Russia has never been busier — or more exhausted. After three years of war, the Kremlin boasts record-low unemployment and record-high labor shortages. Factories can’t find welders, farms can’t find drivers, and the defense industry is devouring what’s left of the civilian workforce. The result is an economy that runs without advancing — its motion […]
Category: World
Ethiopia’s “Renewal Through Planting” and the Politics of Green Authoritarianism
The intense Ethiopian sun burns down as thousands of volunteers in green shirts, school children alongside politicians, take up shovels and saplings in a publicly broadcasted spectacle to plant millions of trees in a single day. They are participating in the world’s largest state-led reforestation campaign, Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, with official figures claiming that […]
The Euro Problem: Is Further Integration the Solution?
Twenty-five years after its launch, the eurozone is failing its citizens. In Spain, the unemployment rate sits at 10.29 percent. In Greece, 26.9 percent of people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Meanwhile, Italy’s public debt has climbed to 137.9 percent of GDP, the second highest in the euro area after Greece. The […]
Decolonizing the Climate Crisis
In the Atacama Desert of Chile, the promise of clean energy for the world comes at a steep cost. Beneath the salt flats that power electric vehicles in the Global North, Indigenous communities struggle with water scarcity and environmental degradation. The imbalance between the consequences for the South and North shows that the pursuit of […]
A Faraway Rebel Group Upped Their Game Enough to Hurt the Average American
Despite the world being more connected than ever, much international conflict feels disconnected from people’s day-to-day lives when it has no day-to-day effect. Beyond the rational, moral judgements made about foreign conflicts, empathizing with the tragedy and loss, in terms of the direct impact on citizens’ lives, these distant wars are often considered, at best, […]
The Rise of Developing Nations from the Chinese Net Decline
As cranes dotted skylines across Nairobi, Colombo, and Karachi in 2013, China’s vast Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) had sprung into full velocity. Pouring over $1 trillion into developing countries symbolized their promise to rewrite the global economic map. However, today, those exact cranes remain inactive. The dozens of lower-middle-income nations that had once received […]
The End of Ideology, the Rise of Identity
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama suggested that history had reached its end, not because events would cease, but because humanity had supposedly resolved its deepest political question: how to live. Liberal democracy, he argued, met the human demand for recognition (what the Greeks called thymos) more fully than any rival. After the fall of communism, politics […]
The Dystopian Spiral of Third-Country Deportations
Shuttled out of countries under mysterious circumstances, dropped off in foreign states, and left with little legal recompense, the story of modern third-country deportees sounds like something out of a political fiction. But third-country deportations are intensely real, and they are only increasing. Third-country deportations occur when a non-citizen is deported from their current nation […]
Remembering the City of Darkness
Near downtown Hong Kong, about a kilometer away from where Prince Edward Road East crosses the Kai Tak River, lies a historical artifact in the form of a lush and serene public space: Kowloon Walled City Park. A wandering tourist might find its name a bit strange. Kowloon — sure. Park — makes sense. But […]
Netanyahu Faces the World, and the World Walks Out
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly on Sep. 26, 2025, symbolism freighted the event. His address was not merely a policy statement: It was a high-stakes performance under the twin shadows of war crimes allegations and a Trump pardon that cleared a path for him to […]