With Peter Mandelson once again slinking away  from British government with his (apparently forked) tail between his legs, it gives pause for reflection on the dangers inherent in the fact that, at some level, politics comes down to the personal. Just like all news is local news somewhere  in the world, the people at the heart of power behind the headlines, campaigns, and scandals of national or global significance, are people, driven by personal agency and motivations. For d

Widely accepted international legal norms inject moral norms and ethical considerations into global politics, often rightly so, criminalising violent foreign intervention, crimes against humanity, and more. Presidents and world leaders, most recently Rodrigo Duterte, have been held to account by the International Criminal Court, for example, for these transgressions. Yet, accountability for President Trump’s recent military operation in Venezuela, which violated the sovereign

From the federal United States to the hyper-centralised UK, and even in the tightly state-directed system of China, local government is increasingly constrained and hollowed out. The slow-building emergency in government debt is not only on a national level but on a local level too. Across advanced and emerging economics, local governments have taken on growing responsibilities without the fiscal tools to fund them, undermining service provision and political trust without tr

Relations between the USA and Venezuela experienced one of the most shocking fractures in modern diplomatic history this January when President Maduro was captured by US special forces and taken to New York. His midnight Caracas kidnapping has transformed tensions between the two countries from a classic diplomatic crisis into a global sovereignty and legal crisis, rendering it a pivotal test of the nascent multipolar world order, rather than a mere feud between strongmen. An

Only a select few would claim agricultural surpluses are a sexy topic. But in this arena the seeds have been sown for a potential backlash against the current US administration, as recently decimated international food aid policies were once a pressure release valve for tensions with the agriculture lobby over slumping crop prices – a problem faced by the US government again today.  Trump’s vision is of America as a producer, an export powerhouse, maker and grower of things t

When asked about his thoughts  on JFK’s assassination, Malcolm X responded with the phrase “the chickens come home to roost.” Malcolm, writing during America’s imperialist scramble over the newly decolonized nations, criticized the belief that America could impart political violence abroad without expecting any consequences closer to home. American naivete, if not outright arrogance, has led to the perpetuation of Western imperialism to our day. Consistently, America undermin

On December 9 th  an inconspicuous press release  by Huntington Ingalls Industries   (HII) and Babcock International quietly announced a huge shift in US defence procurement. For the first time the US nuclear submarine program will manufacture significant components outside the states. The announcement confirmed that complex hull assemblies for the new US navy’s (USN) Virginia block VI nuclear submarines  will be produced in Babcock’s Rosyth dock in Scotland.  For defence obs

This Trump administration’s recent Latin American chevauchées are old school. But the world has moved on since Monroe, and regional actors may well respond in more modern manners to the egregious treatment of Venezuela. ‘Gunboat diplomacy’ was the name awarded, perhaps most famously, to the actions of US Commodore Perry in the 1850s. The USA gained access to the closed-off Japanese economy by pounding Japanese infrastructure from the sea until it got its way. Though this infa

A few weeks before Christmas, I quietly wrote a piece  for a student publication exploring Trump’s continuation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine  through his rampant interventions in America’s so-called backyard. In light of recent kidnappings , I suppose I should have bought a lottery ticket too.  Trump had been pushing the limits in Venezuela for a while. On December 10 th , the US seized a crude oil tanker , which Trump claimed was being used to transport oil between Iran and V

The Balkan Legacy  Winston Churchill supposedly posited that the Balkans produced far too much history for it to be accurately consumed, largely echoing the typical “orientalism” rhetoric that Edward Said aptly pronounced as the ignorance many in the West have of anything the wrong side of Rome. Once more, Western nations have made a deep folly in not fully appreciating the precariousness of the peace following the Homeland War of the 1990s  in the former Yugoslavia. Througho

On the 5th of December Donald Trump’s second National Security strategy was released to little fanfare, nevertheless precipitating great global alarm, not least in Europe, as it appears to promote an archaic vision of a world once again carved up for consumption by superpowers.  This National Security Strategy is very streamlined, at only 29 pages, compared to  Trump’s 55-page 2017 equivalent. It even describes these old strategies as ‘ bloated and unfocused.’  This reflects

On the thirteenth anniversary of the Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, Syrian politics entered a new era with the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. Following the completion of the Syrian Revolution with the overthrow of Assad, at the end of the first year (December 2025), the new Sunni central authority established in Damascus by the Transitional Government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is attempting to shape the country's future. While the Transi

On 24 October 2025, the pro-reunification, Turkish Cypriot candidate Tufan Erhurman won the elections in Northern Cyprus. He won convincingly, with a whopping 62.8% of the vote. For the past 51 years, the island has been divided between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and a Turkish-occupied zone in the north - the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Many attempts to reunite Cyprus have failed due to disagreements between regional actors, primarily

This past September, the Trump Administration began conducting airstrikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea as part of the President’s agenda to fight the flow of drugs from Latin America into the U.S. The Washington Post first reported  that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the verbal order to Seal Team Six to “leave no survivors” during a September 2 strike off the coast of Venezuela. As the two survivors were subsequently killed in a second strike, his order would be deem

Siniša Karan has been declared the winner of the recent snap elections  in Republika Srpska, after long-standing leader Milorad Dodik was removed from office back in August. Dodik attempted to seriously undermine the Dayton Accords by denying rulings  from the High Representative, Christian Schmidt, which is a direct violation of the negotiated peace. Under a dual agreement ,   Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has enjoyed its autonomy  alongside Republika Srpska, until recently t

Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with the media. That fact shouldn’t particularly shock anyone, as he seems to have a fairly complicated relationship with everything – Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein must certainly have thought so, at the very least. His relationship with the news media, however, has always stuck out. Beginning all the way back during his campaign for presidency in 2016, Trump has fought tooth and nail against what he designates as “fake news”, culmi

With one fell swing, Donald Trump has ideologically axed the American political establishment. The recent government shutdown in the United States bigly highlighted the growing fracture in our political system, whether through attacks on SNAP benefits or simply flight safety. Although the shutdown has ceased, its effects are certainly to be felt by Americans  going into the holiday season. We are at a crucial juncture in the United States’ national story. Populism has surged

How many Ukrainian soldiers have died in the last three years of war? You probably haven’t heard because, newsworthy as the figure should be, western media outlets rarely report it. The latest authoritative calculation  suggests that both sides have lost roughly the same number of men: that is, approximately 200,000 to 220,000 dead. Staggeringly, this is more soldiers than the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined lost in the First World War. The sad tr

Two peace proposals now frame the future of Ukraine . Washington's draft plan focuses on concessions and neutrality, while Brussels has unveiled a new framework built around the principle that "borders cannot be changed by force" . At first glance, they seem to represent different strategies. In reality, they reflect two competing ways the world has thought about security for nearly a century. The first is universalism, the idea that every state, large or small, enjoys the sa

October 4 th  saw a landslide victory for the Georgian Dream Party, securing them sixty-four out of sixty-four districts on only forty-one percent voter turnout, signalling significant corruption at work.  Over the summer, Tbilisi has been rocked by protests, but in the wake of last year's October election, it is apparent that the Georgian Dream is showing little tolerance for dissenting opposition. Strong economic performance, with GDP rising 7.9 percent  this past year, has