North Korea’s Bomb

Norman Dombey, 2 February 2017

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.

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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....

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Diary: Oil Industry Corruption

Alexander Briant, 19 January 2017

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...

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Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance.

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From Lying to Leering: Penis Power

Rebecca Solnit, 19 January 2017

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...

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Don’t fight sober

Mike Jay, 5 January 2017

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....

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A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

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?

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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...

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Short Cuts: The Trump Regime

Christian Lorentzen, 1 December 2016

The polls had it that Trump would only be able to wreck one party. Now he has wrecked both of them.

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Capitalism in One Family: The Populist Moment

Jan-Werner Müller, 1 December 2016

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’.

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Is this how democracy ends? A Failed State?

David Runciman, 1 December 2016

They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump.

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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...

Read more about The Israelis were shooting from one direction, the Palestinians from the other: Life and Death in Palestine

England prepares to leave the world

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 2016

I never thought I would see this opera again. ‘Rule Britannia!’ peals, the curtain parts, and there is a mad queen poling her island raft away into the Atlantic.

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They were expendable: Iraq and the Kurds

Joost Hiltermann, 17 November 2016

Ever since​ the fall of the Ottomans, the Kurds have been a non-state nation, an insurgent population split across four sovereign states – Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Denied, as they...

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Islamic State v. al-Qaida

Owen Bennett-Jones, 3 November 2016

Underlying tensions are likely to be exposed when the Iraq army and Shia militias take back the city of Mosul from Islamic State, which they hope to do by the end of the year. Some of the city’s Sunni...

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Home Office Rules

William Davies, 3 November 2016

Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that its view of the world, as a dangerous and frightening place, may have deepened in her case or meshed with...

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Short Cuts: Brexit and the SNP

Peter Geoghegan, 3 November 2016

In​ his recent book, The Question of Scotland: Devolution and After (Birlinn, £9.99) Tam Dalyell, for many years the Labour MP for West Lothian, identifies several points at which the...

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Diary: Homo Trumpiens

Christian Lorentzen, 3 November 2016

‘Hey, everybody,​ how about it, huh?’ Paul Ryan said, coming onto a stage decorated with hay bales and pumpkins in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of 9 October. ‘Man,...

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