Archaeological ruins at Mohenjo-daro, Sindh, Pakistan -- Saqib Qayyum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Adam S. Green Inequality and Urbanism Today’s cities are hotbeds of inequality. Urban real estate is one of the most expensive kinds of land in the world. It attracts billionaires looking to store their wealth and hedge funds looking to garner predictable returns: New York’s avenues, Paris’s thoroughfares, and Dubai’s dazzling skyscrapers are great at making the rich

The Republican Party’s crusade to cap or abolish local property taxes is the latest tactic in their effort to drain funding from public education. By Jeff Bryant In what is being touted as the “Golden Age of School Choice,” the option that is most popular with American families—to fund and attend their local public schools—is gradually being made less viable. Take North Carolina, for instance. For years, the Republican-dominated state legislature has chosen to cut the state’s

Itamar Ben Gvir in May, 2025 -- משטרת ישראל-לשכת גיוס, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Vijay Prashad The Theatre of Punishment The treatment of the flotilla activists by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was shocking only to those who continue to clothe colonial violence in the soft language of security. There is now a mountain of evidence before humanity: Gaza has become not merely a place under siege but a geography of calculated despair, where star

Trump and Xi Jinping on May 15 -- public domain image By Vijay Prashad The scenes unfolding in Beijing were carefully choreographed, yet politics can never be reduced to mere spectacle. When US President Donald Trump traveled to China for his summit meeting with Xi Jinping, Western media, as it often does, fixated on spectacle: lavish banquets, honor guards, theatrical gestures that were designed to flatter the US president. Yet beneath all this ritual lay another reality, ha

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigning in Kerala, March 11, 2026 -- Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons By Vijay Prashad In India, over 123 million people voted in the four states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal (home to 290 million people) for their state assemblies. These are influential states: two in the south, one in the east, and one in the northeast. The next national parliamentary election is not scheduled unt

US President George W. Bush speaks with Ghana President John Agyekum Kufuor during their meeting at Osu Castle, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008 in Accra, Ghana By Vijay Prashad In February 2008, beneath the harsh afternoon sun of Accra, US President George W. Bush stood before a small gathering of journalists and dismissed swirling rumors with a chuckle. The United States, he claimed, had no intention of building military bases in Africa. “That’s baloney,” he said. The casual, dismi

Emancipation and Freedom Monument on Brown's Island, Richmond Virginia -- WomenArtistUpdates, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Guillermo Barreto When one person hurts another, common sense dictates that the person should apologize and, preferably, make amends for the harm they may have caused. Apologize, make amends, and ensure it won’t happen again. These seem like basic rules of coexistence. Coexistence among people, but also among sectors of a society and among entir

Tax the Rich placard -- Yuri Keegstra from Milwaukee, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Gary M. Feinman Political debates about democracy often focus on culture, leadership, or polarization. But history points to a more prosaic—and more powerful—driver of political outcomes: how governments raise revenue. Across thousands of years of human history, the strongest predictor of whether power is shared or concentrated is not population size, technological sophistication

From Arthurian epics to submerged cities, Lyonesse shows how folklore and history intertwine to shape a region’s cultural identity. Tristan and Isolde, miniature of the XV century, cropped -- public domain image By Samantha Sudol For centuries, the waters off Cornwall’s Atlantic coast have kept a secret: the legendary drowned land of Lyonesse. Stories of a prosperous kingdom swallowed overnight by the sea have persisted in Arthurian tales, medieval manuscripts, and Cornish fo

Çatalhöyük, 7400 BC, Konya, Turkey - UNESCO World Heritage Site. A very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, 7400 BC (photo 2019) -- Murat Özsoy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Erdem Denk Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük —a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” My tr

Göbeklitepe dig, 2015 -- public domain image By Erdem Denk In the heart of Ankara, less than a kilometer apart, stand two pillars of Turkish academia: the Faculty of Political Science ( Mülkiye ) and the Faculty of Language and History-Geography ( DTCF ). Mülkiye was established in 1859 to navigate the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic relations with the West, while DTCF was founded by the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1935 to create the historical and lingui

Coup president Jorge Rafael Videla assuming power in 1976 -- public domain image By Julián Bokser It has been fifty years since the coup d’état of 24 March 1976, one of the most tragic chapters in Argentina’s recent history: a dictatorship that combined state terrorism with a structural transformation of its economy. Throughout the 20th century, the country experienced six interruptions of its democratic order—in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976—but the last coup ushere

Trump and Vance at a ceremony for the return of the remains of six U.S. soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, Saturday, March 7, 2026 -- public domain image By Vijay Prashad Last year, in July, the United States and Israel bombarded Iran’s nuclear energy and nuclear research facilities over twelve days. After a few days, the two belligerent powers—who had no United Nations authorisation for this war of aggression—opened the door for a ceasefire . At that time,

Flag at a ceremony on Wednesday March 18, 2026 -- Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Vijay Prashad Wars are rarely decided on the battlefield alone. Military campaigns can destroy cities and kill large numbers of people, but political outcomes are defined by endurance, legitimacy, and the historical currents that flow beneath the immediate violence. While the war that US President Donald Trump imposed on the people of Iran may produce tactical victories f

Image via Granma By Vijay Prashad For Paki Wieland (1944-2026), who fought the cruelty of US imperialism all her adult life. The morning of my departure from José Martí Airport, named after the father of the nation, I hugged everybody: the woman who checked me in, the man who stamped my passport, the ground staff. I had hugged all my friends tightly the previous day, my tears fighting for the right to stream down my face. It felt as though, through these hugs, I wanted to som

The American Southern accent reveals how linguistic prejudice reinforces classism, regionalism, and subconscious bias across generations. Plate with a quote from the film Forrest Gump at Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant in Hollywood, California, USA. -- Prayitno, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Madeline VanArsdale [Author’s note: IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is an alphabet of symbols, not entirely unlike the Latin alphabet, which is used to guide pronunc

The US-Israeli strikes against Iran are part of a decades-long war against the Islamic Republic which has refused to bow to US demands that it surrender its sovereignty. Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance fires a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile at Iran, February 28 -- public domain image By Vijay Prashad Having just formed the Board of Peace, the United States and Israel have begun the board’s first war, this time on Iran. The US-Israel attack launched ear

The notorious Megiddo Prison -- image via Middle East Monitor / Twitter By Vijay Prashad and Ubai al-Aboudi In January 2026, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a grim update to its earlier work, titled Living Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps . This report documents the horrific conditions faced by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and detention facilities, revealing structural brutality that must be understood not as is

Portraits of Chavez, Bolivar and Maduro in Venezuela -- Guaiquerí, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons By Celina della Croce U.S. President Donald Trump has not shied away from admitting his thirst for Venezuelan oil. On 16 December 2025, in the leadup to the 3 January bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of the country’s president and first lady, Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, he claimed ownership over Venezuela resources, stating that “America will not… allow a hostile regime to tak

The bar at The Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok, 2019 -- image via X By Kay Young Since the American War on Vietnam, Bangkok has been a key hub for international journalists and academics in Southeast Asia. It offers modern infrastructure, easy travel, and a high quality of life, allowing them to chopper into the periphery and return home for drinks. These advantages foster a professional environment removed from the region it purports to cover. Western expatriates oper