Liam Stanley
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liamstanley.bsky.social
Liam Stanley
@liamstanley.bsky.social
570 followers 230 following 78 posts
Teach and research politics and political economy at the University of Sheffield. Currently researching global culture wars, the radical right, and neurodiversity identity politics.
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Reposted by Liam Stanley
paullangley.bsky.social
Now available for pre-order and we're open for book talks to students, workshops and conferences, organisations etc.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
January 21, 2026 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
will-davies.bsky.social
The dilemma a place like UCL faces is that it can open a new MA and the following year it will have 50 students, mostly paying ~£20k a year. There is no incentive not to do it, and the ‘student experience’ in many cases is appalling.
timbale.bsky.social Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 2d
"Top UK universities increase their reliance on China for overseas recruitment: Data shows that two in five overseas [NB OVERSEAS] students at Russell Group institutions last year were from China" (though that figure hides considerable variation!) www.ft.com/content/9db6...
Graph showing total share of overseas student population at each university made up of Chinese students
January 28, 2026 at 7:55 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
In discussions of "weaponised interdependence", higher education obviously isn't the biggest issue. Yet through a potential exit power, China basically has the capacity to cause a serious crisis (or worse) in UK HE.
timbale.bsky.social Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 2d
"Top UK universities increase their reliance on China for overseas recruitment: Data shows that two in five overseas [NB OVERSEAS] students at Russell Group institutions last year were from China" (though that figure hides considerable variation!) www.ft.com/content/9db6...
Graph showing total share of overseas student population at each university made up of Chinese students
January 28, 2026 at 8:18 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
quinnslobodian.com
Matt Goodwin? The columnist for the magazine available only in departure lounges for private jets?
January 27, 2026 at 5:06 PM
liamstanley.bsky.social
This is a really useful article for anyone researching British capitalism, especially on the intellectual currents and political contexts of Starmer's political economy.
colmpm.bsky.social Colm Murphy @colmpm.bsky.social · 11d
My latest article is out in British Politics. I try to account for the distressed confusion gripping the UK government's economic strategy. In honour of the article's namesake, I include a tortured football analogy.

It's free to read (open access) here.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
This is the abstract for the article 'Labour's choices: The political economy of Keir Starmer's party', by Colm Murphy. It reads: 'This article explores the dilemmas at the heart of the economic strategy of Keir Starmer’s government by tracking developments in British (centre-)left political economy since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It first traces the emergence of a shared narrative of political economy circulating among the UK and transatlantic centre-left, as well as some further left and right, over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Identifying the core diagnoses and prescriptions contained within this narrative, this article situates them in economic, ideological, and political developments since 2008. It then traces the fragmentation of this economic imaginary from 2022. In combination with an unhappy transition to office, this fragmentation has generated a deeply confused and internally contradictory economic strategy in the UK Labour government. This paper then explains this process by placing ideological and political developments in their material and external contexts. A worsening macroeconomic and geopolitical context actively decomposed the constituent parts of the narrative and challenged some of its assumptions; in turn, this revived submerged disagreements within the governing party. The paper consequently argues that while these tensions can be explained partly by ideological closure, they derive to a significant and probably greater extent from institutional and material factors, especially questions of statecraft and the UK’s misfiring growth regime in an increasingly gloomy global context. The paper ends, however, by cautioning against an overbearing determinism. It indicates the remaining arenas for political agency open to the government, should it prove able and willing to act.'
January 23, 2026 at 2:25 PM
liamstanley.bsky.social
Reading quant social scientists on Claude Code is fascinating. It seems like a crisis is coming to that world, whether that's a crisis of overproduction (of potentially comic proportions) or a crisis of skills devaluation. Or both.

tompepinsky.substack.com/p/agentic-ai...
Agentic AI and Social Science Research Practice
Generative AI that follows rules to produce executable statistical code will change social science research practice, for the better and for the worse.
tompepinsky.substack.com
January 23, 2026 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
eris.anarchogoth.rip
how advanced is your nation's sinophobia? very? extremely? you are like baby, we are inventing sinophobia the likes of which cannot be dreamt of

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...
The Chinese restaurants surrounding our most sensitive military bases
The Daily Mail can reveal a bizarre anomaly in the distribution of Chinese restaurants across the country.
www.dailymail.co.uk
January 21, 2026 at 7:28 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
nickbernards.bsky.social
Out now!

I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'.

Link to the intro:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇

1/
January 20, 2026 at 10:05 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
I'm a bit late to the game on this, but this is exacting overview of the problems with US-style political science is compelling and well-worth reading. But rather than a lack of interpretation, I'd say the major issue is a lack of history (or historicism).

harpers.org/archive/2026...
In the Land of the Data Blind, by Jason Blakely
Why political science can’t grasp Trumpism
harpers.org
January 19, 2026 at 9:46 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
I found this article very illuminating on the resource geopolitics underpinning the Venezuela crisis

drilled.media/news/guyana-...
When U.S. President Donald Trump first ordered strikes on Venezuelan ships in September, it was purportedly to intercept drug traffickers. Three months later everyone, including the president himself, acknowledges the role Venezuela’s oil and its fraught relationship with U.S. oil companies over the years plays in the United States’ invasion of the country. But Drilled reporting shows that U.S. oil majors don’t necessarily want back into Venezuela’s declining and decrepit oil fields so much as they are eager to protect their interests in neighboring Guyana, home to one of the world’s most productive oil fields, which Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has aggressively been trying to claim as his own over the past decade.
January 6, 2026 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
politicsjournal.bsky.social
👏 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Prize Winners

