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the British Political Tradition has been increasingly challenged by contemporary developments. Previously, we focused on 3 challenges: the Scottish question; the European question, culminating in Brexit; and the rise of anti-politics, perhaps better seen as a decline of trust in the political elite. We also emphasized that the British political elites’ response to those challenges was, almost inevitably, to defend the British Political Tradition; although this response was, at best, problematic.

Executive view has persisted, as, at every stage, it has tried to limit the role of Parliament in the Brexit process

The claim of the Executive, and many others, is that the referendum showed the ‘will of the people’, thus giving democratic legitimacy to the decision to leave the EU. In contrast, the claim of a large number, probably a small majority, of MPs is that, in a representative democracy, Parliament should have the final say, although for many of these MPs any decision should respect the referendum vote

For three weeks Sisi’s image has been trashed by an insider turned whistleblower whose videos from self-exile in Spain have gripped and paralysed Egypt in turn. 

Mohamed Ali is, by his own admission, no hero. One of only 10 contractors the army uses, he is corrupt. He also only left Egypt with his family and fortune because his bills had not been paid. Ali is no human rights campaigner. 

"Now you say we are very poor, we must be hungry. Do you get hungry? You spend billions that are spilt on the ground. Your men squander millions. I am not telling a secret. You are a bunch of thieves."

revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation. The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history. Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.

That comparisons can so easily be made between the beginning of the French Revolution and the United States today does not mean that Americans are fated to see a Reign of Terror or that a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s looms large in our future. What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs. The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed.

Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans. In a single week in March, 3.3 million American workers filed new unemployment claims. The following week, 6.6 million more did the same. Middle-class Americans who placed their retirement savings in the stock market have recently experienced huge losses. Even before the pandemic, black Americans on average had only 7 percent of the wealth of white ones (Native Americans, even less). Among non-Hispanic white Americans, deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and alcohol continue to rise. Nearly 2.5 million people are incarcerated. Trust in existing institutions (including the Electoral College and Congress) was already vanishingly small.

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

"If you could name one thing that would really change your life, what would it be?" I ask. I’m expecting him to say a better house, or more food, or a doctor, or education for his kids. I’m expecting him to mention one of the things relief money often provides for.But Lebrun grins broadly at me, revealing a missing tooth, and says, "What would help me most? A land registry."

What Lebrun needs is security – security he can build a future on. And he needs agencies to safeguard that security. What Lebrun needs is bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is also the system that organises everything into procedures that are the same for everybody. It’s what holds societies together. It’s not excessive; it’s indispensable.

any effort to fight discrimination requires some level of disruption. For those who are catered to by an exclusionary status quo, the protest movement is often their only source of discomfort. So it becomes easy for them to perceive protesters, activists and other movement-makers as the “real” problem.

in most cases, our societies benefit from the conflict that is produced when people demand inclusion, even if there are others who insist on maintaining unjust norms

There is no perfect social movement, and there can never be a universally acceptable way to agitate for change. Still, movements offer marginalised people a unifying and often effective way to move our societies closer to ideals of justice and inclusion.

The new coalition appears to have largely seized the agenda and changed the narrative: in recent weeks Italy has softened its stance towards NGO ships asking to disembark the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, and has cut a temporary deal with other EU members for the relocation of the asylum seekers picked up at sea – an agreement that the government has touted as “historic”, stressing that the adoption of a less adversarial attitude towards Europe than Salvini's is already bearing fruit

The game is not over, and his mid-summer move may still pay off. The new, fragile ruling coalition, whose two main members have despised and insulted each other for years, has been put under further strain by another sudden, tectonic shift in Italy's political landscape.As it turned out, Salvini was not the only one in a mood for political gambling. Mid-September, barely two weeks after the new cabinet had been sworn in, prominent PD member Matteo Renzi announced he was leaving the party to found his own, Italia Viva (Italy Alive). Although Renzi said he (and the roughly 40 MPs and Senators who joined him) would keep supporting the government, the split marks a watershed moment in the history of the Italian centre-left.

Renzi, a charismatic and influential politician whose stint as Prime Minister came to an abrupt end after he lost a constitutional referendum in December 2016, has long been accused by the left of being too centrist, pro-business and socially conservative, and of steering the party away from its social-democratic roots. His reluctance to clearly label himself as left-wing has become somewhat legendary, just like his flair for hot-air rhetoric.

Analyses of security threats in the continent focus on fragile and failing states, ethnic rivalries, violent extremism, and conflict over natural resources. African governments are seen as too weak to project power as far as their borders, let alone across them. And indeed, since African countries achieved independence in the 1950s and 1960s—and especially since 1964, when the newly founded Organisation of African Unity adopted its “Cairo Declaration” on the inviolability of inherited colonial boundaries—there have been few border wars and just two successful secessions (Eritrea and South Sudan). There have been only a handful of regime change invasions—such as when Tanzania toppled Uganda’s Idi Amin in 1979, and Libya’s invasion of Chad under Muammar al-Qaddafi.

armed rivalry takes different, disguised forms: covert war and proxy war between states is common—in fact, it’s standard. Scratch below the surface of any civil war and there’s usually a foreign sponsor to be found

Most of the time, involvement in a neighbor’s war is authorized at the highest level and implemented systematically, if secretively, by military intelligence or national security

The UK was once viewed by political scientists as embodying a distinct majoritarian form of politics – the ‘Westminster Model’ – that stood in contrast to the ‘consensus’ democracies found elsewhere in Europe. Several of the countries in the latter group, such as Italy, were often assumed to be inherently prone to instability in comparison to the UK. Yet as Martin J. Bull explains, politics in Westminster now has some striking similarities with the Italian approach that once invited scorn from British observers.

the British political system was strong and stable because it was based on a first-past-the-post electoral system that produced a parliamentary majority for a single party in a legislature where a monopoly of power rested in one House (the lower house as the only elected chamber) and was reinforced by two main parties (of a moderate political nature), strong party discipline, cabinet collective responsibility and a Prime Minister who was ‘first among equals’. In contrast, the Italian political system was fragmented and unstable because it was based on a PR electoral system that struggled to produce a majority for a single party (meaning coalition government) in a legislature where both Houses had equal powers, reinforced by a welter of political parties including significant extremist parties, an absence of party discipline, an absence of collective cabinet responsibility, and a Prime Minister whose power was no greater than his coalition partners would allow.

Italy, for example, was presented with its first significant opportunity to ‘modernise’ its political system as a result of the end of the Cold War in 1989. The collapse of the former communist regimes saw an implosion of the Italian party system and the disintegration and dissolution of virtually all the existing parties between 1989 and 1994.

The Oct. 13 landslide victory for outsider presidential candidate Kais Saied was historic by any measure. After an unpredictable contest in which voters appeared determined to purge traditional parties and public figures that have dominated the post-Arab Spring landscape, Tunisian politics has entered a new era –– though exactly what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Riding a wave of revolt that was driven by an unorthodox coalition of students, anti-corruption voters and conservatives, Saied rose from relative obscurity little more than a year ago to best an original field of 27 candidates and seize the highest political office in the land.

everybody has their own interpretation of the 61-year-old professor’s message.  “Some accuse me of being a Salafist, others of being a radical leftist,” the candidate said critically during the Oct. 11 presidential debate. “But I have always been an independent and will die an independent.”

The global system is built around sovereign states, and it shows. This is an enormous problem for groups that define themselves, or are defined by others, as distinct from the country within whose borders they happen to reside, and it’s also terrible as a framework for navigating the global politics of a rapidly changing world.

Sovereignty is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which was pivotal in shifting conceptions of government toward a secular state with entire authority inside inviolable territorial borders. Designed as a diplomatic solution to catastrophic religious wars among feudal, monarchical territories, its tenets have persisted into the modern world largely due to the entrenched power of those states, jealously guarding their unfettered rule over their slice of geography.

as the power of monarchy eroded and European countries needed something else to inspire loyalty among their citizens, the ideal of the nation-state—that the people within those arbitrary borders would feel some sort of collective identity—became popular. This led to more wars as European states expelled or converted anyone who didn’t fit their concept of nation: not French enough, not German enough, not Italian enough. They also spread this idea to their colonies, exporting successive waves of destructive conflicts.

Despite the collapse of its so-called "caliphate" in the Middle East, and the killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, however, ISIL remains a growing and evolving threat in other parts of the world, especially in Africa's restive Sahel region. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the prodigy of ISIL there, is going from strength to strength, bolstering its membership and carrying out attacks.

