Bude Sea Pool, created 1930. While the surfers ride the Atlantic waves, swimmers enjoy calm waters. Still cold though 🥶

Peter Magyar has offered a template which can be used, without too much alteration, in defeating populists worldwide

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

Leaving beautiful Innsbruck after an intense and exhilarating week at the #ecprjs26, critically discussing the concept of “regime” and how best to study it, with an incredible group of scholars. So many new ideas, collaborations and friendships to take forward! Unforgettable.

Absolutely thrilled to learn that my article with Licia Cianetti and Giannia Del Panta, "What is a Regime", has been awarded the Frank Cass Prize for the best article in @democratization.bsky.social in 2025! Thank you so much to the editors for this recognition of our work - we're all over the moon!

Shortlist: 2025 Nonfiction Award | China Books Review Announcing the jury’s shortlist of five books for the Baifang Schell Book Prize: Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China or the Sinophone World.

China Book Review's shortlist for the 2025 Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China.
chinabooksreview.com/2026/04/02/s...

♨️New #OpenAccess Brief report!
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Ibrahim Bornoma, Nick Kirsop-Taylor & David Benson argue that administrative traditions in the majority world must be understood through both colonial and pre-colonial institutional legacies.

🔗 doi.org/10.1002/pad....

My view: the term is analytically & comparatively useful only when detached from its negative connotations & used descriptively to capture the structure of political power in a given polity. "The Trump regime" would refer to a specific constellation of electoral democracy, oligarchy & backsliding.

Critics Have a New Way to Describe the Trump Administration Calling his presidency a “regime” has some benefits, but it underestimates the resilience of the 250-year-old republic.

Happy to see my awesome co-author, Licia Cianetti, quoted in this Atlantic blog on whether to refer to "the Trump regime" and linking to our review article "What is a Regime?"
www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Whenever I have any kind of professional interview, I’m always reminded of the 90s sitcom Spaced, when Daisy is imagining her upcoming interview with a women’s magazine:
“What do you think about current affairs, Daisy?”
“What do I think about current affairs? Well I like them, I think they’re good…”

Sheila Fitzpatrick · Apocalypse Forgotten: Late Soviet Spiritualism The Soviet Union had brought up its citizens as believers in scientific atheism, scornful of the tradition-based ‘...

‘By 1990 surveys showed that a majority of Russians gave some credence to astrology, telepathy, “supernatural forces” and faith healing via the TV screen.’

Sheila Fitzpatrick on spiritualism during the collapse of the USSR.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Just received the most amazing present from my sister: a bootleg copy of Fantasy Top Trumps!🤩 Oh the hours we spent playing this game when we were small, with these haunting images etched on my brain forever!

happy to update that I managed to find funding to make the book open access. it's too late in the production now to covert to OA right away, but the publisher can do delayed OA after one year. still good!

The Regime Question Ongoing struggles over core principles of democratic governance

Reading "The Regime Question" by Amel Ahmed. She shows how the timing of the introduction of parliaments and mass suffrage shaped regime stability in early European democracies. Facinating stuff, with ramification for regime studies today. Recommend💯 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Attacks leave dead vs killed

US House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We're not at war right now.

“We're four days in to a very specific, clear mission, an operation, Operation Epic Fury.”

A Special Military Operation, say, just like your pals in the Kremlin.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi | The dry and the wet burn together The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even...

US leadership of "th ‘international rules-based order’[is] deformed beyond recognition by th Gaza genocide but no alternative architecture has cohered in [its]place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent" www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

It’s insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.

Today's the last day of our @komex.bsky.social course, "Doing Fieldwork in Challenging Contexts" with @xiananj.bsky.social and @surajtelange.bsky.social. What a week of thoughtful and emotional discussions we've had! Our participants are doing inspirational work - its been a privilege to teach them!

The Cornish coast path just west of Portreath. What a way to reset the brain after a week staring at a computer screen! Awesome.

A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.

Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I'm not surprised | George Monbiot It took an FOI request to bring this national security assessment to light. For ‘doomsayers’ like us, it is the ultimate vindication, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem.
Thank you.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“We conclude that a major legacy of pandemic governance in China is a more powerful system of grassroots bureaucracy capable of the microgovernance of citizens’ private lives.”

@cais-exeter.bsky.social @hass-cornwall.bsky.social
#China #polsci

My latest article with Xuan Qin at Fudan Uni is online at The China Journal! Our research evidences the lasting transformations in China's grassroots bureaucracy wrought by 3 years of zero-COVID, in which biosecurity enhanced & deepened political security.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Listen to my awesome colleague @xiananj.bsky.social talk about our up-coming @komex.bsky.social methods course - one week left to register for the early bird fee!!!

We will either end fossil fuel dependency and the predatory extractivist basis of global production, or they will end us through wars and ecological collapse - all at the same time.

Relatable. And increasingly difficult to avoid with the proliferation of photogaphers at conferences and requests from journals to make short videos of one’s recently published articles. No thanks!

Pre-Christian pagan traditions in West Cornwall, UK. Penzance celebrates “Montol”, the shortest day of the year. From tomorrow, the light starts creeping back in! The future is bright, at least in some respects..

The great rebalancing of area studies Western cuts and China’s expansion are shifting area studies eastward, reshaping global knowledge production.

Important article by Gerhard Hoffstaedter that resonates with my own experience:
eastasiaforum.org/2025/10/11/t...
"As Western area studies decline, policy risks being driven more by domestic perceptions than regional expertise. We risk losing soft power, cultural diplomacy and mutual understanding"

Very happy to have a chapter with @beverleyloke.bsky.social in this meticulously curated volume, "Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics: A Handbook" - just out! global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Our piece provides a contextually sensitive account of IR knowledge production hierarchies.