Owen D Thomas

🚨 New paper out in European Journal of IR 🚨 Faiz Sheikh and I draw on Ibn Khaldun’s political thought to rethink the crisis of liberal international order—not as a problem of technique, but as an unresolved and destructive tension between LIO’s claim to universalism and its entrenched whiteness.

🔗 The article is open access at doi.org/10.1177/1354...

1/ 📢 New research! How do societies make sense of violent events? In a new paper with @politicsandspace.bsky.social, Victoria Basham, @rhyscrilley.bsky.social and I explore how the London Bridge attack & Grenfell Tower fire were understood in media & public discourse—and why this matters. 🧵👇

10/ Why does this matter? 🔹 The idea that violence in global cities like London is an aberration furthers myths about how violence is meant to happen to some people and places but not others. 🔹 Denial undermines social justice; it forecloses the pursuit of structural change.

1/ 📢 New research! How do societies make sense of violent events? In a new paper with @politicsandspace.bsky.social, Victoria Basham, @rhyscrilley.bsky.social and I explore how the London Bridge attack & Grenfell Tower fire were understood in media & public discourse—and why this matters. 🧵👇

8/ "It is what it is” 🔹 Calls for systemic change were dismissed. 🔹 Responses seen as ‘political’ were rejected. 🔹 Proposed ‘solutions’ were often fatalist—barriers, trampolines, walking sticks—rather than tackling root causes.

1/ 📢 New research! How do societies make sense of violent events? In a new paper with @politicsandspace.bsky.social, Victoria Basham, @rhyscrilley.bsky.social and I explore how the London Bridge attack & Grenfell Tower fire were understood in media & public discourse—and why this matters. 🧵👇

6/ "This is not who we are” 🔹 Violence was framed as an exception, belonging to another place or time. 🔹 Both events were treated as disconnected from ‘our way of life’—even though global connections made them possible.

1/ 📢 New research! How do societies make sense of violent events? In a new paper with @politicsandspace.bsky.social, Victoria Basham, @rhyscrilley.bsky.social and I explore how the London Bridge attack & Grenfell Tower fire were understood in media & public discourse—and why this matters. 🧵👇

4/ Academic research suggests that global cities like London are entangled in the exploitative global hierarchy (see @idanewid.bsky.social), which is implicated in producing the fragility of places from which the threat of terrorism emerges. Would such connections be part of public sensemaking?

1/ 📢 New research! How do societies make sense of violent events? In a new paper with @politicsandspace.bsky.social, Victoria Basham, @rhyscrilley.bsky.social and I explore how the London Bridge attack & Grenfell Tower fire were understood in media & public discourse—and why this matters. 🧵👇

2/ In 2017, the London Bridge terror attack & Grenfell Tower fire unsettled common ideas about London as a ‘global city’—a place where violence might occur, but not a violent place. How did people make sense of this?