Most of the states that have territory in the Sahel are grappling with the destructive effects of climate change, poverty, food shortages, ethnic conflicts and lack of effective democratic governance. There is little opportunity for the people in the region to receive an education and find work that would allow them to sustain their families. Moreover, they live in fear of being attacked by one of the numerous local armed groups that are active there. This is causing many to embark on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to reach Europe's shores and seek sanctuary there. All this creates an ample opportunity for terror groups like ISIL to expand their influence over the region.

Burkina Faso is now stuck in a vicious cycle where the problems that allowed armed groups like ISIL to infiltrate the country are being exacerbated by their presence, while the resulting desperation is causing more people to join them.

If the unofficial reports of dead and wounded are anywhere near accurate, this might be the most deadly uprising since the 1979 revolution.

Iran’s turmoil is not driven by U.S. policies, nor is it merely some circumstantial spasm. The protests are the latest salvo in the Iranian struggle for accountable government that stretches back more than a century. And the fury and desperation of the Iranians on the streets this week strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the revolutionary system.

After the monarchy was ousted, collective action — both spontaneous and opportunistic — was a primary mechanism for gaining advantage in the chaotic struggle for power.

Once a state becomes highly unequal, it can enter a spiral of decline. All the most unequal rich nations in the world are now falling apart in one way or another and all have a "strong man" in charge: USA, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Israel. On 12 December 2019, the people of the UK confirmed their membership in that club of the world’s most unequal affluent countries headed by a strong man.

More equitable countries tend not to have a leader who matters all that much, a head of government who is not that well known. They also tend to have lower far-right voting, higher overall turnout at elections, higher spending on public goods as a proportion of GDP, fewer (social class)-segregated schools, better quality secure housing, less homelessness, much better mental health, and higher life expectancy. Jobs in such countries are better paid for the majority of people and less precarious.

Nowhere else in Europe is life expectancy falling. Nowhere else in Europe has rising infant mortality. Nowhere else in Europe (bar Germany) has as many people sleeping rough on the streets. Germany only has as many rough sleepers because a very small proportion of the very large numbers of refugees it accepted are without housing. The UK accepts almost no refugees.

design’s English-language lives do orbit around certain ideas: intention, planning, aesthetics, method, vocation. These ideas together form a social system that generates meaning, defining the boundaries of knowledge and the locations of cultural and economic value. Design and the ideas that travel with it, in other words, make up a discourse.

Early in the 20th century, design came to refer to the visual styling of existing products. And then, as modernist ideas circulated in Europe before World War II and as Americans adopted the idea of “industrial design,” design began to refer not just to styling products but also to conceiving and planning their function. That was when design came to mean, as Steve Jobs put it much later, “not just what it looks like and feels like” but “how it works.”

Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.

A lack of social mobility in Britain’s “left behind” communities risks fuelling populism and becoming a national security crisis, according to Fiona Hill, the coalminer’s daughter who became a top White House adviser.

Britain’s social divide is so wide that some communities feel like “another world” to the cities

class barriers today were still holding back people with regional accents

a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 – when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic – fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language

Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.

a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.

Power-sharing arrangements have been adopted to bridge the divisions in the two societies. The Good Friday Agreement and the Lebanese Constitution aim to provide a form of democracy that protects the minority community from the majority — or, in the case of Lebanon, any of the 18 religious groups from one another.

Lebanon has been without a government for almost a year since the devastating port blast in August 2020 and is facing an economic collapse. In Northern Ireland, a government was finally constituted last year after a three-year hiatus. The period covered almost the entirety of the Brexit negotiations, which will have a seismic effect on the future of the region.

Despite almost 25 years of a supposedly cross-community political system, Northern Ireland remains divided along Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist lines

hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined

hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn’t start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.)

Almost 30 years ago, then-Prince Charles declared that he wanted to be a “defender of faith,” rather than simply “Defender of the Faith,” to reflect Britain’s growing religious diversity. It created a bit of a storm in a teacup, as he had clearly not meant that he would be changing the traditional role so much as adding to it. The new King is a particular type of Anglican: one that on the one hand, is incredibly tied to the notion of tradition; but on the other, has shown a great deal of affinity for both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam, two religions clearly outside the Anglican fold that he must now titularly lead.

the King has been quite public about his admiration for Islam as a religion, and Muslim communities, both in Britain and abroad.

Privately, he’s shown a lot of sympathy for where Muslims are in difficult political situations, both in Europe and further afield. Robert Jobson’s recent Charles at Seventy claims that the King has significant sympathies for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, for example. It’s also claimed that he disagreed with dress restrictions imposed on Muslim women in various European countries.