For many Uyghurs, poetry is less a niche literary exercise than a vital part of everyday life. Uyghur culture has become a target of the Chinese government’s crackdown in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, a persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities that the United States has said amounts to genocide. The authorities have destroyed Uyghur holy sites, censored Uyghur books, and suppressed the Uyghur language in schools.
Updated at 12:52 p.m. ET on June 7, 2022.When the Palestinian American journalist and longtime Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was killed on May 11 while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, competing narratives quickly began to take shape.
Russia is isolated. In the week since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of neighboring Ukraine, the country has been ostracized not just diplomatically (even by some of Moscow’s closest allies) and economically (international sanctions have made the ruble worth less than a penny), but culturally too.Russia’s national and club soccer teams have been banned from international matches and tournaments, including the 2022 World Cup qualifiers.
Updated at 5:00 p.m. ET on February 22, 2022In the space of a month, Vladimir Putin has effectively managed to transform a former Soviet state into an extension of Russian territory, in full view of the United States and Europe, without firing a single shot in the country.
Photographs by Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina PiccinniAs the world anxiously watches Ukraine’s borders, where Russia has amassed as many as 130,000 troops, the question on the minds of many is what Vladimir Putin wants, and what he’s willing to do to get it. The answer has immediate implications for the United States, Europe, and the NATO military alliance, whose potential expansion in Ukraine and the broader post-Soviet space is regarded by Moscow as a threat.
Photographs by Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina PiccinniAs the world anxiously watches Ukraine’s borders, where Russia has amassed as many as 130,000 troops, the question on the minds of many is what Vladimir Putin wants, and what he’s willing to do to get it. The answer has immediate implications for the United States, Europe, and the NATO military alliance, whose potential expansion in Ukraine and the broader post-Soviet space is regarded by Moscow as a threat.
Politicians rarely set out to piss off their constituents, much less admit to doing so. So when French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his desire to antagonize France’s unvaccinated citizens into receiving COVID vaccinations, observers and many of his rivals were appalled, and some were a bit confused. Macron is up for reelection in April, and a quarter of his country remains unimmunized.
January 6, 2021, didn’t happen just to America. It also happened to the rest of the world. To watch the crisis unfold from overseas, as I did from my flat in London, was to reckon with the reality that perhaps the United States wasn’t as “back [and] ready to lead the world” as Joe Biden had claimed after his victory.
As Joe Biden convened his virtual Summit for Democracy this week, he warned that democratic erosion represents “the defining challenge of our time.” He isn’t wrong. Democracy is under siege, and this year has been marked by contested elections, coups, and autocratic brazenness. This was the fifth consecutive year in which the number of countries moving in the direction of authoritarianism outpaced those moving toward democracy.
For a while, during the worst of the pandemic last year, European governments largely seemed to reach a consensus. Barring a few exceptions (such as Sweden), countries in the region locked down their economies, keeping people at home in a bid to slow the pace of infection. In time, bolstered by plentiful vaccines, the continent has seen a resumption of near-normalcy: Public-health restrictions have loosened, and travel has restarted.
From the moment when scores of Afghans were filmed clinging to an American aircraft in a desperate bid to escape Taliban rule to the day of the departure of the last American soldier, international attention was trained almost exclusively on Afghanistan—until it wasn’t. By mid-September, just weeks after the Taliban took control of Kabul, the sense of crisis that had galvanized the world’s focus began to wane. Today, Afghanistan has all but disappeared from daily headlines.
In the final days of Germany’s election campaign, the center-left Social Democrats appeared to focus their final message to voters on one idea: respect. The message was plastered across the country on vibrant red posters and featured in the closing campaign speech of the party’s candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who pledged that a Germany under his leadership would recognize the contributions of everyone in society, regardless of their professional or social merit.
When Germany heads to the polls this weekend, the far-right Alternative for Germany will again be on the ballot, once a fringe presence that has become the largest—and most loathed—opposition party in the Bundestag. It has stood at the center of scandal after scandal, yet unlike other far-right parties across Europe, its experience in mainstream politics hasn’t had a moderating effect on its outlook. The AfD of 2021 is more established, but also more radical.
