The new populist right is filtering America’s most inclusive tradition through a political lens. In doing so it feeds an alarmingly reductive view of national history, says Godfrey Hodgson.
The economic recession in Russia has not produced the expected rise in organised crime. The answer to this conundrum lies in the politics of security reform, says Gavin Slade.
Iraqi refugees in neighbouring Arab states are unwilling to return to their country and unable to emigrate further west. Their perilous situation needs to be addressed by the powers who created this humanitarian crisis, says Dawn Chatty.
The traces of optimism that had surrounded Burma’s first notionally democratic experience for two decades vanish on closer inspection of the outcome, says David Scott Mathieson in Chiang Mai.
The Irish government’s request to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for a financial bailout to rescue its broken economy reflects a far deeper decay in the country’s political culture and institutions. This is the very moment to begin to transform them, says Fintan O’Toole.
The Ethiopian government’s political use of international humanitarian aid is a test of donors’ commitment to human-rights principles, says Tom Porteous.
The election of Dilma Rousseff is a landmark moment in Brazil’s political history. But the challenges ahead promise to make the task as hard as her victory proved to be, says Arthur Ituassu.
The international bailout of Ireland’s economy is another epic moment in the crisis of the eurozone. Angela Merkel’s government in Berlin is, as ever, at the heart of events. Katinka Barysch maps the political logic that guides Germany’s current strategy.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t gather your people and ask them to provide wood, prepare tools, assign tasks. Call them together and raise in their minds the longing for the endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The political transformation and social drama of the 1989 revolutions in east-central Europe promised a decisive rupture with the past. But the perspective of two decades and of a global frame offers a more complex picture of this historic moment, says George Lawson.
In the wake of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, many Native Americans adopted civil resistance to fight for rights supposedly guaranteed in the 19th century by the government's treaties with their tribes. This true story is how one tribe in Wisconsin, using no
