American media outlets like CNN and Fox News routinely cover Putin’s closest advisors, like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, but journalists often overlook one of his closest allies, United Russia party member and Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. He ascended to ...

Katya Lopatko: A Win for Centrists “On Sunday, the people of France annoyingly retained their traditional right to claim intellectual superiority over Americans.” The New Yorker’s celebrated political satirist Andy Borowitz summed up the dramatic and drawn-out French election with ...

A time-honored tradition in the foreign policy commentariat is the habit of anyone who studies foreign policy for a living–from undergraduates at USC to PhD’s in International Relations and former Undersecretaries of State for Communications Policy– to put on their ...

Introduction Recently, the EU has undergone significant changes due to external factors including, but not limited to, the 2008 economic crisis, the Arab Spring uprising, the emergence of Islamic State in the Middle East and the Syrian refugee crisis. Combined ...

Abstract Despite friendly appearances, there is a growing policy gap between the US and the EU, be it in military capacity, attitudes towards China or trade and migration. In the past, the UK served as a bridge between the two actors through its ...

Convivencia Destroyed For much of its history, Toledo, Spain was “la ciudad con tres culturas,” the city with three cultures, and the embodiment of convivencia, a time in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived harmoniously throughout Spain. The period of ...

The wave of anti-globalization that has overwhelmed the West over the past year has left no country untouched; political movements everywhere are questioning whether global integration should have measured “progress” for so long. Nowhere has integration gone further in the ...

Concerned murmurs of “populism” hang over many political movements that emerged in 2016. The word littered headlines, describing political parties, politicians and popular movements in the US, UK, Spain, Italy and the Philippines, among others. As far as “isms” go, ...

“Their world is crumbling. Ours is being built.”  The vice-president of France’s far-right, populist Front National (FN) party tweeted this message on November 9, as Donald Trump’s victory became evident. The FN’s prominence in the upcoming French presidential election poses ...

When Pablo Iglesias beat out his deputy and philosophical counterweight Errejón for leadership of Podemos in early February, he made a muted note of the party’s ongoing spiritual crisis: “There’s no doubt we’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Iglesias said, ...