Everyone likes a snappy pop-cultural title with which to approach international politics and strategy because it makes relatable what is often viewed as an opaque process of the elites. Rudyard Kipling’s “Great Game” was a chessboard and originally referred to the various schemes and posturing of the British and Russian empires throughout Central Asia, with […] More
Switzerland poses a fascinating puzzle to anyone interested in contemporary politics. It has a confederate system, which accords a great deal of autonomy and independence to its constituent units, the cantons. Its consociational system is based on consensual decisions, and its extreme system of direct democracy allows Swiss citizens to vote in a slew of […] More
Amy Cooper worked at my firm when I was a paralegal. She was a cohort member in my PhD program, a professor whose class I took, a professor in the department I taught in and on the faculty I interviewed with for a job. Amy Cooper is a character type. She votes democratically, lives in […] More
As protests unfold night after night in city streets across the United States, President Donald Trump, never previously accused of being camera shy, was nowhere to be seen. The New York Times reports on his newfound taste for discretion: “The president spent Sunday out of sight, berating opponents on Twitter, even as some of his […] More
It should be apparent to most observers of international relations that the Chinese government wants the world to play by its own set of rules. Beijing appears to believe that China’s rise and its assumption of global leadership positions are an inevitable extension of earlier periods in its history, when it was the world’s most […] More
The current public health crisis has become a major challenge for European economies. It particularly affects countries in the southern part of the eurozone, as they are still suffering from the effects of the euro debt crisis of 2009-12. In the absence of a convincing fiscal policy response from the European Union or the eurozone, […] More
Across America, people are coming out in hordes to protest the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the knee of a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin choked Floyd with his vicious stranglehold, pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for an interminable eight minutes and 46 seconds, even as Floyd […] More
“If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, young, gifted, and black in America, you would choose right now,” Barack Obama told a graduating class at Howard University in Washington DC four years ago, drawing attention to Hansberry’s 1996 collection of plays, interviews and letters that bore a […] More
