Society

‘Without a poster, you don’t exist!’ – on the curious political banners of Mumbai

20 minutes

At the Kremlin in 1943

Stalin presented Orthodox leaders with a proposal: the Soviet state that had destroyed their Church would bring it back

Kathryn David

Wielding death

When everyday life is marked by oppression and violence, can a martyr’s death truly be an act of freedom and resistance?

Umar Lateef Misgar

Women at the barricades

The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune

Carolyn Eichner

Beyond ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ – could a range of verdict options be more just?

9 minutes

An unholy alliance

Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites. There’s something far more troubling going on

Suzanne Schneider

How the first woman of colour to be elected to the US Congress remade education

21 minutes

What lies beneath government

Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens

Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth

The ungreat replacement

Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame

John Rapley

Is mass media still ‘manufacturing consent’ in the internet age?

5 minutes

The discontent of Russia

Lenin envisioned Soviet unity. Stalin called Russia ‘first among equals’. Yet Russian nationalism never went away

Joy Neumeyer

Cowboy progressives

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed

Daniel J Herman

With barely a possession to his name, Rabbit builds a life around fighting corruption

10 minutes

High crimes and cabals

The official definition of corruption – the abuse of public office for private gain – does little to capture the reality

Sudhir Chella Rajan

When the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonised Derek Jarman

24 minutes

The biggest picture

No wonder we cannot agree on how globalisation works and whether it’s a good thing. All the stories we have are flawed

Anthea Roberts & Nicholas Lamp

The emancipated Empire

The British Empire was first built on slavery and then on the moral and economic self-confidence of antislavery

Padraic Scanlan