It’s​ striking how thoroughly Latin America’s contemporary right has absorbed neoliberalism. Earlier cohorts entertained a range of economic philosophies, depending on what best served their interests...

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Diary: Siege of El Fasher

Jérôme Tubiana, 23 October 2025

The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels – volcanic hills – were redoubts for...

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Short Cuts: Gerrymandering

Aziz Huq, 23 October 2025

The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting...

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Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to...

Read more about Parable of the Parakeets: Mélenchon’s Ambitions

From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and...

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Almost Alone: Tony Benn’s Beliefs

Andy Beckett, 25 September 2025

What exactly was Tony Benn’s significance? He was certainly an unusually clear analyst and critic of the distribution of power in Britain. ‘We live in a strange country,’ he said in his final Commons...

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Short Cuts: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism

Peter Geoghegan, 25 September 2025

Reform has been accused of lacking policy: its critics say it’s a party of Farage and his epigones, with few firm plans for running the country. This isn’t entirely true. An overarching Reform theory...

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Repeal the 20th Century: Pre-MAGA

William Davies, 25 September 2025

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the...

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Goodbye to Grangemouth

Ewan Gibbs, 11 September 2025

Any form of ‘just transition’ – managing the move to a greener economy while also protecting workers and communities – seems implausible in the context of spiralling energy costs, failed climate...

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The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young...

Read more about Do you feel like a failure? In the Manosphere

The Mask Is Off: Bukele’s Prison State

Tom Stevenson, 11 September 2025

Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s...

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Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump

Ferdinand Mount, 14 August 2025

It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary, tariff mania seems like a frantic attempt to resurrect the past, not unlike those nostalgic...

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In Evin Prison

Amir Ahmadi Arian, 14 August 2025

More than an hour after the bombing of Evin Prison, the guards finally came out of their offices. From behind a locked door they began shouting at the prisoners in the women's ward. ‘See?’ they yelled....

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Berlin Diary

Adam Shatz, 14 August 2025

Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief...

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With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the...

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For a long time, it had seemed that Assad might outlast everything. Then, almost overnight, it was over. And with his fall came the possibility, however fragile, of accountability. Yet high-ranking officials...

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Graeber seems to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist militants, arguing and taking field notes. He would arrive with his notepad, ready to...

Read more about Baseline Communism: David Graeber’s Innovations

I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons...

Read more about Short Cuts: Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?