Doug Stokes

Professor in International Relations. Vienna. Hon Prof, Exeter University. Think tanker. Confront the infinite.

[Philip Cunliffe @thephilippics]

Are these guys not Blackshirts, literally dressed all in black, enforcing blasphemy laws?

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

The UK is a striking example. Its comparatively low rates of tax and social insurance contributions for low-paid workers plus a relatively flat state pension mean that people (immigrant or otherwise) who do small amounts of paid work or remain on low incomes contribute little to the exchequer but still benefit from robust state support. https://t.co/QcgoEI4PQC

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

UK productivity grew twice as fast as thought after 2008 financial crisis https://t.co/2gRwdMeXzh How could the OFS get this so wrong?

[Peter Ramsay 🇬🇧 @peteray21]

A coalition of fake nationalists who want to hand over their peoples’ “independence” to the EU.

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

Watch this, highly recommend, and remember - Boris Johnson Ben Wallace Keir Starmer etc disgracefully went along with prosecuting SAS and refused to change the ECHR/HRA law to stop the madness.
Right now special forces in Hereford and Poole cannot be told the legal basis for their ongoing operations. No authority can clarify because the ECHR madness is unconstrained and depends on whatever lawyers and judges decide.
Many are being persecuted right now for doing missions they were ordered to do and were given medals for.
The senior military have been pathetic in hiding year after year.
The shameful saga says a lot about why yookay is a laughing stock.
What sort of country behaves like this towards heroes like this?
One that’s lost and its elites are rotten to the core…

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

@BDSixsmith Congratulations

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

An interesting and very counter intuitive read. I recycle most things but perhaps that's anti environmental?

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.

- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.

- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.

- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.

- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.

Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.

New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. https://t.co/TsGJdcwG76

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

Some of my earliest memories as a kid in East London were the horse drawn rag and bone men. 'Any ole iron' was the shout.

[Philip Cunliffe @thephilippics]

The Man Who Was Friday: Global Islamism after Unipolarity
https://t.co/tKouB7wsQm

In advance of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve had a piece published in American Affairs providing an overview of the Global War on Terror, and the prospects for jihadism, political Islam and global Islam itself in an era of US decline.

The question behind the piece is simple – what happens to jihadism, Islamism and global Islam as US leadership of the international system ends? 9/11 happened at the peak of US unipolarity. Since then the US has obviously declined, but this has had little if anything to do with the efforts of Al Qaeda or any other Islamist or jihadi organisation. What will Islamists do when the Great Satan becomes the Little Satan? And why is Islamism declining in its historic core, the Arab Middle East?

The paradox, I argue, is that Western decline and Islamist decline are going to go in hand in hand. This is because both Islamism and global Islam itself – at least as they emerged since the 1970s – are predicated on the rise of US unipolar hegemony. Now, they will decline together.

The inter-relationship between US power and Islamism / jihadism goes far beyond the well-documented and well-established links between the CIA and jihadism, stretching all the way back to the Afghan war in the 1980s, in which the US armed jihadis to fight its wars, a policy that continued right through the 1990s across the Balkans. This alliance broke down with the attacks of 9/11, before being restored in the 2010s as part of the NATO effort to oust Arab nationalist regimes in Libya and Syria.

Beyond the ebb and flow of the US-Islamist alliance, I argue that the spread of jihadism and the spread of global Islam itself was rooted in US-led hyper-globalisation. This reflected the spread of new communications technology, open borders and financialization. More importantly, globalisation was predicated on suppressing the nation-state and with it, national sources of political obligation and loyalty that might have substituted Islamic radicalism with national solidarities. This has critically undermined states in the post-colonial world, where states were already weak. Paradoxically, the Ummah – the transnational Islamic community of believers – could flourish in unipolarity because there was a single overarching centre of political authority – the US itself.

Jihadis, blue helmets and aid workers were all different prongs of the same political order of cosmopolitan globalization. Alongside UN protectorates, aid corridors defended by multinational troops, no fly zones policed by NATO bombers, and refugee camps abandoned by governments to NGO rule, we had the development of insurgent Islamic emirates in regions battered by war and military interventions. Jihadism took advantage of state failure everywhere, not only in peripheral areas such as the Horn of Africa and the Sahel but in the West too. Brussels, capital of the transnational European Union, became one of the epicentres of jihadi atrocities in Europe. With lawless districts overseen by hapless security forces, the central state in Belgium had been deliberately decentralised and disorganised by complex multilayered administrations intended to devolve power to Belgium’s sub-national groups and administrative fiefdoms over the course of decades. With the central state crushed between the transnational bureaucracy above and devolved sub-national administrations below, jihadis found they could operate as easily in Brussels as in Bamako.

