One of the most widespread misconceptions in the realm of politics is the notion of a left-right axis. This has been used over and over to explain political outcomes and paint the various factions as polar opposites. For example, in the US the two main parties, the Republicans (right) and Democrats (left), are often portrayed…
A Brave New World is coming? Perhaps. We had a recent discussion with a group of people in the hopeless business of doing long term forecasting. This made us think about what the world will look like over the next 20 to 40 years. A pretty thankless task, but the bottom line is without a…
Laws of politics have been turned upside down. The Intellectuals Yet Idiots can make no sense of it. The underdog who ‘tell it how it is’ appeal to people while established reasoning does not. Politicians used to pit people against each other and bribe key electoral groupings with the spoils of ‘democratic’ victory to maintain…
Arguably one of the easier calls for us to make after 37 years in power was that President dos Santos would find ways of affording himself another 5 years in. Like any ‘effective’ leader, Mr. Santos made sure the final deal to do just that was stitched up long before the Party Congress formally convenes…
A month on from Turkey’s failed coup attempt, and you’ll find endless op-eds opining the supposed strategic implications of Erdogan’s rear-guard offensives. In a nutshell, it breaks down into four key arguments. The first is that Erdogan will oversee a ‘brutal crackdown’ to consolidate power wherever and whenever possible out to 2019 against any form…