Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

The ceasefire in the Middle East is on shaky ground. Israel continued its bombardment of Lebanon on Wednesday, claiming its activities there are not part of the deal with Iran. These attacks killed at least 254 people across Lebanon and injured over 800 more in what was Israel’s largest offensive of the war so far.

Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz again and threatened a “regret-inducing response” if the strikes continue. Donald Trump subsequently warned that US strikes on Iran would resume if it did not comply with the ceasefire. We spoke to Scott Lucas, an expert in Middle East politics at University College Dublin, who addresses several key issues.

Why is there confusion about whether Lebanon was included in the ceasefire?

Part of the problem is the nature of diplomacy in 2026. The Trump camp and Pakistan’s prime minister, Shahbaz Sharif, who has been a key mediator between the US and Iran since the start of the war, both issued statements on social media instead of coordinating the release of an agreed text.

That said, there should be no confusion. Sharif’s social media post made clear that the ceasefire also applies to Israel’s campaign in Lebanon. He wrote: “I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”

Trump also accepted that later peace talks in Pakistan would be based on Iran’s ten-point plan, which he described as a “workable basis on which to negotiate”. One of Iran’s demands is for “an end to attacks on Iran and its allies”. This includes the Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Why then is Israel still attacking Lebanon?

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not have an interest in ending the war until he establishes something he can claim as a “victory”. Israel’s objective in Iran is regime change. At the start of the war, Netanyahu announced that the “goal of the operation is to put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran”.

Trump’s goals in Iran are less clear. He entered the war pledging to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, destroy its missile capability, break its regional proxies, eliminate its navy and create an opening for regime change. But Iran’s regime is still in place and the Trump camp now appears willing to enter into negotiations with it.

So Netanyahu’s focus shifts to Lebanon and expansion of the Israeli occupation in the south of the country. Attacks will continue until that is achieved. The situation is similar to Gaza, where Israel now occupies 53% of the territory after its two years of attacks.

By presenting a victory over the threat of Hezbollah, pushing the group further from the Israeli border, Netanyahu can try to bolster his support at home despite any disappointment over the inconclusive outcome of the war in Iran.

Will Israel’s actions push the Gulf states closer to Iran?

For the first time since the start of the US and Israel’s war on February 28, the Iranian and Saudi Arabian foreign ministers have spoken by phone. In a statement following the call on April 9, the Saudi foreign ministry said the two men “reviewed the latest developments and discussed ways to reduce tensions to restore security and stability in the region”.

However, this is only a tentative beginning to repair the damage of the past six weeks. Gulf states are unhappy that the US exposed them to Iran’s retaliation by embarking upon the war, but that does not erase their anger with Tehran over the extent of the damage Iranian attacks have caused to energy infrastructure in the region.

Reports suggest that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have in recent weeks even been pressing the Trump camp to “finish the job” in Iran with ground operations to vanquish the regime. That option appears to have been paused for now. However, it is not off the table if the US-Iran negotiations collapse.

Where does all of this leave Donald Trump?

Angry, frustrated and uncertain what to do next. Trump’s bluster on April 7, in which he said “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran reached a deal, was always an expression of weakness rather than strength. The plan A for regime surrender, with the killing of the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of commanders and officials, did not have a plan B for when the remaining leaders refused to concede and instead struck back.

With Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz and choking off Gulf shipping, including of oil and gas, the Trump camp was reduced to either ground operations or talks. Trump snatched at the latter amid military advice of the difficulties of a ground assault and domestic opinion that is largely opposed to further escalation.

But he did so by handing Iran the diplomatic initiative. Now the White House is trying to pull it back, including by giving Israel the green light to continue its assault in Lebanon. The US is now denying that Lebanon was ever included in the ceasefire deal, with Trump calling it a “separate skirmish”.

The situation in the Middle East thus remains extremely volatile as delegates from the US and Iran head to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad for crunch talks on April 10.

Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why is Israel continuing to attack Lebanon, despite the ceasefire? Expert Q&A – https://theconversation.com/why-is-israel-continuing-to-attack-lebanon-despite-the-ceasefire-expert-qanda-280302

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Naomi Braithwaite, Associate Professor in Fashion and Material Culture, Nottingham Trent University

“Nobody has been able to pronounce my name properly … but everybody knows what it means,” Elsa Schiaparelli once said, with typical self-assuredness.

A protagonist of surrealism, the Italian-born fashion designer was an extraordinary couturier who pushed the bounds of creativity, leaving her mark on Paris fashion and beyond. Dazzling, theatrical, witty and avant garde, her creative genius is the subject of the V&A’s latest blockbuster exhibition Fashion becomes Art in London.

More than 400 objects have been brought together by a fashion, art and photography curatorial team for the first exhibition of its kind in the UK to showcase her unique contribution.

It is Schiaparelli’s connection to the Surrealist movement that she is most renowned for, through her creative collaborations with the artists Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau.

One of the most iconic designs is Schiaparelli’s lobster dress, created in 1937 in collaboration with Dali, which demonstrates how her work blurred the lines between fashion and art – a theme articulated throughout the show. The lobster dress is on display in the room titled Creative Constellations, next to Dali’s famous lobster telephone which was created a year after the dress.

Schiaparelli was a designer who transformed what fashion could be, and who saw dress designing not as a profession but as art. Her autobiography, Shocking Life, highlights her innovative approach. She was the first to use shoulder pads and animal print, and will forever be known as the woman who created the colour of shocking pink. The exhibition showcases these themes including her strength as a colourist, beautifully illustrated by the Harlequin-style coat from her 1939 Modern Comedy Collection.

Schiaparelli transformed herself from an untrained designer to become the most discussed designer in Paris during the interwar period. The silhouettes, materials, embellishments, use of colour and accessories are curated beautifully against a mesmerising soundtrack, making this a fitting exhibition to showcase Schiaparelli’s extraordinary life.

From Rome to Paris

Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli was born in a Roman palazzo to a family of aristocrats and intellectuals on September 10 1890. She left Italy for Paris at the age of 23, where she began to embrace a less conventional life.

Her first collection was launched there in 1927 – the same year she opened her atelier, where the more daring woman could buy knitwear featuring geometric black-and-white trompe l’oeil designs. These pieces remind us that in her early career, Schiaparelli was known for designing clothes for sport and leisure as a response to modern society’s growing interest in these pursuits.

As her creative style flourished, she transformed the everyday wardrobe through suits embellished with the most extraordinary buttons and unusual pocket placement. This is wonderfully illustrated in a coat designed for British socialite and star of the stage Pamela Carme, with buttons in the shape of Greek comedy/tragedy masks.

From extraordinary daywear to exquisite evening gowns, the exhibition delights with an array of creations that narrate Schiaparelli’s creative journey and radicalisation of the ordinary to the extraordinary.

The evening wear collections (Pour le Soir) embody her use of innovative materials such as cellophane, and her love of striking silhouettes. These drew the attention of socialites and celebrities, and established her as a leading designer of the 1930s who transformed the traditions of haute couture fashion.

Blurring the lines of fashion and art

The exhibition’s senior curator, Sonnet Stanfill, defines the 1930s as the era when Schiaparelli started to experiment with the boundaries between art and fashion.

Examples include the wonderful Circus Collection from summer 1938, which features the bone dress with its unique padded construction and visible zips. It stands as perfect example of Schiaparelli’s affinity with surrealist ideals and an innovative approach to materials and construction.

The surrealistic philosophy is further encapsulated through the display of lavish Schiaparelli jackets, where a shifting spotlight draws attention to embellishments and embroidery by the renowned Parisian embroidery house Maison Lesage.

There is a spectacular array of accessories on display, most notably Schiaparelli’s upside-down shoe hat – showcased in a circular glass bubble through which is framed, in the background, the lobster dress. Glimpsing further into the distance, the glass bubble reveals the 1937 evening coat designed with Cocteau with mirrored kissing faces beneath a cascade of pink roses. The display technique is a surrealistic spectacle in itself.

Beyond Paris

Other highlights include Schiaparelli’s creations for stage and screen. Featured work includes a trouser suit for Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich, who herself challenged the conventional ideals of femininity and female style.

Schiaparelli had a great passion for British textiles and in 1933 opened her London salon in Mayfair. According to her autobiography, London was the most masculine city in the world, and of the English she said: “They are profoundly honest, but mad, mad, mad.” Although her time in London was short-lived with the salon closing in 1939, she came to the attention of some notable clients including Lady Alexandra Haig, whose plum jacket is on display.

Schiaparelli retired and closed her fashion house in 1954. It lay dormant until its resurrection in 2019 under the creative direction of Daniel Roseberry. Many garments on display illustrate how Roseberry maintains the Italian designer’s vision by combining innovation with unpredictability.

