudes and habits that underlie our political activities.

This thought can be captured by saying that democracy is centrally a civic ethos. This ethos derives its content from the fundamental democratic ideal of self-government among equals. To be clear, this ideal identifies an aspiration. A democratic society is one that strives to become a self-governing society of equals. And that aspiration calls upon us as citizens to cultivate within ourselves the competencies that enable us both to advance justice and duly recognize the equality of our fellow citizens by attempting to understand their political values, priorities, and concerns.

Democracy’s civic ethos, then, invokes the need for citizens to be engaged participants who are also politically reflective. The dual aspect of democracy’s civic ethos gives rise to conflict. Engaged political participation exposes us to group dynamics that artificially escalate partisan animosity, intensify in-group conformity, and tether our political imagination to the categories and rivalries of our current political world. That is, in the ordinary course of meeting our civic duty to be democratic participants, we undermine our reflective capacities.

This conflict within the democratic ethos has become especially difficult to manage because our everyday social environments are saturated with triggers of our political reflexes. To reclaim the democratic aspiration, we need to critically reexamine our own political habits, and this reexamination calls for moments of solitary reflection on political ideas and circumstances that lie beyond the familiar landscape of contemporary democracy. Democracy indeed happens “in the streets” when citizens engage in collective political action. But democracy also happens in public libraries, parks, and museums—in spaces where citizens can be alone to refresh their political imaginations by contemplating unfamiliar and distant democratic possibilities.

_{Featured image by Colin Lloyd via Unsplash.}

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Understanding fossil-fuel propaganda: a Q&A with Genevieve Guenther

2024’s UN climate summit in Azerbaijan is a key moment for world leaders to express their convictions and plans to address the escalating stakes of the climate crisis. This month we sat down with Genevieve Guenther—author of The Language of Climate Politics, and founder of End Climate—to discuss the current state of climate activism and how propaganda from the fossil fuel industry has shaped the discourse.

Sarah Butcher: How did you first get involved in climate change activism?

Genevieve Guenther: I got really concerned about climate change after I had a child and started to worry about what kind of world he would inherit after I died. So I utilized my training as a scholar to master the field of climate communication, while learning about climate science and economics, in the hopes of using my expertise in the political effects of language to help move our climate politics forward. Eventually I began working on The Language of Climate Politics, and while I was writing it I also founded the group End Climate Silence to help push the news media to cover climate change with the urgency it deserves.

SB: How did you come to recognize that the language people–and more importantly the media—use was having an impact on efforts to actually create change?

GG: As recently as 2018, public-opinion surveys showed that even many Democrats felt some doubt that climate change was real. I could see that this doubt tracked very neatly onto the rise of the disinformation that there was a lot of scientific “uncertainty” around the issue. (Scientists were projecting a range of possible outcomes from rising carbon emissions, but they were definitely not saying that climate change was fake.) I realized that voters had heard about this supposed uncertainty because, at the time, news outlets were platforming so-called “climate skeptics” to provide what they called “a balance of opinion” about climate change. Later I discovered that most Americans learn everything they know about climate change from the news media. So it became apparent to me that how journalists talk about climate change had, and still has, a great deal of influence over America’s climate politics!

SB: Do you have any examples of fossil-fuel propaganda that you share with people to illustrate the scope of the problem?

GG: Fossil-fuel propaganda is a huge phenomenon! There are many lies about climate change and clean energy floating around. You may have heard that developing off-shore wind turbines is killing whales (it isn’t), or that fossil fuels are the most reliable form of energy (they aren’t), or that focusing on your personal carbon footprint is the most important thing you can do to fight climate change (it definitely isn’t). But the propaganda I investigate in my book is the complex of lies, myths, and incorrect assumptions that create the false and dangerous belief that we can keep using coal, oil, and gas but still deal with climate change anyway. We cannot! So I expose the scientists, economists, lobbyists, and journalists who propagate this false belief, illuminating the bankruptcy of their ideas and giving readers clear, actionable messages to counter mis- and disinformation in their own conversations about climate change. Focus-group polling shows that these messages increase concerned Democrats’ and Republicans’ support for phasing out fossil fuels by up to ten points.

SB: What are the biggest misconceptions you see around fossil-fuel propaganda?

GG: That it spreads only among the uneducated or the right wing. My book shows how some scientists, economists, journalists, and even climate advocates sometimes inadvertently echo the core fossil-fuel propaganda and thereby normalize it, shaping mainstream views about climate change.

