Donors need more than an alternative menu of policy options. They need a fundamental re-think about how development happens and their role in the process, while exploring in a much more open-minded way the messy, complex reality with which they are engaging
In Maxim Kantor’s opinion, the 39 deaths in the Moscow metro bombings on 29 March are victims of that fight between bulldogs under the carpet, as Churchill described Russian politics. The victims are always the poor, never the bulldogs. And guess who gains by the tragedy?
In the past three years 5,000 women have left the industry compared to 750 men. The quality of our television affects the very nature of our democracy, society and culture. It really matters who our media workers are: the workforce must be as pluralist as our politics needs to be.
Henry Marsh, an English neurosurgeon, tells the story of his twenty-year friendship with Igor Kurilets, a young Ukrainian who resolved to drag Soviet neurosurgery into the 21st century
In conversation with oDRussia’s Deputy Editor, a former British Army officer reflects on Tolya’s experience as a conscript in the Russian army. To what extent will the proposed military reforms help with dedovshchina, or institutionalised bullying?
Richard Collins explores Britain's complex broadcasting inheritance and asks how we can make use of changing circumstances and technologies to overcome the crisis in the provision of public service content
What was done to counter the ’rise and rise’ of Adolf Hitler, fascist German leader, in the 1930’s? What could have been done?
The Levada Center has been monitoring Russian attitudes to Stalin for years. Alexei Levinson, reviewing changing attitudes to this iconic figure following the Center's latest survey, finds that he remains popular, and that people are strangely forgiving of his crimes. But there is some resistance
The doctrinal contempt of Islamist regimes for popular festivals such as the Iranian nowrooz (new year) extends to suspicion of every expression of spontaneous life. The result is to conjure the very rituals of resistance they fear, says Asef Bayat.
A spirited protest in central Kyiv embodies the ethos of a new, civic Ukraine whose people - despite their politicians - have internalised the values of the “orange revolution”. Alexander J Motyl reports for openDemocracy
