Louisa Lim’s discussion of the nationwide Democracy Movement in 1989 is quite possibly the only balanced analysis in existence. — Those outside China call it a massacre, the Chinese call it an incident, but what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was part of a far broader political awakening among the country’s educated urban elite. Discussing the events of 1989 has since become a picketed battleground, with one side claiming…

Where attacks against immigrants and Muslims are apparently the new normal. — Studies by several top UK universities, themselves suffering after loosing thousands of EU academics to Brexit, have found a dramatic rise in racially-motivated hate crimes since the 2016 referendum. Having already become a prominent voice dissecting British racism, in Natives, Akala contextualises the social and cultural influences that have shaped…

We need to learn to separate history from the past — For those of us who studied history to degree level, separating ‘history’ from ‘the past’ seems fairly elementary. The past is what happened and history is how people have written about it. When I first began my training as a historian nearly ten years ago, I saw history as apolitical…

And, if not, is it worth saving? — Democracy, as we know it, is dying. And, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, that might not be such a bad thing. It has taken a global pandemic for us to fully realise it, but something is broken and it goes far beyond who we voted for. In Great Britain…

Nigel Farage’s “campaign” is as dangerous as it is self-serving. — He tried to set himself up as the Donald Trump of Great Britain, stoking up xenophobia to turn the ‘white’ working class against immigrants, minorities, women, liberals, lefties, and all manner of apparent undesirables. …

Is there more to this fear than nearly a century of propaganda? — I went a little bit viral on TikTok recently for voicing the unthinkable: I said that I like paying taxes. As you might imagine, it was predominantly the Americans and Conservatives in my comment section who found themselves shocked and appalled. …

Translating the academic debate and its jargon — Judging from the fallout of my previous article — which asked: “Why are Americans and Conservatives So Afraid of Socialism?” — there is a lot of confusion over what socialism is. And, judging from the arguments raging through my responses, much of this confusion comes from self-proclaimed socialists themselves. As…

Here’s a list of free online resources to help you get started. — For a long time, I didn’t care about politics. Growing up working class in the UK, we are intentionally not taught about our political system, how it works, and what it has done in the past. …

Here’s an introductory list of free academic resources — I love what I do, but I hate how many academics seem determined to keep their knowledge from the vast majority of the population. It’s as though they think we’re some secret club, with a degree-level door price and members who can burst into spontaneous Latin on demand. Having accidentally…