Politics Archives - Page 31 of 112

Phony War Again?

How should we respond to Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy’s repeated demands to institute a no-flight zone over Ukraine?

April 13, 2022 • by Jan T. Gross

The question now put before us is simple but fraught: How should we respond to Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy’s repeated demands to institute a no-flight zone over Ukraine? I think there are good reasons why we should heed his request. ...

Europe & Central Asia

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Preaching to Ukrainians that there are “good Russians out there who are also victims of Putin” is the same as saying “all lives matter”

April 11, 2022 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

Despite what I regard as obvious parallels with Nazi Germany, I still find it very hard to break the wall with my international colleagues who urge us Ukrainians to remain open to dialogue and even sympathy with ordinary Russians—the good Russians—who they say are “also victims of Putin’s regime.” ...

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Politics

The Riot on New Zealand’s Front Lawn

Reckoning with an antivax occupation, homegrown racism, and global white nationalism

April 11, 2022 • by Lydia Nobbs

Ardern’s words might have comforted those New Zealanders taken aback by the protest, but it fails to seriously engage with the complexity of the occupation, which intermingled transnational far-right tactics with homegrown white supremacy, wellness misinformation, and indigenous disenfranchisement. The protest, and Ardern’s response, has wide implications for parsing both ...

Europe & Central Asia

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Can a kleptocracy have national interests?

April 6, 2022 • by Nikolay Koposov

Russia has no national interests, not even in Ukraine. Russians are denied subjectivity, the means of making rational and responsible decisions. Instead, they have state-sanctioned propaganda, rigged elections, pretend patriotism and a profoundly inhuman leadership....

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Europe & Central Asia

Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom

Russia’s imperial dreams and the tragedy of Central Europe

April 6, 2022 • by Karolina Koziura

Some in the West are amazed that Russia is losing this war so far. Others are surprised by the courageous ways in which Ukrainians are resisting attacks and defending themselves with determination. Yet the opposite has happened. Ukraine has never been further away from Russia and closer to Western Europe ...

The Right

The Return of the Repressed

Poland has effectively abandoned antifascism

April 5, 2022 • by Irena Grudzińska-Gross

Was it only my generation—people born shortly after World War II—that believed fascism had been defeated? We were convinced that lessons had been learned and linear progress was ahead of us; it was unimaginable that anyone would defend such an ideology any longer. All European regimes (but for Franco’s) were ...

Politics

How China Sees Russia’s War in Ukraine

It’s all about America

April 4, 2022 • by Mark Frazier

Many ordinary Chinese citizens, as well as foreign policy elites, have concluded that America is China’s number one national security threat. From their standpoint, any country that confronts the United States deserves at least tacit support....

Europe & Central Asia

How Did it Happen That People in A Country With The Third-Largest River in Europe Have No Drinking Water?

A Socratic dialogue on war in Ukraine

April 1, 2022 • by Ihor Andriichuk

How did we end up here? How did we end up in a world where people in the country contributing ten percent to the world’s grain export are starving to death? How did it happen that people in a country with the third-largest river in Europe have no drinking water? ...

How Did it Happen That People in A Country With The Third-Largest River in Europe Have No Drinking Water?

Politics

What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

The unruly role of modern social movements in testing the limits of political freedom

March 31, 2022 • by James Miller

I realized, as I wrote to Bill, “that it's quite unclear precisely what form of the American regime we are all ostensibly defending, at this juncture in history. Is it the current form as you describe it, which is so peculiarly open to popular pressure from the bottom up? What if ...

What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

Politics

Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Our contemporary conundrum

March 30, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

But how deeply have these recent developments disrupted the forms of the two main political parties? Are we still dealing—as the title of my book implies—with “movements and parties?” Or with movement-parties, hybrids that have added the passions of movements to the parties, while depriving the parties of one of ...

Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Politics

Why We Should Rethink the Distinction Between “Institutional” and “Contentious” Politics

Movements and parties do not begin as separate kinds

March 30, 2022 • by Elisabeth Clemens

It was not so long ago, perhaps a few decades, that inquiry into movements and political parties lived within separate disciplines. Aspiring political scientists who were interested in movements might have found themselves forced to make careers in sociology. Until recently, political sociologists were focused on protests and revolutions, paying ...

Politics

How Movements on the Right and Left Differ—and Why That Difference Matters

Defiant oppositional disorder threatens Republicans and the future of democracy in America

March 30, 2022 • by Michael Tomasky

I believe that one can’t understand American politics today, and one certainly can’t properly understand the rise of Donald Trump, without keeping this aspiration/opposition distinction at the center of our analysis. Because just as the movements of Left and Right are different in this key respect, these differences inform and ...