Anand Teltumbde argues that the resignation of India's Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in July 2026, forced by the “Cockroach” protest movement against examination fraud, succeeded in part because the movement was deliberately, strategically rude. Teltumbde reads the movement's profanity — mock diapers mailed to a minister's office, slogans no newspaper could print — not as a lapse from political seriousness but as its central weapon. Drawing on James C. Scott's distinction (…)

Every anniversary of Nicaragua's 1979 revolution revives a false choice: either the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship is the legitimate heir of the Sandinista revolution, or the revolution itself led inevitably to today's regime. This piece rejects both claims. It traces the dictatorship's origins not to 1979 but to a cumulative sequence of political failures across four decades: the displacement of the revolution's historic protagonists; the 2000 pact between Ortega's Frente Sandinista de (…)

The Balkan states have different strategies to deak with their peripheral position in the European economy, valuable mainly for what can be extracted from them. Serbia's government survives by playing Moscow, Beijing and Brussels against each other, selling access to its lithium, minerals and arms markets to whichever power will tolerate its rule in return. Albania has tried the opposite path — unconditional compliance with Brussels — and reached the same place: a government prepared to hand (…)