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...

Read more about First Recourse for Rebels: Financial Weaponry

LRB contributors

LRB Contributors, 24 March 2022

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,...

Read more about On Ukraine

Diary: In Portadown

Susan McKay, 10 March 2022

‘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...

Read more about Diary: In Portadown

Coup-Contrecoup

Rahmane Idrissa, 24 February 2022

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...

Read more about Coup-Contrecoup

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...

Read more about Fanning the Flames: Zemmour’s Obsessions

A Tiny Sun: Getting the Bomb

Tom Stevenson, 24 February 2022

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...

Read more about A Tiny Sun: Getting the Bomb

Bad Judgment: How many people died?

Paul Taylor, 10 February 2022

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...

Read more about Bad Judgment: How many people died?

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...

Read more about At the British Museum: ‘Peru: A Journey in Time’

To Own Whiteness

Musab Younis, 10 February 2022

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.’...

Read more about To Own Whiteness

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...

Read more about You’re with your king: Morocco’s Secret Prisons

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...

Read more about Check Your Spillover: The Climate Colossus

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

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...

Read more about To Serve My Friends

Fishing for Potatoes: Nissan Rogue

James Lasdun, 27 January 2022

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...

Read more about Fishing for Potatoes: Nissan Rogue

In the Superstate: What is technopopulism?

Wolfgang Streeck, 27 January 2022

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...

Read more about In the Superstate: What is technopopulism?

So what’s it like in there, the drum-bearer asked me when we reached the gates of the delegates-only COP26 Blue Zone, thickly fenced behind rows of anti-ram-raid bollards, with the nearby drains and...

Read more about Inside the Sausage Factory: In the Cryosphere

Along with Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and the never-Trumpers of the Lincoln Project, Liz Cheney is one of the last standard-bearers of a Republican conservatism grounded in some version of rationality....

Read more about Big Stick Swagger: Republican Conspiracism

The Family Biden

Christian Lorentzen, 6 January 2022

There are a lot of apparently bullshit things in The Bidens, but it’s hard to see them as actually criminal or even especially outrageous once you accept that a politician’s family will trade on his...

Read more about The Family Biden

Short Cuts: Nigerian Oil

Adewale Maja-Pearce, 6 January 2022

Nigeria pumps out​ 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, making it the biggest producer on the continent. The multinationals – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell et al – in partnership with local firms and the...

Read more about Short Cuts: Nigerian Oil