The Conversation

In her first state of the union address as president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen called out hatred and pledged to build “a union of equality”. While European institutions have been at the forefront of fighting hate…

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline. Reliable large-scale…

On a Tuesday morning in September 2001, the American experience with terrorism was fundamentally altered. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six people were killed as the direct result of attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. Thousands more, including…

The UK left the EU on January 31 this year. Yet, the trading relationship between the two parties will not change until January 1 2021, when the transition period agreed by both sides expires. And with negotiators heading into their…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended weeks of speculation about the state of his health by announcing his surprise resignation today. The 65-year-old Abe was finally forced to concede to the ulcerative colitis intestinal disease that had brought his first brief term in…

Today, U.S. laws and regulations bar kids under the age of 14 from working in most industries. Children under 17 may not work more than three hours on school days, for example. Ever wonder where these rules came from? While studying this issue…

Many tourists – especially people who come from western democracies – are fascinated with the communist pasts of central and eastern European countries. Their desire to gaze upon, consume and experience the remnants of life behind the Iron Curtain contrasts…

Global business travel has largely ground to a halt during the pandemic. Experts have been raising the alarm that this is the death of business travel as we know it, arguing that it will be a long time before the virus is…

The number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has increased significantly – up to 4,343 this year compared with 857 in the same period last year. The number of lurid headlines calling for action has also increased significantly but…

Nearly 400,000 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities in 2019 – more than one-third of the country’s international students. A sharp decline in the number of these students would spell financial trouble for U.S. colleges and universities, given that Chinese…