Trump is dismantling the US Park Service. www.hatchmag.com/articles/tru.... h/t Brian Tyler Cohen on x. This follows up on the Feb 2025 establishment of a US Sovereign Wealth Fund to be capitalized with US Public Lands and Parks. Here we go. www.americanprogress.org/article/trum...
My thanks as well to @kwissoker.bsky.social and @DukePress for all of their work on and with the book. dukeupress.edu/on-the-semic...
My huge thanks to Anoush Suni, Fahad Bishara, Nora Elizabeth Barakat, Mustafa Tuna, @LeylaAmzi, and @ottomanchoon, and especially the editors of CSSH, for their engagement
As CSSH writes in the intro, seeing the "semicivilized as a problem space might help us pry open ideological loops in which so much of contemporary political theory is stuck, and then to find “submerged potentialities and pathways” that “escape territorialization and totalizing control.”
My reply to the forum about "On the Semicivilized" @dukepress.bsky.social has dropped in @CSSHJournal. What, I ask, are the grounds for collective life with int'l order buried under the rubble in Gaza, Beirut, and Tehran? What are the horizons of political life and sovereignty today?
@UPennMEC @PrincetonAnthro @UPennAnth @PrincetonPIIRS @dukepress.bsky.social
Really look forward to being in conversation with Prof. Deborah Thomas about On the Semicivilized, at the Middle East Center of U Penn on Tuesday March 31. If you are in Philly, please come by!
mec.sas.upenn.edu/events/2026/...
"This article outlines the multiple and uneven ways in which delivery riders are “put to work” in the platform economy... conclude that bicycle couriers are the twenty-first century’s sandwichmen in both senses: delivering sandwiches to the wealthy and human billboards traversing urban space."
You absolutely don't ever have to hand it to Tucker Carlson.
Really useful.
Thank you for letting me know! Can't wait to read this.
Julia, many thanks for the kind words.
I would just add that Aimee Genell’s much-anticipated monograph, Empire by Law, is coming out in July!
cup.columbia.edu/book/empire-...
I'll add a few to this list, works of fiction. First one is by Emil Habibi, a relative of mine: www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Se...
In Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower,' set in a dystopian Los Angeles after there is no fuel left for cars or a functioning electricity grid, people are faced with a choice: live in homemade fortified gated communities, or sell themselves to corporate agro-farms.
⬇️ 🔻⬇️
More to come - still formulating my response to these incredible pieces. @csshjournal.bsky.social @dukepress.bsky.social
Read @leylaamzi.bsky.social to see how all of this applies to the remaking of political order in Bosnia at the interface of empire, with fascinating insights (for me as an anthropologist of debt) into the role of fiscality in the remaking of identity, and how these pasts still shape our presents.
times in which unspeakable violence is unleashed without regard for the international law reshaped after Versailles, times when peoples dubbed barbarian in lands of the "semicivilized" are deemed undeserving of their past, their present, or viable futures for those who survive.
The question is, instead, is why archaic concepts that fell from view in 20th century formulations of social and political theory and anthropology are now asserting themselves as "problem spaces" in David Scott's sense, as crucial issues of our times--
--just think of scholars such as @lalehjoon.bsky.social, @mchrislow.bsky.social, Umut Özsu, Aimee Genell, and others, not to speak of multiple bizarre texts of late 18th and 19th century identifying types of semicivilized beings in China, Ottoman Empire, Japan, and the Philippines
As always the brilliant @leylaamzi.bsky.social, is too generous. Neither the concept of semicivilized nor illumination of how this archaic term is intertwined with dilemmas of attenuated sovereignty, structural indebtedness, and the making of international law is mine-
This must read book by the amazing @leylaamzi.bsky.social is now available in paperback. Can't wait to teach it
no matter what your priors are, Please shift them after Day19
For "Iran is winning" camp, US & Israel now waging war against energy infra & economic life, immiseration leads to regime change
For "US & Israel are winning" camp,IR retaliations->more expensive & more bodybags bsky.app/profile/70sb...
"Establishing a public bank that regularly purchases municipal debt ... would not only significantly expand a city’s fiscal capacity to support its communities and environs, but also reclaim regional public finance from a parasitical and punishing bond market."
I am not saying there should be a better, more competent unprovoked aggression against Iran. The war is unjustifiable, even were it winnable, which it does not look to be. I am saying that the Trump people were unwilling to do the basic work of preparing for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, work typically performed by belligerents who know how to, like, win. I am saying that not only is their agenda loathsome, they do not know ball.
Just have to figure out how to respond to the beauty and rigor of this gift....@dukepress.bsky.social @kwissoker.bsky.social
What a gorgeous set of essays responding to a prompt by Andrew Shryock about concept work from On the Semicivilized. dukeupress.edu/on-the-semic.... I learned so much and am so inspired by these scholars and the worlds they shared in the worst of times. Beyond honored.
"Compared to the last maximum disruption during the 1956 Suez Crisis (as a percentage of total liquids demand), this represents the largest oil supply loss in history, by a factor of TWO"
Suez then. Hormuz now.
The End of European Empire then
The End of What now?
www.prnewswire.com/news-release...
Beneath all the reporting so far on the run-up to war is a simple truth:
The President of the United States, a man who holds more power than any human being in history, is a complete rube, easier to manipulate than your average seven year old.
US and Netanyahu's calculation that killing Iran's leadership and crippling aerial bombardment would bring Iran to its knees are a profound misreading.
India's former ambassador to Iran has much clearer assessment