Project MUSE®: Soundings: A journal of politics and culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Soundings: A journal of politics and culture.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USIssue 53 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: Soundings: A journal of politics and cultureTWOProject MUSE®Soundings: A journal of politics and culture1741-07971362-6620Latest articles in Soundings: A journal of politics and culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial: Challenging authoritarian political cultures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987195
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The late summer and autumn of 2025 saw mass arrests during non-violent Palestine solidarity protests in cities such as London and Liverpool. The proscription of Palestine Action as a 'terrorist organisation', in response to its sustained nonviolent direct action against the direct links between UK-based arms manufacturers and the genocide in Gaza, has resulted in protesters being targeted for simply holding signs saying 'I Support Palestine Action'. This repression of peaceful protest has disproportionately impacted on older activists and has been accompanied by an intense vilification of solidarity action. Shabana Mahmood and Keir Starmer have sought to construct Palestine solidarity protests as 'unBritish', and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallEditorial: Challenging authoritarian political cultures2026-04-09text/htmlen-USEditorial: Challenging authoritarian political cultures2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®483872026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Subverting Nkrumah: The Information Research Department and the practice of neo-colonialism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987196
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The British state's authoritarianism has been integral to its international operations and long neo-colonial historiesIn recent years we have seen numerous examples of the British state's suppression of dissent and civil liberties, obfuscation of public oversight, and secrecy in its policing and security operations. The 2023 Public Order Act and expanded police powers have been used to impose severe sentences on peaceful protestors, as in the five-year sentences handed down to those who blocked the M25 motorway in 2022.1 Responding to this sentence, Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, issued a statement questioning 'how a sentence of this magnitude can be either reasonable
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallSubverting Nkrumah: The Information Research Department and the practice of neo-colonialism2026-04-09text/htmlen-USSubverting Nkrumah: The Information Research Department and the practice of neo-colonialism2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®725432026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09'Everyone knew what was happening': The paradoxes of state secrecy and its making
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987197
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British state secrecy continues to reflect the colonial past that shaped itThis article focuses on official means and practices related to state secrecy. In highlighting some of the tensions, paradoxes and continuing colonial characteristics of UK state secrecy practices, it calls into question understandings of secrecy associated with authoritarianism, as well as the alternatives posed as its antidotes. Instead, it looks at the more nuanced, subtle, collective, and contradictory ways in which authoritarianism is (re)produced, entrenched, and extended - primarily through a focus on state documentation. The article also cautions against narrow but sweeping understandings of authoritarianism; raises questions about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmall'Everyone knew what was happening': The paradoxes of state secrecy and its making2026-04-09text/htmlen-US'Everyone knew what was happening': The paradoxes of state secrecy and its making2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®1248772026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Race and nation in Wales
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987198
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Does Wales have a nationally distinctive approach to race?The very existence of the Welsh nation is in some senses oppositional. The most original and theoretically sophisticated history of the Welsh, Gwyn Alf Williams's When was Wales?, locates the formation of the people within the period of resistance against the Saxon invasions, which produced a border for a people having much in common.1 They were defined by the invaders as Welsh (foreigners), while they called themselves Cymry (companions). Subsequent Welsh history was in some ways a dialectical process, in which the cross-border thesis created an internal antithesis - the many and changing iterations of Welshness. After the acts of incorporation of 1536 and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallRace and nation in Wales2026-04-09text/htmlen-USRace and nation in Wales2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®635032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Affects of austerity in the third sector
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987199
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Austere capitalism is a catalyst for worker stress and ill health in third sector spacesRelations between the state, market and third sector are in many ways like those between tectonic plates - continuously shifting and often uneasy. Each sector influences and shapes the others, creating tensions, convergences, divergences and transformations. In Scotland, the third sector is sculpted by the policies and priorities of both the UK and Scottish governments; and the decisions made at these levels affect the funding received and services delivered, as well as determining the bureaucratic mechanisms through which the third sector maintains its existence. This reliance on the state and - at its most stable - the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallAffects of austerity in the third sector2026-04-09text/htmlen-USAffects of austerity in the third sector2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®430722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Organising lessons
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987200
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Dave Featherstone and Jenny Morrison interview Rosie Hampton, Friends of the Earth Scotland Oil and Gas Campaigns Manager and Living Rent Partick member.This discussion focuses on Rosie Hampton's involvement in Friends of the Earth Scotland and Living Rent, organisations involved in very different kinds of campaigning. The first section discusses a Just Transition, reflecting on FoES's discussions with trade unions in their Our Power campaign, which sought to co-create demands for the energy transition with offshore oil and gas workers. This is of particular significance given the closure of the Grangemouth-Petrochemical plant/refinery in 2025. It also engages with community organising in the North-East of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallOrganising lessons2026-04-09text/htmlen-USOrganising lessons2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®422682026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The long 1980s reframed
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987201
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Reflections on The 80s: Photographing Britain (Tate Britain, London, November 2024-May 2025)The first image greeting visitors to The 80s: Photographing Britain is a photograph of Jayne Desai, one of the South Asian women at the heart of the Grunwick dispute of 1977. It is a striking choice to begin with: not Thatcher, not punk, but a woman of colour on strike. Desai stands as both an emblem of defiance and a reminder that the political terrain of the 1980s had already begun in the 1970s. The curators are clear that the decade cannot be told as a self-contained narrative of Thatcherite triumph or consumerist style. Instead, the exhibition insists on an expanded temporality, what might be called the long 1980s, one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallThe long 1980s reframed2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe long 1980s reframed2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®125522026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Rethinking economic growth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987202
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After the Second World War, the pursuit of economic growth came to dominate politics and society, not just in the West, but throughout the world. People in poor countries aspired to catch up with the West; Western nations chased each other ever onwards and upwards in a league of their own. The measure used to compare growth performance, both over time and across national boundaries, was Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head of population. It was taken for granted that there was no limit to growth and that growth was an unqualified good.With the onset of a prolonged period of anaemic growth after the financial crash of 2008 and the recession that followed it, these assumptions were called into question. Faced with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallRethinking economic growth2026-04-09text/htmlen-USRethinking economic growth2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®397322026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Podcasting, political elites and the democratic crisis in the United Kingdom
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987203
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Political elites have adopted 'cosy' careers in podcasting alongside their newfound political 'frenemies', further undermining the media's democratic functionWith nearly half of the world's population casting their vote, 2024 was declared a 'super year' for elections. However, it turned out to be a year in which democracy reached a new crisis point, with electorates across the globe returning greater numbers of authoritarian and populist governments, and disillusionment and lack of interest among the voting public reaching new heights. We are living in an age of post-democracy: politics has gradually slipped back into the control of unelected elites as democratic institutions have been hollowed out, producing a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallPodcasting, political elites and the democratic crisis in the United Kingdom2026-04-09text/htmlen-USPodcasting, political elites and the democratic crisis in the United Kingdom2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®605932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The precarity engine: An alternative, incomplete history of British computing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987204
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Wartime filmmaker and artist Humphrey Jennings begins his idiosyncratic but compulsive guide to the industrial transformation of Britain with an extract from Paradise Lost, which describes how Mammon led the angels expelled from heaven into creating Pandaemonium, the capital of Hell.1This article offers an abridged history of the British computer industry as a way of seeking to understand its own contribution to Pandaemonium, and of revising some of the prevailing narratives that have surrounded the growth of electronics and computing power since the 1940s. It argues that, whilst computer technology has resulted in some remarkable innovations over the years, it is important that we consider these within the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallThe precarity engine: An alternative, incomplete history of British computing2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe precarity engine: An alternative, incomplete history of British computing2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®724712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Phil Cohen 1943-1924
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987205
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By profession Phil Cohen, who has died aged 81, was for the larger part of his life an academic. Yet he never felt like an academic and he seldom conducted his life as if he were one. His was a restless intelligence, endlessly curious, zipping from one collective project to the next, becoming in the process a peculiar species of trickster-intellectual. The dynamism of his thinking derived from his listening to the voices of London's dispossessed, internalising their sensibilities such that they entered his own being. This was a practice which challenged the very basis of academic objectivity.He exuded an incomparable intensity, driven by the conviction that to live the life of the mind was a mission which required
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/618/image/coversmallPhil Cohen 1943-19242026-04-09text/htmlen-USPhil Cohen 1943-19242026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®84212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09