Notes on Kharkiv

An ethnographer’s reflections on communication in wartime

In this war, resistance to Russian aggression is equipped and organized and supported as much through volunteer networks as through the generous but slow-walked bankrolling from European countries whose promises and delays Ukrainian linguistic inventiveness has come to describe as “Macroning” and “Shultzing around.”...

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Notes on Kharkiv

There’s Nothing Natural about Turkey’s Earthquake Disaster

Erdoğan’s AKP failed to plan for a catastrophe—but did create a strategy to use this catastrophe to stay in power

The current crisis in Turkey is not a natural disaster but a political one. We knew that a massive earthquake would hit southeastern Turkey. For many years, several geologists have not only specified where the fault line would most likely break but also which individual settlements the ensuing earthquake would ...
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There’s Nothing Natural about Turkey’s Earthquake Disaster

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...
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American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

The democratic project is both unfinished and unstable

Even though the post-war consensus over the meaning and value of specifically liberal democratic institutions seems more fragile than ever—polls show that trust in government experts and elected representatives has rarely been lower—democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites ...
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Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

How John Dewey’s notion of social intelligence can remake contemporary politics

For Dewey, the notion of social intelligence is that human beings are able to shape and change the world through the understandings that they gain from the fund of human knowledge that exists: old ideas combined and related through the world as we experience it, and latched onto something new. ...
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Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

On a universal right to migration and the ideal of “composite nationality”

Douglass’s conception of multiracial democracy envisioned the political coexistence on egalitarian terms of individuals of “all races and creeds” as fellow citizens. He called for a “composite nationality” anchored in the idea of a universal human right to migration and the political legacy of the Americas as a multiracial continent. ...
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Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy