Read the Full Statement🚨⬇️
internationalpolicy.org/publications...

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Ultimately, argues Romeva i Rueda, "As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup and beyond, mega-events will not simply ask whether democracies can host the world. They will ask whether democracies are prepared to govern themselves coherently under global scrutiny."

While this Olympics will spotlight Italy, there's already been grumblings about the ICE agents sent from the United States to the games; the agents abroad have a different role than those conducting deportations in the US, but their presence been enough to illicit protest already.

Host countries should not take for granted that winning the bid means people from other countries will be willing to travel and compete, especially if they cannot guarantee freedom from arbitrary detention. Organizations governing international sport can and ensure such protections exist.

"Fans, athletes, journalists, officials, and civil society actors must be able to travel freely and safely for the event to function as a genuinely global gathering. Mobility, in this sense, is not a logistical detail. It is a democratic condition," argues Raül Romeva i Rueda for the IPJ.

Read the full piece ⬇️
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/w...

@negarmortazavi.bsky.social: "I don’t think the American people have the appetite for another big, endless war in the Middle East”

Here's something I published @cipolicy.bsky.social basically explicitly for that audience, about how the international community can respond to illegal US actions (in this case, the killing of Venezuelans and abduction, but it holds for internal killings too) internationalpolicy.org/publications...

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Unchecked security forces, filled with agents assured that the Trump administration will protect them, are running roughshod over democracy and the law. The way out of the crisis is to ensure that they do not enjoy impunity forever, starting from promises of accountability now.

"Emboldened by the lack of comprehensive, meaningful accountability for similar conduct over the past decades, the Trump administration has chosen to escalate and expand preexisting abusive practices in pursuit of its authoritarian aims" argues @rosie-berman.bsky.social

The way out of the crisis of impunity is accountability. In domestic policing, that means an end to qualified immunity, including and especially for federal agents. People must be secure in reporting wrongdoing to congress, and even in opposition Congress should prepare investigations of harm.

The crisis people are experiencing in the United States is the same as the crisis people are experiencing at the end of the Pentagon's bayonets abroad: promised and proven impunity for those doing the harm, a threat to endure what one must for those targeted. internationalpolicy.org/publications...