A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Wolfgang Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation?

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Britain is​ the most centralised country in the Western world. Its political system is weighted overwhelmingly towards Westminster, with few institutional safeguards against the writ of...

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Short Cuts: The Trump Regime

Christian Lorentzen, 1 December 2016

The polls had it that Trump would only be able to wreck one party. Now he has wrecked both of them.

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Capitalism in One Family: The Populist Moment

Jan-Werner Müller, 1 December 2016

Those who draw a lazy equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump fail to recognise that populists don’t stop at protesting against Wall Street or ‘globalism’.

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Is this how democracy ends? A Failed State?

David Runciman, 1 December 2016

They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump.

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Despite​ the images of hijacked planes, homemade rockets, the charred wreckage of buses and Kalashnikov-wielding militants in balaclavas, the most common form of resistance in more than a...

Read more about The Israelis were shooting from one direction, the Palestinians from the other: Life and Death in Palestine

England prepares to leave the world

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 2016

I never thought I would see this opera again. ‘Rule Britannia!’ peals, the curtain parts, and there is a mad queen poling her island raft away into the Atlantic.

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They were expendable: Iraq and the Kurds

Joost Hiltermann, 17 November 2016

Ever since​ the fall of the Ottomans, the Kurds have been a non-state nation, an insurgent population split across four sovereign states – Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Denied, as they...

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Islamic State v. al-Qaida

Owen Bennett-Jones, 3 November 2016

Underlying tensions are likely to be exposed when the Iraq army and Shia militias take back the city of Mosul from Islamic State, which they hope to do by the end of the year. Some of the city’s Sunni...

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Home Office Rules

William Davies, 3 November 2016

Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that its view of the world, as a dangerous and frightening place, may have deepened in her case or meshed with...

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Short Cuts: Brexit and the SNP

Peter Geoghegan, 3 November 2016

In​ his recent book, The Question of Scotland: Devolution and After (Birlinn, £9.99) Tam Dalyell, for many years the Labour MP for West Lothian, identifies several points at which the...

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Diary: Homo Trumpiens

Christian Lorentzen, 3 November 2016

‘Hey, everybody,​ how about it, huh?’ Paul Ryan said, coming onto a stage decorated with hay bales and pumpkins in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of 9 October. ‘Man,...

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The Big Man: The Rwandan Genocide

Alex de Waal, 3 November 2016

Did​ the Rwanda genocide happen because a few army officers and politicians, squabbling over whom they should appoint as leader, casually used mass murder as a means of obtaining a temporary...

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No! The Colombian Referendum

Gwen Burnyeat, 20 October 2016

It took​ four years for the Colombian government and the Farc – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – to reach the peace agreement signed earlier this year. President Juan...

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Diary: In Syria

Patrick Cockburn, 20 October 2016

Across Syria​ towns and districts are under siege. In the north, the Syrian army and its Shia allies from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, assisted by Russian air power, have surrounded the opposition...

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Destined to Disappear: ‘Race Studies’

Susan Pedersen, 20 October 2016

At the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not...

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Women ‘There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!’

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Auctions in the Forest: Mushrooms

Francis Gooding, 6 October 2016

‘As​ a land-user thinketh, so is he,’ the American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay ‘The Land Ethic’ in 1948. People needed to ‘quit thinking about...

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