The rise and fall of the Japanese Empire
For a nation of islands, Japan has always had an uneasy relationship with its horizons. The same sea that protected it for centuries eventually became the highway for its soldiers, traders, and …
The fracturing of the international order in an age of impunity
How tenuous is peace?
The honest answer is: considerably more tenuous than most people in the comfortable West assumed for most of the past several decades.
The post-Cold War era generated an …
The role and limitations of international law in world affairs
What is international law?
International law is, at its simplest, the body of rules and principles that governs relations between sovereign nations. It is not law in the way most people understand …
Mexican culture: A living mosaic of civilisations, faith, and tradition
More than sombreros and mariachi
Mexican culture is one of the richest and most layered cultural identities in the world. Not a single tradition, but a fusion of ancient Indigenous civilisations, …
Did the UK have a Black civil rights movement?
Britain often tells its modern story as one of gradual tolerance, polite reform, and multicultural evolution. Compared to the dramatic confrontations of the American civil rights era, the UK’s …
Nicaragua: From colonisation to independence
Long before the Spanish arrived with their crosses and cannons, the land that would become Nicaragua was a tapestry of peoples, languages, and worlds that bore little resemblance to one another. The …
Who gets to be “American”? Geography, history, and the US claim to the name America
Geographically, the term America doesn’t refer to a single country. It refers to a vast landmass stretching from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of Patagonia, which English speakers …
The colonisation of Chile: The long road to freedom
Few nations on Earth occupy as dramatic a geography as Chile. Stretched along the southwestern edge of South America like a ribbon of extremes. From the driest desert on the planet in the north to the …
The Mexican Revolution: Fire, land, and a nation remade
A country on the brink
By the dawn of the twentieth century, Mexico had endured three decades under the iron hand of Porfirio Díaz. His regime, known as the Porfiriato, had modernised the country …
New Zealand: The dark history of Māori colonisation
When contact became conquest
The colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand is often remembered through the language of treaties, settlement, and partnership. But beneath that narrative lies a far …
Keep hope alive: The rise, power, and legacy of Jesse Jackson
October 8, 1941 – February 17, 2026
Civil rights leader, Baptist Minister, presidential candidate, and voice of the voiceless
Origins: A son of the South
Jesse Louis Burns came into the world …
Ernesto “Che” Guevara: : The revolutionary icon
Few figures in twentieth-century history have inspired as much devotion and provoked as much controversy as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary whose life and death …