SB: What sets your book on the climate change crisis apart?

GG: I think my book is personal and accessible, but also has a real scope. I try to sort out the whole kaleidoscope of climate disinformation, so we can see and counter it clearly. The book discusses what the science says will happen to the US and the UK if we don’t phase out fossil fuels; how past economic models have low-balled climate damages and what the new economic models project for the future; the promise and challenges of climate technologies; the recent history of US and international climate politics; advice for coping with climate change emotionally and helping to build a more powerful climate movement; and more! The climate journalist Amy Westervelt said in her endorsement that the book “takes the whole overwhelming universe of fossil-fuel propaganda and distills it,” providing “one of the best explanations I’ve read of how the heck the climate crisis has gone unchecked for so long.” And Kieran Setiya, who’s not even a climate person, but a Professor of Philosophy at MIT, said: “if you want to understand the climate crisis and you only have time to read one book, this should be it.” I’m pretty proud of that, honestly.

SB: What was the most surprising thing you discovered working on this book?

GG: That China has enacted a whole-of-government, whole-of-society climate policy, called the “1 + N” policy, to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060. That was a huge surprise! I hadn’t known that China had passed comprehensive climate legislation. I don’t think many people in the West know this either. But I describe the provisions of China’s climate policies in Chapter 4, so hopefully now more people will understand the depth of China’s commitment to decarbonization.

SB: Is there anything in the current debate that gives you hope about our climate future?

GG: I try not to deal in hope. Hope keeps my focus on things I cannot control. Instead, I try to embrace what I think of as intellectual humility—I don’t know what’s going to happen politically, because no one does—and I try to accept what I take to be my duty. That is, I feel like, being alive with relative privilege at this historical moment, I have a responsibility to help resolve the climate crisis, so that at the end of the day I can say I did my best. I mean, that’s all that can be asked of us, right?

SB: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

GG: I hope they feel equipped to resist the dominant forms of climate disinformation in public discourse and feel empowered to talk about the climate crisis in ways that will focus the conversation on phasing out fossil fuels. And I hope they feel fortified and inspired to do that work!

_{Featured image by USGS on Unsplash.}

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Is Boris Johnson like James Bond—or more like Homer Simpson? [long read]

The question may seem like an odd one, so let me approach it by sketching some context. 2024 has been a year of elections worldwide, with voters around the globe hitting the ballot boxes, from India (the most populous country in the world, with the largest electorate) to Venezuela to the UK. And needless to say, one of the most consequential of the 2024 elections looms on the horizon­—indeed, advance balloting via postal vote began as far back as September—with so much at stake in the US Presidential election, now just days away on November 5th.

At this point the political tactics and rhetorical strategies of the major candidates and parties are more than familiar to us: Kamala is a commie, Donald is weird; Harris can’t be trusted with the border or the budget, Trump will be a disaster for abortion rights, the environment, and democracy itself. And so on.

One particular rhetorical weapon available to political actors, to diminish their opponents or to aggrandize themselves or their allies, is to liken them to other agents—even, or perhaps especially, those fictional agents known as characters. The commentariat likes to play this game too. This takes us back to Boris Johnson. In the 2019 election campaign—which Johnson and the Tory party won with a landslide victory—Johnson was likened by one group of polled voters to James Bond, the suave Secret Service/MI6 agent born in the fictions of Ian Fleming and developed through the movie franchise beginning with the adaptation of Dr No (1962).

Embraced in some quarters, this rather unlikely analogy was met with derision and push-back in others, in particular via a counter-comparison made by another group of voters in the same poll. Johnson isn’t much like James Bond, so this response went; he’s rather more like Homer Simpson. Strip away the trappings of his upper-class background, and what you’re left with is a bumbling, unkempt, uncouth oaf, prone to gaffes, a ‘bit like a buffoon…in the power plant, thinking what do I press here? What do I do?’

History weighs rather heavily in favour of the Homer Simpson comparison. What, I shouldn’t have broken my own social distancing laws during covid? I’m not allowed to mislead parliament? I can’t manipulate parliamentary procedure to suit the interests of my party? D’oh! But all such analogies will be partial, highlighting some attributes of the object, downplaying others, and suggesting a kind of ‘gestalt’—an overall shape—to the character of the figure under scrutiny.

