In the Realm of the Last Man is an unusual book; an autobiography that pulls triple duty, it ruminates on its subject’s complex life, sets the record straight on past debates and criticisms, and closes by defending liberal democracy against rising competitors on the Left and Right. The book pulls off the first two admirably, though the apologia for liberal democracy highlights some of Fukuyama’s limitations as a commentator.

The self-portrait Fukuyama paints is of an intellectually inclined man who has always tempered his speculative impulses while keeping one foot firmly on the ground. Aside from giving himself the occasional and by and large justified pats on the back, Fukuyama comes across as a confident but relatively humble man well aware of what he owes to others. The long sections on how his ethnically Japanese family was interred in concentration camps during World War II are filled with righteous indignation. Honestly describing his complex relationship with his professor father, Fukuyama notes how he “remained a diehard liberal his whole life.”

The elder Fukuyama was disappointed when his son gravitated toward moderate conservatism. This rightward shift “pained my father greatly”, we are told. “He didn’t really understand what had changed my thinking; he told his friends that one of my professors had gone to work for the Pentagon and ‘brainwashed’ me after returning to academia.” Fukuyama admits to regretting some of this youthful animosity toward his father and ending up now committed to the kind of progressive liberalism he dismissed as a young man.

This transition from left to center-right to center-left critic of radicalism on either side takes up the bulk of Fukuyama’s reflections. Early on, he became fascinated with postmodern critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other French philosophers. These were all the rage in the 1970s, and Fukuyama recounts that his “fascination with postmodernism led me to graduate from Cornell early and move to Paris so I could study with the masters.” Unfortunately, this exposure to unfiltered postmodern theory led him to conclude that these ideas were part of a project that was “essentially nihilistic, built on the assertions of the impossibility of reasoned discourse, inference from empirical evidence, and ultimately of philosophy itself. Truth claims simply masked the assertions of power by a dominant social actor at the expense of groups that were marginalized.”

Frustrated by postmodernism’s endless criticism, Fukuyama chose to move in the opposite direction. Before graduating he fell under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss, among others. Though they differed substantially in their theoretical and political beliefs, they were united in their conviction that philosophy’s pursuit of capital T truth was a noble enterprise.

Of particular importance to Fukuyama was the debate between Leo Strauss and the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In Natural Right and History, Strauss famously repudiated the strong versions of historicism — the view that social values and institutions were entirely the product of historical developments rather than human nature — associated with Edmund Burke, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. Whether in its more conservative or radical forms, historicism led to the view that what counted as true and good was largely settled by the norms of the time. Strauss was famously guarded about his own philosophical preferences but expressed a qualified admiration for the commitment to discovering timeless truths one saw in ancient philosophy.

Kojève, however, famously interpreted Hegel as arguing that human nature developed over time, and with it our ability to more richly understand our relation to truth and to one another. Consequently, the philosopher’s goal wasn’t to understand transcendent truths but rather the process of how our conceptions of truth became richer over time. Kojève gave this idea a political spin, hypothesizing that one day we would reach the “end of history”; there would be no more debates worth having because we will have worked out how to offer meaningful recognition to each and all.

Fukuyama describes his own view as “middle ground between the Strauss and Kojève positions, and indeed the middle ground is what I tried to elaborate in The End of History and the Last Man.” He is sympathetic to the view that historical processes shape human convictions, and that changes in politics and society are possible. This includes the prospect of improvement through the cautious application of reason; most radically, this increasingly includes the ability to apply science to alter major features of human biology even prior to conception. The prospect of endless unconstrained change worries Fukuyama, who insists that there is such a thing as human nature. What he means by this is a “core set of faculties and inclinations that ultimately served to limit human autonomy and ensure that there was also continuity in the human experience over time.”

One of these core human inclinations is what he, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, calls the thymotic desire for recognition. In his book Identity, Fukuyama describes thymos as the “third part of the soul” alongside desire and reason. Thymos is “the seat of judgements of worth. . . .  [individuals driven by thymos] also crave positive judgements about their worth or dignity. Those judgements can come from within. . . . but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth.” Fukuyama thinks that while liberal societies have done much to rationally organize societies to secure many human needs, they have long struggled to offer anything like equal recognition to all their members. This stirs the thymotic yearnings of the soul, leading to resentment of those who are recognized as greater or more valuable.

Fukuyama is not usually understood as a thinker interested in human psychology, but this is more a product of a general failure to read more than the title of The End of History and the Last Man. Few familiar with this work ever “ bothered to read the last five chapters of my book, which dealt with the problem of the last man.” The book is a considered rumination on whether liberal capitalism was indeed the last ideology standing at the end of history. At the time Fukuyama hypothesized it might be, left-wing alternatives to liberal capitalism were lifeless — the Soviet Union was still tottering on in 1989 when Fukuyama wrote the essay, “The End of History?”, on which he based his book, but it collapsed two years later, as if to promote his hardcover.

The fall of the Soviet Union profoundly discredited communism, while many of the Left’s brightest minds had become enamored with trendy but ultimately “nihilistic” postmodern critical theory of which Fukuyama had always been wary. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, the last chapters of The End of History make the case that many right-of-center personalities will remain driven by “megalothymonia” — a yearning for a sense of superiority and greatness that makes them discontented with merely being the well-paid but bored technocratic managers of docile nations and respectably successful companies. As he put it near the close of The End of History:

It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not indeed reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted — indeed, that are not even touched — if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Messner, or a politician like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition that they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just. And as long as they are not, the horizon of human possibilities that they define will not be ultimately satisfying for the most thymotic natures.

Fukuyama remains committed in broad strokes to the story he told more than thirty years ago. Liberal democracy provided material affluence and rational government for many. But personalities like Trump did indeed find simply being real estate developers and New York playboys destined for an esteemed place in the Epstein files unsatisfying. They wanted to be Alexandrian men of destiny, but they could only do this by smashing the liberal order and replacing it with one of their own making.

Fukuyama shows real insight into the enduring populist appeal of the Right when he notes that liberals failed to recognize how these prejudices concealed a yearning to make moral judgements about the world that were more forceful than what mere toleration seemed to allow. In addition to failing to address the emotional needs of those who had no interest in just being an equal citizen in a society of equal citizens, liberalism failed to recognize the need people have for meaning beyond living day-to-day.

These dissatisfied constituencies were primed to listen to megalothymotically driven populists who stoked their anger at being looked down upon by self-righteous liberals that chastised their moral views as so many racist, sexist, homophobic, and nationalist prejudices. What Trump et al. offered them was confirmation of their own moral superiority over those who pretended to be their betters, alongside a sense of cosmic significance in combating the evils of a decaying elite liberal order. For Fukuyama, the January 6 protesters didn’t just riot because they thought the election had been stolen from them. They wanted to “play-act at being armed revolutionaries defending their way of life” against sinister globalists and immigrant baristas making $7.50 an hour alike. The reality was that “they were simply dupes enlisted to soothe the ego of a single narcissistic fraudster.”

The end of history ended after about twenty-five years, give or take, and we are very much in an era in which liberal democracy faces pressure on all fronts. Fukuyama has deep insights into the roots of the attack from the Right, which makes a great deal of sense given his early attraction to Strauss, Bloom, and the neoconservative movement — although his understanding of the Left’s impulses is more questionable. Throughout In The Realm of the Last Man he expresses considerable regret for where this early attraction led him. He signed a periodical calling for the United States to invade Iraq and unseat Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s. This of course ended in the death of almost a million Iraqi people and thousands of Americans troops. Fukuyama admits that he was driven to sign the letter more out of group loyalty than hawkishness. “The problem was psychological, and not a matter of policy judgement or moral disagreement. The issue was a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends.” When Fukuyama did eventually break with the neoconservatives, it came at a significant cost, though he admits it was “liberating” to abandon right-wing orthodoxy and adopt more social democratic positions.

