Monthly Digest is a resource provided by Security in Context that provides a list of recent publications, calls, conferences and other items relevant to the critical global, security, and international political economy studies audience. In addition to new items, our digest may contain relatively recent entries, so please double check dates on any calls or conferences. All descriptions taken from their original sources unless otherwise indicated. If we’ve missed something, or you have items you’d like to contribute for future digests, please email us at: submissions@securityincontext.org
Books
The Women of the Far Right
Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization
By Eviane Leidig
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-women-of-the-far-right/9780231558303
On mainstream social media platforms, far-right women make extremism relatable. They share Instagram stories about organic foods that help pregnant women propagate the “pure” white race and post behind-the-scenes selfies at anti vaccination rallies. These social media personalities model a feminine lifestyle, at once promoting their personal brands and radicalizing their followers. Amid discussions of issues like dating, marriage, and family life, they call on women to become housewives to counteract the corrosive effects of feminism and champion the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which motivated massacres in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo.
Eviane Leidig offers an in-depth look into the world of far-right women influencers, exploring the digital lives they cultivate as they seek new recruits for white nationalism. Going beyond stereotypes of the typical male white supremacist, she uncovers how young, attractive women are playing key roles as propagandists, organizers, fundraisers, and entrepreneurs. Leidig argues that far-right women are marketing themselves as authentic and accessible in order to reach new followers and spread a hateful ideology. This insidious—and highly gendered—strategy takes advantage of the structure of social media platforms, where far-right women influencers’ content is shared with and promoted to mainstream audiences. Providing much-needed expertise on gender and the far right, this timely and accessible book also details online and offline approaches to countering extremism.
Doing Harm
How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror
https://www.mqup.ca/doing-harm-products-9780228018612.php
Doing Harm pries open the black box on a critical chapter in the recent history of psychology: the field’s enmeshment in the so-called war on terror and the ensuing reckoning over do-no-harm ethics during times of threat. Focusing on developments within the American Psychological Association (APA) over two tumultuous decades, Roy Eidelson exposes the challenges that professional organizations face whenever powerful government agencies turn to them for contributions to ethically fraught endeavours. In the months after 9/11 it became clear that the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency were prepared to ignore well-established international law and human rights standards in prosecuting the war on terror. It was less clear, however, that some of Eidelson’s fellow psychologists would become part of the abusive and torturous operations at overseas CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay. Nor was it initially clear that this ruthless enterprise would garner acquiescence and support from the APA’s leadership. Doing Harm examines how and why the APA failed to join human rights groups in efforts to constrain the US government’s unbridled pursuit of security and retribution. It recounts an ongoing struggle – one that has pitted APA leaders set on preserving strong ties to the military-intelligence establishment against dissident voices committed to prioritizing do-no-harm principles.
Policing Empires
Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US
By Julian Go
The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. Policing Empires offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. Julian Go tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use. Go reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the "imperial boomerang." Policing Empires thereby unlocks the dirty secret of police militarization: Police have brought imperial practices home to militarize themselves in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.
Articles
NATO Destroyed Libya in 2011; Storm Daniel Came to Sweep Up the Remains: The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter
By Vijay Prashad
https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/libya-floods/
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.
Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.
The New (Dis)Order: The Evolving UAE-Israel Security Alliance
By Tariq Dana
Journal of Palestine Studies
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EHT66WDQERF8IB6KFWQE/full?target=10.1080/0377919X.2023.2244868
The normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel under the Abraham Accords is part of a long-standing security cooperation between the two regimes to monopolize regional power. Indeed, with the rapidly changing political and security landscape in the Arab world, the Abraham Accords have become central to understanding alliance formation in the region. The Accords have significantly enhanced the already existing security and military relations between Israel and the UAE, with heavy Emirati investment in advanced Israeli weapons systems and security technologies, military and intelligence sharing, as well as economic partnerships in strategic sectors. While the alliance is often portrayed as a defensive security arrangement aimed at countering the “Iranian threat,” a closer examination reveals that it is much more than that. Sponsored by the United States, the alliance entrenches Israeli settler colonialism and Arab authoritarianism as mutually inclusive pillars for the region, with the ultimate objective of reproducing US hegemony in the face of changing global dynamics.