The Johnson episode is not an isolated one. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—mocked by Johnson himself with a lewd limerick—also became the target of a satirical comparison with a fictional character. Erdoğan has been likened to Gollum, the stunted, grasping, unreliable Hobbit from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Erdoğan didn’t take kindly to the unflattering analogy; at least three individuals were pursued in the courts for making the comparison (with varied outcomes). Erdoğan’s fellow autocrats, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are similarly reported to be unamused at comparisons made between them and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dobby the House Elf (from Harry Potter), respectively. In all three cases, the comparisons have a serendipitous, physical basis—all three political figures look sufficiently like the fictional characters to whom they are likened for the comparison to stick; the popular ‘separated at birth’ trope trades on the same phenomenon of physical resemblance between figures who in other respects contrast strongly with one another.

Note, however, that there is variation here in the way the negative comparisons work. Winnie and Dobby are benign, child-like figures, pointedly contrasting with and ironically undercutting the authoritarian, strong-man demeanours Xi and Putin seek to project. By contrast, Gollum is menacing, pointing directly to a negative trait in Erdoğan (though in an interesting twist, in one of the Erdoğan cases, the defence successfully maintained—with support from the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson—that the specific images from the film depicted the naïve but good-natured Sméagol rather than his demonic alter-ego Gollum, and so the comparison could not be held to be insulting). But in all three cases, the strategy is to drain the target figures of their symbolic standing by likening them to fictional characters—usually absurd, pathetic, or comic—drawn from children’s fictions (Gollum first appeared in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, written for children). And in all three cases, the fictions from which the characters hail are in wide international circulation, making the satirical force of the comparisons readily understood across communities, cultures, and nations.

We think of characters as creatures of the imagination, but as these examples show, they enter our actual lives in a multitude of ways. Satirical character comparisons in the political domain are but the tip of the iceberg; we routinely consort with fictional characters first by imagining them, and then by comparing them with those in our individual social worlds—not just public figures, but friends, family members, colleagues, and not least, ourselves. Characters arise from our fascination with the varieties of human personality and agency, and they act as vehicles for contemplating and comparing our own agency with that of other agents, possible and actual.

Possible and actual? Aren’t characters, in the sense discussed here, by definition fictional? They are indeed. But even non-fictional representations which purport to represent the actual world rather than project an imagined world—documentaries, news reports, political campaign materials—offer characterizations of the agents that they represent. Joe Biden really exists, but when Trump dubs him ‘Crooked Joe’, he reduces the multifaceted real agent into what the novelist E. M. Forster described as a ‘flat’ (one-dimensional) character, casting him as the villain in a political melodrama. The ‘baby Trump’ blimp seen floating above London on the occasion of his visit in 2019 did the same for the former president, characterizing him as a bloated infant. The latter trope is restaged, alongside Trump’s more recent ‘Sleepy Joe’ characterization of Biden, playing on Biden’s perceived infirmity, in a political cartoon by Steve Breen. Johnson’s limerick characterizes Erdoğan as a voracious zoophile (and is rather mild compared with the poem by German comedian Jan Böhmermann that preceded it).

Cartoons have long been a vehicle for such polemical characterizations. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Nast’s political cartoons established the iconography of Republicans as Elephants and Democrats as Donkeys; in our own era, Spitting Image carried the tradition of the political cartoon caricature into the world of television. Through these examples we see that the characterizations can be spare and abstract, drawing on types rather than individuals: Democrats are likened with the donkey as an animal type, not with any specific donkey (say, Winnie’s gloomy friend Eeyore); Republicans with the elephant as a type, not any specific elephant (say, Dumbo or Nellie).

All of this points to some important metaphysical features of characters. The first is that characters are real. That might seem like an oxymoron, if we hold that characters are imaginary, and imagined objects are just those things that aren’t real. But we need to recognise a more expansive conception of reality. Characters are real in the same way that novels, or scientific theories, are real; that is why we can refer to and make use of them in the workaday world, including the sphere of politics. As abstract artifacts—recipes for possible persons—the reality of characters is distinct from the reality of flesh-and-blood individuals, but they have a reality and a utility as palpable as physical artifacts, from hammers to Humvees. Characters are part of the furniture of the world.

