Advanced search

Empire of Facts?

Susan Watkins on Helen Thompson, Disorder. Contemporary political and geopolitical turbulence tracked in a global history of fossil fuels.

Five Wars in One

Analysis of the war for Ukraine as the collision of five different types of conflict, distinct in their origins, means and ends, whose interlocking has produced a dangerous escalatory dynamic.

An Avoidable War?

In the first of three texts on the war for Ukraine, an examination of the narrative dominating Western media coverage—an unprovoked Russian assault, in which NATO, a defensive alliance of democracies, has played no role?

Structures of Oppression

The notion of ‘caste’ has gained currency as a descriptor of America’s racial order. Sketch for a systematic comparison of African-American and Dalit predicaments, querying the analogies, in an engagement with Sujatha Gidla and Alan Horn’s ‘Caste, Race—and Class’ in NLR 131.

Paradigm Shifts

Do Biden’s American recovery plans and the EU’s New Generation package signal the shift to a post-neoliberal era? A comparison of the two, unpacking policies, ideologies and capitalist economies, indicates diverging tracks.

The Fractured Right

Susan Watkins on Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy. The new right-wing forces in America and Europe assailed by a fierce old-right opponent.

Politics and Pandemics

As the 2020 US election looms, how to assess the political fall-out of COVID-19 to date, across a world landscape of varying state capacities and social formations? Xi and Modi, Vizcarra and Bolsonaro, Merkel and Trump in comparative perspective.

Britain’s Decade of Crisis

Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ victory set in the context of the multiple crises that have roiled the UK since its financial bubble burst in 2008—economic, social, regional, national, European—to which the new Tory ascendancy poses as solution.

Beating the Beadles

Susan Watkins on Kate Manne, Down Girl. A moral-philosophical argument for a feminism of the privileged, as first in line for misogynist policing.

America vs China

Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?

Which Feminisms?

The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?

Casting Off?

How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.

Oppositions

After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.

The Political State of the Union

Debt, deflation and stagnation have now become the familiar economic stigmata of the EU. But what of its political distortions? A survey of the three principal—and steadily worsening—imbalances in the outcome of European integration: the oligarchic cast of its governors, the lop-sided rise of Germany, and the declining autonomy of the Union as a whole in the North Atlantic universe.

Annexations

After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.

Another Turn Of The Screw?

Beneath the roiling surface of the Euro-crisis, a further chapter of the EU integration project is underway. Susan Watkins on the institutional machinery Berlin is imposing across the Union, and the political stakes—and hypocrisies—laid bare by the struggle.

Presentism? Reply to T.J. Clark

Responding to Clark, Susan Watkins questions the adequacy of a perspective built upon man’s propensity for violence, and defends a historicized politics of social transformation against the cramped horizon of the present.

Peter Campbell

Remembering the watercolourist, typographer and writer—resident art critic at the London Review of Books—who redesigned NLR.

Blue Labour?

Anatomy of the UK’s new crossbreed government, and the uneven electoral geography that produced it. Amid the ruins of New Labour’s economic model and spreading Euro-turbulence, what prospects for resistance to austerity’s impending axe?

Shifting Sands

What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.

The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty

What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.

Toryism After Blair

Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.

Continental Tremors

Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.

Vichy on the Tigris

With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.

A Weightless Hegemony

Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.

A Socialist Cassandra

Susan Watkins on Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. The distinctive intelligence of a continental socialist in Britain.

Saffron Gastronomy

Susan Watkins on D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow. The gastronomic legends and taboos of India’s modern Hindu chauvinism, as the BJP reshapes the country’s curricula.

The Nine Lives of Karl Marx

Susan Watkins on Francis Wheen, Karl Marx. The latest biography—a man for postmodern times?

An Allegory from Atlantis

“Christa Wolf, Medea. A Novel in Voices, Virago Press, London 1998, HB £16.99.” read more