Politics & Economics

It shouldn’t be more important that the North Sea wind farms get built than that some of their towers are made by low-paid labourers working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week; and yet the immense...

What most people in the US call an ‘embargo’ – meaning the sweeping trade restrictions first imposed in 1960 and ratcheted up many times since – is known in Cuba as el bloqueo,...

‘This is certain – for I have noted it several times – some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s...

The feminist campaigners of the interwar period set the terms for future activism by insisting that the language of human rights is inherently feminist. Their telegram diplomacy and ‘foot in the...

Kagame has successfully deflected criticism, partly thanks to Western guilt over the genocide in Rwanda (a recent report commissioned by Macron said that France bears an ‘overwhelming responsibility’)...

It is one thing to station military forces around the world to maintain your empire, but quite another to do so for someone else’s. It’s not a new observation that those in power in Britain...

In Tigray​ in northern Ethiopia a famine is unfolding in the dark. Reporters and aid workers have been unable to access large parts of the region since war broke out in November. Satellite imagery...

The war over the control of Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the only interstate conflicts in the world, a leftover from an age before the religious and sectarian contests of tribal militias which have turned...

For much of the past fifteen months, hospitality has been either banned or strictly regulated. Once the state is involved in deciding whom we may eat or drink with, and even what counts as a shared ‘meal’...

Abunduluk joined the RSF three years ago, but was one of the early members of the original Darfur rebellion in 2003. His body, covered with scars, is a map of the Darfur conflict. He rolled up his trousers...

In​ Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson wrote that ‘in the two centuries after about 1760 … no country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the...

Mohammed bin Salman already wields immense power and he is only just beginning. As well as rewriting the royal family’s code of seniority and bringing most ministries under his direct control, he...

The unlikely union between a Fascist leader and a Jewish American opera singer offers interesting perspectives on Fascism’s evolving attitudes to race, religion, culture, gender and so on, particularly...

The violence that broke out inside Israel was ugly, a chaotic mixture of pogroms and score-settling; it is a threat to the delicate fabric of Arab-Jewish relations that no politician in Israel can afford...

Early​ results matter. They matter when TV pundits are required to fill hours of overnight election coverage, and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide...

One way to politicise the pandemic would seem to be to make a contrast be­tween competence and incompetence. But that’s misleading: politics is always about choices and priorities (who will live...

The shipping industry has worked hard to hide itself from view, and we have colluded with it. We don’t want to think about how that 90 per cent of everything got here. The labour of an entire industry...

The social identities behind the vintage references in Artem Chekh and Zakhar Prilepin’s works are the fundamental oppositions of the 21st century: on one side the liberals, the bourgeois, the cosmopolitans,...