Postcolonial Global Justice Published in The Journal of Development Studies (Ahead of Print, 2026)

I wrote a brief review of Shuk Ying Chan's excellent book Postcolonial Global Justice. Check it out (gift link):

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JFJWZ...

In the last 20 years, the "two state solution" has been a discursive mechanism to convince people that

(1) this is a "conflict between neighbouring peoples" rather than between the state and dominated/colonised people within

(2) That there's a credible route towards partition, when there isn't one

Postcolonial Global Justice Published in The Journal of Development Studies (Ahead of Print, 2026)

I wrote a brief review of Shuk Ying Chan's excellent book Postcolonial Global Justice. Check it out (gift link):

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JFJWZ...

JOB! I'm hiring a Senior Research Associate in Social and Political Philosophy as part of the ERC LEAD Project.

Deadline is May 3rd, and candidates would ideally begin in September 2026 or asap after.

Feel free to contact me with any questions - Share widely!

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

We Could Have Been Worse: ‘Whataboutism’ and Defensive Memory Among Perpetrator Groups - Political Behavior Can exposure to harmful acts committed by other groups obstruct meaningful confrontation with one’s own group history? This paper explores the extent to which favourable inter-group comparison — the i...

I’m excited to see this published in @polbehavior.bsky.social!

When faced with historical harms committed by an ingroup, what is the effect of ‘whataboutism’ — appeals to ‘worse’ harms committed by other groups? 👇

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

Devolution, delegation, and digitisation: Accountability gaps in fragmented border regimes Contemporary borders are increasingly fragmented and dispersed, variously through externalisation practices and inwardly through everyday bordering ch…

New paper!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Where does accountability lie in contemporary border regimes?

CFP: Special Issue of Moral Philosophy & Politics on "Citizenship and Global Inequality".

Please consider sharing & submitting. Open to interdisciplinary work that engages with philosophical debates.

#migcitsky #poltheory #philsky

www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

🚨New publication! Thrilled to finally see this paper out in @psrm.bsky.social 🎉

📊I study how gender shapes coalition preferences among politicians. Turns out mayors prefer forming governments with women-led parties, perceiving them as better communicators and more competent governors.

In stark contrast to the Trump administration's prioritization of the deportation machine, Spain's progressive government just announced a minimal-conditions program for the regularization of undocumented immigrants, estimated to benefit more than 500.000 people.

On labor market and fiscal effects, see also:

doi.org/10.1086/730122

Responding to unauthorized residence: on a dilemma between ‘firewalls’ and ‘regularizations’ - Comparative Migration Studies Residence of unauthorized immigrants is a stable feature of the Global North’s liberal democracies. This article asks how liberal-democratic policymakers should respond to this phenomenon, assuming bo...

If you want to read more about progressive approaches to irregularity, and how the logic of exceptional regularization programs can clash with the logic of institutionally or spatially limited protections for the undocumented (so-called 'firewalls'), I have just the paper:
doi.org/10.1186/s408...

What all this points to is that liberal democracies have very good reasons to operate regularization programs on a rolling (rather than exceptional) basis. Indeed, the U.S. used to do this, under its now-defunct 'immigration registry' program. This is a program that can be revived.

What the Spanish government realizes is that liberal democracies worth their name can't deport their way out of such problems. As we see in the US, large-scale removal campaigns and widespread undocumentedness both undermine some of the very same values, such as the open society and the rule of law.

Widespread undocumentedness threatens to create a permanent underclass. It also provides a pool of extraordinarily exploitable labor, weakening the bargaining power of workers as a class.

There are many reasons why undocumentedness is a problem for liberal democracy. The more people live in the shadows, the less the ideals of the open society and the rule of law are being realized. Fear of apprehension also disincentivizes the undocumented from civic behavior, e.g. crime reporting.

Among other (good) goals, this policy explicitly seeks to prevent migrants' vulnerability to a future Spanish version of ICE-style thuggery, feared to be unleashed if the right wins the next elections (as they are currently favored to do).

In stark contrast to the Trump administration's prioritization of the deportation machine, Spain's progressive government just announced a minimal-conditions program for the regularization of undocumented immigrants, estimated to benefit more than 500.000 people.

Opinion | State Terror Has Arrived

M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"

Also, I hope you don't mind if I plug our recent migration dilemmas essay on "migration myths" here, as I feel it overlaps significantly with your discussion.
doi.org/10.1017/S089...

Thanks for the piece, Alex. It does seem, though, that most of your targets are advocacy or public discourse tropes rather than the highly varied research (normative and empirical) on these issues. I wouldn't say the latter necessarily track the former.

Congrats! Look forward to reading

Where to (Next)? Family and Childhood Migration Experience and Migration Aspirations in Adulthood - Claudia Brunori, Louise Caron, Sergi Vidal, 2026 Migration is increasingly recognized as a dynamic, often recurrent, and intergenerational process. Yet, little research has examined how childhood exposure to i...

📢New article in International Migration Review!

w/ @svidal.bsky.social (@lifelongmove.bsky.social) and Louise Caron, we study how immigrant descent and migration experiences in childhood shape later-life aspirations towards migration.

Check it out (it's OpenAccess!) 👇
doi.org/10.1177/0197...

go.bsky.app/5QRth7t

Die Rote Hilfe ist die älteste, größte und wichtigste Solidaritätsorganisation für linke Aktivist*innen. Wem es an Demokratie und Antifaschismus gelegen ist, sollte sie jetzt unterstützen. Shame on you @glsbank.bsky.social

Remember when every leader wanted their picture taken with Greta? She is still that truth teller, they just can't face the truth of their crimes.

Bar chart showing the distribution of childhood experience of transnational separation (TS) from a parent by age at first migration to the United Kingdom.

The last piece of my PhD thesis is now published on @demresjournal.bsky.social 🎉

Using retrospective data from @usociety.bsky.social, I find that only a minority of childhood migrants arrived in the UK with their parents.

Read more 👉 doi.org/10.4054/DemR...

#OtD 9 Oct 1945 the UK Labour govt defended its jailing of 226 Spanish Civil War and anti-Nazi resistance fighters, describing them as "members of an enemy paramilitary organisation". Some killed themselves, others were deported to Spain for execution stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1094...

Happy to give this talk at @upf.edu tomorrow!