Articles

Three months after the Biden-Xi summit, the two sides’ divergent framings of the bilateral relationship are hindering progress. Paul Haenle* and Sam Bresnick* Fifty years ago this week, former US President Richard Nixon flew to China, setting the stage for a dramatic shift in relations between the two countries. Much …

Pushbacks at Europe’s borders have not been compliant with the Refugee Convention. Nor would internal ones. Felix Bender* Pushbacks have become the ‘new normal’ on the European Union’s external borders. What they entail, in the absence of legal due process, has become readily apparent. Refugees are being apprehended and detained in …

Angana P. Chatterji Critical elections are proceeding in five states in India, including in its most populous state and political nerve center, Uttar Pradesh. The election there in particular illustrates the majoritarian nationalism that is driving widespread and lethal aggression against Muslims across the country. Amid the balloting that commenced on Feb. 10 and will end March 7, with …

James Zogby* In his ground-breaking 2008 book, The Way We’ll Be, my brother John used decades of polling to observe and define the values and worldviews unique to cohorts of Americans. He argued that their life experiences shared with contemporaries, defining events and traumatic moments, shaped their views, values and sense of possibility. …

David McNair As diplomats put the final touches on preparations for a joint summit between the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) this week, early indications suggest the headline outcomes will disappoint. But what is happening behind the scenes is much more significant. Why? Because dry intergovernmental negotiations …

James Zogby* This past month, we were treated to a few classic examples of how Israel deals with criticism and how it may be finding it increasingly difficult to dodge challenges to its abusive behaviours. Example 1 On 12 January 2022, Omar Abdulmajeed Assad died at the hands of the …

The Conservative Party used to be famed for its pragmatic retention of power, Paul Mason writes. It’s lost that muscle memory. Paul Mason* Meltdown’ was the word Britain’s newspapers reached for as Boris Johnson’s administration fell apart at the end of last week. As a metaphor, it’s accurate. In a literal nuclear …

Kate Pickett ponders how social scientists can bring structural inequalities to light when media focus on individual lives. Kate Pickett* Epidemiologists and public-health researchers tend to work at scale. Although, as with doctors, our work is aimed at uncovering the causes of disease and death, our focus is a population …

‘Inequality’ is never the official cause of a death, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. Jayati Ghosh* The pandemic brought home to us a hard truth. Unequal access to income and opportunity does more than create unjust, unhealthy and unhappy societies; it kills people. Over the past two years, people …

James Zogby* There was a flurry of news reporting last month after a newly elected Republican member of Congress was captured on video telling a crowd of supporters about her nervous elevator ride with a Muslim member of Congress. As her audience giggled in delight, she noted that there was …