WPSA 2026

After a history of epic highs and lows, WPSA 2026 is off to a fantastic start as our morning panel on “Green thinking: Ideologies and Environmental Political Thought” went really well. Overlooking the Pacific from the 32nd floor of the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego, I presented the chapter that Jon and I started drafting last summer when I was in Stockholm. Briefly mentioning nuclear energy in my presentation, it was fascinating to see how many in the audience were nodding along, and how fundamentally the discourse has shifted in favour of a more science-based approach.

Then, determined to defeat the jet lag monster head-on, I traded the conference lunch for kayaking with Johanna and dozens of sea lions in Mission Bay. With pelicans wheeling overhead, I got a lot of exposure to our nearest star, so I suspect I will look plenty guilty of mischief at tomorrow’s panel, where I will be presenting my aviation article.

Twice

Just as I had more or less given up on airline status, and with my Star Alliance Gold with Turkish Airlines about to expire later this year, I was upgraded not only once, but twice in the same day. Moments after I published my post from the lounge in Frankfurt, Johanna and I were given complimentary upgrades all the way to business class for our nine-hour flight to Chicago.

Considering that we bought these basic economy tickets for 4,500 SEK roundtrip and had only bid a couple of hundred euros to upgrade to Premium Economy, the value was obviously exceptional, briefly making me reconsider the wisdom of jumping off that infamous hamster wheel.

Anyway, walking up the stairs to the upper deck of the Queen of the Skies, for the third time in my life, we were treated to nuts and Larson Le Black Reserve champagne as this majestic aircraft prepared for its Atlantic crossing. Flying above the North Sea, the main service began with Grüner Veltliner “Hund” from Niederösterreich and tuna tataki, followed by halibut and prawn in shellfish sauce, before ending with cheese and port, as tradition has it.

After turning my seat into a bed, I fell asleep somewhere south of Iceland, only to wake up above Greenland as my internal body clock once again expressed its strong dislike for daytime naps. Ordering a cup of black coffee, I decided to turn my inability to sleep into some last-minute conference preparations, and with a couple of hours left until Chicago, I could not be more excited for the adventure ahead.

Der stille Amerikaner

Just as in Locarno, the idealism and foregone hopes of the past continue to pull me. I find myself returning to The Quiet American, fittingly in German translation, on the upper deck of Lufthansa’s Boeing 747-8 “Schleswig-Holstein”, as we leave Europe behind.

Torbjörn Elensky, writing in Svenska Dagbladet, put it well: in Greene’s novel, the old empire’s man is the British cynic – worn down, clear-eyed – while the new empire sends Pyle: Harvard-educated, crew-cut, catastrophically sincere. Pyle does not cause harm despite his good intentions. He causes it because of them. He is, as Elensky notes, the inverse of Mephistopheles: where Goethe’s devil does good through the evil he pursues, Pyle does evil through the good he strives for.

What reads differently now than it did in 1955 – is the endpoint of that trajectory.

A couple of weeks ago, Fareed Zakaria reminded his viewers of the Iraqi Revolt of 1920 – how an overextended Britain spent the equivalent of its entire education budget fighting a peripheral war, losing a thousand soldiers, to little long-term gain. Empires rarely fall in a single dramatic moment; more often, they dissipate through a long series of misallocated priorities – each perhaps defensible in isolation, each compounding the last. What is lost is not only blood and treasure, but the futures deferred – the social investments never made.

The pattern feels familiar now, as Trump’s “little excursion” into Iran unfolds and the familiar arguments circulate. What is striking is that these arguments are no longer even dressed in Pyle’s language. There is no talk of a mission, no third force, no bright theory imported from a think tank. What has replaced the quiet American’s idealism is something Fowler, Greene’s narrator, might not have anticipated: war as entertainment, or even as rambling absurdity, with the White House publishing endless memes inspired by Call of Duty and Gladiator while promising different speculative timelines to satisfy the stock market.

Greene’s novel ends before Pyle fully understands what he has done. The reader understands before he does. Perhaps that is the most unsettling thing about rereading it now, flying west, the continent shrinking behind us: the sense that we are no longer at the beginning of the story, but that we may already be well past the point where understanding changes anything at all.

Back above the clouds

Passing the gate at Gothenburg Landvetter Airport, I was greeted by the characteristic “beep” and a new seat assignment in business class for the morning flight to Frankfurt. Having already been upgraded to Premium Economy for the transatlantic leg, the trip is off to the best possible start as Johanna and I fly out over Kattegat.

