third recent text from friends in ~Jordan asking if Zohran Mamdani is *really* about to win

1. as a political scientist we absolutely love to discuss early voting
2. first time in a while my voice messages back haven't needed to explain some distressing feature of U.S. politics
3. fingers crossed

That shift is obvious to all: I reached out to a knowledgeable friend about the piece, and he hadn't even heard of the court case: "I've been on Palestine frequency since 2023"

But it also shows up in the data, for instance ACLED's tabulations of protests in Jordan --

list experiment in the wild

The findings reinforce that users across platforms can develop very distinct understandings of the costs of conflict. Violence is more rooted in macro-political meaning on Twitter than on Telegram, with ceaseless airstrike warnings divorced from dialogue on the conflict’s central framings.

We also examined how messages differ across users how post on all three platforms. On a given day in 2020, one revolutionary org posted a stylized remembrance of a revolutionary youth on Twitter; news about airstrikes and Assad-ISIS conflict on Telegram; news about both, but non-stylized, on FB.

The paper constructed and analyzed similar datasets from three distinct social media platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook. Analyzing millions of messages and images from 2017-2020, we show distinct visions of the conflict across these different platforms

Our article “Social Media Narratives Across Conflict: Evidence from Syria” is now ahead of print at the Journal of Politics!

Trump wants to “clean” Gaza of Palestinians

Calls King Abdullah directly after US pauses all foreign military + development aid to Jordan but not Egypt and Israel. Those are top 3 recipients of US $ globally.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

And @yezidsayigh.bsky.social latest writing on the IMF's struggles to impose any conditions on Egypt's military companies

carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/...

today brought to you by @seanyom.bsky.social and Pete Moore's excellent new article "The Fortress State: Extreme Militarization in Jordan"

brill.com/view/journal...

reading new articles about about military spending in MENA and can only think of this Dril tweet

Excited to be co-organizing the 2024 Comparative Labor Workshop with Bluesky-less Danny Daneri!

We aim to bring scholars working on labor issues across subfields and methods orientations into conversation

Please apply with an abstract by Dec. 8 for March 8-9, 2024: forms.gle/8LDewfTw4a1N...

Translating lawyer Hala Ahed's call for Jordan to withdraw from water deal w/Israel @ Dubai COP next month

She is an influential Front Line Human Rights Defender awardee whose phone had been targeted w/Pegasus spyware

www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/profile/h...
twitter.com/Hala_Deeb/st...

Translation of Jordanian activist Sameer Mashhour on how translating massive street mobilization for Palestine toward political wins requires institutions

Backdrop:100s of ongoing arrests, years-long repression of country's teachers' union and independent parties

twitter.com/sameermashho...