So characters are imaginary but real entities. And in the cases at hand, we see how they can function as a vehicle of imaginative cognition: the forging of metaphors and analogies, in which one entity is thought of in terms of some other entity. Consider the classic case of Charles Philipon’s satirical depiction of Louis-Philippe, which allows us not only to see the King in the drawing, but to see him as a pear, and thus by inference as a fool (‘poire’ meaning ‘dupe’ or ‘fathead’ in the Parisian vernacular of the period). And once again, we see that the idea of a ‘poire’ as a type is all that is necessary: no specific pear, or fool, need be invoked for the charged characterization to pack its punch.

Our examples also point to the portability of characters. A character will be invented in a given fiction, but they can take on an existence beyond that literal ‘origin story’, reappearing in subsequent fictions created not only by the original author, but others too. The case of James Bond is a rich and instructive example, appearing first in Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953). By now Bond has featured in dozens of later films and novels authorized by Fleming’s estate, not to mention his countless appearances in fanfics. There is a sense in which each one of these versions of Bond is different—as different as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig, and all the other actors who’ve incarnated Bond in the films, are from one another. But a thread of continuity runs through these different renderings of the character; and it is this continuity which allows us to refer coherently to ‘James Bond’, and to transport that character from one fictional world to another, and, as we have seen, from the zone of fiction to the real world.

So the traffic between the real world and the worlds of fiction runs in both directions. Moving in one direction, the very concept of character designates the fictional analogue of an actual human agent, and many specific characters are modelled on and inspired by actual persons. Moving in the other direction, fictional characters are a tool for thinking about real people and the world itself. A web search reveals the strategy in full swing, as one might expect with the Presidential election just around the corner. Chris Wallace likens Nixon and Trump to the Joker; Trump’s critical remarks about wind power earn him comparisons with Don Quixote, swinging at the enemies populating his political fantasy, as illusory as the windmills Quixote mistakes for giants. George R. R. Martin compares Trump with Joffrey Baratheon, while Stephen King points to two of his characters as Trump-types, and dozens of other commentators play the comparison game. And Trump himself can’t stop referring to Hannibal Lecter—a fictional serial killer modelled on a real one—though it isn’t always clear what the former President wants to say through these allusions, or even whether he thinks Lecter is a figure to love or to loathe. None of this means that the distinction between the actual world and the worlds of fiction has been swallowed by a post-truth vortex; indeed the force of these comparisons depends on our ability to keep the different status of the fictional figures and their real targets of comparison straight—a task that most of us manage effortlessly, all the time.

_{Featured image by Matt Davis via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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Why Migrants Matter

“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live here,” said Donald Trump during ABC’s presidential debate on September 10, 2024. His comments amplified false rumors spread by J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential nominee, who claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating the pets of longtime residents. Dehumanizing and vilifying immigrants has been a mainstay in xenophobic rhetoric mobilized during elections in the US and Europe by mainstream and alt-right-wing parties alike.

Fabricated and baseless rumors about immigrants is nothing new. Like the Haitians of Springfield, the ancient Phoenicians—a Semitic population that had an extensive trade network that spanned from Assyria to Iberia—often faced negative stereotyping and prejudice. Ancient Greek sources describe the Phoenicians as wily traders and deceitful moneylenders. Even famous Phoenician immigrants suffered from such prejudice. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, one of antiquity’s most influential philosophical schools, was a Phoenician immigrant in fourth-century BCE Athens, originally from Kition on Cyprus. Although Zeno was a preeminent thinker in Athens, he was subjected to disparaging comments because of his migrant status and his Phoenician ethnicity. His teacher called him “little Phoenician,” a demeaning term. One of his biographers described him as stingy because he was a foreigner. A rival philosopher accused him of plagiarism, saying that Zeno would sneak in to listen to his lectures, steal his ideas, dress them in Phoenician style, and pass them as his own. Even after his death, one of his students wrote a funerary epigram trying to downplay Zeno’s Phoenician origin, writing: “What reproach is there if your fatherland is Phoenicia?”

If a prominent figure like Zeno experienced such discrimination, what indignities did most immigrants, who belonged to the lower classes, suffer? One political treatise from fifth-century BCE Athens complains that the notion of citizenship was eroding because immigrants and enslaved persons were indistinguishable from citizens in their looks, dress, and rights, when in fact enslaved persons had no rights and immigrants faced many legal constraints. A few decades later, several court cases dealt with similar issues. With flimsy evidence they accused the freedwoman Neaira of illegitimately claiming the rights of Athenian citizenship and alleged that Euboulides had unlawfully removed the plaintiff, a certain Euxitheus, from the citizen register. These and other texts discuss the supposed dangers posed by immigrants revealing the vulnerability of immigrant populations, even in a multiethnic city like Athens.

