The economic impact of COVID-19 has been much harder on those at the bottom of the caste ladder in India, reflecting the persistence of a system of social stigmatization that many Indians believe is a thing of the past. Untouchability has been outlawed since 1947, and an affirmative action program has lowered some barriers for stigmatized caste groups. But during the pandemic, members of lower castes suffered heavier job losses due to their higher representation in precarious daily wage jobs and their lower levels of education. Lower caste families are less able to help their children with remote learning, which threatens to worsen labor market inequality in India. But Dalits, at the bottom of the caste ladder, have recently.

The Pakistani Constitution promises “free and compulsory” education for all, but 20 million children are not in school. Many who are enrolled receive poor-quality education: surveys show Pakistani students ranking among the lowest achievers in the world. This has led families in all but the lowest income groups to seek private alternatives for their children, weakening the constituency for improved public schools. Under Prime Minister Imran Khan, the government has pushed for a Single National Curriculum. Critics contend that it will not address lack of access or the poor quality of education, but that it could lead to restrictions on school choice, provincial autonomy, and linguistic diversity, while imposing a narrow vision of national identity.

Communities of landless Hindus and Muslims in the Sundarbans, a mangrove-forested river delta sprawling across the Bangladesh–India border, have common class-based grievances and concerns for the imperiled ecosystem that transcend their religious differences. Their shared beliefs and practices include veneration of the same Muslim saint, Bonbibi (the Lady of the Forest), who is regarded as a protector of the forest and the landless poor who depend on it to eke out a livelihood. Their ecumenical practices reflect religious ideals shaped by the complex, delicate ecosystem that sustains them. This tradition is not a muddled synthesis of Islam and Hinduism; it is rooted in the history of settlement in the region.

For centuries, malaria kept European colonial interests away from the Maldive islands, leaving the remote Indian Ocean island chain on a distinct and largely self-governed trajectory. Successful mosquito eradication in the twentieth century paved the way for development. The COVID-19 pandemic posed a new challenge to the economy, which is now heavily dependent on tourism. But resorts were able to reopen relatively quickly, since they are mostly set up on islands apart from those inhabited by local communities. The nation also has proved adept at finding ways to make tourism compatible with Muslim traditions, though imported harder-line Islamic ideology has raised tensions in recent years. Now the islanders must manage their entanglements with rival regional powers, as China and India compete to provide infrastructure.

After a deadly June 2020 clash between Chinese and Indian troops on the contested border in the Himalayas, both sides eventually agreed to pull back their forces from the immediate vicinity of the border. But neither country made any notable concessions, and tensions remained high as a series of skirmishes continued. With authoritarian nationalists in charge in Beijing and New Delhi, backed by public opinion, compromise has proved hard to reach.

A new book explores a premodern idea of the Indian subcontinent as a home for members of all religious traditions: the vision of Hindustan developed by the seventeenth-century historian Firishta, a Persian-speaking Muslim. His perspective was neglected and distorted by colonial-era historians who contributed to a Hindu-centric idea of India.

The two-decade effort by the United States and its NATO allies to build a modern liberal state in Afghanistan envisioned electoral democracy replacing village councils and other forms of customary authority. But citizens still rely on these community-based bodies to resolve disputes, provide small-scale public goods and services, and broker relations with local government. Customary institutions may also provide protection against predatory government officials. Although the international community has largely overlooked customary authority, US and NATO military forces eventually recognized their importance. Throughout history, Afghan rulers have regarded customary authorities as threats to their power, and they have been largely excluded from ongoing peace talks among the United States, the Afghan government, and the Taliban.

Governments in Europe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by expanding their welfare systems to protect health, jobs, and incomes. The varied initiatives embody the principle of solidarity and demonstrate how welfare programs serve as a form of collective insurance against risk. But the twin health and economic crises also exposed gaps in coverage for many, including migrants and gig economy workers. Fiscal austerity, enforced by the European Union, has long constrained efforts to close those gaps.

In contrast with their halting response to the global financial crisis a decade ago, European policymakers acted quickly to mitigate the economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. They eased the way for governments to run deficits and increase their debt loads. In a breakthrough, the European Union agreed to a plan for common borrowing for a pandemic recovery fund. Although controversial in some countries, common debt would make it easier to address inequities among member states. But the plan was nearly derailed by objections from Poland and Hungary to a provision that would withhold funds from member states that violate the rule of law and other democratic norms, raising doubts about how transformative the borrowing precedent would prove to be.