Despite Fukuyama’s journey of maturation to the social democratic left, he still struggles with understanding the instincts and ideas that animate it. His curt dismissal of complex thinkers like Foucault and Derrida is just the tip of the iceberg. Fukuyama rather lazily dismisses the students who set up pro-Palestinian encampments as privileged ne’er-do-wells who “want a break from their lives of steady and unheroic striving” and quips that they are not “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia or victims of the civil war in Sudan.” The difference — that America’s government isn’t allied to Russia or Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces but is deeply committed to supporting Israel — seems not to register to Fukuyama.

Elsewhere in In the Realm of the Last Man, Fukuyama complains that there is “no clear systematic vision on the left for what kind of society should replace liberal democracy, as there once was.” He is deeply wary of the recent tendency of young people to become “more sympathetic to socialism or Communism than previously” since in the past these have led to “nightmares.” This take is wildly out of date. Proposals for everything from “Nordic socialism” to “socialism in the twenty-first century” to “liberal socialism” abound. Moreover, these didn’t come out of a vacuum. Any decent history of socialism would show it is a political and economic tradition that’s as internally diverse as liberalism and conservatism are.

A general refusal to draw too deeply on left-wing insights limits major dimensions of Fukuyama’s diagnosis of liberalism’s woes. He’s absolutely correct that the Right has always had a significant constituency made up of people who are dissatisfied with the prospect of being their brother’s equal and keeper. They want to conceive of themselves, and be acknowledged as, “recognizable superiors”, as Friedrich Hayek noted in his thoughtful essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative.” Many of the resentments that appear on the Right are fueled by anxiety around dispossession; that the unworthy, unwashed multitudes of the world are threatening to take away the hard-earned riches of citizens or positions at Ivy League universities. This combination of believing oneself to be simultaneously a superior and also a victim of the weak is very powerful and has given the Right a lot of cultural pull.

But Fukuyama’s book doesn’t sufficiently interrogate the social origins of these attitudes, perhaps because its author remains at least somewhat sympathetic to them. He often chimes in to acclaim the importance of meritocracy and even gives one cheer for megalothymia as a “necessary motivator of any kind of human excellence. . . . ” What this doesn’t interrogate is just how the very emphasis liberals place on meritocratic mythologies has contributed to festering social resentments. Given his stated admiration for Michael Sandel, Fukuyama might have engaged with the former’s important book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel is very critical of how the meritocratic myth that everyone ought to be given a (very unequal) opportunity to succeed while acknowledging that most will not succeed has produced pathological results. We have a vulgar ruling class that increasingly tells itself it owes nothing to anyone, and worse, many poor and lower-middle-class people who are told that if they can’t make it they have no one to blame but themselves. The message for the poor under meritocratic liberal capitalism is simple: save your pennies, cut out the Budweiser, and either go to college or invest early in Bitcoin. It should come as no surprise that a society riven by such toxic ideas would generate mass forms of resentment, and much of the blame must be laid at the feet of liberals who propagated meritocratic mythologies even in the face of mounting evidence showing the immeasurable amount we owe to others for whatever success we are lucky enough to achieve.

At the conclusion of the 1989 essay, Fukuyama admitted he could “feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed”. Now history is once again back, the older Fukuyama mainly seems to feel a powerful nostalgia for the post-historical 1990s. He should be careful what he wishes for. It is perhaps appropriate that he would remain, to the last, someone whose political allegiances are stamped by the ideological parameters established back when neoliberal hegemony seemed untouchable. Over time, Fukuyama has steadily moved from the neoliberalism and neoconservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the moderate progressivism of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. But it was the failure of just these forms of centrism that paved the road to Trumpism — and they will not save us from it.

Across India’s cities and industrial belts, the basic act of cooking a meal is becoming increasingly precarious for low-income households. Part of that shock reflects spillovers from the conflict in the Middle East, particularly due to disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for crude oil and LPG.

India depends heavily on LPG imports, making domestic prices highly sensitive to global energy markets and external supply conditions. Fluctuations in international fuel prices and supply disruptions are increasingly passed on directly to households.

Provision of India’s LPG subsidy, which exceeded 400 billion rupees annually in the mid-2010s, fell sharply by 2020–21 before being partially restored in recent years. Government budget data shows LPG subsidy expenditure has fluctuated sharply over the past decade, reflecting a broader shift toward market-linked pricing.

Today LPG subsidies have become increasingly targeted rather than universal. In 2025–26, the government allocated around 120 billion rupees to support Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a program that subsidizes cooking gas for low-income households, reflecting a narrower approach to welfare support.

For consumers, this translated into a steep rise in refill costs. The price of a standard 14.2-kilogram domestic LPG cylinder, which hovered around 400 to 500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in 2022, before easing slightly to around 850 to 950 rupees. For low-income households, this remains prohibitively expensive.

While subsidies still exist, many households report receiving little meaningful relief. For a daily wage worker earning 300 to 500 rupees, a single refill can consume two to three days’ income, making regular use difficult to sustain. Parliamentary data indicates that PMUY beneficiaries use significantly fewer cylinders annually than other consumers, underscoring the affordability constraint.

In Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, Parveena sits outside her one-room house, an empty LPG cylinder resting beside her like a useless object.

“For the past few days, we have been running from one gas agency to another,” she says. “We are not getting refills on time. Without gas, we cannot even cook one meal.”

A mother of two and a daily wage worker, Parveena has already begun cutting back. “For two days, my children have slept hungry,” she says. “Prices are rising every day. Even if we find LPG, it is too costly. We are poor; how can we pay so much just to cook food?”

While India has expanded LPG access significantly over the past decade, sustained usage among low-income households remains uneven. In recent months, that strain has deepened. Reports from multiple states, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, point to refill delays, long waiting times, and rising dependence on alternative fuels.

In some areas, households have begun reverting to firewood and kerosene fuels associated with both poverty and long-term health risks.

Parveena’s neighbor notes quietly, “We cannot just leave this place. At least the men find some work here. . . .  Somehow we survive with that.”

In neighborhoods like these, leaving is rarely a real option. Survival depends on staying and adjusting. But adjustment has limits. For women in particular, the burden is immediate and physical. When LPG runs out, it is they who must find alternatives like collecting firewood, managing inefficient stoves, or stretching meals across days.

In working neighborhoods across India, families report reducing the number of meals they cook, delaying refills, and stretching cylinders beyond their normal use. “We adjust” is how several workers describe it.

Faheem, thirty-two, a migrant worker from Gujarat currently working in Bengaluru, describes the situation as disturbing.

“We can’t get gas here, and now we are being forced to leave our home,” he says. “Cooking has become difficult, sometimes even impossible, and we don’t know how to manage our house and land anymore. Everything has become too hard.”

“Sometimes it’s expensive; sometimes it’s not available at all. Life has really become difficult,” he adds.

For many households, alternatives remain out of reach. Electric cooking is often presented as the next step in India’s clean energy transition, but it requires up-front investment in appliances and a reliable electricity supply.

For precarious urban and rural households, both remain uncertain. As a result, the transition to cleaner energy is unfolding unevenly, shaped as much by income as by infrastructure. On the outskirts of cities, firewood and kerosene are reappearing as fallback options.

Chulhas, traditional Indian stoves once replaced in the name of clean energy, are being used again. Health experts have long warned about the consequences of such reversals.

Prolonged exposure to smoke from firewood and biomass fuels is linked to respiratory illnesses, particularly among women and children who spend the most time near cooking spaces. What appears as a short-term coping strategy can carry long-term health costs.

Anjali, thirty-three, a mother of two and resident of rural Odisha, says, “Since we are not getting refills on time and sometimes have to wait weeks, we are being pushed back to firewood.”

“In our village, most homes once switched to LPG, but nearly 30 to 40 percent still burn firewood for cooking, even with connections, especially among poorer families.”

“The smoke makes our children cough, and my wife spends hours every day tending the chulha,” Arun Kumar, her husband, adds.

As the train begins to depart from Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, Ramesh Varma climbs aboard.

“I came here to earn,” he says. “But if I cannot even eat, what is the point?”

In homes like Parveena’s, the uncertainty continues. Across India, in thousands of kitchens, the same question lingers.

The film is not helped along by having our hero played by the stupefyingly dull Andrew Garfield. As the fictional farmer called simply “Ploughman,” he’s in perpetual mourning over his family that died in the black plague. Pushed to his limit by the royal taxes that are beggaring his community, Ploughman assaults the tax-collecting hirelings of King Richard II, thus kicking off the revolt.

Ploughman explains that his name refers to the fact that he and his work are regarded as one entity, but hearing it said over and over gets very distracting. What’s with that name anyway? Ploughman. Is he the worst superhero ever? Is his superpower growing potatoes?

I should add that Garfield is in no way believable as a fourteenth-century farmer. He has the soft-boy look of some random coffeehouse laptop jockey, yet we’re supposed to accept that he’s a formidable figure, lean and sinewy from a lifetime of hard labor. Wielding his favorite weapon, the sickle — don’t get your hopes up, communists! — he’s such a deadly fighter, he readily defeats the knights who are guarding the king, one after another, in an absolutely delusional action sequence that arrives late in the movie. Honor labor, Greengrass, by acknowledging that a farmer might be very handy with his sickle and still not be able to defeat, on his own, several highly trained knights whose lifelong calling is combat.

Unsurprisingly, this lame attempt at an action-oriented historical epic is bombing badly at the box office. It’s the second of two failed films in a row for Garfield after The Magic Faraway Tree, which is the real title of a real movie that opened a few weeks ago and was immediately consigned to oblivion by a disgusted public.

Making Ploughman the superhuman Everyman at the center of The Uprising pushes into secondary roles the more interesting historical figures who actually led the revolt, played by more exciting actors — Cosmo Jarvis as renegade soldier Wat Tyler and Jamie Bell as seditious priest John Ball. There was a certain poetry and logic to soldier and priest, sword and scripture, joining forces to lead the most massive peasant revolt in English history. But here, it gets thrown out of whack by shoving a sad-sack farmer into the foreground.

Greengrass wants to make sure that women get some screentime too, which is fair enough, so there’s a fictional character named Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), an ex-nun who was raped by a priest and had her newborn child torn away from her, who’s now a head-shaven toughie ready to fight. And the worried mother of troubled boy king Richard II, Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), prays that he’ll find the strength to rule independent of his corrupt and self-serving counselors who include the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), Sir Robert Hales, the grand prior of the Knights Hospitaller (Tom Hollander), and nobleman politician William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller).

Woody Norman as fourteen-year-old Richard II, tormented by nightmares and conniving advisers and presentiments of doom, does a nice job of making the boy king both pitiable and disturbing. He appears to be a weak reed on which to build any confidence, yet the peasants still believe intensely in kings divinely ordained by God and are convinced he’ll cast off his evil counselors once the people petition him with their grievances. When the boy king finally does find the strength to lead, well — I probably don’t have to say “SPOILER ALERT!” when I tell you that this doesn’t go well for the peasants. Or for peasant leaders.

Just to give you one example of what ultimately happened — though it’s not handled this way in the film, which chickens out at every turn — the priest John Ball was executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. If you look it up, you’ll find that’s a gruesome multiple-step form of medieval capital punishment that certainly wasn’t the origin of the word “overkill,” but that term comes to mind nevertheless.

But that’s a bummer, right? So Paul Greengrass decided to find a way to tack a happier ending onto The Uprising. And this really is a SPOILER: Greengrass has Ploughman escape and then turn up again in an idiotic denouement when the heavily guarded royal coach bearing King Richard II and the Queen Mother is lumbering through the woods and gets surrounded by a bunch of masked figures all wearing dull green who drop down out of the trees.

“It’s Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” you think with a sinking sense of despair, and it is, only this bunch is anything but merry. It’s Robin Hood and his Morose Men, starring Ploughman as the beloved masked outlaw of Sherwood Forest, not in the least cheered up by finding this liberating form of ongoing rebellion and guerilla-style warfare. Ex-nun Alyce is now one of the low-spirited gang. Any hopes Greengrass might have cherished that The Uprising would kick off a rebooted Robin Hood series die a well-deserved death right here.

Where’s Errol Flynn when you need him? When somebody in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) says in shocked tones to Flynn’s Robin Hood, “You speak treason!” he answers with heartening élan, “Fluently.” So goddamn proud of himself and his fellow rebels, I mean. Those were the days. But here, we have the worst of both worlds: gritty “realism” and absurd Hollywood convention.

Here Ploughman/Robin Hood has a chance to kill Richard II, this little royal sumb-tch who betrayed Wat Tyler and John Ball and slaughtered thousands of trusting peasants who believed in him. But you can’t count on these dreary depressive half-hearted rebels who never really commit to their own revolution. Ploughman/Robin Hood merely drags the king out of his carriage into the dirt and says scornful words at him. He promises that, after this schoolyard-style humiliation, the boy king will be harassed by a fresh set of nightmares till the end of his days. Yeah, that’s real punishment. An already nightmare-plagued teenage king, safe in his castle, has more nightmares. That’ll show him.

How media-makers have embraced utter toothlessness even in fictionalized narratives of historical rebellions is sickening to contemplate. Movies like this are just one more way of reminding ourselves that for decades we’ve been macerating in weak equivocation and class-traitor spinelessness.

So there’s yet another promising cinematic premise gone down the chutes — with a bomb this size, nobody will be able to make another 1381 English Peasant Revolt movie for who knows how long. And I’d like to see a unsparingly realistic version of that film that includes some of John Ball’s famous incendiary speeches, such as the one with the mocking kick-ss line, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”

Then it should show Ball’s hanged-drawn-and-quartered execution after Richard II reneges on every promise to his too-trusting subjects in order to get them to disband and then hunts down their rebel leaders.

Let’s look at this historical uprising squarely. It has, shall we say, enduring relevance.

By securing parliamentary backing for the disarmament process, the Erdoğan–Bahçeli alliance has accomplished what once appeared politically impossible. Despite steadily declining approval ratings since the 2024 local elections, the ruling coalition has partially detached the Kurdish question from the traditional government-versus-opposition cleavage and gained unprecedented room to maneuver politically.

Until now, the parliamentary arithmetic had been relatively stable. The ruling bloc depended on Turkish conservative-nationalist mobilization; DEM on organized Kurdish democratic-patriotic support; the CHP — now largely succeeded by the Yeni Parti — relied mainly on urban secularist votes. Across the last four national and local elections, Kurdish voters and their political leadership consistently backed the CHP as the only viable national alternative capable of producing a new interlocutor for a negotiated settlement.

Beginning with the secret talks with Öcalan, continuing through his unilateral call to dissolve the PKK and culminating in the Framework Law, the ruling coalition has cut diagonally across Turkey’s political alignments. Unlike during the 2013–15 peace process, Ankara’s implicit message is now clear: the state can negotiate directly with Öcalan and the Kurdish movement without first democratizing Turkey’s political order.

This has given Cumhur İttifakı (the ruling People’s Alliance) a major competitive advantage. Under the banner of Terörsüz Türkiye (“Terrorless Turkey”), it can pursue a strategy that combines regulated pacification of the organized Kurdish movement with continued authoritarian competition against the main opposition. From the government’s perspective, the two tracks are complementary rather than contradictory.

The second track has continued uninterrupted since 2025. Beginning with the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March last year, there have been police raids on at least thirty-nine municipalities that the opposition CHP captured in the 2024 local elections. Dozens of mayors have been detained or imprisoned on corruption charges based largely on forced or highly contested confessions.

The same governing technique was first perfected against Kurdish municipalities. Between 2015 and 2025, Kurdish mayors were removed in successive waves under terrorism-related charges; CHP municipalities are now targeted through corruption, bribery, and embezzlement cases built on similarly politicized judicial practices.

For the Kurdish movement, the Framework Law, despite the state’s instrumentalization of it for pacification, is far more than symbolic. According to the statement released by the DEM Party after its visit to İmralı, Öcalan said:

A trek of a thousand kilometers commences with a single step. With this law, we are setting out to resolve a historical problem. We are at the beginning of a democratization process that will be at least as important as the founding of the Republic.

The “process,” since its public announcement by Öcalan on February 27, 2025, has progressed through irreversible steps demanded by the government — disarmament, dissolution, and withdrawal of armed units from Turkish territory — whereas the state’s own commitments remained political pledges rather than legally binding. Öcalan’s optimism is clearly nurtured by the fact that some of those assurances have now been written into law and thereby transformed into legal obligations, thus marking a threshold.

As a result, Öcalan emerges politically stronger after two years of negotiating. His February 2025 call, the PKK’s dissolution congress, the symbolic disarmament, the formation of the parliamentary commission, negotiations over a legal framework, and the Framework Law comprise an unbroken chain of concessions and Öcalan’s recognition by all negotiating parties as the indispensable interlocutor of the process.

However, this success comes at a price. The more effectively Öcalan delivers PKK disarmament, the more Erdoğan becomes confident that he can separate the settlement of the armed conflict from Turkey’s progress toward the rule of law, human rights, and democracy.

Thus, the framework law remains both historic and deliberately confined in the face of colossal historic demands. It regulates pacification, prosecution, and reintegration but leaves full Kurdish demands unresolved. It offers no promise or call for Kurdish rights, no local democracy, no return of the mayors replaced by government-appointed trustees, no amnesty for prisoners of conscience, and no hint of Öcalan’s future status.

This is the political world into which former PKK guerrillas will return after their release.

The political force that defeated the ruling alliance in the 2024 local elections with decisive Kurdish support was subsequently dismantled by judicial intervention. Following the court-imposed return of former CHP Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the majority of the parliamentary group, local leadership, and grassroots organization regrouped as the newly founded Yeni Parti, under Özgür Özel, while maintaining its commitment to a negotiated solution of the Kurdish question and supporting the Framework Law.

Yet the parliamentary vote exposed a profound contradiction. A majority of Yeni Parti deputies voted against legislation that could release imprisoned PKK members and suspend pending prosecutions. Whatever the party’s broader democratic credentials, many Kurdish voters interpreted that vote as opposition to the immediate release of their imprisoned relatives.

The Yeni Parti is not as powerful as before the vote — a move that weakened its standing within the Kurdish electorate, albeit not irreversibly. There remains room for Özel and his leadership to reconstruct a democratic alternative that links the end of armed conflict to wider democratization. Whether they succeed may become one of the decisive political questions of the next phase.

The majority of Kurds support the “process.” Yet this should not be confused with trust in Erdoğan. They are carefully observing how the law will be implemented. It is moving beyond rhetoric into legislation; there is reason to hope for an end to the armed conflict, the release of prisoners, and the normalization of political life.

Yet there still remains the memory of the collapse of the previous peace process of 2013–15, and the ongoing reality of trustee-controlled municipalities, mass prosecutions, and the weaponization of the judiciary against those calling for Kurdish rights. Therefore, if Kurds are turning their faces toward peace, this by no means implies that they are opening their minds to Erdoğan’s autocracy. They have learned a bitter lesson: if they don’t empower themselves, they will remain powerless.

The continuing repression of Yeni Parti municipalities creates an intense dilemma within the Kurdish constituency. A Kurdish voter may simultaneously believe that Öcalan is right to pursue negotiations, that ending the armed conflict is historically necessary, and that the government’s treatment of the Yeni Parti is fundamentally undemocratic.

The methods now used against the Yeni Parti — criminal investigations, removal of elected officials, prolonged detention, and politicized prosecutions — closely resemble those long directed against Kurdish municipalities. Rather than drawing Kurdish politics toward Erdoğan, this may reinforce a different conclusion: negotiations can end the war, but democratic guarantees must become universal.

The government’s current perspectives and actual governance give no hint of democratic transformation. They are best understood as a set of selective nonaggression pacts under a wider authoritarianism. The state is relaxing one historic axis of coercion while intensifying another.

Armed conflict has long vanished from the former war zone between Turkey and the PKK. The decisive question is no longer whether there will be armed conflict or whether the PKK leaves the mountains. The issue, now, is whether the political room opened by the call to lay arms becomes a democratic space for all or merely space newly monopolized by Erdoğan’s state and his military-industrial complex.

Multilingual scholarship in the past twenty years has dislodged the stereotype of Japan as an inherently conservative and peaceful society without any protest culture. But the legacy of the Long ’60s remains bitterly contested due to the violence — directed not only at the state but inward, at rival New Left factions. For most of the Japanese public at large, the period tends to exist as a blur of helmeted students clashing with riot police for causes vaguely related to the Vietnam War.

But the famous unrest of the late 1960s had a precedent. A decade earlier, Japan passed through a comparable period of political and social turbulence over the American military bases on its soil and the security treaty that bound the country firmly to the Western bloc. Adachi belongs to the generation that came of age around the renewal of the treaty in 1960 and that remained haunted by its failure to stop it — a failure that made them appear, to the young activists at the end of the decade, outdated and politically compromised. This goes some way toward explaining Adachi’s detached, often satirical portrayal of student radicals during his peak years from around 1967 to 1972. In the films he directed or wrote for Wakamatsu Kōji in this period, such as Schoolgirl Guerrillas (1969) and Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), the leftists are no better than the authority figures they oppose and tend to collapse into glorified LARPing or, worse still, self-destructive violence.

Alongside this societal strife, postwar Japanese culture witnessed an explosion in the avant-garde that redefined attitudes toward the body and artistic mediums. Visual artists like Kazuo Shiraga turned painting into a physical record that captured the traces of the practitioner’s body, and dance styles like butoh fractured the aesthetic of the body into something grotesque and fragile. There was a shift to more allegorical modalities of political art, to which aspects of Adachi’s output also adhere, such as his early films Bowl (1961) and Closed Vagina (1963), which express the disillusionment of the 1960 security treaty protests through oblique metaphors like the titular female genitalia instead of more didactic messages. One of the many reasons a film like Galaxy (1967) is so engrossing and rewarding to rewatch is that you can read it as both an allegory of mid-’60s disenchantment and a surreal psychodrama about a bourgeois man’s mental breakdown.

Adachi’s more allegorical and ambiguous films may reward a closer look in ways the better-known ones — those in which the oppositional politics of the day are writ large — do not. Compared both to the militant documentaries of Shinsuke Ogawa, which chronicled the struggle of farmers opposed to the construction of Narita Airport in the 1960s and ’70s, and to the overtly political (and almost instructive) films of Jean-Luc Godard from around 1968 to 1976, much of Adachi’s work is far more opaque, even abstruse at times, despite the agitprop reputation of his output.

Nominally a film about a notorious spree killer, A.K.A. Serial Killer is a highly conceptual exploration of state power residually haunting the postwar landscape of Japan, rendered through hypnotic visuals. Completed in 1969 but not shown publicly until 1975, it focuses on the everyday urban and rural spaces that shaped the perpetrator of sensational crimes and is regarded as a seminal work in landscape theory (fūkeiron). The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), codirected with Wakamatsu, was filmed while Adachi was embedded among Palestinian guerrillas and was initially dismissed as merely recruitment propaganda for impressionable Japanese leftists, yet it is actually a pensive meditation on the nature of living on a daily basis as part of a revolutionary struggle, engaging in a dialectical inquiry with the viewer by posing questions and positions.

Like. A.K.A. Serial Killer, Adachi’s recent films Revolution+1 (2022) and Escape (2025) have dealt with sensational figures — former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassin and the fugitive bomber Satoshi Kirishima, a marginal member of a group that carried out a series of bombings of corporations in the 1970s — albeit in a somewhat more conventional biopic style. Upon release, they prompted febrile responses in Japan (especially the Abe film), but the headlines overshadowed the fact these films were avowedly not celebrating their subjects. Neither condemning nor condoning, Revolution+1 portrays how Abe’s assassin was pulled almost inevitably toward his act by domestic and socioeconomic circumstances, while Escape focuses on the mental strain of living an ascetic life on the lam as a way of both atoning and continuing the struggle. In these times of endless culture wars and social divisions, such approaches to political art (and violence) are arguably more fertile than the didactic or provocative.

Adachi has expressed admiration for Franz Kafka and Lu Xun, drawing on their writing for his film Artist of Fasting (2016), a typically bawdy tale of a man who arbitrarily takes up residence one day in a quiet neighborhood and becomes a spectacle attracting a broad range of people in society, all looking to exploit him for their agendas. Static, disjointed, and packed with literary references, the film seems very distant from Adachi’s 1960s and ’70s output’s cast of student activists and wannabe revolutionaries and its more frenetic pacing. And yet Artist of Fasting ultimately suggests a through line between both periods by functioning as an ironic portrait of an individual’s attempts to resist power.

While the overtly politicized filmographies of others may date, Adachi’s oeuvre has the potential to outlive his and our lifetimes and offer lessons for future viewers. “Creating is, above of all, firstly about hoping,” Adachi wrote in 1970. Though his work lacks the formal elegance and stylistic consistency of Japanese filmmakers like Nagisa Ōshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses) and Yoshishige Yoshida (Eros + Massacre), it is precisely this anarchic range and rejection of cinematic convention that gives his cinema the capacity to retain political currency. And this should indeed give us hope.

Many will interpret this development as another step in the collapse of the American empire. Iran’s threats to sell oil in renminbi have led to prognostications about the imminent demise of the “petrodollar” regime, often depicted as the culmination of “de-dollarization” initiatives led especially by the BRICS. Yet the idea that the US empire rests on a “hydrocarbon-dollar complex” is a myth.

The dollar’s status does not derive from the fact that any particular commodity is priced in dollars but from its role within the global credit system and the strength of the US economy. Large inflows of private investment into the United States have sustained demand for dollars, even as the dollar’s share of official reserve holdings has gradually declined. Moreover, that the dollar anchors credit markets means that the balance sheets of firms and central banks are tied to dollar obligations and assets. Debt is just as important — perhaps even more fundamental — for fueling global capitalism as fossil energy.

To be sure, raising rates will have little impact on inflation — barring a truly drastic increase sufficient to spark a recession, as with the 1979 “Volcker Shock” that inaugurated the neoliberal period with an iron fist. Raising rates will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reverse the surge in oil prices now rippling through the economy. Nor can monetary policy undo Trump’s chaotic tariffs, which have also generated significant price pressures.

Rather, the Fed’s imposition of monetary austerity is necessary to protect the stability of a global financial system that remains deeply dependent on the dollar. With enormous fiscal deficits requiring ever-growing issuance of Treasuries, failing to raise rates risked deepening the bond market sell-off by raising doubts about whether the Fed retained sufficient independence to impose discipline. Because the dollar is world money, this turmoil in Treasury markets would reverberate through credit, funding, and asset markets across the global economy.

That the imposition of monetary austerity is necessary for global capitalism points to the illusory nature of the pro-worker Keynesian alternative imagined by some on the Left. The Fed was by no means faced with a straightforward choice between a pro-worker low-interest-rate policy and a pro-business high-interest-rate policy. Raising interest rates clearly has real costs for workers. On the other hand, had the Fed continued to pursue a more accommodative path, long-term US interest rates would likely have risen still further, increasing borrowing costs while threatening greater stress in Treasury markets. And a serious Treasury crisis — or the emergence of a “doom loop” in which the Fed became the dominant buyer of US debt — would hardly be good for workers. Given the existing balance of class forces, workers would doubtless bear the costs of restoring stability.

Bond market volatility represents capital cracking down on the American state’s profligacy. The question now is who will pay for the belt-tightening.

Rather than a lack of working-class discipline, at issue today is a macroeconomic regime that has combined tax cuts for capital and enormous military expenditures with war and tariffs. While Trump sought to partly fill the fiscal hole by aggressively slashing Medicaid, food assistance, and other programs for social provision, these cuts could only go so far. As inflation, rising interest costs, and volatility in Treasury markets narrow the room for maneuver, those priorities increasingly come into conflict. Either capital is made to absorb more of the adjustment through higher taxes and a reordering of fiscal priorities, or workers will be forced to pay through some combination of inflation, high interest rates, unemployment, and further cuts to social provision.

The stakes extend beyond the affordability crisis. The same pressures that impose the need for adjustment also bear directly on the ability to address the existential crisis of climate change.

Decarbonization requires enormous investments in energy, housing, transportation, and infrastructure over long time horizons, which are made much more difficult by growing pressure on public finances. Net interest payments have now surpassed military spending, exceeding $1 trillion per year, and are projected to rise rapidly as debt and borrowing costs increase. Yet it is impossible to imagine addressing the ecological crisis without massive expansion of state investment. Raising taxes, shifting budgetary priorities, and monetizing debt can create space to begin this project, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the extent to which capital will vehemently oppose all of this, let alone the extension of state planning a green transition would require.

Achieving a sustainable future therefore hinges on building the power of the working class to take on capital and empire. While stabilizing Treasury markets is imperative in the short run to prevent a broader economic contraction and hold down household borrowing costs, the current turmoil demonstrates how sharply even the American state’s room to maneuver is circumscribed by financial markets.

The episode reinforces the lessons drawn long ago by Marxist state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas: the capitalist state possesses real autonomy, but that autonomy remains decidedly relative. For socialists, the contradictions that follow from this fact cannot be escaped simply by choosing better monetary policies. This is precisely why the state cannot simply be wielded by socialists elected to govern it. The challenge, rather, is to operate within a state that is constrained by capitalism while simultaneously building the power necessary to transform those constraints — no small task.

Start with Reingold’s bookstore post. In the video, the Quran is the final supposedly inflammatory title we see after Fanon’s and the rest. At Columbia, the Quran is assigned to second-year students, not all freshmen, in the required Contemporary Civilization course. Here, however, the suggestion is that it’s unacceptable even as an object of study. This ignores the Quran’s place in a secular, scholarly course as one text among many major works of world literature. I took Contemporary Civilization this past academic year and found no instructor urging students to adopt radical Islam. Excerpts from the Old and New Testaments are likewise assigned across Columbia’s Core Curriculum. In fact, in the video, you can clearly see a giant stack of The New Oxford Annotated Bible just below the Quran, though Reingold zooms in only on the latter.

Her implication that Fanon, Rothstein, and Dahl are anathema to a proper university education is just as absurd. These are serious, influential writers — whatever one may think of them — whose work clearly belongs in a university curriculum. But for Reingold, the problematic nature of these texts is self-evident and further proof that Columbia is a hellscape of radicalism. It is a mirror image of the Right’s favorite (and sometimes true) “ultrawoke” caricature — the perpetually offended young person — but produced by a publication that markets itself as anti-identitarian and pro–free speech.

The month before the bookstore post, Reingold cowrote an exposé alleging that the photos of twelve Palestinian children featured in The New York Times as evidence of Israeli-induced starvation “lacked important context” because the children had underlying medical conditions. To pro-Israel partisans, she had debunked a story — in the Times, no less. But of course, underlying conditions do not refute the fact of starvation; children already ill are more likely to die first in a famine. Reingold provided no counterevidence to prove that the children were not starving or that the Gaza Strip was not in a humanitarian crisis. For her exposé, she reached out to Yannay Spitzer, then an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose comment she paraphrased as “Hunger in Gaza is largely declining since Israel resumed aid deliveries in late May after its nearly 80-day blockade.” And yet, to say hunger declined after Israel lifted the blockade is to concede that Gaza had been experiencing mass hunger because of it.

In an Instagram reel, Reingold treats the fact that the same children, ill “not just with malnutrition,” appeared in photographs by different people as evidence of “coordination” — the implication being that they were being paraded around by pro-Palestinian forces as part of a propaganda drive. She claims that she did “something so simple, it’s shocking no other journalist bothered to do it”: translating their names into Arabic and finding local reports, which she says discuss underlying conditions more than anglophone sources do. Some of those conditions, she concedes, The New York Times had in fact reported. Still, her work, by her own estimation, produced “a more nuanced story.”

And yet the reel’s conclusion was anything but nuanced: that Israel was not responsible for famine and that “the average Gazan does not look like that.” None other than Benjamin Netanyahu reposted it with the caption “Facts matter.”

For Reingold, the defense of Israel’s war is paramount. Her defense turns the suffering of starving children — images that would disgust any normal person — into a question of public relations. The pushback against her defense of Israel, she claims on her website, was “a global cancelation campaign.”

Reingold’s partisanship appears as something like a religion. But that religion is not Judaism or merely a belief in the Jewish national project; it is deference to the unflagging righteousness of a modern nation-state with a sophisticated military, nuclear weapons, a powerful American lobby, near-total control over the occupied territories, and a foreign policy that repeatedly massacres civilians.

That may be why Reingold, again using the language of wokeness, calls images of starving children across mainstream media “problematic”: they make her uncomfortable and call into question her unflinching loyalty to the Israeli state.

Interestingly, Reingold was not always this way. She writes of becoming an “October 8th Jew” (she is part Jewish, on her father’s side), saying she came to “the Arab-Israeli conflict as a nearly blank slate,” open to the claim that Israel is an apartheid state guilty of genocide. She describes the later realization that this “wasn’t a civil rights movement. . . .  This was about Jews” that moved her in the opposite direction. Now, rather than treat widespread outcry over Israel’s atrocities as a legitimate political response to a state’s actions, she recasts it as evidence of antisemitism.

For instance, earlier this summer, Reingold insinuated that a Jewish Voice for Peace activist she interviewed was not really Jewish on the grounds that the person had not grown up Jewish. By this questionable standard, it seems Reingold herself would not qualify as Jewish either. But what she is saying is clear: a real Jew must be an avid supporter of Israel. This is an ideological loyalty test in defense of a state’s conduct, not a description of Judaism or even of Zionism.

I have no reason to doubt Reingold’s account of how she arrived here. Her earlier work — at Georgia Public Broadcasting, Yellowstone Public Radio, Politico, and Matthew Yglesias’s Bad Takes, which a LinkedIn post says she conceived and helped launch — contains no hint of the “October 8th” partisan she would become.

This is where it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for her. She appears to believe that Mamdani’s election, declining support for Israel, and sympathy for Palestinians signal a new antisemitism. In her words, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” At a time when many American Jews saw the horrors unleashed upon Gaza and began to question their support for Israel’s current regime, to the extent that a recent survey shows that Mamdani is more popular among US Jews than Netanyahu is, Reingold went in exactly the opposite direction. A report she coauthored on the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2026 New York primary victories in June ran under the scary subtitle “On Tuesday, radical House candidates won big in the city. ‘It doesn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore.’”

Her earlier piece, “How to ‘Make Your Campus Palestinian,’” framed Jewish students’ recruitment into pro-Palestinian activism as a cynical strategy to legitimize antisemitism. It is true that student protests did sometimes veer into territory broadly alienating to many Jewish students; in rare cases, some individuals adopted downright violent rhetoric (there will always be cranks). But ultimately, the American outcry was and is directed at a foreign government’s violence, financed by the United States — not “the Jews.” In explicitly tying the protection of Jews to support for Israel, Reingold is insisting on the actions of Israel as the will of all Jews, a mirror of what antisemites often do.

Other examples abound. In April, a Reingold piece about Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed ran at The Free Press under the headline “Michigan Gets Its Own Mamdani.” In it, she asks El-Sayed “whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” Reingold describes him, when he asks what she means by “Jewish state,” “narrowing his eyes” in response. In another piece about Jewish parents with Mamdani-voting children, she sides with parents horrified by their children’s choices; one hoped to supervise a daughter’s absentee ballot to make sure she would not vote for Mamdani. Meanwhile, a May “investigation” by Reingold into Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, chastises her for the contents of a Spotify playlist and for “liking” a Tucker Carlson clip on Instagram about AIPAC and its failure to register as a foreign lobby. Ironically, for a publication founded on opposition to cancel culture, here was the perfect example of it — scrutinizing minute social media activity in order to depict someone in the worst possible light.

It is easy to criticize Reingold as an internet personality with less than savory politics. But she has found a niche doing clear hasbara at The Free Press. With founder Bari Weiss increasingly occupied by her controversial role at CBS News, Reingold has arguably become the outlet’s most visible persona. In Reingold, we have a younger version of Weiss, tweeting and Instagramming in defense of a constantly war-making and increasingly unpopular state, but without Weiss’s more composed and occasionally believable journalistic posture.

While Warfield echoes some Green members’ calls for a new focus on “community organizing” (a vague ambition that has both preoccupied and evaded much of the British left for several years), Polanski’s leadership continues to define success in terms of electoral victories. His distinct strategy has been to maximize the party’s potential with an eco-populist political offer and more sophisticated communications. Warfield embraces the necessarily difficult task of analyzing such an electoral project while it is not just ongoing but still in its very early stages.

The book went to print before the Makerfield by-election, which resulted in Andy Burnham’s return to the House of Commons as a Labour MP and his successful ouster of Starmer as prime minister. This means that now very significant context is out of scope in the analysis. Without doubt, Polanski’s bid to reach Parliament in the coming Holborn and St Pancras by-election will itself be a defining chapter in this story.

Such accounts are thus inevitably provisional and partial, and Warfield is right to historicize Polanski’s rise in order to give the reader a stronger basis for understanding events as they continue to occur. Working backward, he locates the Polanski project in a lineage of electoral advances and leftward shifts in the Greens’ recent past. This particularly includes Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas’s spells as leader, as well as an ecosocialist tradition in the party dating back to the mid-2000s.

However, this optimistic story of the Greens’ initially slow and steady but now accelerating advance is complicated by recent events. Burnham’s arrival as prime minister makes Polanski’s task more difficult, as he seeks to differentiate himself from an apparently authentic and relatively popular Labour leader who is prepared to criticize neoliberalism. This challenge was underlined by the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election on July 30, which Labour won decisively despite the Greens’ hubristic claims that they alone could defeat the hard-right Reform. A Polanski defeat in Holborn and St Pancras would not signal an end to his project. Yet in further slowing the Greens’ momentum, it would raise questions about whether the party can adapt to the new terrain under his leadership.

A Polanski victory in Holborn and St Pancras, on the other hand, would likely renew the party’s confidence that it can win anywhere, especially to damage the Labour government from the left. Still, even such an outcome should not obscure the deeper incoherence that has underlain the Greens’ current electoral strategy. Within Warfield’s account, we can identify three distinct electoral aims expressed in the party: to supplant Labour; to stop Reform UK; and to represent a progressive social bloc.

Polanski is quoted in The Green Socialist as aiming to replace Labour as the main party of the Left. In this vision, the Greens see themselves as capitalizing on a broader realignment in British politics, with the old parties in terminal decline.

However, this trend is less obvious today than it appeared a year ago. Just as Farage’s Reform UK has struggled to fully supplant the Conservatives, Labour has consolidated its position by substituting the uniquely out-of-touch Starmer with Burnham’s centrist populism. This strategy mobilizes Burnham’s Northern English identity and working-class affect against the Westminster system, while offering piecemeal ameliorations to the cost-of-living crisis. Polanski has, for now, lost his monopoly on hope in British politics, meaning he is no longer able to just fill the space abandoned by Labour. Reaching beyond his natural supporters to build a diverse social coalition motivated to support his eco-populist insurgency is a more compromising task.

This tumultuous political environment further complicates the second thrust of the Greens’ electoral mission: the call to stop Farage and his Reform UK vehicle. While the Gorton and Denton by-election demonstrated the Greens’ capacity to play this role, other parties have shown they can too. As well as Labour retaining the Greater Manchester mayoralty, Plaid Cymru cohered the anti-Reform bloc in last year’s Caerphilly by-election. Furthermore, beyond specific (by-)elections, Labour has the strongest claim to the anti-Reform mantel nationally, as the only party that can plausibly incorporate both Green and Reform voters into its own coalition. Indeed, although both the Greens and Reform are motivated by an antiestablishment energy, both lack a genuinely majoritarian impulse; they each appeal to distinct social bases that are highly unlikely to vote for the other in great numbers. This puts a relatively low ceiling of support on both parties.

The Greens’ third electoral purpose, the least explicitly discussed by Warfield, thus appears to be the most viable. Labour may be the strongest electoral bulwark against the far right, but the Greens can confidently claim to be the main political opposition. While Burnham continues to tail Reform with regressive migration policies and backsliding on climate action, Polanski’s Greens can differentiate themselves as the standard-bearers of migrants’ rights, climate justice, and anti-fascist and Palestine solidarity. By consistently offering a principled alternative to Reform in the public debate, the Greens could secure a permanent place on the Left of British politics without indulging in the compromises required for outright electoral victory.

It is evident in Warfield’s account, though, that sections of Polanski’s supporters are not satisfied with a party that simply reflects progressive talking points back to a minority section of voters. Warfield, like the party faction Greens Organise (composed mostly of activists not schooled in Corbynism), is committed to an ecosocialist politics. Even though Warfield projects the label onto Polanski (including in the book’s title), Polanski prefers to describe himself as an eco-populist. In fact, I could find no public record of Polanski proactively using the term ecosocialist. This exposes a contradiction within not just the Green Party but the Polanski project itself.

This distinction between eco-populism and ecosocialism is not just semantic. For it also represents a latent tension between Polanski as the figure who has catalyzed the Greens’ rise and more politically ambitious elements of his base. If ecosocialism is an ideological politics (socialism within ecological limits, per Warfield), then eco-populism is a communication strategy (the construction of a “people” mobilized against a socio-ecological enemy, as in the call to support the 99 percent against the ultraelite 1 percent). Although they may be complementary, the one does not necessarily imply the other. Polanski’s use of eco-populism is relatively unsophisticated, deployed to signal an implicit environmentalism while mostly speaking about inequality.

Ecosocialism is laden with a greater depth of meaning, however. Warfield characterizes this as a project to build the economy within ecological limits, by discarding both the profit motive and the pursuit of perpetual growth. This implies an essentially revolutionary politics of rupture with the core logics of capitalism, even if Green ecosocialists don’t necessarily articulate it in that register. This is not to say that ecosocialists should adopt the style of unreconstructed revolutionaries. But it is necessary to politically clarify the contradictions between socio-ecological transition and capitalism, especially considering the urgent timescales of the climate crisis.

Ecosocialism simultaneously implies both a conviction regarding what must be done and uncertainty about how to achieve it, amid an unprecedented constellation of structural crises. It means offering a programmatic alternative to a growth strategy based on the combination of remilitarization, artificial intellgience, and fossil fuel production — a socio-ecologically destructive strategy to which Burnham’s Labour still subscribes. If the Greens’ current political approach is a shopping list of more or less agreeable (and sometimes contradictory) left-wonkish policies, ecosocialism implies a shift toward a program of democratic ecological planning and experiments in transition.

For Green ecosocialists serious about this politics, the key question is whether the party’s organizational structure is currently capable of developing and advancing this alternative. The answer, quite manifestly, is no.

Warfield argues in The Green Socialist that the main point of optimism is not Polanski himself but the party’s membership and democratic structures. While this is a useful corrective against a tendency to overinvest in inevitably inadequate leaders, it underplays the limitations of the party’s democracy and culture.

Currently, the Greens have a structure that allows any member to attend party conferences and vote on policy motions. While this may appear to be participatory, it only aggregates individual preferences rather than cultivating a collective democracy. Those who self-select to determine Green Party policy experience no democratic accountability, and those who cannot attend conferences have no opportunity to shape their political composition. This is not the mass deliberation needed in order to develop a shared analysis and a coherent ecosocialist program to drive the project forward.

Furthermore, the lack of a democratic whip for councilors or MPs means that they are free to ignore the party membership or prioritize local concerns over advancing collective priorities. The composition of Greens Organise means that it has not learned the most important lesson from Corbyn’s Labour. Like previously failed projects on the Left, the faction has deprioritized organizational questions rather than understanding that satisfactorily resolving them is a precondition for sustained outward-facing success. But Green ecosocialists must be prepared to confront the limitations of the party. Its democratic structures are not something to be celebrated but completely remade in service of a collective party life.

At Al-Haq’s offices in Ramallah, this work takes the form of an archive built up across a decades-long Israeli occupation. When we tried to get there from Bethlehem in July 2025, we got stuck in a long line at the checkpoint. An hour before our appointment, we still didn’t know if we’d make it. Every trip is subject to Israeli soldiers’ discretion. “We’ll get to Ramallah, inshallah,” says our guide.

Inside the offices, researchers have been collecting testimonies from across the occupied West Bank. Al-Haq keeps data on killings and demolitions, analyzes photographs and videos, and reconstructs attacks in order to challenge the official Israeli accounts. It has also created a forensic architecture unit, which uses spatial analysis and architectural tools to investigate human rights violations.

“One of the things that motivates me to wake up every morning is that Israel seems to be running scared of our investigations,” says Mariam (who has been given a pseudonym), a researcher at Al-Haq. That fear, she explains, translates into pressure on funders and threats against banks. “They try to scare every single donor.”

When an archive can refute the military’s version of events and contribute to international legal proceedings, it becomes a political threat. This is the evidence-gathering capacity that the sanctions now target.

In truth, the attack on Al-Haq did not begin with the US sanctions. In 2021, Israel had already designated it and five other Palestinian organizations as terrorist. Then, in September 2025, Washington included Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and PCHR in the sanctions program established through Executive Order 14203 against the International Criminal Court. Assets under US jurisdiction were frozen, while US individuals and companies were prohibited from providing them with funds, goods, or services.

Since most international transactions are conducted in US dollars and through US-based platforms, many banks, donors, and partners in other countries severed ties despite not legally being required to do so. The report Criminalising Accountability refers to this as a mechanism of over-compliance. In less than a month, these organizations lost between 20 and 60 percent of their revenue, and YouTube removed over seven hundred videos, including witness accounts of torture and images of demolitions.

For Al-Haq, this has meant staff left unpaid and US collaborators forced to resign. For Al Mezan, the sanctions compound the devastation in Gaza, affecting staff who’ve been displaced and the fate of researchers who must document events while also trying to protect their families, on top of their offices being hit. “We have no funds; we’ve had to cut salaries, and this has a direct impact on our ability to document crimes in Gaza,” says Younis.

Albanese has also been personally sanctioned for her work as a UN special rapporteur. Her assets have been frozen and her transactions blocked, and she faces restrictions on entering the United States. When she takes the floor in Geneva, her first remark is directed at the institution that was supposed to protect her.

Why, she asks, did the UN wait so long before discussing sanctions against one of its own special rapporteurs, against prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court, and against Palestinian organizations that cooperate with the justice system?

Albanese says she has “less autonomy than [her] thirteen-year-old child. . . .  just for writing reports to the United Nations” and is treated by the financial system like a “narcotrafficker, a drug dealer, or a terrorist.” What do she, the Palestinian organizations, and ICC officials have in common? They’re there “to pursue accountability, to advance justice for victims and survivors.”

“Prosecutors cannot visit occupied Palestinian territory,” explains Sourani. They depend on organizations capable of reaching witnesses and preserving evidence. “When the Office of the Prosecutor, Palestinian organizations, judges, and the special rapporteur are targeted, the circle closes. The intention is clear.”

The same selectivity permeates international institutions. In the UN Security Council, the permanent members’ veto power means there are often no consequences for violations. In the Human Rights Council, the same power dynamics determine which crises will lead to concrete measures and which instead remain a matter of only reports and resolutions.

The ICC remains open, but it is isolated from the people who are gathering evidence and investigating. “We are witnessing the dismantling of accountability from the ground up,” warns Albanese.

For Al Mezan’s executive director, Issam Younis, returning to the UN’s Palais des Nations holds personal significance. In 1993, he came here as a student to tell member states that Palestinians were being tortured. More than three decades later, the torture continues, and his organization is being sanctioned for its work with the ICC.

“Governments no longer deny committing crimes,” he says. “In the past, they used to deny it. Now they’re proud to commit war crimes and genocide.”

The images of Israel’s crimes, the official statements, and the many eyewitness testimonies have failed to provide protection. Indeed, this impunity is evident in the confidence with which the crimes are displayed: those who commit them are well-aware that the images will circulate and that other states will stand idly by.

At the meeting in Geneva, a Palestinian lawyer recounted how detainees were forced to live for months inside a circle drawn on the floor, with their hands and feet chained, allowed to step outside it only for one-minute showers. “I’ve worked with prisoners for years. I’d never seen anything like it.” He described rapes, sexual violence, and amputations performed without anesthesia.

“Torture does to the individual what genocide does to a group,” Albanese says. Documenting these acts does not restore to the victims what has been taken from them, but it preserves the possibility of recognition and justice being done.

The lack of international action over Israel’s crimes in the West Bank has further consequences in the form of home demolitions, the seizing of land, and yet more attacks by settlers.

Take what happened on July 28 last year in Umm al-Khair, when a bulldozer from a nearby Israeli settlement entered the village and damaged Palestinian property. Teacher Awdah Hathaleen, an activist and father of three, filmed the scene. In the videos, Israeli settler Yinon Levi raises his gun and fires in his direction. Awdah is fatally shot in the chest.

Levi lives in the nearby settlement of Carmel. In 2024, he’d already been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada for his role in violence against Palestinians. Yet the Trump administration revoked the US sanctions. After the killing, Levi was arrested and then quickly released again; Awdah’s body, however, was held for ten days, while conditions were imposed on the family regarding the funeral. “How can you release the murderer and hold onto the victim?” asks a representative of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center.

For Haneen Hathaleen, Awdah’s niece, what has changed since October 7, 2023, is above all the license with which the Israeli settlers act. In previous years, she says, the violence was at least partially restrained by fear of international backlash. Now that seems to have vanished. “After everything that happened in Gaza, no one has called Israel to account for anything,” she says. “So whatever they do here, who would dare oppose them?”

The women of Umm al-Khair say that, since October 7, settlers have been coming almost every night. They enter the village, vandalize property, and prevent families from sleeping. “It’s not like it used to be,” they say. Fear is growing within the community that the increase in attacks will accelerate the displacement and annexation of their lands. The impunity for what is happening in Gaza is not separate from the West Bank: it strengthens the settlers’ conviction that they can act without resistance or consequences.

In an interview at the Café Suisse in the Palais des Nations, Palestinian Ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi tells me of the limitations of sanctions that target only individual settlers. Such measures, he argues, do not address the political and military system within which settlement violence is made possible and protected. They may restrict travel or freeze certain assets, but they do not stop the attacks or the expansion of settlements on the ground.

Sanctions against those who document the violence are being expanded; sanctions against those who perpetrate the violence may be revoked or remain without concrete effect. In Umm al-Khair, impunity means that Awdah is killed, his body is withheld, and the attacks against his community continue.

At the Palais des Nations, following the report on torture, some statements shift the debate from the evidence to Albanese herself: Hamas, accusations of antisemitism, and adherence to the code of conduct. The people documenting crimes must once again defend their legitimacy.

“Diplomacy in times of genocide is not neutral,” Albanese responds. Younis insists that the UN member states need to take action: “Stop showing solidarity without taking action. It is time to act for accountability.”

The tools exist. States that are parties to the ICC can defend the court’s work; the Netherlands can safeguard its operations; the EU can counter the effects of sanctions; and the UN can defend the special rapporteur to whom it has entrusted the mandate. Yet none of these actors has devised a response capable of protecting these people and institutions.

The US government, through its control of the dollar, works to thwart accountability. But impunity is also fostered by states that acknowledge crimes and then refuse to use the tools that they have available to stop them. Many EU member states’ governments routinely claim that they stand up for international law, yet they maintain military, economic, and diplomatic relations with Israel without protecting the ICC or Palestinian organizations.

What is happening in Palestine will not remain confined to Palestine: impunity doesn’t just shield crimes that have already been committed but also makes future ones more likely. Every time a state sees another one disregard the courts, violate international norms, and pursue its own aims without paying the price, the rule of law loses strength elsewhere as well. The message to other governments is that rules can be set aside so long as they have political, military, or economic protection. This is how exceptional crimes come to set a precedent.

This erosion is already evident in the growing challenge to international institutions. Chad has begun the process of withdrawing from the Rome Statute, a decision welcomed by Washington, which has called on other states to follow suit.

According to Sourani, it would be a mistake to think that all of this concerns only Gaza or the Palestinians. Sanctions are replacing the rule of law with the “rule of the jungle.” “What is lost in Palestine will be lost everywhere,” warns Albanese.

Meanwhile the genocide continues. The organizations that are supposed to collect and preserve evidence of it are being obstructed, deprived of funding, and isolated from international institutions. And even as the destruction continues in Gaza, settler attacks and pressure on Palestinian communities are mounting in the West Bank too. Yet while those who commit these crimes act with impunity, those documenting them are forced to defend their right to exist.