Best of the week - 26 February 2021

Each week BISA Director, Juliet Dryden, scours the internet for IR-related content that might interest you. Here she brings you this week's best readings and podcasts to keep you up to date with what's happening around the world.

COVID-related

• No jab, no job: the moral minefield confronting the UK government. Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian
• Boris Johnson’s great gamble by Stephen Bush in New Statesman
• The EU is all out of vaccine excuses. Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg Opinion
• Vaccine diplomacy: how some countries are using Covid to enhance their soft power. Michael Jennings in The Conversation
• Podcast: Covid 19 death count: which countries are faring worst? Are different countries counting deaths from Covid 19 in the same way? Tim Harford finds out if we can trust international comparisons with the data available. From More or Less: Behind the Stats, BBC Radio 4
• Podcast: The crisis of meritocracy with Colm Murphy and Peter Mandler: how has mass education become such a crucial social and political issue under Covid? From the Mile End Institute podcast series at Queen Mary, University of London.

UK

• Break up Britain:  the imperilled state of the UK. Andrew Marr in Prospect Magazine
• Podcast:  Generation rentier: fixing a broken economic model. Find out what happens when an economy rewards owning things rather than doing things? Listen to Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd
• Podcast: What does Jeremy think?  A look back at the late Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood who for two decades was at the very heart of Westminster from Black Wednesday to Brexit. From TALKING POLITICS.

Global politics

• Democracy on the defence. Turning back the authoritarian tide. Yascha Mounk in Foreign Affairs
• Earth’s existential threats: inequality, pandemics and climate change demand global leadership. Jacob Ainscough, Alex McLaughlin, Luke Kemp, Natalie Jones in The Conversation
• Russia and the West: the path not taken. Sergey Radchenko in Engelsberg Ideas
• Sasha Baron Cohen’s message to Mark Zuckerberg: calling out the social media companies who profit on racism, misogyny and autocratic propaganda trends
• The diplomat as gardener. What George Shultz understood about American power. Nicholas Burns in Foreign Affairs.

Russia

• Why won’t Amnesty call Alexei Navalny a prisoner of conscious? Masha Gessen in the New Yorker
• As Navalny rises in Russia, Kazakhstan watches nervously. Nygmet Ibadildin in Open Democracy
• Putin and Erdogan have formed a brotherhood of hard power: but the bond is brittle. Read the view from the Economist.

China

• The battle for China’s backyard: the rivalry between America and China will hinge on South-East Asia. The leader in the Economist
• The old world and the middle kingdom. Europe wakes up to China’s rise.  Julianne Smith and Torrey Taussig in Foreign Affairs
• How China is outflanking the United States in the Middle East and staying under the radar.

What’s going on in the rest of the world?

• How the dream of the Arab Spring died. Jeremy Bowen in the New Statesman
• Having won Syria’s war, Al Assad is mired in economic woes. The New York Times
• The axis of resistance to Israel to breaking up. Syria is turning against Hamas, and Iran’s efforts to mediate aren’t working.  Anchal Vohra in Foreign Policy
• Stability in the Middle East requires more than a deal with Iran. Sanam Vakil in Foreign Affairs
• Biden and the Iran nuclear deal. What to expect from the negotiations. Ali Bilgic in The Conversation
• Reinventing Islam. Elias Muhanna in the London Review of Books
• What fiction reveals about the Algerian war. Rebecca Liu in Prospect Magazine
• How Biden should not leave Afghanistan. Stephen M Walt in Foreign Policy
• China in Myanmar’s ‘biggest loser’. A relationship decades in the making is now under jeopardy. Read Timothy Mclaughlin in the Atlantic.

Space and climate war

• Space forces: where are the space arcs? Tom Stephenson in the London Review of Books
• Podcast: The new climate war. Listen to renowned climate scientist Michael Mann speak to Clover Hogan about the thirty-year war to deflect blame and delay action on climate change from Intelligence Squared podcast series.

And for something completely different…

• What’s it like to be: a bat? Cal Flyn in Prospect Magazine.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash