For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.
Analyses
- Francesca Rolandi 12 July 2017Set against the backdrop of sleepy Danubian Europe, Hungary has, in recent months, returned to being at the centre of international attention. What has brought the spotlight back onto Budapest are two laws, passed one soon after the other, which have resulted in conspiracy talk of a deliberate attack on academic freedom and the world of NGOs.
- Massimo Campanini 9 July 2017This short paper is meant to be an introduction intended to wonder whether Libya ever existed or is a modern invention1. Broadly speaking, the answer can be found in the following clear-cut sentence of Jamil Abu’n-Nasr: “The area forming present-day Libya begins to have its own political identity after the Arab conquest only with the establishment of Ottoman rule in it at the middle of the sixteenth century
- Ananya Vajpeyi 6 July 2017All nationalism involves some historical sleight of hand, in choosing what to include and what to exclude while constructing a narrative of the nation’s past, and a shape of its essential identity.
- 27 June 2017Two weeks ago, Tunisian security forces used excessive force to try to stop peaceful demonstrators in El Kamour Tataouine, killing one of them. Six years after the 2010-2011 uprising, many Tunisians are wondering what is left of their revolution
- Giuliano Battiston 26 June 2017“We are not winning in Afghanistan right now. We will correct this as soon as possible,” said U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis during a recent Senate hearing.
- Ananya Vajpeyi 20 June 2017Gandhi advocated sincere fellow-feeling, the capacity to suffer for and with someone else, without self-congratulation, as the quality that makes anyone a real Hindu.
- Giovanna De Maio 16 June 2017‘Honor killing’, ubijstva chesti in Russian, is fairly common in Chechnya where homosexuals are often killed by relatives in order to preserve the family’s honor from the shame they have brought.
- 14 June 2017Syria is only discussed in geopolitical terms, associating its daily history to the ruthless military operations of the great powers or the periodic massacres carried out by the Assad regime against its own citizens, inflicted with impunity in the country’s remote provinces as well as in the capital’s suburbs.
- hat leads young European boys and girls to radicalization and jihad fascination? Which are the inputs that convince them to become part of Daesh fighters?
- 12 June 2017It was last summer when the mayors of a number of French seaside resorts forbade Muslim women from wearing burkinis on the beach.