Aro Velmet
is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California and the author of Pasteur’s Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is also an editor of Eurozine’ Estonian partner journal Vikerkaar.
Articles
Far-right foreign policy in the age of MAGA 2.0
A conversation with Quinn Slobodian
For the US today, tariffs serve the same purpose as bombs. But Trump’s revival of 19th century-style economic imperialism may be alienating his international far-right allies – with one exception: Russia.
Let’s make cabbage great again
Podcast: Vaccines in West Africa and whiteness in the East of Europe
How is whiteness constructed and why is it so fragile? What’s at stake in discussing colonial memory for eastern Europeans? Do they actually eat a lot of cabbage?
Renaming is about respect
Museums on race
Addressing discrimination towards black people is a collective responsibility. Racism, evident in visual memory and disguised through political association, reaches beyond countries with direct colonialist pasts. Taking Estonia as a case study, historians and curators discuss how to ‘render race’ in museums and public discourse.
Promise and peril
Mass vaccination gone horribly wrong in colonial Africa
While much of the current day anti-vaxx sentiment is rooted in conspiracy theories, some fears have real historical experiences underlying, which must be reckoned with. Aro Velmet looks into how a yellow fever vaccine, rolled out in French West Africa during World War II, may have killed thousands over more than four decades.
The secret history of radiation
An interview with Kate Brown
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, international agencies dismissed local doctors’ warnings about a ‘public health catastrophe’ in order to suppress scandal over nuclear tests carried out by the West since the 1950s. Kate Brown talks to Aro Velmet about the secret history of radiation and what Chernobyl means in the era of climate change.
An ominous sign
UK, Estonia and Latvia after the EP election
What next for Britain and the EU? Though the Brexit Party will now be one of the largest national parties in the European Parliament, combined support for the ‘hard Remain’ parties is greater still. The EP election played out as a referendum on Estonia’s government too, while Latvia was spared a populist surge.
Anarchism, work and bureaucracy
An interview with David Graeber
‘On a deep, cultural level, people actually believe that if you don’t do something that at least mildly frustrates you, then your work is not valuable.’ Anthropologist, activist and bestselling anarchist David Graeber on the police state, bullshit jobs and why people need no telling that capitalism is bad.
Universalist politics and its crises
A conversation with Camille Robcis
Human emancipation was always a more complex issue than it might at first seem, and never more so than in today’s France. Historian Camille Robcis discusses the evolution of French Republicanism since the 1980s in relation to controversies over same-sex marriage, integration and racism.

