Adam Shatz’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
‘Honourable was the swift and timely aid offered to them in their struggle by the West,’ the Times said of the Libyan rebels who rose up against Gaddafi during the Arab Spring in 2011;...
‘Argo fuck yourself.’ The line is repeated several times in Ben Affleck’s 2012 historical spy thriller, Argo. Based on the memoir by Tony Mendez, a CIA agent, the movie...
The fighting that began in Aleppo on 19 July 2012 lasted four years, five months and three days, killing more than thirty thousand people – almost three times the number killed in the...
What to make of him? The man is a shock, like the toy buzzer in a prank handshake, and the effect is to baffle and immobilise thought.
Early in 2014, the Bank of England put out a quarterly bulletin entitled ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ which put to bed one of the most persistent – and false...
Barack Obama is said to have told Donald Trump at their post-election meeting that North Korea is the biggest foreign threat the US faces.
Independence was handed to Ceylon’s elite on a platter. ‘Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England,’ Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said....
The final meeting I have in Nigeria is with the senior partner of a respected law firm. He is an impressive individual: knowledgeable, realistic, straight-talking. I ask him what our chances of bringing...
Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance.
Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic...
In October 2013 a Time magazine article entitled ‘Syria’s Breaking Bad’ alerted Western media to the prevalence across the region of a little-known stimulant drug, Captagon....
Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Wolfgang Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation?
Britain is the most centralised country in the Western world. Its political system is weighted overwhelmingly towards Westminster, with few institutional safeguards against the writ of...
The polls had it that Trump would only be able to wreck one party. Now he has wrecked both of them.
Those who draw a lazy equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump fail to recognise that populists don’t stop at protesting against Wall Street or ‘globalism’.
They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump.
Despite the images of hijacked planes, homemade rockets, the charred wreckage of buses and Kalashnikov-wielding militants in balaclavas, the most common form of resistance in more than a...