Tag Archives: Mobilization

Regular activity

Roundup, mid 2025

Teaching: Considering a different De Pizan text to adopt next semester (The Book of the Body Politic? The Book of Peace?). Other potential changes to the reading list: new tragedy (Ajax?), new Platonic dialogues, new passage selection for Augustine, a substitute for Rabelais (Erasmus? Bruni’s Laudatio?). Also thinking about changes to the organization of class time (e.g., beginning the week with a quick text survey) and of assignments (e.g., structuring take-home writing prompts with several micro-questions).

Research:

  • History of political thought: Reading for the second chapter in the project (Filippo Buonarroti): praxis over doctrine; coordination of underground activities; role of Brussels under the Dutch kings as a center of radical politics in the Biedermeier era; political experiences peaking early; Oneglia; transnational revolutionary myths; risky bookselling; Freemasonry; the importance of Corsica (the long shadow of Jean-Jacques); land reform and the Gracchi; a talented musician; the democratic Left against federalism in 1830s Italy; communism and natural law; the importance of revolutionary dictatorship. In other news, found a potential venue for presenting the Alfieri research (chap. 1): the BIAPT conference in Edinburgh, January 2026 (https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/conference/apt-2025-2-2/).
  • Tech and politics: New paper project on governmental legitimacy and surveillance, to be presented at the MANCEPT conference in Manchester (early September) in a panel on democratic deconsolidation and non-ideal theory.

Interesting books:

  • Adami, Christoph. The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Anderson, Perry. Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. London: Verso, 2024.
  • Applbaum, Arthur Isak. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard university press, 2019.
  • Beneš, Jakub S. The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Beonio-Brocchieri, Maria Teresa. Introduzione a Abelardo. I Filosofi. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1974.
  • Bobrycki, Shane. The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Collective Behavior in Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 500 – c. 1000. USA: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Bradlow, Benjamin H. Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Braunthal, Julius. History of the International, Volume II: 1914-1943. Translated by John Clark. New York: Praeger, 1967.
  • Cacioppo, Stephanie, and John T. Cacioppo. Introduction to Social Neuroscience. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University press, 2020.
  • Callanan, John. Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Cantimori, Delio. Utopisti e riformatori italiani. Edited by Lucio Biasiori and Francesco Torchiani. Saggi. Storia e scienze sociali. Roma: Donzelli editore, 2021.
  • Cennevitz, Martin. Verrà il giorno: le origini del primo maggio. Translated by Vincenzo Papa. Milano: Elèuthera, 2025.
  • Champlin, Edward. Tiberius and His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Christiano, Thomas. The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2008.
  • Cunningham, Fiona S. Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Daum, Andreas W. Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography. Translated by Robert Savage. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Richard H. Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Robert C. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Deibert, Ronald J. Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. Toronto, Ontario: Simon & Schuster, 2025.
  • Diggins, John Patrick. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago London: University of Chicago press, 1994.
  • DISCO Network, Disco. Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. 1st ed. Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media Series. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Douady, Stéphane, Jacques Dumais, Christophe Golé, and Nancy Pick. Do Plants Know Math? Unwinding the Story of Plant Spirals, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Now. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Dourish, Paul. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge, [Massachusetts]: The MIT Press, 2017.
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionnary Age. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton university press, 1991.
  • Goldin, Claudia Dale. Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2023.
  • Graeber, David. Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
  • Graham, A. C. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science. Hong Kong : London: Chinese University Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong ; School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1978.
  • Halvorson, Hans. How Logic Works: A User’s Guide. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
  • Hancox, Dan. Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Haskel, Jonathan, and Stian Westlake. Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy. Princeton : Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Hesk, Jon. Sophocles: Ajax. Bristol Classical Press Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.
  • Howes, Hetta. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2025.
  • Jubb, Robert. Unjust Authority: Justice, Liberal Democracy and Political Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • Kaufman, Arnold S. The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics. [1st ed.]. New York: Atherton Press, 1968.
  • Kauṭilya. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra: A New Annotated Translation. Translated by Patrick Olivelle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Keane, Webb. Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kim, David D. Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Koerner, Joseph Leo. Art in a State of Siege. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kohl, James, and John Litt. Urban guerilla warfare in Latin America. Cambridge, Mass London: MIT press, 1974.
  • Kotsonis, Yanni. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lamb, Michael. A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le siècle du populisme: histoire, théorie, critique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020.
  • Levy, Jonathan. The Real Economy: History and Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
  • McQuillan, Dan. Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
  • Merriman, John M., ed. Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979.
  • Mindell, David P. The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Morrison, Robert G. Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe. Stanford Ottoman World Series. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • O’Brien, M. E., and Eman Abdelhadi. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022.
  • Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
  • Reid, Richard. The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Schroeder, Paul W. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered. London New York: Verso, 2025.
  • Seymour, Richard. Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Stanley-Becker, Isaac. Europe without Borders: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Stewart, Ian B. The Celts: A Modern History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Storm, Eric. Nationalism: A World History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 10. Berkeley: University of California press, 1996.
  • Ullmann, Walter. Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. London: P. Elek, 1977.
  • Walter, Alissa. Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Wawro, Gregory J., and Ira Katznelson. Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Wen, Xin. The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
  • Wright, Andrea. Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In-Formation Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Interesting events/visits: Juvarra buildings in Turin; Alfieri’s native home in Asti.

