Institute for Human Sciences

Putin’s crack-down on dissent at the beginning of his third term was a watershed moment for Russian journalism. While the majority of critical reporters were forced to leave, those that remained morphed into regime propagandists. How to explain their political subservience?

Democracy in the US is under threat from within. Racial nationalism – a throwback to unresolved tensions from the American Civil War – has found new impetus under Trump, forcing civic nationalism into a corner. Will the immutable longevity of the American Constitution be its paradoxical undoing? And how might the US recover from its emerging dictatorship?

Imperial Russia saw the nation as the sea into which all the other Slavic cultures flowed. The idea persists today not only in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbourhood, but also in the way eastern Europe is studied in the West.

Internal colonialism continues to characterize relations between England and the rest of the United Kingdom. Nowhere is this more evident than in the British Government’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where lesions caused by lingering political indeterminacy have been further exposed by Brexit.