What Is Camp Grayling?
By Benjamin Stumpf
https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/what-is-camp-grayling
Do the National Guard deserve a forest? This question is asked by activists in the Stop Camp Grayling movement, an effort to stop the expansion of the Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center in Michigan, already the largest training facility for the National Guard in the United States. Camp Grayling is a massive military training compound that occupies 148,000 acres (230 square miles) of the Northern Michigan Forest, land stolen from the Ojibwa and the Odawa at the headwaters of the Au Sable River. A proposed expansion announced in January 2022 would have more than doubled the size of the facility, which already provides “premier facilities” for the National Guard and the Army, as well as police departments and foreign military partners, to train in a wide variety of war and weapons scenarios.
Lectures/Webinars/Interviews
The Women of the Far Right - An Interview with Eviane Leidig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehDPBchP4r8
In this video, host and executive producer of the Security in Context podcast Anita Fuentes interviews researcher Eviane Leidig on her new book, "The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization."
Leidig's book can be found here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-wome... Eviane Leidig is a postdoctoral fellow at Tilburg University. She is affiliated with the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology in London, and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague. She has been featured by The Independent, Al Jazeera, BBC, Australia Broadcasting Corporation, and Bellingcat, among others. Her latest book, "The Women of the Far Right," explores how alt-right women on platforms like YouTube and Instagram build radicalized followings online.
APSA 2023: Democratic Backsliding Roundtable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJwSChvaoWQ
A panel about democratic backsliding hosted by the editors of PS: Political Science and Politics in conjunction with an upcoming special issue. Moderated by Justin Esarey and Peter Siavelis. Featured speakers: Anne Meng, Andrew Little, Staffan Lindberg, Carl-Henrik Knutsen, Yana Gorokhovskaia, Daniel Weitzel, Daniel Triesman, Robert Blair, and Michael Miller.
Libya is a crime scene: An interview with Vijay Prashad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IrXkvfnfKY
In this video, Executive Producer of the Security in Context Podcast Anita Fuentes interviews historian Vijay Prashad about Tricontinental’s recent newsletter titled “NATO Destroyed Libya in 2011: Storm Daniel Came to Sweep Up the Remains” where he discussed the tragedy of the flood that struck the city of Derna in the aftermath of Storm Daniel and resulted in the deaths of thousands. Vijay is a historian, journalist, and executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and the author of forty books including “Arab Spring. Libyan Winter”, published in 2012.
Bankers & Bombs: How Venture Capital and Private Equity are Feeding the Military Industrial Complex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbU-mhSbtL4
This event was co-sponsored by Security in Context and the Middle East Policy Forum at The George Washington University. Ties between the financial sector and the weapons industry are not new. The very first venture capital firm in the US was founded to profit from new technologies developed for use in WWII, and the role of military spending in turning Silicon Valley into a tech hub is well documented. But the rapid proliferation in the number of VC and private equity firms investing in weapons and intelligence technologies is a more recent phenomenon. Firms like Veritas Capital, Civitas Group, and Paladin Capital specialize in steering more private capital into weapons development and pushing tech start-ups to develop military applications for their products. And it isn’t just startups. Many large funds have divisions that combine the marquee names and government contacts of high-ranking military and national security retirees alongside asset managers who use their rolodexes of wealthy clients to raise capital for new defense-tech investments.
Will this surge of private investment in weapons technologies divert scarce resources from addressing other urgent problems? Will it fast track the development of high tech systems like robotic weapons controlled via artificial intelligence that pose serious risks of automated killing outside of human control? And will it cement an alliance between the Pentagon, arms makers, and Silicon Valley that could supersize the military-industrial complex and bring it unprecedented influence? To address these questions and more, QI held a discussion with Shana Marshall, associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at The George Washington University, Edward Ongweso Jr, finance editor at Logic(s) magazine, and Jonathan Guyer, senior foreign policy writer at Vox. William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, moderated.
The Women of the Far Right - An Interview with Eviane Leidig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehDPBchP4r8
In this video, host and executive producer of the Security in Context podcast Anita Fuentes interviews researcher Eviane Leidig on her new book, "The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization."
Leidig's book can be found here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-wome...
