The Chatterbox

Samuel Moyn, the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins us to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, its role in international relations, and the possibility of a multipolar liberal order emerging in a period of U.S. decline.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes!

*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.

• 01:15: The Liberal Order in Decline
• 03:47: Features of Liberalism
• 08:51: Liberalism in International Relations
• 11:15: The Intellectuals’ Abandonment of Liberalism
• 16:58: The Roots of Neoconservatism
• 20:43: Liberal Internationalists, Human Rights, and Intervention 
• 27:41: Decolonization as a Liberal Project
• 32:41: A Coming Liberal Multipolar Order?
• 43:35: The EU’s Position in the Emerging Order

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David talks to Lea Ypi about her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, which tells the story of her grandmother’s extraordinary life and in doing so uncovers the hidden history of mid-twentieth-century Europe. But it is also a book about the different philosophies of dignity and how those ideas can shape, make and break individual human lives. A conversation about death and displacement, identity and betrayal, secrecy and salvation. 

Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi is out now – get it wherever you get your books. ⁠https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458930/indignity-by-ypi-lea/9780241661925⁠

The 2nd film in our autumn season of Films of Ideas at the Regent Street cinema is coming up on Thursday 25th September: a screening of My Dinner with Andre, followed by a live recording of PPF with playwright and screenwriter Lee Hall, creator of Billy Elliot. Tickets are available now ⁠https://bit.ly/4fWDa7V⁠

Next up, the start of a new series: Fixing Democracy

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Our guest: Arjun Appadurai 

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• Central European University: CEU

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Podcast Company: scopeaudio

Follow us on social media!

• Central European University: @weareceu.bsky.social

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @ahcdemocracy.bsky.social

Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks! 

GLOSSARY

McCarthyism 

(07:46)

McCarthyism describes a period in the early 1950s when U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a campaign to uncover alleged communist influence within the American government. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy gained national attention by making sweeping accusations of subversion and disloyalty, often without credible evidence. His claims fueled widespread fear during the Cold War and resulted in many individuals losing jobs or reputations despite the lack of proof. The term has since come to signify the practice of making unsubstantiated charges, especially in a highly publicized or politically motivated way. McCarthy’s power declined after his aggressive methods were exposed during nationally televised hearings in 1954, when public opinion turned against him. Later that year, the U.S. Senate formally censured him, marking the collapse of his influence. Today, McCarthyism is remembered as a cautionary example of how fear and suspicion can undermine democratic institutions. source

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended.

This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and unforeseen geo-political changes.

Based on six years of ethnography, the book shows how people struggle, strategize, and profit from this ongoing, complex, and multidirectional change.

The author offers a new theoretical approach called critical assemblage analysis, which provides an alternative way of exploring the dynamics between language and society by examining the interaction between material, discursive, and affective dimensions of Cold Rush. The approach builds on previous work at the intersection of critical discourse analysis, critical sociolinguistics, nexus analysis and ethnography, but expands toward works by philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

This book will be of interest to researchers on language, discourse, and sociolinguistics interested in engaging with social critique embedded in global capitalism and accelerating climate change; as well as researchers in the social and human sciences and natural sciences, who are increasingly aware of the fact that the theoretical and analytical move beyond the traditional dichotomies like language/society, nature/human and micro/macro is central to understanding today´s complex, intertwined social, political, economic and ecological processes.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode (ever!) with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. In our conversation, Kaboub outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining fiscal agency is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. We talk specifically and at length about the CFA franc currency union, a system with violent colonial roots that continues to constrain the economic and political agency of its member states in West and Central Africa.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In this episode, we welcome Nicholas Vrousalis onto the show to discuss his recent book Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust. The basic thesis of the book is that capitalist exploitation should be understood as a problem of domination, and thus freedom, rather than a problem of fairness or vulnerability. For Vrousalis where there is exploitation there is domination, but there can be domination without exploitation. Throughout our conversation Nicholas takes us through his defense of normativity in Marxist theory, how normativity relates to social theory more broadly, and what makes domination under capitalist social relations structural rather than interpersonal. We conclude with an outline of what an emancipated economy would look like.

leftofphilosophy.com

References:

Nicholas Vrousalis, Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Get a free copy of the book here: https://academic.oup.com/book/44885?login=true 

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

Indigenous food sovereignty—and the lack thereof—is intimately linked to histories of colonial oppression and present-day exploitative capitalism and extractivism. Nonetheless, as this episode’s guest Kaylee Michnik shows us, rebuilding sovereignty can happen through intergenerational learning, land-based practices, and relationality. During the Amuse Bouche segment, Alexia Moyer tells host David Szanto about the tasty and tenuous history of camas cultivation by Coast Salish peoples. And in the After Taste, Courtney Vaughan responds to Kaylee’s article, “Moving Your Body, Soul, and Heart to Share and Harvest Food” from Vol. 8 No. 2 of Canadian Food Studies.

Guests:

Dr. Alexia Moyer is co-Managing Editor of Canadian Food Studies and a founding member of the editorial collective, red line-ligne rouge, based in Montreal.

