The World Today

June & July 2016: The lost art of leadership

Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon reveal disturbing details from their research project into how people at the top struggle to cope In a digital age which throws up surprises

A young high-flyer on how to correct the older generation’s failings

Catherine Fieschi on the significance of the political gesture, be it a handshake or a peck

Michael Binyon on the challenges of renaming a country

Backlash to land reform makes regime stop and think, writes Alex Nice

India’s Agni-5 intercontinental ballistic missile which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile weighs 50 tonnes and is 17 metres long

China, not Pakistan, is the target of India’s deterrence drive, argues Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan

Our cover story puts an unsettling question to anyone who has climbed the ladder to a leadership position in a big organization. Have the qualities that helped you to get to the top made you unable to cope with an increasingly unsettled world?

Articles

The West needs a wartime response to today’s challenges, argues Chris Donnelly.

Ben Rhodes said journalists who cover international affairs from Washington ‘know nothing’

Philip Seib on the shortcomings of the White House’s spin machine

Identity is important to Leave voters who are more likely to align with an English rather than British feeling of identity

EU vote may be close but problems will not evaporate, writes Matthew Goodwin

A Romanian shepherd stands next to riot police outside the Parliament building in Bucharest during a protest in December

Lucy Ash on the simmering feud between hunters and shepherds

Saudi men and women queue for Big Macs separately on either side of a barrier

Saudi Arabia looks to the future by curbing the mutawaeen, writes Najah Al-Osaimi

Women mourn the death of a Kosovo Liberation Army fighter who died defusing land mines in October 1998 during the ethnic Albanian majority’s war against Serbian troops under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic

Vernon Bogdanor warns that the Balkans could erupt again if the EU implodes

Also in this issue

An girl shows her hand, covered in henna drawings to ward off bad luck, in Cairo, Egypt

Jane Kinninmont on Egypt’s recurring anxieties over unmarried women

Khanna argues that the world is now shaped more by connections than by geography

Thomas Raines finds this paean to globalization a little too much to take in

A meeting between officers of the Spanish Blue Division and the Wehrmacht in 1943. Spanish soldiers from this division fought with the Waffen SS on the Russian front

Michael Williams on the limits to David Rieff’s brilliantly phrased polemic

Resistance on Istiklal Street by Canan uses the visiual language of the Ottoman miniature to show the facade of every building

Feminist artist Canan shines a light on Turkey’s troubles through her work. Alan Philps meets her in Istanbul

EDL supporters march through Bristol in 2012

Georgina Wright admires a brave inquiry into what makes the far-Right tick

Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, has been without aid for three years

On the morning of May 12 people in the besieged town of Daraya south of Damascus heard that an aid convoy was heading their way with supplies of food and medicine, the first during the three years they have been encircled by the Syrian army. Since the closure of a smuggling route into Daraya, signs of severe malnutrition have multiplied.

6 books we recommend on the Arab revolt

The UN mission chief on the daily challenges of rebuilding Somalia after 25 years of war

A Somalian refugee with her child in the Hagadera section of the Dadaab refugee camp

On May 6 the Kenyan government announced that it planned to close all its refugee camps including Dadaab, the world’s largest, with 600,000 residents, by May next year.

Chatham House experts answer your questions

The graph shows the significance of two issues – immigration and the economy – in helping the British electorate decide which way to vote in the European referendum on June 23.