Best of the week - 27 November 2020
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Each week BISA Director, Juliet Dryden, scours the internet for IR-related content that might interest you. Here she brings you this week's best readings and podcasts to keep you up to date with what's happening around the world.
UK politics/overseas aid
- Cuts to UK foreign aid budget are short sighted and could harm British interests says Victoria Honeyman in The Conversation
- Dominic Cummings was no iconoclast, but he understood the Tories Europe problem, writes Helen Thompson for the New Statesman
- It’s vital Britain secures an EU trade deal for our future growth and economic stability says Hilary Benn in the House Magazine
- The obstacles to a Brexit deal are not what you think. Do not look at disputes between the two sides but within them. David Henig in Prospect.
US politics
- The can-do power. America’s advantage and Biden’s change. Samantha Power in Foreign Affairs
- Why go high? Adam Shatz on America’s defective democracy in the London Review of Books
- The end of the embarrassment from the Economist
- Trump’s contempt for how democracy works has rarely been so stark. Alice Lilly for Prospect
- Podcast: Young people vs Joe Biden from TALKING POLITICS. Cathy Cohen of the GenForward Survey project based in Chicago talks about race and representation. What do young Americans want from democratic politics? How do their priorities vary according to race and ethnicity? And can a Biden presidency deliver on the desire for real change?
- Podcast: Listen to the debate: Will the election of Biden really change the relationship between Europe and the United States? From Intelligence Squared.
Around the world
- China says autocracy works better. COVID tolls will lead people to include its right. Isobel Hilton for Prospect
- Time to call Hungary and Poland’s bluff. Budapest and Warsaw are playing a weak hand in pledging to veto EU budget and recovery plan. R Daniel Keleman in Politico
- The end of Golden Dawn. Has Greece shown us how to deal with neo-Nazis? Read Georgios Samaras in The Conversation
- France and Macron aren’t helping solve Islam’s crisis. They’re strengthening extremists instead. Mustafa Akyol in Foreign Policy
- Egypt locks down. Tom Stevenson on the arrests of leading human rights activists working for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) in the London Review of Books
- Al Qaeda’s leaders are dying but a greater challenge looms. Read Charles Lister in Jihadica.
The best of the rest
- The right to belong. A history of statelessness and the problems with defining people by their citizenship. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in the New York Review of Books
- The line between tolerance and respect. Nick Cohen in the Spectator
- Late beauties of the British Empire. Jan Morris from Engelsberg Ideas
- Podcast: Start here. What is the internet doing to us? The Times tech columnist Kevin Roose discovers what happens when our lives move online from Rabbit Hole.
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
