Julian Elfer
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In his widely acclaimed book Time to Start Thinking, Financial Times chief US columnist and commentator Edward Luce charted the course of America's relative decline, proving to be a prescient voice on our current social and political turmoil. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of liberal democracy--of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the...
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The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy? A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age...
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Philipp Ther is professor of Central European history at the University of Vienna. His books include Europe since 1989: A History (Princeton), The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe, and Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe. He lives in Vienna.
The history of Europe as a continent of refugees
European history has been permeated with refugees. The Outsiders chronicles...
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"Eric Heinze explains why global human rights systems have failed. International organizations constantly report on how governments manage human goods, such as fair trials, humane conditions of detention, healthcare, or housing. But to appease autocratic regimes, experts have ignored the primacy of free speech. Heinze argues that goods become rights only when citizens can claim them publicly and fearlessly: free speech is the fundamental right, without...
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"Opium's Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the "war on drugs." A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span...
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"Honorable Mention for the Stein Rokkan Prize, European Consortium for Political Research and the International Science Council" Michael Bruter is professor of political science at the London School of Economics and director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory (EPO). Sarah Harrison is assistant professorial research fellow at the LSE and deputy director of the EPO. They are the coauthors of Mapping Extreme Right Ideology, The Future of Our Democracies,...
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The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions imposed by the West transformed European politics. The conflict did not escalate to the levels originally feared but nor was either side able to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Ukraine suffered a loss of territory but was not forced into changing its policies away from the Westward course adopted as a result of the EuroMaidan uprising of February...
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A provocative account showing that "China"-and its 5,000 years of unified history-is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day.
China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.
In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China's present-day geopolitical...
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The story of Rome's richest man, who died a humiliating desert death in search of military glory
Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome's first modern political financier. Instead, Crassus and his son led...
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The uses of shame (and shamelessness) in spheres that range from social media and consumerism to polarized politics and mass violence
Today, we are caught in a shame spiral-a vortex of mutual shaming that pervades everything from politics to social media. We are shamed for our looks, our culture, our ethnicity, our sexuality, our poverty, our wrongdoings, our politics. But what is the point of all this shaming and countershaming? Does it work? And...
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What is capitalism? Is capitalism the same everywhere? Is there an alternative?
The word "capitalism" is one that is heard and used frequently, but what is capitalism really all about, and what does it mean? This Very Short Introduction addresses questions such as, "what is capital?" before discussing the history and development of capitalism through several detailed case studies, ranging from the tulipomania of 17th century Holland, the Great Depression...
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A distinguished historian of Spain and Europe provides an enlightening account of the development of nationalist and separatist movements in contemporary Catalonia and Scotland. This first sustained comparative study uncovers the similarities and the contrasts between the Scottish and Catalan experiences across a five-hundred-year period, beginning with the royal marriages that brought about union with their more powerful neighbors, England and Castile...
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Since its publication in 2003, the first edition of Black Garden has become the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, were pulled into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, spell the end the Soviet Union, and plunge a region of great strategic importance into a decade of turmoil. This important volume is both a careful reconstruction of the history of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and...
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The first comprehensive history of the 1921 Cairo Conference which reveals its enduring impact on the modern Middle East
Called by Winston Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set out to redraw the map of the Middle East in the wake of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The summit established the states of Iraq and Jordan as part of the Sherifian Solution and confirmed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine-the...
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Exactly a century ago, intelligence agencies across Europe first became aware of a fanatical German nationalist whose political party was rapidly gathering momentum. His name was Adolf Hitler.
From 1933, these spy services watched with growing alarm as they tried to determine what sort of threat Hitler's regime would now pose to the rest of Europe. Despite intense rivalry and mistrust between them, the spy chiefs began to liaise and close ranks against...
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A radical manifesto for how to deal with climate breakdown
The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond?
In Planet on Fire, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global...