Rabbit holes: German rearmament, deficit spending, and the leadership cadres of the SPD; outsourcing of public coercion and patrimonialization of the State; organized crime and grassroots social control; the West as a historical political category; the cultural history of violence as organizing principle; queuing as a structuring of the urban space; Garibaldi; symbolic communication in the High Middle Ages; Roger Bacon on heresiarchs and fascinatio.

Sundry: Experimenting with decentralized alternatives to collaborative word processors/file-sharing.

Domestic politics and elections

Russian pre-electoral disinformation in Italy

An interesting blog post by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue discusses Russian propaganda in the run-up to the recent Italian general elections.

Basically, the study identifies 500 Twitter accounts of super-sharers of Russian propaganda in Italian and plots their sentiments with regard to party politics, the conflict in Ukraine, and health/pandemic-response policy during the electoral campaign. This is not, therefore, a network of coordinated inauthentic behavior, but rather a bona fide consumption of Russian propaganda.

There are some interesting takeaways from the data, the main one being the catalyst function of coverage of the Covid-19 response: a significant proportion of users in the group began sharing content from Russian propaganda websites in the context of vaccine hesitancy and resistance to public health measures such as the “green pass“, and then stayed on for Ukraine and Italian election news.

What remains unclear, however, is the extent of the influence in question. The examples given of Kremlin-friendly messages hardly suggest viewpoints without grassroots support in the country: it is fairly easy, for instance, to find the same arguments voiced by mainstream news outlets without any suspicion of collusion with Russia. Also, the analysis of candidate valence does not support the conclusion of a successful misinformation campaign: the eventual winner of the election, Giorgia Meloni, comes in for similar amounts of opprobrium as the liberal establishment Partito Democratico, while the two major parties portrayed in a positive light, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the 5 Star Movement, were punished at the polls. Perhaps the aspect of the political views of the group that was most attuned to the mood of the electorate was a generalized skepticism of the entire process: #iononvoto (#IDontVote) was a prominent hashtag among these users, and in the end more than a third of eligible voters did just that on September 25th (turnout was down 9% from the 2018 elections). But, again, antipolitical sentiment has deep roots in Italian political culture, well beyond what can be ascribed to Russian meddling.

In the end, faced with the evidence presented by the ISD study one is left with some doubt regarding the direction of causation: were RT and the other Kremlin-friendly outlets steering the political beliefs of users and thus influencing Italian public discourse, or were they merely providing content in agreement with what these users already believed, in order to increase their readership?

Trustworthiness

A global take on the mistrust moment

My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.

Information and the public sphere

Free speech and monetization

Yesterday, I attended an Electronic Frontier Foundation webinar in the ‘At Home with EFF’ series on Twitch: the title was ‘Online Censorship Beyond Trump and Parler’. Two panels hosted several veterans and heavyweights in the content moderation/trust & safety field, followed by a wrap-up session presenting EFF positions on the topics under discussion.

Several interesting points emerged with regard to the interplay of market concentration, free speech concerns, and the incentives inherent in the dominant social media business model. The panelists reflected on the long run, identifying recurrent patterns, such as the economic imperative driving infrastructure companies from being mere conduits of information to becoming active amplifiers, hence inevitably getting embroiled in moderation. While neutrality and non-interference may be the preferred ideological stance for tech companies, at least publicly, editorial decisions are made a necessity by the prevailing monetization model, the market for attention and engagement.

Perhaps the most interesting insight, however, emerged from the discussion of the intertwining of free speech online with the way in which such speech is (or is not) allowed to make itself financially sustainable. Specifically, the case was made for the importance of the myriad choke points up and down the stack where those who wish to silence speech can exert pressure: if cloud computing cannot be denied to a platform in the name of anti-discrimination, should credit card verification or merch, for instance, also be protected categories?

All in all, nothing shockingly novel; it is worth being reminded, however, that a wealth of experience in the field has already accrued over the years, so that single companies (and legislators, academics, the press, etc.) need not reinvent the wheel each time trust & safety or content moderation are on the agenda.