Analysis

The Free Trade Agreement: How It Functions and What It Does

A free trade agreement (hereinafter: FTA) is a treaty between two or more parties that reduces or removes barriers to commerce between them while leaving each party free to set its own trade policy towards everyone else. Several hundred such agreements are now in force, and the great majority of world commerce takes place between...

The Fragile Human: Why It Is So Difficult To Maintain Stable Human Organisation.

Political scientists, historians and also laymen interested in these fields have been puzzled as to why so many great civilisations rose to glory but also vanished just as often. When we look at the past years of our own times, whenever this might have been, we found history to be quite linear, or, at least,...

The Industrial Revolution: History and Interpretations

The industrial revolution refers to the transformation of production, work and social organisation that began in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and spread over the following century to continental Europe, North America and beyond. Its central features were the application of mechanical power to manufacturing, the concentration of work in...

Realism and Liberalism in International Relations

Realism and liberalism are the two theoretical traditions that have shaped the academic study of international relations more than any others. Each offers an account of why states behave as they do, what makes conflict and cooperation more or less likely and what can reasonably be expected of the international system. They are taught as...

The Authoritarian Character

There is a pattern that keeps resurfacing across the political and cultural landscape of European and Neo-European societies, one that is difficult to name but impossible to ignore. The same individuals who express fierce admiration for strongmen and self-made millionaires and billionaires tend to reserve an equally fierce contempt for those they perceive as weak,...

Inside NATO, Outside the New Europe? Türkiye and the Risk of Strategic Exclusion

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (hereinafter: the NATO) Summit held in Ankara on 7-8 July 2026 projected institutional confidence. Allied leaders reaffirmed their commitment to Article 5, announced more than $50 billion in new defence procurements and presented greater European and Canadian responsibility as the foundation of a modernised Alliance. Formally, therefore, NATO did not...