Articles

From climate change to political corruption and authoritarianism, leaders of protest movements share a common dilemma: how to achieve impact when existing parties and institutions cannot be trusted?

According to AstraZeneca, the EU is demanding preferential treatment in the supply of the coronavirus vaccine. And according to the EU, restrictions on the export of the vaccine are all about accountability. There are reasons to be sceptical about both claims.

Masturbation became an important medical and moral issue around 1712, Thomas Laqueur argues. Increasingly viewed by Enlightenment thinkers as a pathology of the solitude of an unmoored mind, the private practice was quickly linked with feelings of shame and guilt, with implications for self and society that would last for centuries.

The film of Putin’s Palace is above all a story of monumental corruption. Yet it is also a story about the Russian leader’s warped historical imagination. Despite the residence’s imperial pretensions, its secrecy speaks volumes about the cultural chasm between Putin and the Romanovs.

Extractivism and its impacts seem to be globalization’s end game. Industrial capitalism plunders natural resources, wreaking havoc on biomes and the lives of Indigenous peoples – then moves on. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing speaks about the ‘friction’ between dynamic groups that can ultimately bring regeneration.

Just landed in Moscow after recovering from the Novichok poisoning of last August, Putin’s major political opponent Aleksej Navalny was immediately arrested. This selection of Eurozine reads helps understand why the Kremlin fears him and is cracking down on niches of free expression and rising civic activism.

Trump wasn’t an aberration: he only renewed the US nation’s bitter, uncivil war over whether a clear majority of its people want to forge a republic of equals. The challenge for Biden will be to assert his ‘American ideal’ over the competing vision that Trump has left behind.

Critics of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s controversial ECB ruling in May 2020 claimed it had hindered EU integration and undermined rule of law. But although the ruling was applauded by Eurosceptics, it was anything but anti-European, argues the Court’s former president.

Amateur photographers offered a range of alternative windows on life in the USSR undercutting the dogmas of socialist realist aesthetics. Bohdan Shumylovych places the Kharkiv School of Photography under Lacan’s psychoanalytic ‘cultural gaze’.

The roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines gives much-needed hope. But if the drug industry keeps being devoted exclusively to profit, inequality and mistrust will cost lives in poorer countries, and eventually also in the wealthy western world.

The case for Brexit may amount to more than pure fiction. But there is no denying it is rooted in a revivalist narrative of British history. Whether the perceived enemy be Europe, the welfare state or migrants, the right has been waging the same battle since the 1980s.

The US is facing a twisted, belligerent reality: rioters brazenly revealed their identity in an unmasked raid on the Capitol; the ‘Save America’ rally undermined the constitutional process; and incitement came from the person at the very top of the institutions being debased. All while COVID-19 is on the rise as America’s deadliest threat.

It may seem utopian, but granting rights to inanimate beings could break the institutional deadlocks of environmental policy making. Not only that, ‘a parliament of things’ could eliminate the inequalities inherent in our anthropocentric approach to politics.

On 17 December 2010, Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the arrogance of the political authorities. Bouazizi’s suicide marked the beginning of the uprisings across the Arab world. A decade later, the consequences of the Arab Spring are still unfolding.

The erosion of democracy wasn’t gradual; the writing was on the wall. It was the public understanding that lapsed. The recent Trumpist attempt to overturn an election now ends the fantasy that American democracy is distinct. Political junkie Claire Potter weighs in.

People are starting to notice nature’s invoices: forest fires burning koalas, plastic in the oceans, but the loss of biodiversity freefall has not yet fully broken through onto the political agenda. The pandemic now highlights the connection between human health and the mismanagement of nature and wildlife.