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    Encampment policy and public perception: a cross-country analysis of host community responses to Rohingya refugees
    (Springer Nature, 2025-07-06) Keeni, Minakshi; Takashino, Nina
    This study examines the influence of encampment policies on host community perceptions towards Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Nepal, with an emphasis on how these perceptions shape the future of the refugees. Bangladesh, which has implemented an encampment policy, contrasts with Nepal, where no such policy exists. The research employs ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to evaluate host community attitudes towards government policies, citizenship for newborns, and access to essential services like healthcare, jobs, education, and social security. The findings reveal that in Bangladesh, wealthier community members perceive less economic competition from refugees, particularly in job markets, due to the restrictions imposed by the encampment policy. However, social media in Bangladesh exacerbates negative perceptions, particularly concerning citizenship for Rohingya newborns, potentially hindering social cohesion. In Nepal, the absence of an encampment policy correlates with more negative perceptions among younger and economically vulnerable groups, who view refugees as competitors for limited resources. The study concludes that while encampment policies may mitigate immediate economic tensions, they risk deepening social divisions. Conversely, the lack of such policies in Nepal may lead to heightened resource competition and social tension. The research highlights the need for adaptive policy strategies that balance economic integration with social cohesion, ensuring sustainable refugee-host relations in both countries.
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    El capital como poder en el siglo XXI: Una conversación
    (2025) Hudson, Michael; Nitzan, Jonathan; Fix, Blair; Di Muzio, Tim
    El 3 de diciembre de 2024, Michael Hudson se reunió con los investigadores del capital como poder Jonathan Nitzan, Tim Di Muzio y Blair Fix para discutir las intersecciones entre sus dos líneas de investigación. Lo que sigue es una transcripción de la conversación. Vídeo de YouTube (inglés): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBOU4xBg2pA
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    The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought
    (2025) Fix, Blair
    For decades, the word ‘fascist’ existed solely as a hyperbole — a term meant to insult rather than describe. But lately, politics have grown so hyperbolic that the label looks increasingly sincere. For example, when a powerful man advocates far-right politics and brazenly performs Nazi salutes in front of a cheering crowd, it seems like we have a word for that. What was it again? Ah yes … fascist. Of course, fascism is easy to see when it happens elsewhere. But when it grows under your nose within your own culture, even the most blatant signs can seem obscure. So what we need, then, is a hard-nosed way to measure the spread of fascist ideology — a method that is calmly quantitative, immune to both apologetics and hyperbole. In my mind, the best option is to study patterns in written language. Backing up a bit, all ideologies have words that they emphasize, corresponding to concepts that they deem important. Now, we can get a qualitative sense for these words by reading a corpus of ideological text. But if we want to quantify an ideology, a better approach is to count words. When we do so, we can objectively identify the ‘jargon’ of an ideology — the words that it uses frequently and (crucially) overuses relative to mainstream writing. And once we’ve got this jargon, we can return to written language at large and track the changing frequency of our ideological jargon. The goal is to use word frequency to measure the spread (or collapse) of the ideology in question. In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language. Because I’m an anglophone, I’ll start with English writing. Running the numbers, I find that in English books, fascist jargon has been on the rise since the 1980s. Now this trend is admittedly alarming. But I’m going to resist the urge to focus myopically on the present. And that’s because the best way to understand today’s neo-fascism is by studying the deep past. Here, then, is my key finding. Although ‘fascism’ was ostensibly born in the early 20th century, the linguistic data tells a different story about fascism’s origin. Looking at five European languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French), I find that the high point of fascist jargon came several centuries before Hitler and Mussolini were born. In short, what we call ‘fascism’ may be best treated as a repackaging and rebranding of a set of dark ideas that have longed plagued humanity. So when fascists look into the future, they’re really peering into the long-dead past.
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    The Half Life of Empire
    (2025) Fix, Blair
    A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits. And on the large scale, we have the long-term evolution of human societies — a scale so sweeping that the actions of individuals are as insignificant as the shifting grains of desert sand. The task of social science is to somehow connect these two scales — to show how the characters of history act on a stage that they do not fully control. Looking at the present political spectacle, it’s clear that the world order is changing. In a matter of months, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the US-led regime that reigned since the end World War II. But here is an interesting question: if Trump had not been re-elected, to what extent would things be different? The answer depends on our choice of scale. In a world without Trump, the eddies of small-scale history would surely be altered. There would be no ‘department of government efficiency’, for example. Nor would their likely be an unfolding US-led trade war. But on the scale of long-term history, many tides would remain the same. Chief among them would be the inexorable decline of US empire. To put things bluntly, the ‘American century’ is over and will never return.
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    The Soviet Experiment with Empire
    (2025) Fix, Blair
    In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use. Afterwards, several readers requested that I apply the same methods to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Here’s my attempt to do so.