Best of the week - 4 June 2021

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.

Global ideas

• Reducing poverty can actually lower energy demand. Marta Baltruszewicz in The Conversation
• Deference to history will not be enough to answer the geopolitical questions of the future. New systemic forces are at play. Francis J Gavin for Engelsberg Ideas
• We need a 21st century Marshall Plan to curb migration to Europe. Tim Marshall in Reaction
• Podcast: Why Constitutions Matter. Listen to historian Linda Colley talk about her new global history of written constitutions: the paper documents that made and remade the modern world. From Corsica to Pitcairn, from Mexico to Japan, it's a story of war and peace, violence, imagination and fear.

Covid-related

• Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women. V (formally known as Eve Ensler) in the Guardian
• Nepal’s Covid-19 swells as global funding slows. Irwin Loy in the New Humanitarian

UK, Europe and Russia

• Labour will never win again if it can’t acknowledge, let alone answer, the English question. Helen Thompson in the New Statesman
• Podcast: The case for big change and building coalitions to make it happen. FT writer Martin Sandbu talks about why this is a moment that demands a transformation of our economy and what it could look like. Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd
• Turkey will not return to the Western fold. Ankara’s assertive foreign policy is here to stay. Asli Aydintasbas in Foreign Affairs
• What to do about Islamic terror supporters still in Syria. Denmark’s decision sets a worrying trend. Kerstin Bree Carlson in The Conversation
• What’s new about Russia’s new protests. Svetlana Erpyleva and Oleg Zhuravlev in Open Democracy.

China

• China’s inconvenient truth. Official triumphalism conceals societal fragmentation. Elisabeth Economy in Foreign Affairs
• The Taiwan temptation. Why China might resort to force. Oriana Skylar Mastro in Foreign Affairs
• One country, two systems, no future. The end of Hong Kong as we know it. Jane Perlez in Foreign Affairs.

Australia

• Australia’s abandoned refugees: nine years of exile in offshore purgatory. Shaminda Kanapathi in Open Democracy.

Middle East

• Two states or one? The peace process has become an obstacle to progress. From the Economist
• Did Biden break the glass on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Washington’s new focus on human rights could redefine the US’s long standing approach. Elise Labott in Foreign Policy
• After 12 years of Netanyahu, here’s what to expect from a new coalition government in Israel. John Strawson in The Conversation
• Getting rid of Netanyahu would help Israel clean up its politics. Read the view from the Economist
• ‘Apartheid’ claim and the verdict of international law. Leonie Fleishmann in The Conversation
• The Houthis have defeated Saudi Arabia and peace won’t come by dictating terms to the victors. Annelle Sheline in Foreign Policy.

Africa

• The giant of Africa is falling. Can Nigeria save itself? John Campbell and Robert I Rotberg
• Podcast: The Insurrection in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado. Who are the militants known as Al-Shabaab and what are their interests? Listen to Hold Your Fire podcast.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash