Despite assurances from the Taliban that women in Afghanistan will be allowed to resume work and education, their future remains uncertain Life for the women of Afghanistan has changed immeasurably since the Taliban takeover that ended in August 2021. Straight away, women were ordered to stay at home, requiring a male guardian in order to go out in public. In September, women protesting in Herat lost their jobs. Since then, women have been murdered in Kabul, while further women-led protests have been violently put down. Just as in the previous Taliban regime of the mid-1990s, parents have be ..read more

Alastair Bonnett, professor of social geography at Newcastle University, charts Russia's colonial history and asks what it tells us about the war in Ukraine Colonialism does not come in one flavour. In Britain we think of colonialism as the conquest of distant lands and empires as fragmented assortments of foreign territories. Russian colonialism and the Russian empire are different. Rather than sailing to far-off shores, Russia expanded – east, south, and west – and absorbed its neighbours. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MONTHLY PRINT MAGAZINE!Subscribe to Geographical today for just £38 a year. Ou ..read more

Matthew Benwell, senior lecturer in human geography at Newcastle University, considers the ways in which flags can be used and co-opted Recent controversies in British politics and public life about the presence or absence of national flags on government buildings, as well as the size or number of flags on display during television broadcasts, has shed light once again on the emotions with which the nation’s fabric is imbued. Along with maps, flags are the objects most commonly associated with political geography, attracting interest and intrigue as symbols and colours that represent nations ..read more

El Salvador's Bukele eyes Bitcoin to renew El Salvador’s economic independence, but the economic and environmental impacts might not add up On 9th June 2021, El Salvador’s congress approved President Nayib Bukele’s proposal for Bitcoin, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies, to become legal tender within the nation. This will move the currency from a form of payment that businesses can choose to accept (Bitcoin is already legal in El Salvador, as it is in most countries) to one that they have to accept. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MONTHLY PRINT MAGAZINE!Subscribe to Geographical today for j ..read more

Tim Marshall is a British journalist, author, broadcaster and geopolitics columnist at Geographical Take Global Britain, add defence spending and then subtract foreign aid cuts, and what do you get? Globalish Britain? There’s an inherent tension between Global Britain, as defi ned by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and cutting a key soft- power tool that helps Britain to continue to ‘punch above its weight’ around the globe. There’s a further tension when you add increased defence spending because the increase is almost the same amount as the aid cuts – about £4 billion per annum. What message ..read more

As the world moves away from fossil fuels, we can expect a wide variety of geopolitical bumps in the road, says Marco Magrini ‘To put it mildly, gas is over,’ said Werner Hoyer, president of the European Investment Bank in January. His institution will soon stop funding fossil-fuelled electricity generation, in accordance with its own climate roadmap. As the EU is expected to adopt a new carbon-reduction target of 55 per cent by 2030, shifting financial resources towards green energy is certainly a sound proposition. But it ain’t that simple. Both the EU and the USA are pressing Germany to a ..read more

The international effort to stem the landmine crisis has been a humanitarian success story. The 2019 casualty numbers, however, reveal there is work yet to be done Signatories to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty – which earned the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize – are obligated to cease production and development; to destroy stockpiles within four years; and to clear areas contaminated with anti-personnel mines within ten years. Some 159 countries have completed the destruction of stockpiles and 33 are now considered to be landmine free.  There’s still ..read more

A programme to employ ex-guerrilla fighters as conservationists is starting to take off in Colombia Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world. More than 56,000 species have been recorded in the Colombian Amazon – 9,000 of which are unique to the region. But for more than 50 years, insurgencies and violence have crippled scientific study in this cradle of biodiversity. Now, four years after a landmark peace deal between Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nation’s rich biodiversity may have found an unlikely force of forest guardi ..read more

A new study has analysed the extent of Covid-19 misinformation in traditional media sources. Results reveal the power that US President Donald Trump has to influence the circulation of misinformation Researchers at Cornell University have analysed 38 million media articles, finding that US President Donald Trump is the largest driver of Covid-19 misinformation. The authors performed a comprehensive analysis of media coverage on the Covid-19 pandemic, using a platform that aggregates online news, blogs, podcasts, TV and radio media pieces sourced by webcrawlers and third-party providers. The ..read more

Angus Parker examines the impact of the coronavirus on the stability of the Chinese Communist Party In an interview given to local media in early January, Li Wenliang, a young doctor from Wuhan responded to a question by saying ‘a healthy society should not have only one kind of voice’. Dr Wenliang was one of eight medical professionals who were investigated by the local authorities for spreading rumours, after raising concerns about the coronavirus in late December. After being released, Li Wenliang contracted the virus and died two weeks later. Never miss an issue Subscribe today to ..read more