With an out-of-office reply in place, the coming days will include the annual conference of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego, a mountain trail race in Silverado, and a desert escape under the stars in Borrego Springs. Posting may be slightly delayed, but I will do my best to bring Rawls & Me along.

Reviewing

Being part of a new Routledge volume on ideology and environmental politics, we are currently doing rounds of internal peer review before the manuscript is sent out for external review. In my case, this means that I have read two chapters so far, one on eco-authoritarianism and another, more conceptual, for the introduction. Soon, I will receive a third chapter on eco-feminism, and with the train ride between Halmstad and Gothenburg being just one hour, I need every caffeine fix I can get to stay on top of it all.

At least yesterday was a blast, as I kicked off the thesis supervision process for the 12 + 3 theses I am supervising this semester. I remember back in Lund in the aughts, when supervising half that number was considered an unusually heavy load. With Halmstad University currently laying off staff, I fear this trend will only continue.

And as for worrying trends, I cannot help but note that Germany is now considering ramping up coal power to substitute for expensive gas in the wake of the Iran war. A week ago, the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Katherina Reiche, told an oil conference in Texas that the EU’s net-zero target should be relaxed. In that sense, the chickens may finally be coming home to roost with regard to the Energiewende. Rather than expressing any Schadenfreude, I can only hope that its supporters will be willing to draw the right conclusions from this.

The Difference a Decade Makes

Daylight Saving Time

Wide awake long before dawn, I decided to sneak out for a harbour run while the kids were asleep, stopping for a morning coffee at the Preem gas station in Gårda and watching a waxing yellow Moon give way to a misty sunrise.

After 18 kilometres of quayside running, I started worrying about the kids, so I took the tram home. Yet, after dropping William off for his second day of math camp at Chalmers, I topped up with 10k of indoor rowing and 4k on the treadmill at Nordic Wellness Järntorget. With that, I at least made it to 60 kilometres this week, which makes me wonder how I ever managed to run twice or almost three times that in a single week. At least the rowing is good shit. I tend to think of it less as cardio and more as a form of muscular endurance training, and 50 km per month has really upped my game.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the war in Iran continues, and much as Trump had hoped for some kind of “Iranuary 6th” moment, domestic revolt does not seem to be forthcoming. As so many times before, violence only reinforces the sense of victimhood on which the regime feeds. After decades of failed regime change, from Libya to Iraq, one cannot help thinking that the pull factor of freedom, and the sympathy that followed 9/11, might once have inspired a generation had the US not responded as it did.

Halfway there

Having dropped William off at Chalmers University of Technology for another weekend of mathematical wizardry, I went down to Chalmersgatan where Nordic Wellness has just acquired a new and rather fancy gym. Rowing ten of the twenty kilometres I need to finish before heading to the US, I almost felt like being halfway there, a feeling that intensified over a bagel at Jimmy & Joan’s.

Listening to “Nåt som verkligen är bra” by Lars Winnerbäck, I realise I am clearly not the only one prone to seeing images. But with only two hours left until I have to pick William up again, I have to stop dreaming and return to work. If not before, I promise to start April with one of my signature mid-Atlantic blog entries.

Workaholics

With the rain intensifying outside, I curl up on the sofa after a tense day at work. Coming from a family of workaholics, I do not expect much sympathy, but this week will go down as one of the busiest on record, with eight hours of seminars both today and tomorrow.

Having less than a week left in Europe, logistics is a puzzle of its own, but for now it seems as if everything is where it should be. Hopefully, the rain will pass overnight so that I can repeat my Monday morning run to Jansa brygga, famous for its seal colony.

Over lunch

Over lunch, my sister called me to share her fears about the world and the direction of AI development. As a software engineer in Stockholm, she is seeing first-hand how the industry is changing – how AI-generated, customized code is rapidly replacing open source and human intent.

Always the optimist, I try to stay sane by taking Caia to Tylösand. Yet, with companies like Anthropic having made AGI their explicit near-term target, I cannot deny that I am scared too. Even if we somehow avoid turning all of the solar system into “computronium”, the consequences of an intelligence explosion are, to a large extent, beyond human imagination.

For now, our best hope seems to be that human-level intelligence turns out to be a much harder problem than the past five years of AI development have given us reason to believe. Either that – or that something is in fact “wrong” with reality at a much more fundamental level (think Fermi’s paradox).