After years of rapprochement, the relationship between Russia and the West is more strained now than it has ever been in the past 25 years. Putin's motives remain for many a mystery, though not for...więcej »
Japan, anchored by its traditions, transformed by American post-war Occupation, and globally recognized for its technological innovations, manufacturing prowess and pop culture, faces powerful chal...więcej »
For nearly two decades, the area surrounding the French port of Calais has been a temporary staging post for thousands of migrants and refugees hoping to cross the channel to Britain. It achieved g...więcej »
The global response to the Covid-19 pandemic is the greatest science policy failure in a generation. We knew this was coming. Warnings about the threat of a new pandemic have been made repeatedly s...więcej »
Global thinker, public intellectual and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful acad...więcej »
With more than 500,000 people killed and at least half the population displaced, Syria’s conflict is the most deadly of the 21st century. Russia’s decision to join the war has broken th...więcej »
Since 1945, Britain has had to cope with a slow descent from international primacy. The decline in global influence was intended to be offset by the United Kingdom’s entry into Europe in 1975...więcej »
Russia is back as a major force in global politics, but what does this mean? Is Russia the dangerous revisionist foe that meddles in Western elections and tries to subvert the liberal international...więcej »
Over the past century alone, Russia has lived through great achievements and deepest misery; mass heroism and mass crime; over-blown ambition and near-hopeless despair – always emerging with ...więcej »
Today Syria is a country known for all the wrong reasons: civil war, vicious sectarianism, and major humanitarian crisis. But how did this once rich, multi-cultural society end up as the site of on...więcej »
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immedia...więcej »
International Relations emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the early twentieth century, but its philosophic foundations draw on centuries of thinking about human nature, power and authori...więcej »
Increasingly age appears to be the key dividing line in contemporary politics. Young people across the globe are embracing left-wing ideas and supporting figures such as Corbyn and Sanders. Where h...więcej »
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most controversial philosophers of the eighteenth century, and his groundbreaking work still provokes heated debate in contemporary political theory....więcej »
Sketches in the Theory of Culture is a remarkable work by all measures. Written by Zygmunt Bauman when he was still a professor in Poland, and originally intended for publication in 1968, it was su...więcej »
During the last few decades, the gap between the incomes, wealth and living standards of rich and poor people has increased in most countries. Economic inequality has become a defining issue of our...więcej »
Gorbachev’s Gamble offers a new and more convincing answer to this question by providing the missing link between the internal and external aspects of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Andrei Gr...więcej »
We are living in a period of great uncertainty. Votes for Brexit and Trump, along with widespread political volatility, are not only causing turmoil; they are signs that many long-predicted tipping...więcej »
When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we see? Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the 2...więcej »
The Black Hole of Auschwitz brings together Levi’s writings on the Holocaust and his experiences of the concentration camp, as well as those on his own accidental status as a writer and his c...więcej »