For eight years, France has been fighting jihadists in the Western Sahel. The first deployments were in Mali. Others followed, across a swathe of arid land south of the Sahara, from...
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 and...
‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ You might...
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,...
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...
Men are far more likely to be killed than women; trans men and women more likely to face harm. But many women live in fear of the person they share a bed with. Daily life under duress, the bruises that...
The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention...
No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, or Sturgeon who, though full of...
It is assumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems...
Most accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative focus on its geopolitics or geoeconomics. But large infrastructure projects have wider ramifications: lives are affected, connections forged and knowledge...
Every step of the Brexit saga has been dictated by the Conservative Party’s struggle to save itself: to prevent voters defecting to the more uncompromising Ukip, and then to check the paralysing internal...
The ‘I’ of autobiography and racial belonging is not assumed in Imperial Intimacies. Hazel V. Carby’s shifting perspectives for her present and past selves – her narrative moves from the singular...
Many building-owners have already begun the process of retrofitting safety features and billing them to lease-holders. Some will have sophisticated fire alarm systems installed, which isn’t a solution...
The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by kinship networks. It is not...
As any Palestinian could have predicted, Israel has been the first state to introduce colour-coded identification documents to distinguish between those who have been vaccinated and those who haven’t....
If it occurred to the home secretary, Priti Patel, or the minister for ‘immigration compliance’, Chris Philp, that an army barracks wasn’t the best place for refugees who...
Bill Gates didn’t divest from fossil fuels until 2019. Better late than never, I suppose, but it was well known in the 1980s and at times Gates can sound a bit like your most boring uncle telling you,...
Unionists know that if they want their country to survive they need to make it attractive to those beyond their traditional base. Yet the DUP continues to indulge bigots, neglects the needs of working-class...