Great cover!

So

Maybe something like this? www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Being a freelancer means this would be all his own gear and he’s now going to have to cover the costs of repair/replacing anything damaged himself. Insecure work costs workers in so many different ways.

The world is so much poorer for not having Jon Kudelka in it

Will not be mourned or missed. But he will be remembered as a mass murderer.

How Doubt Became a Weapon in Iran AI manipulation, and the very suspicion of it, serves those who have the most to hide.

I always learn so much from reading @mahsaalimardani.bsky.social 's work - and you should too. Here she writes about AI and disinformation surrounding the protests and atrocities in Iran: www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

Just gonna draw everyone's attention to these three:

A real throwback with Marc in FP writing about the MB and designation. As a frequent critic of the Brothers, I would just add that words should have meaning, particularly when they are tied to legal consequence. Holding noxious political/religious views is quite obviously not tantamount to terrorism

What Syria Achieved One Year Ago I still remember the euphoria I felt the morning Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime was toppled, writes Hassan Hassan.

“Like millions of Syrians in the diaspora, I had resigned myself to the idea that I may never see my birth country without Assad in charge. But an 11-day rebel offensive led by Ahmed al-Sharaa changed all of that” — powerful, personal essay by @hhassan.bsky.social on anniversary of Assad's fall

👇

Congratulations on your new book! 🎉🎉

CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination Audio recordings, intercepted phone calls and other intelligence link Mohammed bin Salman to killing that Saudis say was conducted by rogue elements.

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I hired and worked with Jamal for a year.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

War Crimes Indictment Reveals a Hard Road to Justice for Syria

Prosecutors say a Syrian security official accused of torture hid in plain sight in Europe for years, protected by Israeli and Austrian intelligence agents.

On Wednesday, Brig. Gen. Khaled al-Halabi, 62, was indicted and charged.
@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/w...

Many dictatorships use foreign helpers to influence democracies.

In our new study, we examine why, when, which authoritarian regimes employ Western PR firms - a particularly important type of foreign helper.

Study + summary are open-access 👇

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We are hiring a PhD student to join us at the @hertiesecurity.bsky.social (start Sept. 2026)!

If you want to conduct research on topics related to digital authoritarianism, state repression, contentious politics or social movements online, then this job might be for you!

Oh damn it’s online! Sorry I should learn to read! Please come and visit us soon ❤️

Ohh you’re in Australia!! Good luck, and let me know if you come to Melbourne!!

ABSTRACT I argue the instrumental, paternalistic strategic culture often adopted in Australian foreign policy circles is counter-productive, preventing Australia from having productive and sustainable relationships with Pacific states. If Australian officials want to follow through on rhetorical commitments to enhance Australia's relationships in the Pacific, Australia must actively recognise the agency Pacific states have and place itself within this community of actors. Australia often positions itself as part of the 'Pacific family, but to be a collaborative member of this family it must go beyond headline commitments and fundamentally reconsider the evolving agency of small Pacific states and how this shapes Australia's interactions with them. We can understand this through the lens of normative communities. Revisiting constructivist International Relations theory, I reexamine who is included and excluded in the communities of actors that norms apply to. This has particularly significant implications around norms of climate change action and mitigation. Australia has historically tried to water down agreements and slow-role actions in this space. The ongoing bid to host COP31 perhaps offers an opportunity to both show leadership on climate-related issues and to reconfigure assumptions around Pacific agency and address the effects this has on Australia's relationships in the Pacific.

