Jonathan Power

“Brazil has a great future, and always will,” said Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, in the 1960s. In truth, it is not difficult to be cynical about Brazil. It is a large land of both great potential and many lost opportunities, and yet, whenever I visit it, as I have regularly over 40 […]

“Life,” said Martin Luther King “is a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign.” He must have said that when his spirits were flagging as most of the time he was optimistic about making the world a better place. I was reminded of this when reading a new report, ‘Freedom in the World, 2016’, […]

Yesterday in Kabul, the so-called Quadrilateral Coordination Group — comprising representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US — met to hold discussions on a roadmap to peace in Afghanistan. A former Taliban senior official said that “military confrontation is not the solution” and that a “political solution” was needed to end the war in […]

Make no mistake: Barack Obama is going to go down in history as one of the great American presidents. At home he has confronted poverty, ill-health, racism, gun laws, unemployment, immigration and the criminal justice system with amazing tenacity, sometimes to great effect, even though the Republicans have fought him tooth and nail over every […]

We have much to be glum about as we come to the end of 2015, the latest is the killings of cafe sojourners and music fans in Paris. But we are brainwashed with bad news” “If it bleeds it leads.” One plane crash is worth more airtime than news that we are winning the fight […]

What drives people to extremes? Why do the people behind al Qaeda or Islamic State (IS) get so charged up and angry? Perhaps to understand we should go back to the 16th century in Europe and the furious debate about the “divine right of kings”. For decades the royal houses of Europe had been becoming […]

Russia stands at a major crossroads as it works out how exactly to deal with the 14.5 million ethnic Muslims that live inside its borders. If added to this are the migrant workers from Central Asia and Azerbaijan the total is around 20 million. Compare this with Germany, which has five million and France, which […]

On Sunday the German vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, publicly accused Saudi Arabia of financing Islamic extremism in the west and warned that it must stop. He said that the Saudi regime is funding extremist mosques and communities that pose a danger to public security. “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of […]

Not that long ago in Britain Sherlock Holmes could quite legally sit by the fire with his pipe and sniff cocaine. If friends wanted to join him they could, without fear of a police raid, smoke marijuana. Opium was used for those in unbearable pain and could be bought without a doctor’s prescription. Alas, most […]

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has unanimously adopted a resolution strongly condemning the escalating violence in Burundi. It paves the way for the UN to send in thousands of blue-helmeted peacekeepers. The resolution, which was passed unanimously, condemns the wave of killings, arrests and human rights violations. The resolution requests that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon […]