Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The Paris Agreement, held from 30 November to 12 December 2015, has been hailed as a “historic turning point” in the battle against global climate change. Consequently, dialogue surrounding greenhouse gas emissions, particularly around political and economic compliance.
In France today, pork has become political. A series of conservative mayors have in recent months deliberately withdrawn the pork-free option from school lunch menus. Advocates of the policy claim to be the true defenders of laïcité, the French secular principle that demands neutrality towards religion in public space.
In the United States, thoughts are turning to the start of the primary season, when votes are cast to choose each party’s presidential nominee. It’s a complicated and sometimes very long process, beginning in Iowa and winding all the way to the conventions in the summer, and every time it gets going, there are certain buzzwords that seem to find their way into the American popular consciousness.
If someone were to tell you that the restaurant industry is one of the lowest paying sectors in the US economy, the types of jobs that might come to mind include those in the fast food segment. Not surprisingly, workers from all parts of the restaurant industry—tipped and non-tipped—live in poverty.
It was an election year. A Supreme Court justice appointed by the most conservative Republican president in history had just died. The President, the most progressive Democrat to ever hold that office, now had a chance to begin to reshape the Supreme Court. But the president was up for reelection, with no guarantee he would be reelected.
Brexit—the prospect of Britain exiting the European Union—has garnered a great deal of attention in the past year as Britons debate the pros and cons of remaining a member of the EU. So-called Eurosceptics oppose integration with Europe for a variety of reasons, among them the constraints it places on the UK’s ability to negotiate more advantageous trade agreements, and the regulations and bureaucratic excesses the EU imposes on Britain in economic, financial, and judicial matters.
For centuries this question has haunted European thought, and as new fences are erected and bodies wash up on the shores of the Mediterranean its implications reassert themselves with renewed urgency. For over twenty years the outsourcing of migration controls has meant that European publics have been protected from the practical reality of forced displacement and the economic desperation that is now showing up on holiday beaches.
Unlike the Monroe or the Gujral doctrine, this is a doctrine not named after a person espousing it. It is named after tiny Tripura’s capital town, Agartala , which former Bangladesh foreign minister Dipu Moni describes as the “war capital of the Bangalee nation in 1971.”
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe returned home from the Far East, where he had been for a month, on 22 January 2016. Mugabe was chipper and appeared physically fit, as he shook hands and exchanged greetings with a long queue of government officials, service chiefs and other ruling party dignitaries who converged on the Harare International Airport to welcome him home.
Political philosophy explores questions relating to the best organization of our collective political and economic institutions and policies. As such, one might expect that detailed discussion of policy issues would be commonplace in political philosophy. Just the opposite, however, is usually the case.
Hopes for change on the issue in Australia were raised and quickly dashed following September’s leadership spill in the centre-right Liberal Party, in which Malcom Turnbull defeated Prime Minister Tony Abbott, 54 votes to 44. Once seen by advocates of law reform as a champion of marriage equality, the new Prime Minister stated his intention to maintain the coalition’s position on the issue.
It would seem that President Obama has a new prey in his sites. It is, however, a target that he has hunted for some time but never really managed to wound, let alone kill. The focus of Obama’s attention is gun violence and the aim is really to make American communities safer places to live.
Global inequality, particularly as it exists today, is more “process” than natural phenomenon. An era of unprecedented interconnection means that individual practices, just as much as large-scale social, political, and economic actions, shape, sustain, and reinforce power dynamics.
On 11 August 1965, the Watts Riots exploded in Los Angeles taking the nation by surprise. Sparked by an arrest that escalated into a skirmish between local residents and police, the riots lasted six days. They laid bare the seething discontent that lay just beneath the surface in many black communities.
Can solidarity exist? Or is it just a fantasy, a pious dream of the soft of heart and weak of brain? Gross inequality, greed and prejudice: these manifestations of selfishness which stalk our world may seem to invite our condemnation and to call for an alternative – but what if they are part of the natural order?
Sometimes it is gratifying to have predicted the future. Sometimes it is not. The recent postponement of the so-called “Cadillac tax” until 2020 falls into the latter category. I predicted this kind of outcome when the Cadillac tax was first enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare.” I am unhappy that events have now proven this prediction correct.