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The Portuguese Experiment
The coordinator of Portugal’s Left Bloc traces her trajectory from theatre to the political stage. The prominence of women in the party’s leadership, the social achievements wrested so far from the grip of the Portuguese establishment, and the prospects for extending those gains or seeing them reversed by Brussels and Berlin.
The World As Gallery
First global art movement or mere identity of a New York set? Potpourri of avant-garde practices or formalist tautology? A survey of Conceptual Art’s crystallization, among international neo-avant-gardes and the artistic networks of global centres, between an abstract global imaginary and its concrete contestations.
Incommensurate Russia
With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.
A Footloose Scholar
The descendant of Dutch bargees, Jan Breman has been investigating workers’ lives for half a century, travelling from rural Gujarat to the Javanese uplands and now coastal China. The social relations patterning control of land and labour framed in historical perspective, from colonial plantations to the globalized informal economy.
Africa’s Leaky Giant
Recent analysis of Congo’s plight has foregrounded notions of local agency and impenetrable complexity, excluding structural analysis. In a landmark rebuttal, Joe Trapido argues that it is just as implausible to deny the agency of powerful outsiders as that of powerful Africans. Dynamics of a primitive accumulation that never results in sustained development, its gains still leaking overseas.
Unexpected Cuba
Alone among the ex-Comecon countries, Cuba has forged a distinctive path since 1991—not transition to capitalism but careful adjustment to external change, safeguarding its gains in social provision and national sovereignty. Emily Morris challenges the view that Havana will have to embrace the market and submit to foreign capital if it is to survive.
Ukraine’s Fractures
Antecedents and aftershocks of the Maidan protests. A Ukrainian sociologist discusses the riven political and ideological landscape laid bare by the fall of Yanukovych, and the tensions being stoked in the country’s east by Russian interference and Kiev’s ongoing military assault.
Class in the 21st Century
From São Paulo to Beijing, a rising middle class has been hailed by liberal commentators as a bulwark for consumption and democracy in the decades ahead. Taking stock of these claims, Göran Therborn offers a magisterial overview of the global class landscape and the still prodigious numerical weight of manual workers within it.
A New Global Depression?
Interview with the author of The Dollar Crisis, one of the few analyses to predict the 2008 financial meltdown. Richard Duncan tracks its causes to the credit explosion unleashed by the fiat-dollar system, in toxic symbiosis with the global wage deflation caused by manufacturing’s shift to the East.
Democratic Janissaries?
Turkey has been hailed in the West as a democratic model for the Islamic world. Cihan Tuğal takes a cool look at the Erdoğan government’s domestic and foreign-policy record, from ‘zero problems’ diplomacy to the blockade of Libya and dirty war on Damascus, airstrikes on Turkish Kurds and silence on Bahrain.