Comment & Opinion - Columnists Archives

01 August 2019
Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination by Robert Bickers. Harvard University Press. 2017.   This is not a book about Chinese history as such. It is a…
31 July 2019
War is gathering around the world, and autocratic leaders are undermining the legal checks on their discretion to launch attacks abroad. With the rule of law under threat, the…
30 July 2019
Scott L. Montgomery with a long read that provides analysis to the latest unfolding Iran crisis. Things have heated up once again between Iran and the West, the U.S. in…
25 July 2019
The Constitution was framed to thwart the democratic aspirations of most of the public, says Chomsky. Between Trump's White House and the Republican-controlled Senate and…
22 July 2019
We live in dangerous times — no doubt about it. How did we get to such a state of affairs where democracy itself is in a very fragile condition and the future of human…
15 July 2019
Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn. 2018. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674737563   There is a Chinese saying about two people sharing the same bed…
05 July 2019
It is no easy task to make sense of U.S. foreign policy in the current era. Trump is wildly unpredictable and lacks any semblance of a coherent view of world affairs, appearing to…
04 July 2019
Branko Milanovic uses Olsen's roving and stationary bandits framework to explain Russia's contemporary oligarchs.   Vladimir Putin’s recent interview to the Financial…
28 June 2019
"Free markets" do not guarantee workers any freedoms other than the freedom to be unemployed and to starve. Long before the growing interest in economic inequality facing…
20 June 2019
Branko Milanovic asks if our life is a CV, what kind of social scientist will we make?   Recently I read, rather by accident than design,  short lives of…