Articles

The US-Israel war on Iran has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora. A personal account of altercation in Sweden highlights the fervour of pro-monarchists versus the dislocation and loss inflicted by escalated violence.

Under Xi Jinping the Chinese Communist Party has closed down the debate about the Cultural Revolution. However, its legacies are conspicuous throughout contemporary Chinese society, not least in the capitalist economy, while in some respects Xi’s personalist rule resembles Mao’s.

Modernism promised a bright future. But adventure soon became routine – the early Crystal Palace experiment since reflected in shopping malls and office blocks. Now ‘shit experiments’, rolled out by tech oligarchs and authoritarian governments, utilize neuroliberalism’s handle on malleable human behaviour. Can anything of social experimentation be salvaged for welfare and basic income needs?

Habermas’s insistence on the need for negotiation with the Putin regime stemmed from a failure to comprehend the eastern European experience of totalitarianism. The argument that regime change is not a legitimate policy option for the West is not groundless. But it is historically wrong.

Both emotional and uncanny, sincere yet ironic – contemporary British-based composers are pioneering a new aesthetic: musical metamodernism.

Habermas understood that the possibility for German–Jewish dialogue after the Holocaust depends on commitment to universal law. But when the past demands silence about the present, that possibility is denied. On the contradictions in Habermas’s exemplary cosmopolitan project.

Hungary’s elections will be decisive for the future of the anti-EU pressure group MCC Brussels, the European arm of the Fidesz-associated Mathias Corvinus Collegium. How would an Orbán defeat impact on the illiberal international?

Stigmatized during socialism, LGBTQIA+ people in Slovakia continued to face political and social adversity in the following decades. Two veteran activists reflect on the campaign for equal rights after ’89 and why it remains as necessary as ever.

Which Iranian artist in exile isn’t asked how their work relates to oppression, protest and war? How can creatives overcome colonial expectations of intelligibility? Opacity – questioning transparency’s supposed purity – becomes a technique of survival and a form of protection, as in the work of Chohreh Feyzdjou.

Even if the Iranian regime manages to stay in power, it will no longer have the means to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. The current war has brought Israel closer to its goal of becoming the centre of gravity in the Middle East.

When NATO intervened in the Yugoslav wars on 24 March 1999, depleted uranium weaponry punctured Serbian targets across the region, leaving permanent contamination behind. Populists, whose victim narrative gained ground, now position nuclear as the solution to energy dependency. But how can public fear and security be one and the same?

Change the directors, cut the funding, rewrite the narrative: from Washington to Warsaw, mnemonic warriors are deploying the same techniques to weaponize history. How museums have become key arenas in the culture wars.

While Trump’s violence has never been purely rhetorical, few anticipated his appetite for the use of military force since returning to power. Do Americans share their president’s growing bellicosity? And what if they decide they don’t?

Quackery with a university logo: the failed attempt to introduce pseudoscience onto the curriculum of Georgia’s flagship technical university was a bizarre episode in a culture war being waged by the Georgian Dream government on the country’s higher education system.

The German government’s decision to reinstate national service has hit resistance. Young activists, aligning climate protection and peace, are turning to pacifist groups. Ex-conscripts, now elderly, embody lessons of the nation’s past. Will following the lead of Scandinavian and Baltic countries, prioritizing civil defence, shift public opinion?

Giving a big tech boss the job of cutting US government spending unleashed an onslaught of hacking and dehumanizing tactics. Now that the obliteration of institutional data – linked to losses of jobs, USAID projects and lives – has been normalized, where does that leave digitization’s legitimacy and America’s once significant soft power?