Some 10-15 million members of the Roma minority live in Europe; an estimated 6 million are citizens of the European Union. It was not until the 1990s that European Union institutions began treating Roma as an ethnic minority deserving of human rights protections. Concerns about mass migration of Roma from Eastern European countries where they face severe discrimination was one of the reasons the EU included protections for Roma among the conditions that candidate countries had to meet to qualify for consideration in its most recent rounds of enlargement. Those EU efforts have overlooked similar discrimination and neglect in western member states.

European integration based on a supranational form of pooled sovereignty has taken on increasingly state-like qualities. With every move toward absorbing additional members, the European Union system has expanded its geographic reach. The state-like power of the EU is apparent in the impact its integration processes have had in societies just outside its borders. Its growing influence is most notable in misfit border territories, from Kaliningrad to Transnistria, and from Cyprus to Northern Ireland, that are tenuously under the political control of neighboring geopolitical powers.

The campaign that succeeded in pushing Britain out of the European Union focused on the perceived threat of unrestricted inward migration, obscuring the fact that over a million British citizens took advantage of open borders to settle in Europe. Post-Brexit, Britons no longer are entitled to automatic EU citizenship. The exit agreement secured the legal basis for their continued residency, but their rights remain uncertain.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, was an Enlightenment philosophe as well as an absolute monarch. His writings, available in a new translation, reveal a complex character and raise questions about government and autocracy in contemporary Europe.

The bicentennial of the Greek Revolution against Ottoman rule is an opportune time to ask why conflict between Greeks and Turks has continued for over two hundred years. Greek and Turkish national narratives reveal deeper reasons for the persistence of mutual belligerence, including common emphasis on national emancipation through violence, perceptions of iniquitous treatment in previous political settlements, and the influence of “banal imperialism” embedded in everyday national symbols. These mindsets continue to fuel disputes over Cyprus and maritime rights.

The November 2019 ouster of President Evo Morales, followed by the interim government’s harsh crackdown on his supporters, plunged Bolivia into a political crisis just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived with devastating effect. The interim government’s haphazard response was marred by corruption scandals over procurement of medical supplies. After several delays, a general election was finally held in October 2019. Luis Arce, the presidential candidate of Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism, won decisively. But Morales’s subsequent return from exile signaled that the struggle over his legacy would continue.

Mexico and Brazil, both among the region’s hardest hit by COVID-19, took strikingly different steps to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic. Although President Jair Bolsonaro dismissed the need for social distancing measures, the government provided substantial financial aid to citizens though cash transfer programs, avoiding potentially sharp increases in poverty and inequality. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who also displayed a dismissive attitude about the virus, made relatively little effort to protect the poor and unemployed from its effects, despite his pro-poor rhetoric. As a result, the Mexican economy was projected to contract by 9 percent in 2020, while poverty sharply increased. Rising malnutrition and missed schooling may have long-term consequences for inequality.

In June 2019, Nayib Bukele, a former mayor affiliated with the former guerrilla movement FMLN, became president of El Salvador at the head of a new party allied with a splinter faction of the right-wing ARENA party. Capitalizing on the corruption scandals that tainted the two major parties, the youthful businessman rode to victory on an anti-sleaze platform. He has made Twitter his government’s main communications platform, using symbolic politics to achieve high public approval ratings. But the president spurns openness and transparency in government, is hostile to the media, and openly defies the legislature and the judiciary, putting democracy at risk.

This essay situates Guyana’s recent election standoff in a longer, relatively unbroken trajectory of racially divisive politics. It explores how historically oppressed peoples have directed their hostility at each other while governments have worked with extractive industries to perpetuate a neo-imperial economidepenc structure. The recent discovery of major offshore oil deposits has started a new cycle of this economic dency on commodity exports and multinational corporations while raising the stakes of racialized domestic political competition.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promoted himself as a historical figure equal to the great heroes of Mexico’s national mythology. His populist rhetoric denigrates political opponents as enemies of the people. But more than two years into his term, his promises of economic growth have failed to materialize, partly because of his attachment to austerity.

Two new books about the China–Latin America relationship reach different conclusions about the implications of growing trade ties for Latin American development. One author argues that countries in the region have had varying success in taking advantage of opportunities created by increasing Chinese engagement, while the other sees old patterns of dependency in the exchange of raw commodities for Chinese manufactured goods.