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Benjamin H. Bradlow

@bhbradlow.bsky.social

Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, @princeton.edu Visiting Researcher, Wits Southern Center for Inequality Studies CIFAR Fellow, "Humanity's Urban Future" Member, IAS School of Social Science, 2026-27 bradlow.princeton.edu

502 Posts6112 Follower775 Folgt
Livio Silva-Muller@liviosilva.bsky.social · last wk.

The answer I propose involves thinking about climate change as an issue of state-building in a transnational space. The analytical focus is on the interactions between the national environmental bureaucracy, opposing elites, and their ties inside and outside the nation-state.

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Livio Silva-Muller@liviosilva.bsky.social · last wk.

One of my dissertation papers is out this week, I answer one question: How do states build and lose decarbonization capacities? It's about the Brazilian Amazon since 1985, an increadible case of succesful, state-led decarbonization! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... 🧵🧵🧵

Reach and Retrenchment of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest1 | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 132, No 1

How do states build and lose the capacity to decarbonize? Based on a comparative-historical analysis of Brazil’s drastic reduction and later resurgence of CO2 emissions from 1985 to 2022, this article...

journals.uchicago.edu

Alondra Nelson@alondra.bsky.social · 2w ago

I have a new short essay out in LIMN's special issue This Is Not a Platform titled "Platform Obscurantism: The Hidden Substrates of Machine Learning." ChatGPT is a platform. That may be the least interesting thing about it. limn.press/article/plat... 🧵

Platform Obscurantism - Limn

ChatGPT is a platform. The chatbot is infrastructure. Thousands of applications now build on OpenAI’s application programming interface, creating a dependent ecosystem of developers, startups, and ent...

limn.press

Benjamin Braun@benbraun.eurosky.social · 4w ago

Excited to share a new paper on transformative statecraft. We start from a critique of the compensation consensus in climate politics/political science. Compensating losers works – plenty of evidence for that. But when the goal is transformation (not reform), we need to think about mobilization. 🧵

Title: Beyond compensation: Climate politics, mobilization, and transformative statecraft Authors: Benjamin Braun & Leah Downey July 8, 2026 Abstract: Governments have pursued decarbonization through a combination of subsidies for capital and compensation for people. Political scientists have identified the compensation of those who incur losses from climate policies as the the central challenge in building green coalitions and achieving a just transition. However, a decarbonization path aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius en- tails transformative change for virtually everyone. We argue that, under such con- ditions, a compensation-based approach reduces green backlash to pocketbook concerns; citizens to bundles of fixed preferences; and evaluation to policy-by- policy assessment. Proposing to move beyond compensating existing preferences, we contend that transformative statecraft reshapes preferences through political mobilization. From this perspective, a technocratic approach—focused on calcu- lation and compensation—constitutes a binding constraint on green statecraft. We defend this mobilization-based approach against the objections of manipulation and deprivation of freedom and suggest that a democratic version of transforma- tive statecraft is possible.
Jeff Gordon@jeffgordon.bsky.social · last mo.

Industrial policy is often in tension with competition - a problem I call "the dilemma of picking winners." In this essay and the associated working paper, I propose a framework for doing industrial policy without entrenching the winners. lpeproject.org/blog/the-dil...

The Dilemma of Picking Winners

Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special…

lpeproject.org

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Patrick Heller@pheller.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I have new article out in the Sociology of Development on the possibilities of building welfare states in the global south. Its free for now: online.ucpress.edu/socdev/artic...

The Democratic Social Developmental StateParameters of the Possible in the Global South

Colonial legacies and the structural constraints of global capitalism pose significant obstacles to building welfare states in the Global South. Yet the past three decades have seen significant progre...

online.ucpress.edu

Benjamin H. Bradlow@bhbradlow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Without a strategy to absorb the advanced technology associated with contemporary automobiles, overly restrictive local content requirements are no panacea. The US is looking increasingly like middle income countries struggling to keep up in this sector.

Patrick George@patrickgeorge.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"The 50% U.S. content proposal is likely to be viewed skeptically by many automakers, who would struggle to source half of their content from U.S. sources." www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Benjamin H. Bradlow@bhbradlow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"The gap between principle and practice yawns wider with every export control and company added to the Entity List. You can almost see the eyes of America’s adversaries twinkling." — @quinnslobodian.com

The New York Review of Books@nybooks.com · 2mo ago

“Economic warfare began as a discrete effort to change the behavior of adversaries, but over time it became a means for industrial policy to protect America’s waning competitive edge.” —Quinn Slobodian

Janet Vertesi@cyberlyra.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you 👍 the Pope's recent Encyclical, you'll 😍 our new paper, shifting the conversation about "ethics" to one about political economy. Catch it here in pre-print before its release next month! #academicsky

danah boyd@zephoria.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In "Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI," @cyberlyra.bsky.social, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Taylor, and I are particularly keen to understand how the project of AI involves numerous "decoys" that misdirect critics' attention, undermining efforts to hold AI to account. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106

Benjamin H. Bradlow@bhbradlow.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Thanks to @princeton.edu School of Public and International Affairs for featuring some of my recent work on auto manufacturing and the green transition in the Global South in this interview. spia.princeton.edu/news/behind-...

Behind the Headline: The Global Future of EVs | Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

At the Detroit Auto Show in January, the American auto industry’s shift away from electric vehicles was on full display. Rather than displaying EVs front and center, as was the case in 2025, automaker...

spia.princeton.edu