Force Without a Mission
When a power keeps its strength but loses moral purpose
Theme archive
Musings on Geopolitics and Power
Power shifts, conflict, empire, sovereignty, national interests, and the institutions that organise global affairs.
Everything Except Their Names
The accusation arrives early in the Bishkek Declaration, and it arrives with full force: strikes on Iranian territory violated the UN Charter, damaged international law, and put regional peace and stability at risk.
A Correction Before It Arrives
A curator in a regional art gallery is completing the wall text for a group show.
The Beginning of Our Collective Maturity
Collapsing Towards An Empathic Civilisation
Something Behind the Eyes
In the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the horror was never the alien.
The Collapse of the Story
There was a time when power didn’t need to explain itself.
When There Is No 'We'
The Fragmentation of the Public World
The Instrument and The Cage
What Language Does When No One is Watching
Radius of Trust
How a Threat With No Rivals Still Produces Enemies
Beyond the Imperial Monoculture
Why Humanity Needs More Than One Story
Eighty Years Since the Quiet
I was born in 1945, into a world that had just finished screaming and had gone, for a while, quiet.
Believing the Right Villain
Propaganda in a Comforting Voice
The Order That Never Arrived
When Institutions Obey a Rule Nobody Wrote
The Knowledge That Disqualifies
On the fate of those who cannot let go
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.
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