Alexander Etkind
@sashaetkind.bsky.social
Professor of CEU in Vienna. A historian who teaches IR and the Anthropocene, but mostly thinks and comments about the current war. I am writing for the New Statesman.
Happy to see the section on climate disinformation, which I guest-edited together with great colleagues. While rejection of climate issues has not disappeared, public contestation increasingly focuses on who should bear the costs and whose knowledge should count. ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc…
International Journal of Communication
ijoc.org
While any victory of the far right is horrible, it shows poverty of the old left. Gerontocracy doesn’t work. The world is desperate for fresh ideas. Bolsonaro will help Trump and Putin. Israel, Spain and Germany are the next battles. But the biggest one will be the US
💥 A Russian strike against the building of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 9/28/26
An interesting review. I spent years stepping on the grass at Kings Cambridge — and, like the author, failed to understand the reason for asymmetry between sociology, anthropology and history at Oxbridge www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Susan Pedersen · Keep off the grass: Oxbridge Attitudes
Academic life is full of churn. The world changes; younger scholars are seized by new questions and, as they hare down...
lrb.co.uk
A wonderful guidebook, highly recommended. Thank you from all of us, Andrea Peto
I see that the debate between the New Left and neoliberals has triangulated without notice. The new part is the Latourian crowd, and the colors are red, black (like oil) and green. Two older parts hate the novice almost equally, but the reds criticize the greens more passionately
“to make things even worse, the far-right parties that capitalise on migration turn deportation into a political show that promises to eradicate it – a promise they can never keep, for the migrant is their resource.” — My new column in NS www.newstatesman.com/world/europe...
How Europe fell for Faragism
The deportations and offshoring that Nigel Farage advocates are becoming facts of European politics
newstatesman.com
"It is amazing to see #Denmark and #Poland blessing the passage of #Russian tankers – enormous, rusty, full of flammables – along their well-groomed coasts. You cannot take part in the profits of the #petrostate and not, in some way, share its political interests."
Alexander Etkind@sashaetkind.bsky.social · 2mo agoMy fresh column: “It is insane that tankers are regulated more lightly than motorcycles. If Europe has learned to break its addiction to the profits from burning Russian molecules, it has not yet confronted its addiction to the fees for moving them” www.newstatesman.com/internationa...
My fresh: "When people breached the wall in Berlin, we called it freedom. When they breach the wall in Ceuta, we call it a catastrophe. The difference is not in the people climbing. It is in what waits for them on the other side." www.newstatesman.com/world/europe...
Spain gets migration right
The Ceuta crisis brought shame on the rest of Europe, not Pedro Sánchez's Spain
newstatesman.com
My fresh column: “It is insane that tankers are regulated more lightly than motorcycles. If Europe has learned to break its addiction to the profits from burning Russian molecules, it has not yet confronted its addiction to the fees for moving them” www.newstatesman.com/internationa...
The EU cannot break free of Russian oil
The membership now treats sanctions as auctions
newstatesman.com
“Historians should be in the business of defending the past from the totalizers: the people, factions and ideologies — the ones we despise and the ones we agree with — that want to take the dead, too, into their empires.” — a brilliant essay by Charles King www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/o...
Opinion | “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” Isn’t Saying What You Think It Is
In the same year as America’s founding, Edward Gibbon wrote “Decline and Fall.” 250 years later, it still holds lessons for us.
nytimes.com
New York to impose the country’s first statewide moratorium on data centers.
New York to impose the country’s first statewide moratorium on data centers
The order will pause state permitting for new large data centers and direct state regulators to create standards that address environmental impacts, energy demand, water usage and other factors, the g...
nbcnews.com
liquidation of MCC is a bold and important decision. But what will happen to its assets? Will they be confiscated or (partially) re-directed for new educational and research purposes? Hungary and Europe needs its universities and think tanks more than ever
The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 triggered the global crisis of trust and security. It led to Trump’s presidency in 2016, Brexit in 2020, new invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gaza war in 2023, and Iran war in 2026. The retreat from Crimea will start the unwinding of the crisis
Feed: "New Statesman" By: Alexander Etkind on Thursday, May 7, 2026
Vladimir Putin’s nightmares have come true
Russia's leader has created the world he always feared
newstatesman.com
The 14 points signed in Versailles? — Wrong historical analogy. Woodrow Wilson was incomparably smarter, and his advisers too. And this why the next war started decades later
Trump has offered us a profound insight into conflict resolution: All you have to do to get your enemy to stop fighting is to give him everything he wants and ask for nothing in exchange.
Among all the components of national and regional military-industrial systems, refineries are the most vulnerable. The states subjected to petroaggression can always count on this vulnerability – the Achilles heel of the petrostate. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
🤭 The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is opening to a surreal backdrop as a massive fire rages at a nearby oil terminal.
