Joseph MacKay

JOB

Assistant Professor of Political Theory
University of Cambridge
@thecambridgeschool.bsky.social

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Grad school colleague of mine getting it right here.

I have never been more ready for anything in my life.

“For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it,” he said in a message directed to the Iranian people. “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” The president said the U.S. military campaign was aimed at Iran’s missiles, its Navy and its proxy groups in the region — and warned that there could be U.S. casualties. ---

truly appalling to drag Iranian people's liberation struggles into their war rhetoric. this is at the root of why debates about anti-imperialism and anti-authoritarianism are so messed up today, and fundamentally detrimental to democracy movements anywhere

Postdoctoral Fellow - Canberra / ACT, ACT, Australia Classification: Academic Level ASalary package: $89,313 – $112,103 per annum plus 17% superannuationTerm: Part time, Fixed Term, up to 28hrs per week. (2 years) Outstanding opportunity to work on a p...

#HistIR postdoc opportunity at ANU in Canberra

Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations on the Australian Research Council project “Humane Exclusion: How States Justify Excluding Refugees”, reporting to Prof Luke Glanville

DL March 15th – details 👇

Thanks!

5️⃣ In our forthcoming issue, @lefteleven.bsky.social unpacks Russia’s imperial history to understand how the country has legitimized its rule over other populations and territories.

Read the #advancedaccess article here: doi.org/10.1093/ia/i...

Call for Papers, Contesting Imperialism(s), CEEISA Annual Conference, Sarajevo 17-19 June 2026. Submit your papers or panels until March 2026!

Program chairs: Aida Hozić and Dženeta Karabegović

ceeisa2026.com

Known otherwise as the history of philosophy.

In his new EJIR article, @tommychai.bsky.social uses Southeast Asia's long historical position between East Asia and Indian Ocean worlds to revisit foundational questions about the making of the modern international order.

You can read the full paper here: t1p.de/vp17c

The other day I heard Bluesky described as a "discourse diaspora community" and I haven't been able to shake it as the skeleton key to the form and shape of conversations here. Everyone is sitting at the emigre cafe reading reports of the same dispatches from Old Twitter, idly dreaming of the fall.

Composite Horse with Female Rider
Opaque watercolor with gold on paper
Murshidabad, late 18th century
8.5 x 11.5 in

Thank you! Just what I needed.

Is there a preferred translation of Dante these days? I’m about to quote the Paradiso in print, briefly but prominently, and wouldn’t mind getting it right.

People out here complaining about spaces in file names and you just know they use more than eight characters themselves.

📚 Out with OUP this summer: "Experts in a Turbulent World" 📚

An edited volume that connects historical and contemporary perspectives on the role of experts in international organisations. 1/3 👇 #HistIR global.oup.com/academic/pro...

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age The long read: Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve enter...

(I’m belatedly reading the Guardian profile) www.theguardian.com/business/202...

More surprisingly, Tooze said that Anderson's attack helped him clarify his own principles and practices. Anderson used the phrase "in medias res" as a jab at Tooze's neglect, as he saw it, of the deep political and economic forces that shaped his narratives. Yet Tooze has come to embrace in medias res both as "a very succinct summation of the challenge that I'm particularly interested in" and as a simple but profound description of the basic human situation. In his view, there is no escaping the middle of things: every one of us is born, lives and dies in a rushing flow of events that precedes us and will outlast us. He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as "the be-all and end-all" - a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns - is "a lazy way of dealing with reality". To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can't understand history before it happens: "If you're in the middle of shit, you don't actually know what the shit is that you're in the middle of."

Tooze has entered his Kermodian phase.

Thanks!

Historical sources of Russian imperial legitimation claims Joseph Mackay Abstract Russia's war on Ukraine has given rise to a broad debate about Russian imperialism and colonialism. Yet despite Russia's significant imperial history, the field of International Relations has few detailed accounts of its distinguishing historical features. This article builds on existing work to unpack the varied attempts successive imperial projects made to legitimate Russia's rule over other populations and territories. Reconstructing Russia's imperial history, I show its claims to imperial legitimacy, past and present, varied widely. These claims were borrowed or otherwise acquired from an equally wide range of sources. They have tended to accumulate or sediment in Russian discursive practice. To illustrate this, I focus on the period that marked the height of Russian colonialism, the nineteenth century, showing a profusion of practices, styles and ways of speaking. I then argue Russia's wide-ranging claims to imperial legitimacy resurface in contemporary attempts to justify its expansionism. Recognizing the range of attempted imperial justifications helps analysts to better calibrate or specify critiques of Russian imperial ideas today.

Very glad to have published this, at International Affairs. doi.org/10.1093/ia/i...

Global Intellectual History @global-ih.bsky.social organsied a Special Issue on Erased, including a reply. I'm so grateful to Helen M. Kinsella, Joseph MacKay, Christine Sylvester, Immi Tallgren, and Tarak Barkawi for their commentaries. Links to each below...

Very glad to have been involved in this forum on Patricia Owens’s excellent book. @whitproject.bsky.social

Literary Figures and International Thought: The Archetypal Case of Thomas Hardy - Thomas Davies, 2026 How may literary figures contribute to international thought? This article addresses this question using the previously neglected yet archetypal case of novelis...

Available now from @millennjournal.bsky.social: "Literary Figures and International Thought: The Archetypal Case of Thomas Hardy" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

This looks great 👇 #HistIR

The International History and Politics Section of @apsa.bsky.social is accepting nominations for the Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award and the Outstanding Article Award. Nominations are due by January 31, 2026. More information here: connect.apsanet.org/s34/nominati...

CFP: USIH-IU Community Scholars Program | Society for US Intellectual History In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is pleased to announce the continuation of a new opportunity to support continge...

🗃️ Psst, friends at #AHA26 #MLA26 and beyond, please share word of the @susih.bsky.social Community Scholars Program, which unlocks library resources for 3 years (onsite + remote) for #contingent faculty & historians at work beyond the traditional academy, due 2/1 s-usih.org/2025/12/cfp-...

Hmm. I guess that might be a bit like revolution emerging from (or moving into) gangs of one sort or another. I’d been thinking chiefly of rich world states where hooliganism is a kind of déclassé hobby. In any case, I’m going to hope you’re right.