Politics & Economics

Demonstrators climb flagpoles to remove the American flag during a massive rally demonstration in opposition to the war in Vietnam, April 1971.

Visions of America

Adam Shatz

26 January 2026

Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?

Read more about Another Country: Visions of America

Iran’s Crises

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

5 February 2026

In​ a crowded conference room in January 2025, Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the Executives of Reconstruction Party and brother-in-law of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, compared . . .

In the Amazon

Alexander Clapp

5 February 2026

Two thousand miles​ north-west of Rio de Janeiro, the Javari Valley is a swathe of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Scotland and accessible only by boat or helicopter. Its ecological riches and isolated . . .

Japan at the Polls

Christopher Harding

5 February 2026

Ahead of​ last year’s elections to the upper house of the Japanese parliament, Sanseito, a new party of the populist right, ran a ‘Japanese First’ campaign attacking foreign residents and tourists . . .

China sits the Gaokao

Iza Ding

5 February 2026

It’s​ almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which . . .

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

 The inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.

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Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.

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Let Them Drown

Naomi Klein, 2 June 2016

Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. 

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Where will we live? The Housing Disaster

James Meek, 9 January 2014

The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?

Read more about Where will we live? The Housing Disaster

What I Heard about Iraq: watch and listen

Eliot Weinberger, 3 February 2005

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...

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Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin

Christopher Hitchens, 26 November 1998

In​ The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...

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Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future

Edward Luttwak, 7 April 1994

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...

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The Morning After

Edward Said, 21 October 1993

Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.

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Maastricht and All That

Wynne Godley, 8 October 1992

A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....

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Short Cuts: On Venezuela

Tony Wood, 22 January 2026

The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Marco Rubio has stuck especially closely...

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Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was...

Read more about Calling Dr Jekyll: What Kamala Harris got wrong

China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi Jinping a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American...

Read more about Climbing the Ziggurat: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance

Short Cuts: Labour’s Complacency

James Butler, 25 December 2025

Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the...

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When the Messiah Comes: When I met Netanyahu

Jacqueline Rose, 25 December 2025

Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate...

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Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of money...

Read more about King of Cannibal Island: Will the AI bubble burst?

In 1966, as election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara...

Read more about Short Cuts: A Bridge across the Humber

The ghost of the industrial revolution haunts Britain. The language of today’s politicians, of unlocking and unleashing the industrial heartlands, is the language of a seance promising communication...

Read more about Ten-Foot Chopsticks: The North-East Transition

The Job

T.J. Clark, 4 December 2025

What would politics be like in an age where one empire continued to hold sway over the ‘international community’, as it had done for three or four generations, but had to react to its power weakening...

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Assume the worst: Where our waste goes

Brett Christophers, 20 November 2025

Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part...

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Are we doomed? The End of the Species

David Runciman, 20 November 2025

Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse. So maybe there is...

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Short Cuts: Kenya after Odinga

Kevin Okoth, 20 November 2025

I had been back​ in Nairobi for a few days when I heard that Raila Odinga, the towering opposition figure who played a crucial role in Kenya’s return to multi-party democracy, had died at a clinic...

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Short Cuts: Misuses of the Terrorism Act

Asim Qureshi, 6 November 2025

Thousands of people each year are detained and questioned under Schedule 7, the majority of them from ethnic minority backgrounds. To be held without charge and questioned under threat of criminal prosecution,...

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Pig Butchering: Scam Gangs

Alexander Clapp, 6 November 2025

If it were a national economy, cybercrime would be the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China and growing by 15 per cent a year. By 2027 scams are expected to cost the world...

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It’s​ striking how thoroughly Latin America’s contemporary right has absorbed neoliberalism. Earlier cohorts entertained a range of economic philosophies, depending on what best served their interests...

Read more about Sell Your Children: Latin America Shifts Right

Diary: Siege of El Fasher

Jérôme Tubiana, 23 October 2025

The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels – volcanic hills – were redoubts for...

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Short Cuts: Gerrymandering

Aziz Huq, 23 October 2025

The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting...

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Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to...

Read more about Parable of the Parakeets: Mélenchon’s Ambitions

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