Politics & Economics

In​ Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson wrote that ‘in the two centuries after about 1760 … no country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the...

Mohammed bin Salman already wields immense power and he is only just beginning. As well as rewriting the royal family’s code of seniority and bringing most ministries under his direct control, he...

The unlikely union between a Fascist leader and a Jewish American opera singer offers interesting perspectives on Fascism’s evolving attitudes to race, religion, culture, gender and so on, particularly...

Abunduluk joined the RSF three years ago, but was one of the early members of the original Darfur rebellion in 2003. His body, covered with scars, is a map of the Darfur conflict. He rolled up his trousers...

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...

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...

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,...

‘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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....