Eviane Leidig is a postdoctoral fellow at Tilburg University. She is affiliated with the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology in London, and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague. She has been featured by The Independent, Al Jazeera, BBC, Australia Broadcasting Corporation, and Bellingcat, among others. Her latest book, "The Women of the Far Right," explores how alt-right women on platforms like YouTube and Instagram build radicalized followings online.
Morocco Earthquake - An Interview with Zaynab El Bernoussi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnhLNx_p5ZQ
In this video, executive producer of the Security in Context Podcast Anita Fuentes interviews SiC's Zaynab El Bernoussi about the recent Earthquake in Morocco. Zaynab El Bernoussi is professor of international politics at Sciences Po Rabat of the International University of Rabat (UIR). Prior to teaching at UIR, Z taught at Al Akhawayn University of Ifrane and coordinated the Master of Arts in International Studies & Diplomacy (MAISD) and the Human & Economic Development Research Unit (HEDRU). Z holds a Master's in Finance from Instituto de Empresa, an MPA in economic development from Columbia University, and a PhD in political and social sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain. She was a doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a visiting scholar at Smith College and Harvard University. She is part of the executive committee of the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association (ISA) and core faculty of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies. Her work focuses on the politicization of dignity when looking at South-South cooperation, bioethical issues, and human and economic development programs.
Job Openings
Assistant Professor - Classical Arabic Literature
Position Description
The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago invites applications for a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in Classical Arabic Literature with an expected start date of July 1, 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter. Research expertise may be in any genre of Arabic literature produced before 1800, and may focus on any region with significant production of creative literature in Arabic.
Qualifications
Applicants should have an active research agenda that would lead to publication in prominent venues in their field or the potential to develop such a publication record and the ability or potential to be an excellent teacher and mentor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Regardless of specific research focus, the successful candidate will demonstrate a wide-ranging familiarity with Classical Arabic literature and an intimate knowledge of broader historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Candidates must have completed all requirements for the receipt of a Ph.D. in Arabic literature or a related field by the start of the appointment.
Application Instructions
To apply for this position, candidates must submit their applications through the University of Chicago’s Interfolio jobs board at http://apply.interfolio.com/131217.
The application must include:
• a cover letter,
• CV,
• a published article or a dissertation chapter,
• a research statement,
• and the names and contact information of three recommenders.
All materials from each applicant must be received by 11:00 PM Central Time/Midnight Eastern Time on November 1, 2023. Only complete applications will be considered. Applicants may be asked to provide additional materials following initial review.
For information on the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, please visit https://nelc.uchicago.edu. For further questions about this position, please contact Annie Diamond, the Academic Affairs Coordinator for the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, at anniediamond@uchicago.edu.
This position is contingent on final budgetary approval.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
All University departments and institutes are charged with building a faculty from a diversity of backgrounds and with diverse viewpoints; with cultivating an inclusive community that values freedom of expression; and with welcoming and supporting all their members.
We seek a diverse pool of applicants who wish to join an academic community that places the highest value on rigorous inquiry and encourages diverse perspectives, experiences, groups of individuals, and ideas to inform and stimulate intellectual challenge, engagement, and exchange. The University’s Statements on Diversity are at https://provost.uchicago.edu/statements-diversity.
The University of Chicago is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity/Disabled/Veterans Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, age, status as an individual with a disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information please see the University's Notice of Nondiscrimination.
Job seekers in need of a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process should call 773-834-3988 or email equalopportunity@uchicago.edu with their request.
Podcasts
Live With ASI - Season 4, Episode 1
Live With ASI - Season 4, Episode 1 A Month of Knowledge Production at ASI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u371juIl8xM
Live with ASI is a monthly broadcast program that showcases recently published content from the Arab Studies Institute’s various branches. This content includes articles, reviews, pedagogical resources, podcasts, and more. Also featured in the broadcast are brand new interviews and discussions with authors and contributors.
The Society Pages
TSP brings social science to broader public visibility and influence.
The Society Pages (TSP) is an open-access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and supported by individual donors.
TSP consists of in-house “TSP HQ” articles, blogs, and podcasts; our “Community Pages”; and content produced by our partners.
More
Pedagogy
VIDEO - The US National Security State
September Monthly Digest 2023
August Monthly Digest 2023
