‘Today, we tell the despotic regime in Saudi Arabia that we will not be part of their military adventurism’, said Senator Bernie Sanders on 13 December 2018, as the Senate voted to end U.S military support for Saudi Arabia’s conflict in Yemen. Despite bipartisan support for this resolution, passing in both the Senate in March and the House just […]
It was a change announced in silence. On 30 January 2019, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō broke a long-lasting tradition of Japanese diplomacy: when asked about the government position on the so-called ‘Northern Territories’, the three islands (Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan) and one group of islets (Habomai) under Russian rule off eastern Hokkaido that Japan has claimed to be theirs […]
As part of the new LSE History podcast series, Professor David Stevenson spoke with LSE PhD student Artemis Photiadou on his latest book 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, discussing why the First World War lasted as long as it did, why it ended, and why 1917 is a pivotal year. This is the first installment of the International History Blog’s In […]
There is a park in New Delhi that commemorates the British Raj. Dilapidated effigies of British monarchs and viceroys can be found there. An assemblage of arch-imperialists that once imposed a racist and violent order are now covered in graffiti and pigeon droppings. The British Raj sought to cast its imperial legacy in stone but the history of the […]
Even a brief look through the latest scholarship will reveal that the Cold War, as period-defining topoi, is losing its traction and importance. On the one hand, this is because the Cold War historiography has expanded dramatically over the last decade or so. The number of publications has sky-rocketed and the field now covers a broader range of issues […]
The events of the 25 January 2011 revolution in Tahrir Square, and the consequent 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically-elected president Mohammed Morsi, capture the sentiment of King Farouk’s last words to those who overthrew him in 1952: ‘It isn’t easy, you know, to govern Egypt.’[1]
The current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, widely considered to be a man of […]
From the 5th to 14th December 2018, I had the honour of participating on a 10-day academic exchange trip to Japan known as the MIRAI program (meaning ‘future’ in Japanese). This government-sponsored exchange is part of the Japanese government’s efforts to strengthen friendship ties between Japan and Europe by fostering mutual understanding and intellectual discourse. I was selected to […]
Distinctive, but not exceptional, is the theme of A.G. Hopkins’ new tome American Empire: A Global History. For a book 980 pages long, this tagline may sound like a poor return on the reader’s investment. Such anxiety, however, is consistently expelled by the way in which Hopkins presents what Victor Lieberman has called in another context, “strange parallels”. These comparisons […]
The second half of 2018 has seen several disasters around the world. India saw two major destructive floods: One in the state of Kerala in South India and the other in North-East Indian states. Ravaged by heavy rains and flooding of rivers, houses were submerged, and livelihoods as well as lives lost. Relief provision was hampered in inaccessible areas, […]
It is doubtful whether any author better encapsulates the optimism of liberal democrats after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 than Francis Fukuyama. His book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was an unexpected international phenomenon, sparking whiggish debates about the direction of history, from Harvard to LSE to Tokyo.
That he has now published […]
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