Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Cooperation is in our nature, for good and ill, but there is still a nagging doubt that something biological in us compels us to be selfish: our genes. This is the paradox: genes are inexorably driven by self-replication, and yet cooperation continually rears its head. Not only are humans fundamentally team players, but all of nature has been teaming up since the dawn of life four billion years ago.
In the field of International Relations (IR), voices from Latin America have long been underrepresented—overshadowed by dominant Western perspectives, particularly those from the United States and Britain. This blog post aims to spotlight some of the contributions of Latin American thinkers to IR, showcasing how these perspectives challenge established norms and offer unique insights into both regional and global dynamics.
Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.
How can the United States best help Israel defend itself against terrorist atrocity? Obviously, sustaining the alliance and friendship with the United States is vital for Israel and its security. Equally clearly, the scale and nature of Israeli violence in Gaza since October 2023 has placed new and great strain on the US relationship.
Many autocrats come to power with good intentions only to morph into monsters. A new model explains common drivers of this inexorable slide.
Breaking out of the chains had emerged as a central leitmotif and call for activism at the Eurovision Song Contest long before Swiss non-binary singer, Nemo, performed it as the winning song, “The Code,” at the Grand Finale on May 11 2024 in Malmö, Sweden.
In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China’s emergency response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government’s handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. This timeline adapted from the book walks through the day by day chronology of the initial outbreak and explores how both the virus and information spread.
A Swedish study reveals vaccination nudges barely influenced the older, more vulnerable people who needed them but younger people complied. Why?
That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at odds with the very idea of democracy. For that reason, despite his evident role in instigating an insurrection, many Republican senators demurred and chose not to impeach former President Donald J. Trump on 13 January 2021.
India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. The elections to the 543-member lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha) with an electorate, numbering 968 million eligible voters, assumes critical importance as India is going through both internal and external changes that are heavily linked to its rising power aspirations and achievements.
You’ve probably been ignoring your children. This isn’t simply you not paying attention to them because you’re distracted or need to do something.
As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened.
The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the culmination of a number of growing fissures and collisions in the region—between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe and Russia, and Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage, a historian and former diplomat who served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State where he handled the Russia/Ukraine portfolio, looks at the origins of this conflict dating back to 24 August 1991.
Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity.
At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal—the hard-won SDG 11—have catapulted cities up the international policy agenda, it’s hard to believe that urban issues could ever have been considered marginal.
In a context of intensifying great power competition and deep divergences of view between nuclear and non-nuclear powers on the urgency of nuclear abolition, ‘nuclear risk reduction’ has gained renewed attention as a pragmatic framework for managing and reducing nuclear dangers.