On Illiberalism

A research program update

I’ve spent almost a year away from my Substack newsletter considering new directions. In February 2023, I gave a talk to the 13th Australian International Political Economy Network Workshop on the United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his hedge fund career. I’ve also updated my Academia.edu personal site with new documents from my postgraduate studies in higher education teaching.

What has emerged from this is an overarching focus on illiberalism in global politics. I began after my 2020 PhD to focus on metapolitical thinkers in the Alt-Right such as Edward Dutton, Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents), and Ron Unz. I looked at deplatforming; payment systems; economic sanctions; and how strategic culture and weaponised interdependence frameworks might explain this. I mapped out the historical literature in the University of Melbourne’s library system - finding deeper collections on European far right and fascist circles, and Russian authoritarian transitions.

I am now working on a series of new academic journal articles about these areas that build on several publicly available Postdoc proposals. I am using the Brooklyn startup Scite.AI to track citation statements in the recent academic literature, and to identify and to follow several global research teams. You can read a brief statement on my research program which identifies both theoretical and applied domains.

For an overarching geopolitical view I recommend Michael W. Doyle’s recent book Cold Peace: Avoiding The New Cold War (New York W.W. Norton & Co., 2023). I will offer some comments about this book and Doyle’s perspective in the coming weeks.

I’m also looking at AI tools for academic writing: what has worked for you?

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