Theme archive
Musings on Geopolitics and Power
Power shifts, conflict, empire, sovereignty, national interests, and the institutions that organise global affairs.
What We Owe The Dead
A woman in Rafah wraps her daughter’s body in a curtain because there are no more shrouds.
The Architecture of Certainty
At the Strait of Hormuz this week, commercial vessels are still queuing for passage — more than a dozen a day, according to shipping trackers — even as strikes resume somewhere over Iran and a ceasefire that was...
The Weight a Beach Cannot Hold
On the evening of 14 December 2025, an Islamic State–inspired gunman opened fire on roughly a thousand people gathered at Bondi Beach to light candles for Hanukkah.
Architecture of Enmity
A coach in a gymnasium in Lima tells a squad of eleven-year-old girls, minutes before a regional match, that the team on the other side of the net are their enemies for the next ninety minutes.
The Forest Does Not Fall At Once
The woman who grills chicken over charcoal at the mouth of my soi has raised her prices twice since the second week of July.
A Cartography of Ghosts
Navigating the Regimes of Industrial Economism
When Leadership Confronts Reality
The Collapse of Consent
When the Grey Zone Becomes the Main Theatre
War, intelligence, and the slow unravelling of the public realm
Climate Change Policies
Deploying Eco-pragmatism to Frame Action
Sophisticated State Failure
How the West learned to Decay Without Falling
Most Hated Nation
Nation-state legitimacy and the exhaustion of political imagination
The Frame that Admits No Reply
Christine McDougall, who writes at Syntropic World and has spent twenty years building the models and the language her project needs, has published an essay called 95% Yanged Out. It’s a furious, exact, and, in large...
The Pause That Passes For Peace
Why Military Force is Never Sufficient
How We Learn to Love the Fire
Acceptance of War in a Fracturing World
Redacted!
Freedom of Information or the Manufacture of Ignorance?
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