Make Sense of the world
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For months, as the COVID-19 disease was spreading and hundreds of thousands of people were dying across the world, accusations amplified by the media flew across borders in a global blame game. They raised three great destabilizing questions: Which nation was responsible for bringing COVID-19 into...
The term soft power was coined by Joseph Nye in the late 1980s as a country's ability to influence others without the use of force. Soft power is established in culture and grounded in history, unlike hard power, which is based on coercion and the use of military and economic means. Soft power and...
In an op-ed published by The Guardian, the Zimbabwean scholar Simukai Chigudu, an associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford, defends the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement. RMF seeks the removal of a statue in Oxford of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond mining magnate and...
While celebrating the contribution of refugees, we must acknowledge the importance of all who are driven from their homelands not only by fear and terror, but also by desperate need. Human bridges and personal connections have been built by great movements across the globe as people escape war and...
In May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Britain to return the Chagos Archipelago, a cluster of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, an island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. The resolution endorsed an International Court of...
There are many theories as to how COVID-19 began. Some of them are plausible, others are nonsensical. US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have done their bit to fan such theories. Many in the world believe that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was either released...
What a strange, twisted time we’re all experiencing at the moment. It would be bad enough if all we had to contend with was a novel virus, a lockdown and a projected 12 to 18-month wait for a vaccine. Unfortunately, there are those among us who are indulging in the spread of...
There is no part of the globe that has not been affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. At the time of writing, over 200 countries and territories have reported outbreaks as the global number of confined COVID-19 cases continues its steady march towards 4 million. But there is another pandemic...
The European Union’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, gave a stark warning recently about the lack of progress in the post-Brexit negotiations with the United Kingdom. But now, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come back to work after his battle with COVID-19, the disease caused by the...
The catalog of omissions in the British government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is well known. The decision to lock down was taken far too late in the day. Scientists have been too slow to criticize one another and too sure of their assumptions and methods. Shortages of personal...
“Can we please go back to talking about Brexit?” For the past few weeks, I got used to seeing this message on Twitter at least once a day, breaking the monopoly of news about the novel coronavirus. For some, it was a joke, half-nostalgically taking us back to the...
