Savage Minds

Ricardo Vaz, a journalist and political analyst in Venezuela, critically discusses the US operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, highlighting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s framing of the incident as a domestic law enforcement issue, despite Venezuela being outside US jurisdiction. He critiques the role of corporate media, particularly The New York...

Alex Howlett, an independent scholar affiliated with The Greshm Institute, discusses Universal Basic Income (UBI). Beginning with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), an offshoot of post-Keynesianism, he addresses its key principles: notably Keynes’ belief that the Great Depression was caused by a deficiency in aggregate demand, leading to sustained involuntary unemployment that the market could not self...

Peter Salerno, a retired licensed psychotherapist, nationally recognised expert on personality disorders and pathological relationships, and author of The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism and Traumatic Cognitive Dissonance (2024) , discusses his work in the field of narcissism. Beginning with his appearance in the Hulu documentary on Ted Bundy, Salerno rejects the claims by those who believe Bundy...

Michael John-Hopkins, a legal scholar and a senior lecturer in law, discusses the theory of international law and its practice—from its conceptual foundation to what international law promises (sovereignty, non-use of force, equality of states, the UN Charter, rule of law) versus how it is actually applied (power politics, selective enforcement). He delineates the historical context of US foreign...

Professor Sandra Walklate, Emeritus and honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, discusses her work in victimology and violence against women, including her work in the field of femicide. Drawing upon historical paradigms where the concept of feminicide has been previously employed, Walklate notes various examples from the Americas where femicide was used as a tool in drawing attention t...

Alex Gordon, Marxist and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), discusses the current state of affairs regarding Britain’s participation in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the normalisation of extreme violence meted out to black and brown people taking place through social media and mobile phone technology. Where Gordon states that we have a choice today between socialism or b...

Wolfgang Streeck, a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, discusses the current political situation of leftist political organising and the condition of seeking “justice” in our society, an idea he puts under scrutiny. He points to the complexities and contradictions of justice, while highlighting how today political pa...

Vladimir Bortun, a critical political scientist based at St John’s College, University of Oxford, discusses his research into the politics of right-wing populist parties and the state of leftist parties in Europe today. Analysing how right-wing figures like Tommy Robinson attempt to appeal to the working classes by pretending to be on their side while presenting themselves as being on the side of...

Oliver Villar, a political scientist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, discusses his research on US imperial power and Latin American politics, covering his co-authored book, Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review, 2011). Villar historicises the role that the US-led counternarcotic policies, specifically Plan Colombia, hav...

Saskia Garner, Head of Policy and Campaigns at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the UK’s leading personal safety and stalking charity, covers the charity’s history and work in research and policy advocacy across stalking, harassment, online harms, bystander intervention and workplace safety. Recounting the challenges faced in getting stalking recognised in law after the Protection from Harassment Act 1997...

Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, a research economist at the World Inequality Lab and co-editor of the 2026 World Inequality Report, discusses his research on the benefits of early schooling and how early human capital investment closes the “inequality gap” and the effects of such research within current Mexican educational policy. Focusing on the finding of this year’s World Inequality Report, Gómez-Carrer...

Diego Sequera, award winning journalist and writer based in Caracas, Venezuela, discusses the recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and former member of the National Assembly, Cilia Flores, delving into Venezuela’s complex historical landscape. He begins with the Caracazo uprising of 1989, which revealed deep socioeconomic inequalities while uniting the working clas...

Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at New York University, discusses neocolonial history and the formation of anti-colonial movements, which effectively began as an elite-dominated push for power, to widen the colonial apparatus for more participation by wealthy Indians. Historicising how anti-colonial, national liberation movements only took off when the internal agendas of national liberation...

Almut Rochowanski, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, critiques the “NGO-industrial complex,” particularly concerning the impact of foreign funding on civil society development within new democracies. Covering her testimony at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress, on the topic of “Laws Regulating Foreign NGOs: Human Rights Implications,”...

Marta Havryshko, a historian specializing in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, examines Ukraine's ethno-nationalist legacy and its anti-Semitic past. She highlights instances of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms , noting that many Ukrainians, including prisoners of war, collaborated with German auxiliary units during World War II...

Volodymyr Ishchenko, currently at the Institute for East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, discusses his latest book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War (Verso, 2024) and forthcoming paper “Post-Soviet vicious circle: revolution as a reproduction of a crisis of hegemony” (co-authored with Oleg Zhuravlev). Historicising how post-Soviet revolutions in Ukraine have functioned, Is...

Nidhi Srinivas, Professor of Management at the New School, discusses his latest book, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which brings together management and development studies to offer a critical perspective on NGOs, describing how they emerged as key agents of development. Analysing the historical and shifting r...

Alison Gaffney, a mother of two from Corby, Northamptonshire, discusses how she and her partner, Andy Hinde, learned in 2018 that their seventeen-month-old son was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which they believe was caused by the botched disposal of millions of tonnes of contaminated waste after the closure of Europe’s largest steelworks in Corby, Northamptonshire, in 1980. While a 2009 civil cas...

Maung Zarni, UK-exiled Burmese dissident, scholar, rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, discusses his role within the Jury in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka, observing the similarities between the use of starvation perpetrated in Sri Lanka against the Tamil minority and the exercise of starvation used against Palestinians in Gaza. Zarni also discusses his participation in t...

Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, discusses dominant themes from latest books, Emergency Capitalism: Financial Hubris, Economic Collapse, and Systemic Manipulation (2024) and Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization (2022), that address the “age of crisis capitalism” and the post-productive hyper-financialised stage of capitalism that is driven...

Hala Shoman, a Palestinian PhD researcher in Sociology at Newcastle University, discusses her life in Gaza before 7 October 2023, the conditions under which Gazans have been living since, and the physical and political realities on the ground for Palestinians today. Shoman elaborates how Israel’s violence since 2023 has left Palestinian society shattered, since the aggressions are so vast and prof...

Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and author of E rasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2020), discusses the political reframing of “antisemitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which tailored a new definition designed specifically to silence criti...

Dario Guarascio, Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the Department of Economics and Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, discusses two articles he co-authored with Andrea Coveri and Claudio Cozza, “ Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex ” and “ Monopoly Capital in the time of digital platforms: A radical approach to the Amazon case .” Coveri examines the power of digita...

Penny Arcade—poet, actress, essayist, spoken word, video and theatre maker—discusses her trajectory from an immigrant family, originally from Basilicata, Italy, to her upbringing in a working-class Connecticut town to her entry into the art world of New York’s East Village. Looking back on her life as a homeless teen in the Village, her discovery by Jamie Andrews who introduced her to John Vaccaro...

Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, discusses her forthcoming book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Suffering (Verso, 2026), wherein she elucidates the emergence of trauma culture, tracing it back to psychoanalysis and the reification of mental health in post-war America. Analysing the fetishisation and recognition of feelings, Liu historicises the explosion of psycho...