For the past few months I’ve been heavily absorbed in a new role Directing Queen Mary’s Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences …
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Vladimir Putin has challenged liberals to defend liberalism. Liberalism is “obsolete”, Putin stated in an interview this weekend, before his arrival at the G20 in Osaka. Conflating immigration with crime, he insisted that “every crime must have its punishment”. No doubt relishing his timing with respect to Stonewall as much as the G20, he spoke of “core populations” who merited the state’s support. Sexual minorities, by contrast, deserve little more than provisional tolerance of their behaviour. Putin applauded national populists in countries across the liberal democratic west. He supported their upending of the rules-based liberal international order and its domestic counterpart of multicultural national societies. Putin’s rant is a perfect illustration of contemporary anti-liberalism…
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50 years ago, in the space of less than a week, the US experienced not only the Stonewall riots (and the birth of the modern gay rights movement) but a further event of historic significance, less remarked upon at the time, and practically forgotten today (at least in public debate). Yet this second event would intersect with the historical trajectory of Stonewall and the rise of social movement politics more broadly during the 1970s, with important implications for American democracy in the years to come. That other event was the swearing in of Warren Burger, a committed homophobe, as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Burger’s election was triply significant…
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