• Naomi Head: University of Glasgow (UK)
• Niels Spierings: Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
• Liam Stanley: University of Sheffield (UK)
• Sabine Volk: University of Tübingen (Germany)
December 26, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
davidedgarwolf.bsky.social
This is by some distance the best thing out there on this subject
trillingual.bsky.social Daniel Trilling @trillingual.bsky.social · Nov 13
New: for @equatormag.bsky.social I spent months talking to BBC journalists, from front-line reporters to the former head of the World Service, about how the corporation came unstuck over Gaza. But as I was working on the story, it collided with something... bigger... www.equator.org/articles/ins...
Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • Articles • EQUATOR
How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart
www.equator.org
November 13, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
matpaterson.bsky.social
This book is now out: www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b.... A successor to the very much liked book of the same name edited by Andrew Leftwich. very pleased to be in the new one, edited by Colin Hay, with a chapter on 'politics as crisis management'.
November 10, 2025 at 4:23 PM
liamstanley.bsky.social
It’s now clear that there is no going back to “normal” democracy in the US. Even a post-MAGA democratic restoration will likely need a protracted and toxic process analogous with post-WWII denazification

on.ft.com/49pPufE
The Trump Supremacy
Opponents in disarray, allies in line, followers enthralled — the US president is already on his way to building a new world order
on.ft.com
October 24, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
sophieehill.bsky.social
A thread of inspirational quotes from two of my idols: Kemi Badenoch and Ange Postecoglou

(uh-oh, I may have gotten some mixed up... or have I??)

🧵
October 6, 2025 at 9:11 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
This is such a weird article that mixes up the kind of bombastic exaggeration that is a core part of Trump’s personality with genuinely unhinged examples of odd behaviour.
October 6, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
profafinlayson.bsky.social
There's at least one consistent pattern with this government: announcing a big policy before they've worked out any details, or planned its implementation & sending people out to defend it who've got no arguments. E.g.

1) Welfare reform: no plans for actually getting people into work (1/x)
October 2, 2025 at 9:37 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
Anyone interested in the green transition ought to check out this brilliant new article by Chris Saltmarsh, published today in @ripejournal.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Article title: The Chinese road to decarbonisation: China’s party-state capitalism in the political economy of fossil energy phase-out Author: Chris Saltmarsh Abstract: While blind spots around climate change and China in the literature are now being plugged, there remains an imbalance between emphases placed on green energy build-out versus fossil energy phase-out in the political economy of global energy transition. China’s paradoxical energy economy raises the puzzle as to whether the structures of China’s party-state capitalism render it capable of successfully confronting the fossil fuel industry, just as it has scaled green technologies. This article historicises China’s fossil economy, identifying a unique potentiality for fossil energy phase-out arising from its idiosyncratic post-revolutionary development trajectory. The prominence of the CCP in China’s party-state capitalism contrasts with the West’s basis in profit-seeking market forces. This divergence underpins distinct power resources to dominate carbon-intensive industries and ideational resources to legitimate the social upheavals of energy transition. In practice, fossil energy phase-out is far from pre-determined as the potentiality rests in an ongoing struggle between corporate and political objectives within the regime as well as the uncertain responses of domestic populations and international actors. Regardless, scholars and practitioners alike should now understand China as standing alone in the world system as a geopolitically ascendent, continent-sized, post-revolutionary party-state with unique capacities to lead global energy transition.
September 18, 2025 at 11:07 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
Quote of the day courtesy of Bismarck.
September 17, 2025 at 10:17 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
One of the strangest things about my time in HE is how REF has gone from universally loathed by academics to seemingly our best hope for justifying (and therefore maintaining) the research component of our jobs.
September 12, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
stewarthome.bsky.social
“Electric cars can be remotely controlled. Again, not a conspiracy theory. These cars can be shut down… There’s a reason why this neo-Marxist, communist, shambolic government wants us in electric cars. It’s so that we have no freedom whatsoever…" (sic) hopenothate.org.uk/2025/09/10/i...
Inside Reform's conference: conspiracy theories galore – HOPE not hate
Walking around Reform UK’s conference on Friday 6 and Saturday 7 September, one thing was clear: the party is utterly unfit to govern. Most peculiar...
hopenothate.org.uk
September 11, 2025 at 9:09 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
A question about Mandelson: if Starmer sacks him, then does that risk pissing off Trump by implying that fraternising with Epstein represents a red line that should not be crossed?
September 11, 2025 at 8:52 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
jamellebouie.net
the free press trying to make a scandal out of reading robert dahl is very funny (shoutout to dahl, one of the best to ever do it)
anthonymkreis.bsky.social Anthony Michael Kreis @anthonymkreis.bsky.social · Sep 9
One of Bari Weiss’s reporters over at the Free Press was shocked to discover what Columbia students are reading in class:

lol wat
September 9, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Liam Stanley
direthoughts.com
Updated theory of British political decision making
September 2, 2025 at 8:49 AM
liamstanley.bsky.social
As a frequent reader of kids books, I wouldn’t have guessed frog as the most he/him gendered animal
August 15, 2025 at 8:30 PM