As indicated by failure of the Belgian state at the very political core of the European Union, globalization complemented the post-political vision of the Ummah because both were predicated on repressing the sovereign state as a mediating institution for the purposes of political representation and resolving conflicting social interests.

As US supremacy declines, geopolitical pluralism returns, and the globalised world economy cracks up, so too the unipolar Ummah will begin to buckle and come under strain. I argue that the signs of that are already all around us. As the West crumbles as a geopolitical entity, so too Islamic radicals will be deprived of being able to blame a palpably weakened West for the challenges besetting the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

Back when Al Qaeda attacked London’s mass transit system on July 7 2005, their deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri denounced British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a leader of the ‘crusader empire.’ While British forces were embroiled alongside US forces in Iraq, the day of the attack was chosen to coincide with Britain presiding over the G8 summit, as well as being the first day that Britain assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, and when Britain was announced to host the 2008 Olympics. In short, the day of the jihadi attacks on the British capital was the peak of early twenty-first century globalist Britain, when Britain crowned a nexus of overlapping transnational institutions, commitments and status. It is hard to imagine any British citizen holding Britain in as high esteem today as the jihadis did back then; perhaps radical Islamists and jihadis are the last to still believe in Western greatness as it exonerates them of their own victimization.

Today, the Islamic dialectic of fascination and repulsion with Western life will decline alongside the decline in Western cohesion and productivity, at the same time as interallied feuding will make it more difficult to attribute the malignant failures of the modern Middle East on the imperialism and cultural contamination of a Western foil that no longer exists. In the West, Islamopopulism is the rearguard manoeuvre in which the Left seeks support among Muslim voters to substitute for the defection of working class voters to national-populist parties. How long this electoral alliance stays in place remains to be seen. The question for us all is whether the nations that are left behind after the withdrawal of the US imperium can build functioning and independent institutions for the purposes of collective self-government and political order.

This is an overview of the argument; it is developed at greater length in the piece, with more historical evidence and elaboration concerning the relationship between global Islam, Islamism, jihadism, the role of communism, neoliberalism, the failure of nation-building and the Global War on Terror, the works of Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel and Faisal Devji (among others), as well as Middle Eastern history and scans of the wider Islamic world.

Comments welcome; this is a debate that will continue as we transition to a multipolar world.

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

How Greece is wooing hedge funds - https://t.co/Fm35yaO2cO Greece has an excellent retirement visa too. We need more tax competition amongst states.

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

His son's photographs of English rural life are also masterful. "James Ravilious: A Life" is well worth getting.

[Ravilious @Ravilious1942]

Eric Ravilious was killed #OTD in 1942 when the aircraft he was in during a search & rescue mission off Iceland failed to return. From the countryside to war, his depiction of Britain in the 30s & early years of #WW2 remain an incredible legacy, decades after his death.

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

@GarethBHughes @FUDdaily 37% of Britons say government spending on defence and the Armed Forces should be increased, a decline of 11ppts from March 2026 (48%).

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

@GarethBHughes @FUDdaily Russia = 1.4 million battlefield casualties, 450k dead since Feb 2022 invasion, and now controls 8% less territory. UK inventories = a choice. Poland= preeminent land power; Germany is now getting very serious as the ' arsenal of democracy'. Will be a v diff picture by 2028.

[Aylmer @AylmerTH]

Commonwealth citizens can register to vote in UK elections the day they arrive. Not one Commonwealth country returns the favour.

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

Every little helps!

[Charlotte Gill @CharlotteCGill]

Professor Dan Goodley, an expert in "Critical disability studies", has led or worked on projects costing the taxpayer approximately £2.4 million.

He's also a fellow of the British Academy, which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

See if you can understand him

[878 @878org]

British military chief furious about defence shortfalls as threats rise - @878org in America's @RCDefense this week.

Our CEO Dr Radomir Tylecote, & Head of Defence @RobertClark87, write for @RCDefense on our recent report, 'Britain's Military Deterrence Gaps', describing the holes in defence readiness that Britain will need to fix if she is to once more become a serious Atlantic defence partner to the United States.

https://t.co/CEEa4QesiO

[Doug Stokes @profdws]

In the post-Arday furore, I am re-reading Shelby Steele's excellent book on White Guilt and have just discovered that he and his son @Hebro_Steele have a new movie out with the same name. Looks very interesting. Official Trailer (2026) - YouTube https://t.co/OzWLKAaNQI