Politics & Economics

Seafaring is a bundle of contradictions. It is highly skilled labour, yet mostly invisible. Lower ratings of seafarers are housed together, six or eight to a claustrophobic cabin, yet they are chronically...

In​ 2018, the German company Bayer bought the US agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not just its vast portfolio of seeds and pesticides, but also thousands of lawsuits alleging that glyphosate,...

Unlike 20th-century communism or fascism, contemporary Russian ideology does not have a clearly articulated manifesto or creed, but has been formed through successive smaller ideological conflicts. Putin...

Gavin Newsom describes himself as an ‘accidental politician’. The San Francisco mayor Willie Brown anointed him as his preferred successor, though the decisive factor was probably his ability...

Across Tigray, the remains of razed towns are marked with mounds of earth piled over the dead – impressions of war still visible in satellite photographs. A shadow economy has also etched itself...

It might be wise not to be too optimistic about Andy Burnham bringing miracles of delivery, and focus instead on his willingness to question the long-prevailing economic consensus; where Starmer seems...

What makes a game liberating to play is also what makes it stifling and oppressive: in both cases it’s because the rules are arbitrary. At the social level the scoring systems that are needed to...

Despite a few halting steps towards devolving power in Britain, England itself remains a profoundly centralised country, in which national politics always dominates. So why not send a national message?...

Many of those who had been involved in the war’s inception saw the chaotic Nato withdrawal in August 2021 as a betrayal both of Afghanistan and of the project of American power in the world. As...

If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big? 

Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic bottlenecks: the Suez Canal, for example, or the Malacca Strait or the Strait of Hormuz. Controlling these narrow passages, through which large volumes...

Can there be poetic justice in politics? Perhaps once in a lifetime. In 1989, a young Viktor Orbán bravely told the crowds in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square that it was time for the Russians...

Since 1922, the Labour Party has won in Wales at every general election, and has been the largest party in all of the country’s devolved governments since the National Assembly, now known as the...

From the 16th century onwards, as European powers feverishly colonised the world, the possibility of a Northern Sea Route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Scandinavia to the Bering Strait,...

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....

Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling is a book about a city but it’s also a book about families and shows that even good parents can lose sight of their children. I was often reminded of...

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,...

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...