The entrenchment of inequality in the United States damages the economy, degrades politics and corrodes the American dream. A new reality is also an epic challenge of leadership, says Godfrey Hodgson.
A lengthy political crisis in Nepal has exposed deep divisions over the country’s future, in which matters of identity - national, ethnic, caste, class - are to the fore. A new federal constitution is intended to address these. The obstacles in its way could be removed by rethinking the “identitar
The dignified commemorations of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in July 1995 retain their integrity and human core, even as the leaders of a divided Bosnia seek to channel the grief into political pageantry. Peter Lippman, in eastern Bosnia, reports.
Several European states - France, Italy, Belgium and Britain among them - are involved in legal, social or political disputes over the dress-codes of Muslim women. A detailed and alert survey of the variegated experiences and attitudes involved is the best way to understand a complex issue, says S
The narrow defeat of a populist-nationalist coalition, and in particular the advance of a party advocating Slovak-Hungarian collaboration, could open Slovakia to a better era, says Juliana Sokolova.
A decade of wars has produced a strategic shift very different from what Washington and its allies intended - less towards unipolar order than the complexities of multipolar disorder. This poses a challenge to policy-makers and analysts alike, says Arshin Adib-Moghaddam.
A series of careful reports into the leaked emails of climate scientists provides a consistent account of the "climategate" saga. This allows a welcome refocus on the problems of climate change and the role of the IPCC, says Øyvind Paasche.
The new constitution which the Kyrgyz people voted in on 27 June 2010 seeks to break the presidential pattern of government. But the recent violent upheaval has left the government weak. America and Russia both need Kyrgyzstan to thrive as a country ruled neither by despotism nor fundamentalism. T
The death in April 2010 of Fred Halliday, engaged political intellectual and scholar of international relations, provoked many tributes from among the worldwide fellowship of colleagues he had done so much to create and nurture. Now, in what is both a preliminary assessment and an incisive overvie
The choice of a successor to the president killed in the "second Katyn" tragedy was always going to be an emotionally and politically complex process. The result suggests that the Poles and their institutions have passed both tests, says Adam Szostkiewicz.
Six months after the catastrophe in Haiti’s capital, the realities of insecurity, displacement and poverty co-exist with opportunities and agents of reconstruction. Johanna Mendelson Forman offers a view from the ground.
The current form of governance of the Catholic church and the Vatican City State raises fundamental questions about these institutions - and their titular head, says Michael Walsh.