Shoumojit Banerjee

Eighty years on, the Nuremberg trials, for all its imperfections, remain the world’s most audacious attempt to tame barbarism with law. Robert Jackson at Nuremberg Judgement at Nuremberg (1961 film) Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg today has long been stripped of its wartime drama. The dock is empty; the headphones used for simultaneous translation - then a remarkable innovation - are now museum pieces. Yet, eighty years on, the ghosts of Courtroom 600 still stir. The...

More than a century after the Great War, the spectre of Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Theory’ continues to haunt the world’s geopolitics. Sir Halford Mackinder Each November 11, Europe falls silent for two minutes to mark the end of the First World War in 1918. The Armistice that ended the Great War was met with exhausted relief, but also with great illusions, namely that mankind had fought “the war to end war.” Until 2014 (the centenary of the start of the Great War), it is estimated that more than...

Every fight for City Hall has prefigured the battles to come in Washington. Tammany Hall, New York City’s powerful and infamous political machine, controlled it in the 1800s. Fiorello LaGuardia, one of NYC’s greatest mayors, was elected in 1933. From the 18th-century lodges of Tammany Hall to Zohran Mamdani’s street rallies, the battle for New York’s City Hall has always held up a mirror to America. The city’s mayoral elections have been a barometer of national change, where anxieties over...