Politics & Economics

Refugees are rarely able to get visas: you aren’t classified as a refugee under the 1951 Geneva Convention until you are outside your country and unable or unwilling to return. And once outside it, you...

In February, the price of coated papers was up 78 per cent from last year. The manufacturers may have wanted higher prices, but dramatic hikes are bad for the industry’s stability as well as for buyers....

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine by Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley,...

No one​ knows how this will end. Putin’s reckless adventurism has backfired: an attempt to mimic the US on a GDP of $1.5 trillion, smaller even than Italy and minuscule compared to China...

There is nothing wrong in principle with a new bill of domestic rights. It has been the policy of each of the three main political parties at various times over the past two decades and can be done consistently...

The EU claims it runs a ‘fully autonomous sanctions regime’ in the service of ‘safeguarding EU values’. But for the most part its sanctions, and those of the UK, are applied in conjunction with...

‘I’ve been to a right lot of rallies over the years,’ she said. She thought things had got worse. ‘Bit by bit they have taken it all off the Protestant people. We have nothing left. They say we...

The struggle for sovereignty against shape-shifting imperialisms naturally takes many forms. What Malians want is ‘libération’ – a popular word among supporters of Assimi Goïta’s junta – not...

Éric Zemmour’s obsessions are those of the French political class, as well as many public intellectuals and media pundits. He is aware that he is offering a heightened version of what much of France...

Intentional use is not the only danger. Nuclear strategists systematically underestimate the chances of nuclear accident: it has no place in the logic of strategy. But there have been too many close calls...

Estimated weekly excess deaths in England and Wales in 2021. One of the tactics​ used over the past few weeks by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and by loyal MPs and...

Machu​ Picchu is not very old. Despite giving the impression of great and mysterious antiquity, the construction of the site was roughly contemporary with Brunelleschi’s completion of the...

Any psychological approach to racism ‘entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities’, Frantz Fanon argued, because ‘the black man’s alienation is not an individual question.’...

Tazmamart was a place of darkness and banishment: not only were inmates cut off from their families and lovers; they were exiles from history. Aziz BineBine recalls a couplet from ‘Recueillement’ in...

In the face of climate change, the long run – which remains the sacred temporality of economics – is a misleading guide not only to current affairs, but to the long run itself. There is no reason to...

A lot may depend on who succeeds Johnson as party leader. In any case, it’s a fair bet that ‘Boris’, the beneficiaries of his patronage and his media cheerleaders will come to be seen as symbolic...

Carlos Ghosn’s story might not offer quite the deranged immediacy of watching John DeLorean agree on camera to transport $24 million worth of cocaine in order to get his beleaguered factory out of a...

For the new conservatism, crises arise from disorder, not from a wrong order, and their handling should be entrusted to technicians in command of special knowledge, whether scientific or magical, or both...