Such fears expressed by the more conservative parts of the Athenian population were reactions to Athens’ policies of rewarding immigrants with some or all citizen rights. Phoenician immigrants were among the non-Greek foreigners most frequently awarded with monetized gifts of gold wreaths, honorific positions, and a wide assortment of legal awards, such as the right to own property, tax exemptions, the privilege of better seats at the theater at state expense, the right to attend state-sponsored dinners alongside prominent citizens, the right to serve in the military, and even the rare grant of citizenship. Among the Phoenician immigrants who received some or all these awards was a certain Herakleides, who in 330/329 BCE had offered large quantities of wheat to Athens at a lower price and two years later donated money to Athens to help the state purchase grain, during a period of grain shortage. The Athenians eventually honored him with a gold wreath, honorific titles, the right to own property, and the privileges of participating in military service and paying capital taxes, as is recorded on a stele that survives today.

This system of award-giving was employed to attract immigrants, especially wealthy ones, like Herakleides, who could serve the state by carrying out various benefactions. Indeed, in a fourth-century BCE treatise on Athens’ revenue sources, the historian and philosopher Xenophon proposed that more social and legal privileges be given to immigrants because they would inject funds into the Athenian economy and would make Athens great again. All the legal rights Xenophon wanted to give to immigrants would allow “better” men to desire to live in Athens, where “better” stood for more useful to the state or wealthy.

This rhetoric of the good immigrants, immigrants who work hard and benefit the society in which they live, is a familiar trope today, too. Mike DeWine, the Springfield-born governor of Ohio, tried to put an end to the rumors regarding Haitian immigrants and ensuing bomb threats in schools, and hospitals. In an op-ed he wrote: “Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation … [in part] thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants … They are there legally. They are there to work.”

But migrants, documented or undocumented, are not just workers; they are also human beings. They mattered in antiquity, and they matter today, not because they revitalize the economy but because together with citizens they co-create and maintain the diverse societies in which they live. The Phoenician immigrants of the ancient Mediterranean introduced new ideas, such as Zeno’s Stoicism; they benefited Athens in times of need; they broadened what it meant to be a resident of a state; and they helped form multiethnic and diverse communities that thrived. While ancient Greek thought, politics, and society have been idealized, it is unlikely that they would have taken the form they did without the contributions of migrants in general and of Phoenician immigrants in particular.

_{Featured image by Henryy st via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.}

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The father of the party system

Martin Van Buren became president on March 4, 1837, at a time of great optimism. After an acrimonious eight years in the White House, Andrew Jackson was leaving office on a high note. The economy was strong and vibrant. The nation had avoided a civil war. Washington politicians were confident that “the abolitionist scourge” was in retreat. When Van Buren delivered his inaugural address before 20,000 people—nearly all of them there to pay tribute to Jackson, not to welcome Van Buren—he pledged to rule with a light touch. The nation, Van Buren said, had reached a stage where its citizens could govern themselves. They did not need Washington. He called upon the American people “to make our beloved land for a thousand generations that chosen spot where happiness springs from a perfect equality of political rights.” He used the words “happy” or “happiness” seven times in his speech.

He went on to serve for four unhappy years as president.

Weeks into his administration, the economy collapsed. Banks had run out of specie and could not redeem paper money, leaving many Americans broke. The Army brutally carried out the expulsion of the Cherokees and Seminoles from their homelands. Indian removal was not only a humanitarian disaster but a political debacle for Van Buren, whose support among northerners suffered as a result. Further weakening northern support were his frequent capitulations to the slave power. He sided with Spanish kidnappers in the Amistad case and backed efforts to suppress abolitionist literature in the mails and in Congress.

Van Buren had some successes as president. He showed courage and foresight in subduing skirmishes along the northern border that could have led to war with Great Britain. He wisely resisted those within his party calling to annex Texas. And he passed a treasury plan that moved the government away from using unstable state banks to manage the nation’s resources. Yet these victories were not enough to keep him in the White House. In 1840, Americans, for the first time, voted with their pocketbooks. He lost in a landslide to William Henry Harrison, a veteran from the War of 1812 nearing seventy years of age, in one of the most frenzied elections in US history (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”). Eighty percent of those eligible voted, still the highest percentage of voter turnout in the nation’s history.

Van Buren was the first of several undistinguished one-term presidents who failed to halt America’s descent into civil war. Pierce, Buchanan, Tyler, Fillmore—their names usually land at the bottom of presidential rankings. Among the antebellum chief executives, only Polk, who led the nation during the Mexican War, has won praise from some historians, although that is changing too. Few today see the Mexican War as an honorable affair.

Ranking presidents, it must be said, is a mug’s game. The practice reduces the presidency to simplistic and outdated notions of “leadership” and “character.” As a result, key moments in history are downplayed, if not ignored altogether. Van Buren served during a transitional period in US politics, when a more militant and defensive South emerged to dominate politics for a quarter century. Devoid of Jackson’s charisma and popularity, Van Buren was flummoxed by this turn of events, and his bumbling balancing act satisfied few. His presidency, therefore, reminds us of the perils of surrendering principles to a party’s worst elements.

Because Van Buren was an unsuccessful president, his more significant contributions to the nation’s political life have also been obscured. His greatest legacy remains his role in building the nation’s party system (however destructive and dubious partisanship may seem today). Rejecting the Founders’ call for public officials to be “disinterested” (a favorite word of theirs), Van Buren saw parties as a positive good, a mechanism for resolving sectional disputes, keeping citizens engaged, and holding politicians accountable. Most important, a vibrant party system checked the forces of wealth and privilege seeking to manipulate government for private gain. In his unshakable view, strong parties led to sound government—and upheld the all-important principle of majority rule. His advocacy of a permanent party system led to the founding of the Democratic Party, the one still in existence today, albeit in a dramatically different form.

As Van Buren learned during his presidency and its aftermath, however, parties can serve sinister forces as well. In his time the Democratic Party became a vehicle for the expansion of slavery, the deracination of Native peoples, and imperial conquest of the West, better known as Manifest Destiny. Van Buren did not have the mettle to stand up to these forces when he was president. He found his voice in 1848, when he ran for president with the antislavery Free Soil Party, but the slaveocracy could not be stopped. Bitter and unhappy, he died in 1862, with the future of his nation very much in doubt.

The US has endured, though, and so has his party. Meanwhile, Americans are still quarreling over executive power, states’ rights, immigration, war, and economic inequality—issues dominating Van Buren’s time in politics as well. The history of our current discord is long and deep.

_{Featured image: Colorized portrait of Martin Van Buren from a Matthew Brady photograph. Daniel Hass, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0}

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Global mobility, bordered realities, and ethnocultural contact zones

Over the course of the last few weeks, public opinion in the U.S. and the U.K. has ignited in relation to issues of gender, race, religion, and place of origin. However, a closer look at this recent turmoil suggests that there is a clear concern regarding global migrations, inter-genetic contact zones, and the presence of Muslim communities across Western nations. During the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, I felt the academic urgency to focus on global migrations as places of conflict and political contact, and today in 2024 this urgency has acquired a more defined intellectual and cognitive pervasion than back then.

On the surface, anti-immigration in the U.K. and the presidential candidacy in the U.S. of a woman with multiple cultural heritages that self-identifies as an African-American are unrelated and respond to different cultural anxieties. Nevertheless, global social reality provides quite a different perspective, particularly because migrations across the globe are triggering mainstream rhetorical responses that appeal to both nativism and genomic anxieties. Furthermore, the recent social media attacks focused on athletes from Algeria and China competing at the Olympics have put into question the western cultural protocols of trans-inclusion at such a competitive and global level as it is the case of the Olympic Games.

While these sociocultural phenomena seem to underscore different biopolitical trajectories (cultural difference, intersectional power dynamics, and postmodern gender re-configurations), they share a common rhetorical point of encounter. The proliferation of global bordering processes at all biopolitical levels emphasizes that our realities of interaction impose more borders than ever upon human experience. Borders no longer are mere fixed invisible divisions set under geopolitical rationales whose main objective is defining national territorialities. Moreover, the circulation of global migrants across national borders and global urban spaces has shifted the interplay between humans and borders internally. Thus, borders are not only serving as external points of biopolitical entry, particularly as cities in Europe and North America (thinking solely about the Western hemisphere) are experiencing an administrative reconfiguration of public spaces, as street policing has incorporated violent exclusionary practices to further distinguish between those who seem to belong from those who fall under the migrant/other category. In addition, public services targeting migrants are strengthening the protocols of national belonging while also defining the routes that migrants endeavor with administrative purposes, such as obtaining transit, residency, and employment permits.

Back in 2016, while teaching at a very conservative liberal arts institution in the southern United States, I made the risky decision to bring into the classroom The Origins of Nazi Violence by Enzo Traverso. Traverso’s monograph rightfully maps the conflicting genealogy of the Nazi regime, framing the extermination camps as an early epitome of European modernity’s industrialization of dehumanization and killing. The reading provoked a blitzkrieg of disapproval among my students. Despite my efforts to situate the reading within contemporary ethical debates, most of them argued that Traverso’s book was dated because Nazis had been already defeated and therefore that kind of “evil” had been successfully eradicated. I clearly remember my anxiety when one of my students angrily expressed that if Traverso’s book was at all useful it was only to place the role of Barack Obama as the main culprit for constantly fueling waves of anti-white racism across the United States. From this particular vantage point, the current attacks of Donald Trump on Kamala Harris’ heritage and racial origins are not at all unfamiliar among the American electorate. These attacks have a precise epistemological origin and are also sanctioned by entire communities. Moreover, these attacks aim at very specific social and cultural places of exclusion, similarly to what Traverso exposes in relation to the Nazi regime.

Nevertheless, while there is undoubtedly an epistemic entanglement between the emergence of anti-immigration and the rejection to acknowledge the biopolitical rights of migrants, the future keeps promising more global migrations and acute social mobility. In this specific sense, a paradigmatic example of this global phenomenon is the Central America-Mexico-U.S. human migration corridor. Over the course of this new century, a shift has occurred in relation to what at some point was identified as the ground-zero level of undocumented migrations to the United States. The once regarded as dangerous Arizona desert and Río Bravo/Colorado River irregular crossing points have been replaced by the treacherous Darién jungle, which stretches across southern Panama and northern Colombia. One of the consequences of this rebordering process is the sudden amplification of global migrations to North America—as borders play a crucial role in the allocation of human rights and the redistribution of cosmopolitan ethical concerns. While people from all over the world are crossing the Darién jungle on their way to Mexico and the United States, this sudden relocation of the entry point to North America has transformed Central America into a human corridor where entire families invest their futures. In consequence, this phenomenon has transformed in a short period of time the paradigm that once characterized migrants going to the U.S. as lonely men that were often considered outliers in their home countries.

This recent “expansion” of the U.S. national border across Mexico and Central America not only fulfills the American neocolonialist agenda but also demands an ongoing administration aimed at establishing protocols for the control of human mobility. In this specific sense, although departing from a philosophical standpoint, Thomas Nail suggests the term kinopolitics as an approach to understand global mobility. In The Figure of the Migrant, Nail advances the idea that the conceptual understanding of the kinopolitical figure of the migrant underscores the multiplicity and multidirectionality of a global character, “the migrant,” that has become central in the reconfiguration of geopolitical and biopolitical borders. Moreover, Nail’s Theory of the Border proposes that everyday life is bordered in every single direction, including the human body, our mindsets, and material life itself.

Nail’s theoretical approach to both the figure of the migrant and global borders has encouraged me to wonder about the incipient emergence of global identities that in the coming years will challenge the nation-based experiences of belonging. Not only transnational experiences will become more prevalent across global spaces but also the conservative approaches to racial nationhood will be challenged by new genomic configurations inherent to global mobility. The recent Venezuelan and Haitian diasporas are already transforming the urban landscapes of global spaces like Mexico City, which is regarded as the most populous city in North America. Similarly to the ongoing disinformation campaign on social media regarding non-U.S. citizens registered to vote in the upcoming November election, during the recent presidential election celebrated in Mexico on June 2 there were also public opinion concerns regarding the false claim that South American and Haitian immigrants had been given voting cards by the ruling party MORENA, which consequently won the presidential election.

Even though anti-immigration seems to be on the rise across deeply polarized nation-states, the furthering of neoliberal postmodernity across the Global South is paving manifold routes to endeavor global migration with the clear intention to relocate as close as possible to the Global North. After all, the invisible guiding force of neoliberal postmodernity is transforming subjective, objective, and symbolic space into a spatial puzzle that could be understood as a global borderspace. And this process of spatial configuration within the global realm has positioned mobility across borders as a fundamental starting point to both access and understand the future of (inter)national borders.

_{Featured image by NASA via Unsplash}

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