Articles

While Trump’s violence has never been purely rhetorical, few anticipated his eagerness to use 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 wider cultural 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?

Recent statements by the presidents of FIFA, UEFA and the IOC indicate that the resolve to exclude Russia from international sport is crumbling. The justifications for this change of heart are disingenuous. Russia consistently uses successful athletes to legitimize its full-scale war against Ukraine.

Geopolitical, technological and media warfare landscapes are changing at speed. Now that Europe needs to take up a clearer position, how should the block respond? When chaos and uncertainty are generated to wield power – from autonomous weapons systems and pre-emptive strikes to disinformation and propaganda – reflection on long-term reparations provides much needed respite.

Warring parties that benefit from violence and extortion – targeting civilians, looting, smuggling and abducting, pushing identity politics – are averse to resolution. How can diplomatic peace negotiations move beyond discussions about territory and improve the lives of war victims? And how can objective threats be identified in times of escalating conflict?

After four years on high-level alert, defence against invasion becomes a gruelling routine. But could the normalization of war in Ukraine be positive for long-term planning, the public good and the social contract? Literature and critical writing provide valuable perspectives.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is entering its fifth year. With peace negotiations at a standstill, traumatized communities face a tough question: What does it mean to memorialize a war when its end is nowhere in sight? War crime survivors from Yahidne are actively engaging in how their mass confinement is remembered.

Online influencers are using religion to give misogyny a virtuous veneer. How can society support boys and young men, labelled as incels and bombarded with digital hate, seek answers to questions on life and trauma without resorting to male stereotypes?

The anti-EU sentiment emerging from Central Europe today suggests that little remains of the ‘arch-Europeanism’ Milan Kundera once ascribed to the region. But was there something inherent to Kundera’s concept of Central Europe that explains the logic of contemporary Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak nationalism?

AI-generated non-consensual porn is devastating the lives of girls and women. Online images sexualized at the click of a button reveal how unrealistic standard advice for women to exercise caution is. Regulation of AI products that enable sexual violence is a first step. But an ideological and intellectual shift on women’s freedom is needed.

A discussion with the historian Nancy L. Green on the historiography of migration from structuralism to intersectionality; the relevance of trajectories in an age of global movement; and walls, epistemologies and the limits of transnationalism.

Whether an Ivy League academic or a Patriot Front white nationalist, Curtis Yarvin will find your position too democratic. The once obscure blogger’s brand of postliberalism calls for a political system reboot popular with MAGA and Big Tech leaders. But does his eccentric mix of elitist, pseudo-religious and computational thought reflect chaos more than his desired order?

Arguments that ‘hate speech’ is ‘free speech’ abound. The far-right push to normalize offensive language in the name of protection is hypocritical and needs calling out. But is it also time for liberal free speech theory’s ‘marketplace of ideas’ to be reassessed?

Taking advantage of winter’s downtime to deal with coastal mass tourism seems astute, especially in Croatia where no one ever truly has a break from its impact.