Politics & Economics

Shtula, Israel. 08th Apr, 2023. A view of a graffiti on the Israeli-Lebanese border wall,

Hizbullah’s War

Zain Samir

30 November 2023

After nearly two decades of relative calm along the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Israeli defence minister is threatening to do to Beirut what he is doing to Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, has warned Israel that if it ever attacks Beirut again Hizbullah will start bombing Tel Aviv and beyond.

Read more about Hizbullah’s War

War Crimes

Conor Gearty

30 November 2023

International law​ takes a special interest in war. Where there is an armed conflict or an occupation it is not enough to hope vaguely that human rights will be respected and for the UN or a special . . .

Resistance in Myanmar

Francis Wade

30 November 2023

KZa​ Win seemed to know how his life would end. ‘Before the Revolution opened out,’ he wrote in ‘Skulls’, his final poem, ‘a bullet blew someone’s brains out.’ Eight days later, on 3 March . . .

Keep the Con Going

Rosa Lyster

16 November 2023

Everyone loves​ a con artist. Since her indictment in 2018 for defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup of $700 million, Elizabeth Holmes has been the subject of two books, four documentaries . . .

‘The Refugee Problem’

Leila Farsakh

16 November 2023

Almost​ a month has elapsed since Hamas fighters broke the siege that Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip for more than sixteen years, murdering 1400 Israelis, 300 of them soldiers, and injuring 2600 . . .

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.

Read more about Bolsonaro’s Brazil

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. 

Read more about Let Them Drown

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...

Read more about What I Heard about Iraq: watch and listen

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...

Read more about Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin

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...

Read more about Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future

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.

Read more about The Morning After

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....

Read more about Maastricht and All That

John Hume on the end of the Unionist veto in Ulster

John Hume, 2 February 1989

In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...

Read more about John Hume on the end of the Unionist veto in Ulster

Kettle of Vultures: A History of Interest

Jamie Martin, 16 November 2023

Pleasure is supposedly more valuable today than it will be tomorrow; deferral has a cost. But to the canonists, unlike the capitalists, this made no sense. Time wasn’t something that could be bought...

Read more about Kettle of Vultures: A History of Interest

Poland after PiS

Jan-Werner Müller, 16 November 2023

Rather than complacently celebrating Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, we should be trying to understand why self-declared anti-liberals succeeded in the first place, and in what ways their politics might...

Read more about Poland after PiS

Yes, there was Care Not Killing at one end and Dignity in Dying at the other. Yes, an actual guide dog was in attendance, at a tactful distance from Cats Protection. But the bigger presences were Google...

Read more about Short Cuts: At the Labour Party Conference

Before the strike, the country was characterised by comparative egalitarianism, the (relative) power and legitimacy of organised labour, and an industrial economy in which state industries played a prominent...

Read more about Blood All Over the Grass: On the Miners’ Strike

He-Said, They-Said: Crypto Corruption

John Lanchester, 2 November 2023

Crypto is an ideology, an anti-government, individualistic belief system, one that Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t really share. He was a trader, and he saw in crypto a big unaddressed market with a lot of...

Read more about He-Said, They-Said: Crypto Corruption

Short Cuts: Vancouver’s Opioid Crisis

Karin Goodwin, 19 October 2023

Under British Columbia’s decriminalisation pilot, launched in January this year and due to run until 2026, anyone found with under 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamines or MDMA won’t be prosecuted....

Read more about Short Cuts: Vancouver’s Opioid Crisis

After the Old Order

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, 19 October 2023

Most young people in Nigeria regard military rule as an aberration and find it hard to understand why it appears to be popular in other West African states. But in the quarter-century since we swapped...

Read more about After the Old Order

On Nagorno-Karabakh

Tom Stevenson, 19 October 2023

The Republic of Artsakh has gone, but what was it? From the perspective of Azerbaijan’s government, and probably that of international law, Artsakh was an illegal entity. In Armenia it was held up as...

Read more about On Nagorno-Karabakh

Where to Draw the Line: Why do we pay tax?

Stefan Collini, 19 October 2023

The imposition of a windfall tax may be seen as an exercise in fiscal populism or a confession of intellectual bankruptcy, but it’s also an implicit affirmation that society has a right to reclaim at...

Read more about Where to Draw the Line: Why do we pay tax?

Are you still living? Counting Americans

Kasia Boddy, 19 October 2023

Who is counted, how, and for what purpose, has changed a lot since 1790. No census has exactly matched its predecessor in method or design: each time, some questions are dropped and others added, while...

Read more about Are you still living? Counting Americans

Saintly Outliers: Browder’s Fraud Story

Vadim Nikitin, 5 October 2023

Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of...

Read more about Saintly Outliers: Browder’s Fraud Story

Short Cuts: Naomi Klein

Jenny Turner, 5 October 2023

‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d...

Read more about Short Cuts: Naomi Klein

Defanged: Deifying King

Eric Foner, 5 October 2023

People of every political persuasion now claim Martin Luther King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable opposition, not only in the South. The...

Read more about Defanged: Deifying King

Stay away from politics: Why Weber?

William Davies, 21 September 2023

Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’...

Read more about Stay away from politics: Why Weber?

Get a rabbit: Don’t trust the numbers

John Lanchester, 21 September 2023

Data and statistics, all of them, are man-made. They are also central to modern politics and governance, and the ways we talk about them. That in itself represents a shift. Discussions that were once about...

Read more about Get a rabbit: Don’t trust the numbers

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili, 7 September 2023

These days, the debate about the balance of private and public investment in the Global South has been settled in favour of private capital. Privately owned mobile and internet networks, potable water...

Read more about Woke Capital

Macaulay seems to have belonged to what revisionist historians now refer to as the Christian Enlightenment, a movement that stood apart from the more familiar Enlightenment of sceptical or deistic philosophes....

Read more about ‘Drown her in the Avon’: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism

Stephen Vaughan’s life reminds us that there is no sweeping historical change that cannot also be measured in the small, incremental, often painful adjustments of everyday life. His political service,...

Read more about Foxes and Wolves: Stephen Vaughan’s Frustrations

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences