I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the…
Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S.…
The Eastern edges of the European Union stand as landscapes of transformation and socioeconomic and cultural flux, situated between shifting empires and layered histories. Their in-betweenness mirrors…
Since 2021, along with the British and Australian governments, the Canadian government has relaxed immigration policy for Hong Kong immigrants. This policy offers an unconventional path with lowered…
Foreign policy played a minor role in the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September. The vice presidential exchange between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz…
MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. That’s the bumper sticker on my friend’s pickup and that’s what I hope for. I like evidence and data, and I detest TV talking…
With the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina’s November 2023 national election, the country has followed the contemporary global trend of electing far-right governments. Through his frequent televisi…
“I cannot listen to the sound of the warplanes anymore, it sounds like they are flying over our roofs,” as a resident of a south Lebanese border village…
I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic)…
This discussion paper offers two contributions to our collective discussion on the theme of fascism: (a) an integrated set of elements comprising our definition of the concept; and…
On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy,…
Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his…
By taking control of 22 Israeli military bases and localities, sequestering over 200 hostages, and killing more than 1,000 civilians and soldiers (although many details remain ambiguous), Hamas…
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage…
The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my…
In recent work, several authors in anthropology have analyzed how the extreme right is being configured and acquiring a considerable pull on the mainstream (see: Kalb, 2023a; Semán…
On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the…
How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a…
The growth of extreme right-wing forces in the Argentine political process expresses the combination of global trends and specific trends associated with local political history. It also expresses…
The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by…
On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the…
On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the…
Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible…
It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF…