Valentina Pegolo is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford, specializing in Iranian foreign policy.
Attempts by companies like McDonald’s to use memes for marketing have flopped, with ad men unable to reproduce memes’ inherent reliance on collective creativity. Memes don’t fit with the logic of private appropriation — and social media sites looking for ad revenue are giving them ever less space.
Italian prosecutors have called for four Egyptian security agents to be tried for the 2016 kidnapping and murder of labor researcher Giulio Regeni in Cairo. Their appeal follows years in which Egyptian authorities have frustrated efforts to find the killers — and the Italian government has turned a blind eye, for the sake of good relations with Al-Sisi’s military regime.
Donald Trump’s humiliating Tulsa rally showed how K-pop fandom has been able to mobilize fans in a common political cause. But if boy band BTS declared their solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests, the big labels have remained tight-lipped — and even less willing to address their own record of exploiting and abusing hopeful young “idols.”
Even as Iran’s coronavirus death toll nears 5,000, US sanctions continue to bear down on the country’s health care system.
Why is Beijing so worried about the Hong Kong protests? Because they know that the movement, now in its twentieth week, could become a symbol of democratic resistance that all disenfranchised people in the region could rally behind.
The British Navy’s seizure of an Iranian oil tanker has sparked diplomatic crisis and a tit-for-tat action by Iran. Post-Brexit Britain wants to reassert itself as a global power — but it’s suffering from a serious case of imperial overreach.