Kaylee Michnik is a registered dietician and is finishing her PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, where she has been researching and contributing to school food program and policy development.

Courtney Vaughan is a researcher, writer, and community organizer who completed a master degree at Carleton University in 2019 in Indigenous and Canadian Studies. She is currently doing her PhD at Lakehead University.

Mentioned in this episode:

OCAP® protocol: the First Nations principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (in research)

photovoice methodology

illustration of Camas plants by Bryony Penn

Plants, People, and Places, edited by Nancy J. Turner

Credits:

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Executive Producers: Rachel Engler-Stringer, Laurence Godin, Charles Levkoe, Phil Loring, Kristen Lowitt

Music: Alex Guz and Evgeny Bardyuzha from Pixabay

Sound Effects: Aviana_Phoenix, BenKirb, and royalty_free_music from Pixabay

Cover photo: Jacques Gaimard on Pixabay

#digestingfoodstudies

Digesting Food Studies is funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Lakehead University, and the Canadian Association for Food Studies.

Today I talk with Huda Fakhreddine, writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature. Among the many topics we touch upon are the challenges of teaching Arabic literature, especially Palestinian literature, in a time of genocide, when universities, professional organizations, and political groups militate against any honest discussion of these topics, and punish those who do.  We talk about the notion of belonging, and the importance of being able to choose what to belong to, and what not to. Huda speaks of the freedom found in living in Arabic, and explains what that means to her.  She also reads in Arabic and English Nima Hasan’s stunning and wrenchingly beautiful poem, “Old Song.”

Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Among her translations are The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2024), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry Books, 2024). Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, 2019 and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-ālam (And then the World), Manshūrāt Marfa’, Beirut, 2025. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Protean, Lithub, Words Without Borders, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures among many others.  She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.

• Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
• Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
• Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” (2003).
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke UP, 2016).
• Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
• Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; later eds. 2000/2020).
• Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (1968).
• Hua Hsu, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” The New Yorker (June 30, 2025).

How do women and men suffer in different ways in wartime? How are distorted ideas about masculinity and femininity manipulated to promote and justify wars and recruit men to fight? What can be done to counter a return to patriarchal societies post-conflict? How are feminists responding to increasing militarisation in these dark times? 

Over many years, Cynthia Enloe has drawn on women’s first-hand experiences of war to show how patriarchy and militarism have become embedded in institutions and personal lives. Her analysis highlights how wartime shapes the gendered politics of issues such as marriage, family, work, childcare, food, income, prostitution, domestic violence and rape. She criticises the notion of a hierarchy of wartime suffering between women and men and draws attention to how men are coerced into being soldiers, framed as protectors of women, conscripted into militaries, and suffer death, injury and trauma in large numbers from direct wartime violence. She also shows how women’s emotional and physical labour is exploited by governments to support war-waging policies, and how different groups of women and men have tried to resist these efforts. 

In this episode, Cynthia reflects on these issues in particular in relation to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the underlying patriarchal ideas and processes that perpetuate the conflict. Echoing a perceptive and long-standing theme in her work, she brings a feminist curiosity to what she sees, and encourages observers to remain attentive to the full range of questions that should be asked, rather than narrowing focus and leaping to easy assumptions.  

Cynthia Enloe is an activist, researcher and teacher, and still engaged - in her words - in the lifetime process of ‘becoming a feminist’. She is Research Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts and internationally renowned for her work on the interactions of feminism, women, militarised culture, war, politics, and globalised economics in countries such as Japan, Iraq, the US, Britain, the Philippines, Canada, Chile, and Turkey. She’s written 15 ground-breaking books, including her latest Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, 2023 (Footnote Press/University of California Press), for which she reads the audiobook. Among many accolades, in 2018 she was selected to be named on the Gender Justice Legacy Wall at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

• Cynthia’s profile
• ‘Twelve Feminist Lessons of War’ (UK, US, Australia)

Episode timeline

• Intro
• Learning from Ukrainian feminists (01:38-10:18)
• The multiple roles women are expected to play during war (10:18-15:52)
• How even insurgent movements can foster post-war patriarchy (15:52-16:57)
• The insidiousness of ‘returning to normal’ (16:57-17:32)
• The return of the Taliban and the MAGA movement (17:32-19:25)
• Why women’s wars are not men’s wars (19:25-28:43)
• How masculinity and femininity are used to justify war (28:43-36:53)
• Break
• Putin’s strategies to recruit Russian men to fight (37:05-43:15)
• Nurturing feminist curiosity (43:15-48:45)
• The surge in militarisation across the world (48:45-56:21)
• Why we need to look beyond the big leaders (56:21-01:02:33)
• How Cynthia became the feminist she is today (01:02:33-01:05:45)
• What men can do to support struggles against militarism (01:05:45-01:06:33)
• Conclusion (01:06:42)

More info

• Women’s Perspectives in Lviv
• Marta Chumalo
• Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War, by Cynthia
• Putin’s payments to Russian soldiers, New York Times
• The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, by Cynthia
• Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as If Women Mattered, by Cynthia

Music 'Now is time' courtesy of Chaps' Choir and Dom Stichbury.