Once again, Nicolás Maduro claimed a dubious victory in a presidential election and violently suppressed protests—but in 2024, many poor and working-class voters, long loyal to his regime, turned against him.

HIV patient activism has had a profound influence on the embodied health movements that followed it. Complex chronic conditions—for which there is no verifiable test or clear treatment program—have been called “illnesses you have to fight to get,” in part because patients struggle to convince doctors to take their pain seriously enough to give a diagnosis. This essay puts Long COVID into context with other embodied health movements, highlighting how Long COVID activism built upon previous social movements, and how digital networking and viral social media messaging set it apart.

The hammam has long been an important part of everyday life in the Middle East. Though many historic baths fell out of use as home bathing became more prevalent, they are now undergoing a revival as wellness destinations.

This essay outlines how Islamic State repressed local communities after conquering much of Iraq’s territory in 2014, and how civilians, in turn, responded to insurgent governance. While there are as many ways to survive violence as there are people affected by it, most survival strategies fall into four general categories: flight, cooperation, neutrality, and resistance. Iraqis’ experience under the harsh rule of the self-declared caliphate takes center stage, but the analysis includes generalizable lessons about how ordinary civilians survive terrorism, insurgency, and civil war. The essay concludes with an analysis of the core challenges confronting postwar governance in Iraq.

Since 2020, China has dramatically increased the ambition, scope, and resources of its technology and industrial policy. Besides devoting more resources, the government has also expanded direct intervention in the economy, creating new organizational forms in order to link researchers, technology providers, and firms. This program aims to re-engineer the innovation chain—and with it, the entire industrial economy. The government intervenes by creating new organizations, remaking incentives of existing organizations, and serving as a compulsory matchmaker between different organizations and firms. These new organizational interventions increase the extent to which the government steers the overall economy and is leading Beijing to take an even more comprehensive and government-directed approach to technological and industrial development.

China wants to become a science, technology, and manufacturing superpower by upgrading and modernizing its industrial base and concentrating the nation’s innovation resources around strategic priorities. However, it is difficult for the state to integrate innovation resources because of the gap separating universities and research organizations from industry, which impedes the translation of scientific output into technological prowess. By contrast, Beijing has been much more successful at directing industrial development. As a result, achieving a modernized industrial base is now the dominant framework for Chinese policymakers as they pursue technological self-reliance.

Ger districts, informal neighborhoods where residents live in traditional yurts, continue to house much of the Mongolian capital’s population. Government redevelopment plans, in an echo of socialist-era urbanization, call for moving inhabitants to new apartment buildings. The ger districts are often blamed for causing air pollution, poverty, and crime. But many residents are skeptical of the “apartmentalization” scheme and prefer to stay in the ger districts, even though they must provide for their own basic needs, like heat and water, since the state has not provided the necessary infrastructure.

Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election campaign was shaped by an alliance struck between outgoing incumbent Joko (Jokowi) Widodo and a former rival, Prabowo Subianto, who chose Jokowi’s son as his running mate. The seeming affirmation of dynastic power drew criticism, as did Prabowo’s former associations with the authoritarian New Order regime and its human rights abuses. But Prabowo remade his image with his promises of free school lunches and a new “cute” persona while pledging continuity with his popular predecessor’s administration, demonstrating the ambiguities of Indonesian democracy a quarter-century after the end of the New Order era.

In July 2023, Niger experienced the latest in a long series of military coups. Now afflicted by climate change, the country continues to rank as one of the poorest in the world. Poverty and perceptions of corruption limit public confidence in democratic governance. Led by Nigeria, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) imposed sanctions on the new junta and threatened a military intervention, adding to the suffering of the population. But ECOWAS eventually backed down, while the junta moved to cut off antiterrorism cooperation with France and the United States, embracing Russia instead, following a trend set by other recent coups across the Sahel.

Vegetarians developed transnational ties between India and Europe, sharing ideals of purity that also contributed to the formation of today’s Hindu nationalism.