Abhishek Avtans' cross-linguistic survey of swearing in South Asian languages is as much a study in social structure as in phonetics.
A linguist at Leiden University, Abhishek Avtans argues that profanity in South Asian languages functions as a precise diagnostic of the region's social order — encoding caste hierarchy, patriarchal kinship expectations, religious enmity, and gender policing into the texture of everyday speech.
Relational insults and the grammar of hierarchy
Where (…)

Lors des quatre dernières élections au Bangladesh, plus de la moitié des circonscriptions ont été remportées au moins une fois par des candidats tirant leur crédibilité politique d'un ou plusieurs membres de leur famille ayant déjà représenté la Ligue Awami (AL) ou le Parti nationaliste du Bangladesh (BNP). [1]
Les deux partis se sont succédé au pouvoir depuis le rétablissement de la démocratie parlementaire au Bangladesh en 1991, chacun étant dirigé depuis ses débuts par une dynastie : (…)

Gen Z revolts have learned to topple governments. The question of who succeeds them has barely been posed.
The Interregnum of the Young
On the afternoon of 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina boarded a military helicopter and fled Dhaka as hundreds of thousands of students and workers converged on her residence. Fifteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule ended in a matter of hours, brought down by an uprising that had begun five weeks earlier as a protest over public-sector job quotas; (…)

For three days in the middle of June, the spa town of Évian-les-Bains was sealed off from the country it belongs to. Sixteen thousand police, gendarmes, soldiers and border guards held a perimeter that ran along the southern shore of Lake Geneva and across the frontier into Switzerland; the rail line was suspended, the lakefront divided into coloured zones, movement rationed by QR code. On the far side of the lake, in Geneva, some sixty thousand people marched under the banner of a “No G7” (…)

Yet another El Niño, after the strong event of 2023–24, has taken hold of the Pacific Ocean – and this time it may emerge as a historically powerful one. Satellite data through the spring tracked a vast pulse of unusually warm water making its way across the Pacific, and on 11 June 2026 the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its El Niño advisory: the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is officially underway, with conditions expected to (…)

The dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on 15 July 2026 has triggered the largest wave of street protests Ukraine has seen since the “Cardboard Maidan” anti-corruption mobilisations of July 2025. Mikael Hertoft presents the anatomy of the crisis: the strategic conflict between a technocrat defence minister committed to drone warfare and a Soviet-trained commander-in-chief reluctant to relinquish conventional military doctrine, the political pressures feeding into Zelenskyy's (…)

Le gouvernement ukrainien restreint les allocations aux personnes déplacées internes (PDI) depuis mars 2024, en durcissant les critères d'éligibilité au moment même où les loyers augmentent et où le marché du travail ne peut absorber les déplacés. Olha Altunina — représentante du Commissaire aux droits humains du parlement ukrainien pour les citoyens victimes de l'agression armée — documente les conséquences : suspensions d'allocations, un programme de bons de logement dont la capacité (…)

The wartime government has been cutting displaced persons' support since March 2024, narrowing eligibility and tightening means-testing at the same moment that housing costs are rising and the labour market cannot absorb displaced workers. Olha Altunina — the Ukrainian Ombudsman's Representative for citizens affected by armed aggression — documents the consequences: benefit suspensions, a housing voucher programme whose funded capacity covers fewer than one in ten applicants, and a (…)

Amir Kianpour and Morteza Samanpour identify three distinct forms of campism obstructing internationalist politics under contemporary war conditions. “Campism of the fools” endorses any force opposing Western imperialism regardless of its internal repression, tracing a lineage from Cold War tankies to today's apologists for Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria. “Strategic campism” acknowledges the reactionary character of forces such as Hezbollah but still backs them as the only (…)