The next front in the culture wars is climate change, and the battle lines have already been drawn. On one side are the climate skeptics—those who see global warming as nothing more than unusual weather, and argue that government interventions and regulations to curb greenhouse-gas emissions are alarmist or “eco-fascist.”On the other side is Greta Thunberg.This, at least, is what the populist right’s next political battleground looks like online.
Perhaps the 234 scientists behind this week’s landmark climate assessment had hoped that their report—published during a summer of deadly flooding, wildfires, and heat waves—would act as a wake-up call, one that would unite the world’s governments and parties.But political consensus on the issue of climate change, much like the goal of limiting global warming to 1.
When Tokyo bids farewell to the Olympics this weekend, few people there will be sad to see it go. The Japanese public overwhelmingly opposed hosting the postponed Summer Games, fearing that it could exacerbate the country’s COVID-19 outbreak. In the final week of the competition, Japan broke a record no one wanted, reporting more than 14,000 cases a day—its highest since the pandemic began.
When Tokyo bids farewell to the Olympics this weekend, few people there will be sad to see it go. The Japanese public overwhelmingly opposed hosting the postponed Summer Games, fearing that it could exacerbate the country’s COVID-19 outbreak. In the final week of the competition, Japan broke a record no one wanted, reporting more than 14,000 cases a day—its highest since the pandemic began.
When the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko plucked a dissident journalist out of the sky, he proved two things: that his 27-year grip on power is unhindered by international isolation, and that, absent meaningful action by the United States and Europe—whose citizens were among the passengers on the hijacked flight—nothing is going to change.That, at least, is how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sees it.
“It’s a great time to be an American tourist.”Such a statement would have been nonsensical a year ago, when the COVID-19 surge in the United States was so grim that Americans, who are accustomed to traveling most places without issue, were considered personae non gratae across much of the rest of the world.
India considered itself to be “in the endgame” of the pandemic just a few weeks ago. Now it is the global epicenter. The country recently surpassed the devastating milestone of more than 345,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, the biggest total recorded globally since the pandemic began.
If certain corners of the French internet are anything to go by, COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, those who refuse them risk becoming “second-class citizens,” and the country has turned into a “health dictatorship.” That such claims have gained currency in France—home to Louis Pasteur, a robust welfare state, and a universal-health-care system—would have been far-fetched 25 years ago.
Among the visible remnants of Donald Trump’s presidency is a blank patch of wall along a hallway a short distance from Capitol Hill.
Protest movements aren’t designed to last forever. And when they do reach their inevitable conclusion, they tend to follow one of two familiar sequences: In one scenario, a protest triggers the resignation of an opposed leader, the reversal of an unpopular policy, or other concessions (think of the successful recent revolutions in Algeria and Sudan).
Narendra Modi is no stranger to protests. Since his reelection last year, the Indian prime minister’s policies have triggered a number of mass demonstrations, including his decision to revoke the constitutional autonomy of Kashmir, India’s sole Muslim-majority state, and last year’s contentious move to establish a religious test for people from neighboring countries seeking citizenship that excludes Muslims.
In February, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party was down in the polls. Voters were expressing frustrations that her government had overpromised and underdelivered on major campaign issues such as inequality and housing. Some observers suggested that the New Zealand prime minister’s first term would be her last.Then the pandemic happened.
One of the most striking things about the prodemocracy protests in Belarus has been the outsize role of women. A woman, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has emerged as the unlikely political challenger to longtime Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Two of the country’s highest-profile opposition figures, who have been abducted or compelled to flee the country, are women.
In many ways, the coronavirus has been irrefutably bad for populists. It has bolstered the popularity of establishment darlings such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and Italy’s Giuseppe Conte. It has brought once-anonymous health experts, including the United States’ Anthony Fauci and Britain’s Chris Whitty, to the fore. It has cast some of populists’ favored wedge issues, among them immigration and the European Union, to the wayside.
In the weeks since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, nationwide anti-racism protests have called for, among other things, defunding the police. But the members of the Minneapolis City Council decided to go further, announcing their intent to dismantle their police department altogether.Such a promise might have been deemed radical only a few weeks ago.