Politics

International

Unsinkable Paris

The spirit of celebration on the streets of Paris during the Olympics was all the more meaningful to those of us who had lived through so many of the city’s darker recent chapters.

January 16, 2025 issue

Aryeh Neier and Amrit Singh

Guatemala: Democracy Imperiled

Bernardo Arévalo’s inauguration last year as president of Guatemala symbolized the revival of democracy in a notoriously corrupt country. A concerted effort by obstructionist elites now threatens to oust him on specious grounds—and bring repression back.

February 13, 2025 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Joy and Apprehension in Syria

There is widespread relief after Assad’s fall, though no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers and challenges that await them.

January 16, 2025 issue

David Shulman

A Deadly Apathy

A blank indifference to cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war has infected Israel’s collective conscience.

January 16, 2025 issue

Joshua Hammer

Making Germany Hate Again

In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.

December 19, 2024 issue

Charles Glass

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

December 19, 2024 issue

Mark O’Connell, an interview with Rashid Khalidi

Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

The scholar of Palestinian history talks about what has and has not surprised him about the world‘s response to Israel‘s assault on Gaza.

December 19, 2024 issue

Tim Judah

Ukraine Divided

Almost three years after the beginning of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is not defeated, but Russia is not victorious, either.

December 5, 2024 issue

Covid-19 Around the World

Didier William: Dancing, Pouring, Crackling and Mourning, 2015

Edwidge Danticat

Mourning in Place

It’s hard to figure out how to mourn during a pandemic. Our mourning rituals have all been disrupted or taken away.

September 24, 2020 issue

First responders at the Riverside University Health Systems Medical Center, Moreno Valley, California, May 15, 2020

Timothy Snyder

What Ails America

Although I did not understand this then, I had a severe infection in my liver. I was in a condition known as sepsis; death was close.

September 3, 2020

A man holding a painting of Didier Raoult, the French medical researcher promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, during a show of support for health care workers in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Mandé, May 2020

Rachel Donadio

France: After Lockdown, the Street

Over the course of a long, strange April—during which France recorded nearly 20,000 Covid-19 deaths—something had shifted.

July 23, 2020 issue

The Latest

Yassin al-Haj Saleh, translated by Yasmine Seale

The Return

Syria will not be liberated as long as the better part of her, you, remains a hostage of this long-drawn-out captivity.

April 10, 2025

Omer Bartov

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Shredding the Postwar Order

Donald Trump is reshaping relations between Europe and the US more dramatically than at any time since World War II.

April 24, 2025 issue

Julia Preston

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system.

March 30, 2025

Rowan Moore Gerety

Mozambique on the Edge

For months, the country’s people have been taking to the streets in the aftermath of a falsified election. Could the protests bring lasting change?

March 28, 2025

Nabil Salih

The New Baghdad

The Iraqi capital is witnessing an inequitable construction boom, as the elite launder oil money and the state reconfigures sites of dissent.

March 22, 2025

Christian Caryl

How Germany Remade Itself

A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume.

April 10, 2025 issue

Nadia Abu El-Haj

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest.

March 15, 2025

Joshua Craze

USAID: Goodbye to All That?

By gutting USAID, the Trump administration has imperiled the lives of thousands—and threatened the very future of the humanitarian and development industries.

March 12, 2025