Tony Wood

The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014,...

On​ 4 September, 62 per cent of Chilean voters chose to reject the newly drafted constitution, designed to replace the one imposed by the Pinochet regime in 1980. Even in the Santiago metropolitan region, 55 per cent were against. Margins were high in every income group. According to a study by Miguel Angel Fernández and Eugenio Guzmán, the bottom fifth of earners voted...

The world’s fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter, Russia has greater combined oil and gas reserves than Saudi Arabia and will continue to profit from rising oil prices for several more years. But as the world shifts to alternative energy sources – Thane Gustafson in Klimat projects a peak in global demand for fossil fuels around 2030, followed by a swift decline – its hydrocarbon revenues will dwindle. What’s more, Russia is more vulnerable than most to the environmental impacts of climate change. As Gustafson puts it, ‘Russia is already one of the chief causes of climate change; but as time goes on, it will also be one of its chief victims.’

It is too early to tell exactly how bad the consequences of Russia’s senseless and unnecessary war against Ukraine will be. The least pessimistic scenario – a short war followed by a ceasefire – still entails widespread destruction and suffering in Ukraine. And the situation could get even worse, as further players become involved in a proxy war that has every...

Mexico City​, in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is ‘above all, too many people’. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the ‘multitudes surrounding multitudes’: the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions...