Politics

International

Israel: The Way Out

If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some unpleasant though obvious facts.

May 9, 2024 issue

Christian Caryl

Mourning Navalny

Alexey Navalny’s death represents the culmination of the Kremlin’s efforts to push the country into a political deep freeze, but his legacy is a new generation of Russians who yearn to imagine alternatives to Putin’s regime.

April 4, 2024 issue

Tim Judah

Gloom in Ukraine

Two years after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian morale has plummeted.

April 18, 2024 issue

Margaret Scott

Indonesia’s Corrupted Democracy

Behind the victory of his chosen successor in February’s elections lies a complicated story of how outgoing President Joko Widodo has co-opted much of Indonesian society while consolidating immense power.

April 4, 2024 issue

Joshua Hammer

Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage

Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion.

March 21, 2024 issue

Gary Younge

Small Island

What has happened to Britain?

March 21, 2024 issue

Jonathan Steele

The Party Line

A new book about Western journalists’ experience in Moscow during World War II sheds light on the problems of media manipulation and self-censorship in coverage of Russia today.

March 21, 2024 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Russian Exceptionalism

After the fall of the USSR, liberalism, considered foreign, was overwhelmed by various types of nationalism, one of which, Eurasianism, seems to have achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology.

February 22, 2024 issue

From the Archive: Palestine

Tareq Baconi

What Apartheid Means for Israel

A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.

November 5, 2021

Jehad al-Saftawi

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

Nathan Thrall

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Destroyed houses in the Shejaia neighborhood of Gaza City, July 26, 2014

Jonathan Freedland

Gaza vs. Liberal Zionism

Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war.

July 26, 2014

The Latest

Dunya Mikhail

Betraying Iraqi Girls

If Iraq legalizes child marriage, it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression.

September 15, 2024

E. Tammy Kim

Duterte’s Cruel Tricks

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing is both a reporter’s notebook and a contemporary political history of the Philippines.

October 3, 2024 issue

Ian Johnson

China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

October 3, 2024 issue

Tareq Baconi

Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

October 3, 2024 issue

David Shulman

An ‘Unlawful Presence’

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers’ savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.

September 19, 2024 issue

Claudio Lomnitz

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder

Marcela Turati’s account of the massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, is arguably the most thorough piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.

September 19, 2024 issue

Charlie Savage

A Terrible Mistake

Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.

September 19, 2024 issue

William Neuman

Chavismo’s Chokehold

The party of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains a strong hold on state institutions, but it has lost the people’s mandate. Will there be a transfer of power to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González—the true victor of this summer’s election?

September 19, 2024 issue

Jan-Werner Müller

‘Make Europe Great Again’

Viktor Orbán’s program has found less support among European politicians than it has among far-right ideologues in the United States, who consider his regime a model for a second Trump administration.

August 20, 2024