I’m extremely happy with this one. This came to life from a rough paper I presented at University College London’s Urban Lab, but it really took shape through the peer review process at Antipode. I’m going to be honest here: there was a lot of tough feedback, and it definitely threw me for a loop. It took a bit of time for me to recover composure enough to start thinking about how to address the problems and improve. The reason…
This was a highlight of my year. I’ve long admired the work on soft power and mega-events by Jonathan Grix and friends, and I had some ideas on soft power myself. But I intended these ideas as a refinement of the notion of soft power, not as a criticism per se of Grix et al. I wanted to suggest that there were a few ways that we could augment our traditional understandings of soft power in order to account for…
It’s out in the world! I’m very happy about this paper. While it flows from the same place as my doctoral research, it’s a separate piece that stands on its own. Here, I advance the concept of Potemkin Neoliberalism, exploring various dimensions of superficiality in the articulation of the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia. Starting from the idea that mega-events are an expression of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism, I uncover how – unlike many other mega-events – this World…
This booklet is a rarity. Shipped all the way to Zurich from a legendary leftist bookstore in San Francisco (“fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism since 1981”), this is a Soviet broadside against Reagan’s America, seen through the lens of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back when I was living in Russia, a good friend once shared his secret for detecting nationalist media bias. I was complaining about the difficulties in writing critically about Russia because I was worried about playing…
Note: this was originally slated to be a commentary piece for a non peer-reviewed expert journal that shall remain nameless. For reasons I still don’t understand, the editor never wrote me back after commissioning and receiving the piece. I found it again recently during some computer cleanup, and given that it’s over a year past the date they said they would publish – it was aimed for before the 2018 World Cup – I’m going to share the draft here….
Back in 2012, I lost my job in San Francisco. Our whole company did. One day I went into work and the atmosphere was horrible – people were scurrying around, carrying boxes, holding back tears. A bunch of suits had flown out from New York and laid everyone off. Some left that day, and some left a few months later. I didn’t know what to do. In 2013 Nastja and the kids and I left the US. We had five…
Next step is for the esteemed jury to read through it, and then we’ll all meet for a private defense at the end of June. If I make it through that, then they’ll schedule a public defense for later in the summer. It feels odd, to tell the truth. I was sort of expecting angels singing, or at least a feeling of discernible triumph. But to be perfectly honest, it’s really quite mundane. You turn it in, the process begins,…
If this project were a movie, this would be the part where the main character slogs through the endless desert – I’m thinking Gobi, but feel free to fill in whatever wasteland you wish. Parched, exhausted, merciless sun beating down, shirt wrapped over the head, stumbling down a dune. You know the drill. I have expanded my outline to encompass 9 chapters instead of the 8 that it was previously. Right now the title is “For the world, for our…
“At some point you have to take a moral stance and say that undermining authoritarian governments is better than undermining democratic ones.” This is how Robert Orttung, from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington, answered my question today. Robert, together with Sufian Zhemukhov, have written enough about the Sochi Olympics that you pretty much have to cite them if you do any work at all in this area (see, for example, this article in East European Politics,…
There is something fascinating happening in Russia that, I think, also has applications on how we can interpret current affairs in the USA. A quick summary: On August 23, Alexey Navalny publishes an analysis of corruption in the procurement of foodstuffs for the Russian National Guard. It’s impressively detailed, meticulously sourced, brilliantly presented (they even included good English CC:subtitles for those who don’t speak Russian). In a normal system, this level of well-researched accusation would require some sort of response. At least…