Politics & Economics

This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted....

Most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery,...

Lebanon’s civil war did not end in 1990. It assumed new forms and it isn’t over yet. Like my colleagues, I returned to Lebanon again and again to cover each eruption of violence. Most of the wars we...

The Trump administration has introduced two new policies that aim to turn citizens into migrants who can be expelled. The first, a narrowing of birthright citizenship, has attracted considerable public...

It’s no surprise that Operation Roaring Lion (Israel’s name for its campaign) and Operation Epic Fury (as the US calls its own) bear the hallmarks of Israel’s offensives on the Gaza Strip. War with...

On​ 1 November 2024, the canopy of a recently renovated train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. In the weeks that followed, a new protest movement coalesced; it continues to demonstrate...

‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge...

Despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or contempt, a majority of people have a clear understanding of what Nigel Farage stands...

It may well be true that Israeli officials told the White House they planned to attack Iran with or without American help. But to suggest that the US has been led by Israel into a war in which it otherwise...

The enduring liberal fantasy that Melania Trump is unwilling, trapped, in need of rescue, #FreeMelania, has never squared with the most rigorous reporting about her. Gestures that commentators read during...

As a Polish émigré and fervent Polish nationalist, Zbigniew Brzezinski focused most of his fear on the Soviet Union. A visceral hostility to the USSR became the driving force behind his career as a policy...

Why​ did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such influence over Labour? Peter Mandelson tended his own mythology and influence over the...

Călin Georgescu’s entire political programme, in so far as he has one, is based on the need to heal Romania by creating – or, as he portrays it, restoring – a synthetic medieval country, agrarian,...

Ideological exclusion at the border seems anachronistic now, when all human knowledge is accessible online, video-conferencing software is installed on every laptop, and ideas and information can be shared...

It was -10ºC outside and only 10ºC in Yulia’s flat, but she told me this was a good day: the radiators weren’t stone cold. Engineers had reconnected the building to the district heating network,...

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The wars in Indochina gave the US heroin epidemics; Latin America, a plague of powder...

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi Sanae will focus on the immediate economic challenges facing Japan: high taxes, inflation, low wages and the cost of living....

Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long...