Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
One week before the 2022 US midterm elections, President Joseph Biden delivered a prime-time address at Union Station in Washington, DC. Biden suggested that something foundational, fundamental, was at stake. He reminded listeners of the definition of democracy.
Even before the extensive economic sanctions against Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it was hard to browse the news without seeing reports of yet another imposition of sanctions by one country or another.
In this episode of The Oxford Comment, we speak with Brian Levack, Robert Faris, and Tom Nichols on the past, present, and future of institutional distrust, with a particular focus on the contentious 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.
The paradoxical combination of loud saber-rattling and cautious military strategy on both sides of the Ukraine war follows the new rules of conflict involving nuclear powers.
Incarceration takes a heavy toll on one’s mental and physical health. A growing share of older adults are now aging with incarceration histories and poor health.
Check out Episode 75 of The Oxford Comment to hear from Martin J. Pasqualetti and Paul F, Meier on the need for affordable and clean energy, the history of energy in the US, and the dire implications of not changing our energy habits.
Simon Huxtable explores the history of Russian journalism in the Soviet Union and asks how, or whether, it compares to the situation of Russian journalists after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
While researching early Egyptian perspectives on nuclear weapons, I repeatedly came across the symbol of the egg. The atomic bomb, and atomic technology more broadly, was frequently imagined and drawn as an egg in the period after August 1945 in Egyptian magazines and popular science journals.
At this fearful time in American democracy, the best way to starve anti-democratic forces of their energy is to change the subject away from conservative religion and demand investment in civic education, democratic localism, and human rights.
There have been instances of interracial friendship even in the worst of times. Explore some of these noteworthy friendships, which have served as windows into the state of race relations in the United States.
There are many factors that affect our ability to be healthy, but we unfortunately do not all face the same barriers to accessing care. Such roadblocks can be related to cost, discrimination, location, sexual orientation, and gender identity, to name just a few.
In the last of our essays, we discuss the unexpected outcome of the legislative elections and look back on the electoral cycle as a whole. What does French politics look like after a series of fractious campaigns? And do the results offer any hope for the future?
The COVID-19 pandemic set off an unprecedented scale of border closures, a rise in health nationalism, and inequitable global distribution of vaccines, which have all exacerbated the humanitarian situation in low-income countries. This has led to calls for greater cooperation to support vulnerable populations beyond sovereign borders.
The first of July 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It also marks the halfway point of a 50-year agreement between China and Hong Kong that established the “one country, two systems,” rule – a system designed to allow Hong Kong to “enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs” while still remaining a Special Administrative Region of China.
These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself emphatically into a world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable ‘political’ system”, writes Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, his seminal book on the origins of modern nationalism. But this was the world a large majority of all Europeans lived in before the French Revolution and in many cases up until the First World War.
The past quarter of a century has seen a burgeoning scholarship on the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR). By re-examining and revealing how past intellectuals and experts wrote about “the international,” this revisionist work on IR history generates a critical gaze at the assumptions on which IR stands today.