Tamir Moustafa
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tamirmoustafa.bsky.social
Tamir Moustafa
@tamirmoustafa.bsky.social
Law/society, religion/politics, authoritarian ‘rule by law’; Middle East/Egypt; politics of knowledge production. https://tamirmoustafa.com/books
Someone’s working to monetize this with an app, no doubt.
Gig authoritarianism
NEW: a contractor is paying random people $300 to physically track immigrants for ICE. They're given addresses, vehicles, told to monitor the target. That information then goes back up to ICE. These are not licensed private investigators; members of the public

www.404media.co/contractor-p...
November 19, 2025 at 2:33 AM
More US academics are freaking out about the “department of war” than they are about an actual genocide being enabled by their government.
September 6, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Truth in advertising.
September 5, 2025 at 12:56 AM
I’m not on board with every statement in this piece, but it needed to be written and is well worth reading.
If you work on any @UofCalifornia give this one your time. Uni leadership is belatedly asking us to "Stand Up For UC" while repeatedly revising faculty disciplinary policy to make standing up impossible. This essay asks, how did we get here? What now?

utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/09/why-...
Why Should We “Stand Up for the UC?” (Guest Post)
Paris on September 1, 2016     By Sean L. Malloy, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), University of California...
utotherescue.blogspot.com
September 2, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
Pretty amazing that the university president who on more than 3 occasions in the past 18 months called police onto campus to arrest faculty and students, started the new school year by telling students “Question those with the urge to silence or cancel others,” nyunews.com/news/2025/08...
Mills takes the stage to welcome class of 2029 - Washington Square News
Kicking off her third year as university president, Linda Mills welcomed thousands of first-year students at Radio City Music Hall during two showings of NYU’s biannual Presidential Welcome Reality Sh...
nyunews.com
August 28, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
A strange editorial that treats the new offensive as a misconceived, "unworkable" counterinsurgency strategy rather than what it demonstrably is: an ethnonationalist campaign of genocide which, within its own monstrous logic, may well be "workable".

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The Guardian view on Israel’s Gaza takeover plan: a destructive act that must be stopped | Editorial
Editorial: Benjamin Netanyahu has embarked on an operation that guarantees fresh miseries and will solve absolutely nothing
www.theguardian.com
August 8, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
Fondly recalling my own experience with NSF review... in which one reviewer questioned why fieldwork couldn't just be done on Zoom and another referred to feminist IR as not a "well-established body of research." 🫠

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core
Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline - Volume 23 Issue 2
www.cambridge.org
June 25, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
Concord NH
April 5, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Nailed it.
Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage
March 14, 2025 at 7:23 PM
To be clear, this executive order does not “mistake” dissent for bigotry, it purposefully conflates the two. This toxic politics is at one and the same time anti-Palestinian and antisemetic.
February 24, 2025 at 5:50 AM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
I got an Egypt starter pack kicked off.

I'm sure I'm missing many brilliant folks. Please flag accounts I should add!

go.bsky.app/7ujBLzQ
November 17, 2024 at 10:25 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
We noticed there wasn't a starter pack on authoritarian politics yet – Now there is!

go.bsky.app/UFHn7sS

Spread and ask to join!
November 15, 2024 at 5:21 PM
It's touching to read all the tributes to James C. Scott and his scholarship. But I wonder how many political scientists paying tribute would reject his scholarship if they were reviewing it for the APSR, because it doesn't fit within the strictures of the discipline. It is fitting that he opened….
July 23, 2024 at 12:07 AM
Polisky, this may be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone knows of an empirical study that examines how the peer review process may inadvertently work against some research methods while benefitting others. Here’s an example of what I’m after: Austin Ranney, the APSR editor in the 1960s…
June 22, 2024 at 6:15 PM
Polisky

At moments like this, do you wonder why political science is so distant from politics and so obsessed with "value-neutrality"? This article helps to explain why.

doi.org/10.1017/S153...
May 1, 2024 at 6:35 PM
Polisky

"I don't see why it's necessary to so flatly exclude large areas of our discipline." James K. Pollock, April 9, 1964, reacting to the draft policy for the NSF Political Science Program.

For context, see "Political Science as a Dependent Variable" in PoP:
doi.org/10.1017/S153...
April 25, 2024 at 2:23 PM
Polisky

It’s publication day for “Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline”
 
I hope you’ll have a look and join me in considering how the NSF shaped political science and the social sciences more generally.
Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core
Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline
doi.org
April 23, 2024 at 4:34 PM
OMG, these allegations are bananas. Let’s see how this shakes out at the nytimes.
New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed racist and violent rhetoric toward Palestinians.
Extraordinary charges of bias emerge against NYTimes reporter Anat Schwartz
New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed...
mondoweiss.net
February 25, 2024 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
"On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head."

www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...
Opinion: I'm an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn't war — it was annihilation
As a surgeon, I volunteered at a Gaza hospital. The conditions were unthinkable. With a ground offensive in Rafah, people have nowhere to go.
www.latimes.com
February 17, 2024 at 4:55 AM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
The Palestinian scholar @danaelkurd.bsky.social learned about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks while visiting the Jewish Museum of Berlin. For New Lines, she describes the whiplash of absorbing atrocities across multiple decades and reflects on worlds overturned.
Memory Voids and Role Reversals
A Palestinian scholar describes the whiplash of learning about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks while visiting the Jewish Museum of Berlin, and reflects on moral juxtapositions and worlds overturned
newlinesmag.com
November 1, 2023 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Tamir Moustafa
Emily Tamkin on the anti-war movement on the Jewish left.

“‘It felt powerful to be in grief with community, with people who are able to mourn both Israeli and Palestinian dead.’“

slate.com/news-and-pol...
What the Jewish-Led Protests Against Israel’s Actions Look Like Right Now
At the White House, hundreds pleaded: “How dare you use my grief to justify killing innocent civilians in my name?”
slate.com
October 19, 2023 at 12:51 AM