Democracy Archives - Page 4 of 55

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

East Asia & Pacific

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Implications for the United States, China, and the global order

May 21, 2025 • by William Milberg

I have spent decades giving boring lectures on tariffs to graduate students. Suddenly, every other newspaper article is on tariffs. We have to credit President Trump with tapping into the popular disgruntlement with globalization beginning in 2016, leading to a rethinking of the structure of global economic governance and a ...

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

Activism

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

When Russian students decided to stop studying at the institutions where they get educated by the whip

May 15, 2025 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya and Leo Tolstoy

Some lines written very long ago seem to have been written for the current moment. At the University of St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899, students protested the government’s policies and their pressure on university administration. Upon learning about student unrest and being urged by student delegates who were ...

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

Colonization

How Israel Freezes Palestinian Salaries

Clearance revenues have got to go

May 14, 2025 • by Lamees Farraj

Israeli occupation of Palestine oppresses the Palestinian people using every possible tool and method—including control over people’s livelihoods. Some of this economic warfare is highly visible: the destruction of economic infrastructure in Gaza, the prevention of Palestinian laborers from accessing the Israeli job market, and the restriction or denial of ...

Literature

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify

May 14, 2025 • by Yahia Lababidi

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the ...

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

Democracy

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Or, why should ordinary citizens trust unelected experts anymore?

May 8, 2025 • by Mark Frazier, James Miller, Kim Lane Scheppele and Julia Sonnevend

Good evening, my name is Jim Miller. I am a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and I have organized, and will be moderating tonight’s panel with the ungainly title, on bureaucracy and its discontents. To discuss the tensions created by professing democracy as ...

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Activism

“The Amazon Is Not a Warehouse”

A conversation with Dionéia Ferreira on the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network

May 8, 2025 • by Dionéia Ferreira, Eduardo Staszowski and Renata Zampronio

Dionéia Ferreira is a scholar, environmental activist, and community leader in southern Amazonas, Brazil, where she plays a key role in weaving together RETA, the Amazonian Transdisciplinary Network. RETA connects local communities, women leaders, researchers, and legal actors across the territory surrounding the BR-319 highway—a controversial infrastructure project at the ...

Latin America & Caribbean

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Xenophobic rhetoric divides immigrant communities

May 2, 2025 • by Erick Moreno Superlano

Alex was trembling when he entered the café. He had agreed to participate in my research on Venezuelan immigration in New York and we had decided to discuss his story over coffee. But as he walked down the street to meet me, an ICE van had pulled over and parked ...

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

History

The Vision of Hegemony Driving Israel’s Regional Policy

From “periphery doctrine” to open domination

April 28, 2025 • by Emmanuel Guerisoli

Over a long twentieth century of regional tussles, Israel’s local foreign policy focus has shifted from preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon toward a campaign for outright domination. The strategy has shattered the Middle East’s fragile and imperfect status quo, the stability of which was closely connected to the ...

The Vision of Hegemony Driving Israel’s Regional Policy

Activism

Serbia’s Popular Protest Movement and Why It Matters

Students have adopted the dynamics of plenums and public assemblies where collective decisions are made without centralized leadership

April 25, 2025 • by Jorge González Arocha

In recent months, Serbia has witnessed one of the most significant social movements in its entire history—and one of the most important in contemporary Europe led mainly by students. What began as a response to a tragic accident in Novi Sad that left 16 people dead quickly grew into a ...