🚨Delighted to announce the winner of the Boyer Prize for best article published in the AJIA in 2024. Warm congrats to @liammoore.bsky.social for this paper analysing the complexity of 🇦🇺relations with Pacific states. #OpenAccess
www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....
#AcademicPublishing

Image shows a screenshot of the conclusion of the linked Senate inquiry submission. This text can be found on page 10. The text is too long for alt text, but here is the first three quarters of the text: Conclusion Over the past decade, Nous Group’s UniForum data has quietly taken on the status of authoritative benchmark for the quality of a range of professional and academic services performed by public universities in Australia and across the world. This authoritative status is performed through scientific-looking graphs and scientific-sounding jargon designed to imply UniForum data is generated through rigorous methods and backed by expert consensus. This performance of authority is significant: it lends UniForum data an air of credibility and facticity that makes acting upon its results irresistible. When one begins to open the black box and examine how UniForum data is actually produced, however, it becomes difficult to justify the degree to which Australian university executives are relying upon it in their decision-making. My analysis is based on a review of publicly available documents, and it is therefore possible that Nous or its clients would point to things not in the public domain that address some of the conceptual and methodological flaws that I have highlighted in UniForum. But the fact that the underlying UniForum data and methodology is not in the public domain is itself one of the key causes for concerns. When the stakes are so high, it cannot be acceptable for Nous Group and its clients to simply tell university staff and governing councils, ‘trust us, these numbers are based on rigorous methods and analysis.’ The lack of rigor, external scrutiny, and transparency in UniForum’s underlying data and methodology would be a cause for concern in any public institution, but it is especially concerning in the context of universities where rigorous, transparent, and accountable knowledge production is a core part of what we do. ...

Private consultants are taking control of how public universities are evaluated and run.

My submission to the Senate university governance inquiry raises concerns about the impact of Nous Group and their dodgy UniForum data on our universities.

www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStor...

A thread

The amount of shit I got for this segment at the time was astronomical, and it was all from people who now stalk CVS employees to get them fired for insufficient online sadness.

Cheering on political violence is both evil and not new, an outgrowth of an internet intentionally dismantled years ago.

The Washington Post is a disgrace. You cannot stop ideas by firing the people who speak them. You can, however, temporarily hide them from yourself.

Assassination With No Limits Early in my academic career I spent a lot of time in Jordan. I still remember the shock across the country and King Hussein’s palp rage when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized an assassinati...

Assassination with no limits - me on Israel’s shocking bombing of Qatar. I’m old enough to remember Israel trying to assassinate Khaled Mishal in Amman a few years after signing a peace treaty with Jordan so I’m not THAT shocked. But this is big, and bad.

abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io/assassinatio...

President Trump has just announced that Princeton University PhD student Elizabeth Tsurkov who was kidnapped in Baghdad in March 2023 and held by Kata'ib Hezbollah has been released and is now at the American Embassy in Iraq.

On #FirstView -

"Digital Authoritarianism and the Global Technology Industry: Evidence from #Iran" - t.co/rvTrjmucvi

by @daraconduit.bsky.social

GR2P has an exciting double special issue on #Syria coming up, guest edited by @daraconduit.bsky.social from Uni of Melbourne and Yasmine Nahlawi from Dar Justice. It features Syrian authors and practitioners. Rread the introduction online at lnkd.in/gqvR6j6d @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

Volume 5 Issue 2 | Global Studies Quarterly | Oxford Academic Global Studies Quarterly is a fully open access journal that publishes original and innovative scholarship within the broad spectrum of topics, subfields, approaches, and metho...

In the current geopolitical and higher ed context, the publication of this special forum on "technologies of armed violence" is very dear to my heart: academic.oup.com/isagsq/issue... /1

The craven crushing of campus dissent - The Shot There isn’t a free society where universities aren’t havens for academic freedom. The Nazis knew this; Trump, and Australian Zionists, know this too.

Here's @marquelawyers.bsky.social. 'The craven crushing of campus dissent'

The path towards fascism looks like this.

The last day on which a majority of the Supreme Court’s justices had been appointed by Democratic presidents was May 14, 1969.

One of the things we do in the legal academy is support our claims with facts.

Just finished up at RightsCon.

The human rights world is absolutely reeling from the senseless cruelty of the Musk/Trump regime, but it was also extremely good to be reminded that there’s a lot of brilliant people around the world who refuse to bow down to dictators, whatever the odds.