Well, there are many horrific things that are happening these days, so perhaps “thing that wrecks me the most” was a bit hasty. But it will be up there.

Sophie Smith · Sleeping Women: On the Pelicot trial Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations...

I’m a bit late on this, but if you haven’t already, please read Sophie Smith’s LRB piece on the Pelicot case. It’s only January and I’m confident it will be the best thing I’ll read in 2025, and the thing that wrecks me the most. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Thank you! Emailing now.

Very heartened to see that it passed. Do you know if there is a resolution being organized for APSA?

Thank you! This looks really interesting.

Thanks, I’ll check that out.

Current readings on protest:
- Armed Resistance - Fanon excerpts, maybe Huey Newton
- Nonviolent resistance - Brandon Terry on MLK
- Individual resistance - Thoreau, Lisa Maxwell
- Collective resistance - Chenoweth & Stephan
- Conundrums of Resistance - Jo Freeman, Megan Ming Francis

Oops, I missed Francis Fox Piven on disruptive power.

Current readings on power:
- Domination/non-domination - Pettit article, Melvin Rogers chapter
- Exploitation & Expropriation - Nancy Fraser article
- Structural Power - Iris Marion Young excerpts
- Foucaultuan power - Foucault excerpts
- “Good power” - Arendt excerpts, Audre Lorde piece

I’m basically not on social media anymore so I don’t know who will see this, but I’m re-teaching an (undergrad) course called Power and Protest and I wondered if anyone has any can’t-miss readings on power and/or protest that I should swap out for my current readings?

Atlanta tonight.

Free Palestine. End GILEE. Ceasefire Now. 🇵🇸

Doctors Without Borders has been present in a lot of horrific conflict zones, & I'm wondering how what you're dealing with now is similar or different from other places you have experienced? It's different. And yes, I have worked in conflict zones & they're always very nasty. But this is a particularly brutal thing because of the huge number of civilian casualties. And they can't escape it. They can't move. They're told to displace down south. But are we talking about just reducing the area from forty-five kilometres to twenty kilometres in length and trying to put two million people in there, which is ... It's just an extraordinary situation. And no, I haven't seen it. They haven't stopped bombing. They're still bombing. They've got troops in there with tanks. And it's just consistent. It's well documented. We are seeing it all over the world in all the newspapers and television. So it's like people know exactly what's happening. And yet it doesn't stop. I haven't seen that before.

There is just no getting around this bit from the latest Chotiner interview. Doctors Without Borders has never seen this before: the number of civilian casualties, the inescapability of death, the fact that everyone knows what is happening BUT IT DOESN'T STOP.

Editorial: Cease-fire now. The killing in Gaza must stop Israel's quest to root out Hamas has inflicted indiscriminate death and destruction on Gaza and Palestinian civilians. Humanitarian pauses are no longer enough.

LA Times editorial board coming out for ceasefire and characterizing IDF campaign as one of "indiscriminate death and destruction". Wouldn't have expected anything like this

www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

"At a time when we have witnessed antisemitic + terroristic acts that are real and reprehensible, our university leadership has intensified fear + animosity by associating antisemitism and terrorism with and overly broad range of academic programming + political speech." So grateful to the AAUP

Gaza residents told to move south as Israel prepares for expected ground assault UN says Israeli military has given 1.1 million Gaza residents 24 hours to move amid warnings it could cause ‘devastating humanitarian consequences’

1. There is nowhere to go. Gaza is 139 sq mi/365 sq km (DC is 177)
2. There is no way to get there. Spoke to a humanitarian friend. Many of Gaza's roads not usable
3. There is no out. Rafah crossing was bombed this week. Egypt won't host millions of refugees

www.theguardian.com/world/2023/o...

My understanding is that periods of escalation have been a recurrent phenomenon for many decades now. But yes, things are especially bad under Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government.

Revealed: Amazon linked to trafficking of workers in Saudi Arabia Dozens of contract workers at Amazon warehouses say they were tricked into toiling and living in grueling, squalid conditions

Today, the Guardian and other orgs co-released "Trafficking Inc": a massive investigation linking Amazon, McDonalds, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Chuck E. Cheese to labor trafficking and forced labor, particularly in the Persian Gulf

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I agree with this, but I would say “recently” is a pretty big stretch.

Bates is hiring for two tenure-track positions in IR, one with a focus on Europe and one with a focus on East Asia. I’d be happy to answer any questions about working at Bates! Applications are due October 1st.
apply.interfolio.com/129067
apply.interfolio.com/129057

Omg, how did I not know that this was a thing. 😭

To be fair, it is rather impressive how each new email from APSA leadership sinks to hitherto-unplumbed depths of ethical bankruptcy.

I fondly remember the days when reading an email from APSA didn’t make me apoplectic.

it was completely inevitable that this panic would become an excuse for some parents to keep race mixin’ out of the schools

New in the American Journal of Political Science, by Andrei Poama and Briana McGinnis

Citizens with Felony Convictions in the Jury Box: A Peer-Judgment Argument

https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12816

APSA prefers to incur the costs of the in-person conference (costs to APSA’s reputation, future membership & participation & costs to striking hotel workers) rather than incur the costs of moving online (costs which, as Charmaine Chua has shown on Twitter, APSA *can* afford to absorb).

All of this boils down to: yes, APSA *can* cancel room blocks at struck hotels, it just cannot cancel room blocks at these hotels without paying for them. So: it is more accurate to say that APSA leadership *won’t* cancel the room blocks because…