Schiaparelli’s creative legacy continues, her aesthetic enthusiastically embraced by high-profile celebrities. The show includes Roseberry’s 2025 red Oscars gown, created for Ariana Grande who was nominated for best supporting actress in Wicked. Stanfill describes this as one of the exhibition’s highlight pieces.

Fashion Becomes Art takes visitors on a deliciously decadent journey through the world of Schiaparelli, where nothing was ever ordinary. While the correct pronunciation of her name may continue to confound (it’s Skaparelli), this exhibition ensures her creative genius is never in question.

Naomi Braithwaite does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Fashion Becomes Art: a deliciously decadent journey through the surrealist world of Elsa Schiaparelli – https://theconversation.com/fashion-becomes-art-a-deliciously-decadent-journey-through-the-surrealist-world-of-elsa-schiaparelli-279878

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Julie Curtis, Professor of Russian Literature (Emerita), University of Oxford

Director Julia Loktev’s “undesirable” friends are women, mostly in their 20s or early 30s, who live in Moscow. They all work for TV Rain (Dozhd’) founded in 2010 as a lively, optimistic channel with cool programmes for a young audience, which also addressed more serious issues.

The Russian authorities tolerated the existence of TV Rain for over a decade, despite denouncing several of their programmes, which brazenly challenged Vladimir Putin’s increasingly reactionary stance on social and political issues.

The society TV Rain was hoping to shape was a democratic world in which opposition leaders such as Boris Nemtsov (murdered in 2015) and Aleksei Navalny (poisoned with novichok in 2020, died in prison in 2024) would have been able to flourish. In this documentary, we watch as the possibility of that world moves further away.

Using an iPhone, Julia Loktev filmed her friends over four months in late 2021 and early 2022. The resulting documentary, lasting five and a half hours, provides an intimate picture of these young journalists’ lives as they share their apprehensions about the worsening political situation, their struggles to cover what is happening in an environment of increasing censorship and their utter horror when Russia finally invaded Ukraine on February 22 2022.

Loktev’s narration opens the film in 2021 as she drives through Moscow and announces that: “The world you’re about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.” Her concluding text from early 2022 reports that:

All our characters left Russia in the first week of the full-scale war. […] Most independent journalists and most of Russian civil society fled, […] over one million people have left, […] most with no plans to return so long as Putin remains in power. For now, their foreseeable future is in exile.

In the film, we move from the TV Rain studios and clips of their news reports and talk shows, out into the streets, waiting outside police stations and prisons, and up into the women’s apartments. Loktev records their ceaseless discussion of Russia’s plight, the state’s failure to respect people’s constitutional rights, and abuses of power by the police and the judiciary.

Read more:
Meduza: Berlin exhibition highlights the publication speaking truth to Putin while in exile

The journalists react in 2021 with dismay to the extension of a law intended to make it virtually impossible for journalists to work with any foreign organisations, let alone receive any funding. Those who are found to be working as such are officially designated a “foreign agent”, a designation that TV Rain and some of the women are hit with in August 2021.

A “foreign agent” must provide full accounts of all financial transactions, however trivial. They are also effectively banned from participation in political activity, or in any type of education. They also suffer a whole range of financial restrictions and penalties.

Every publication or mention in any media of a “foreign agent” must be accompanied by a lengthy, large-font label identifying them as such. This law has so far succeeded in gagging and disempowering over a thousand human rights organisations, media groups and individual citizens.

But even as these young journalists doggedly pursue the truth, we also share their everyday lives. We see them with their pets and bright nail varnish. They are shown baking cakes and with their kids and mums. They are constantly witty and inventive in their defiance of the authorities, proudly wearing their “foreign agent” T-shirts or concocting a subversive 2021 New Year’s Eve broadcast to run alongside Putin’s dreary and bellicose message to the Russian people.

All of this facetious defiance makes their white-faced reaction to the news that the invasion has begun all the more shattering. Almost immediately, they are informed that even to use the word “war” in relation to the Ukraine conflict is illegal, and that only official reports of events can be broadcast.

Read more:
Aleksei Navalny: new film about jailed dissident who dared to defy the power of Putin

Things get worse. The remarkable Ksenia Mironova’s fiance the journalist Ivan Safronov is arrested on trumped-up charges after he investigates Russian defence contracts (for which he later receives a 22-year sentence). There is an exceptional strength of solidarity among Mironova and her friends, and they share her tears, as well as supporting her to continue her journalistic work.

Younger women, their mums, and older, hardened female human rights activists alike all share wise words and jokes, even as their world seems to be falling apart. This extraordinary film has garnered numerous awards, and immerses us in the lives of those who know they are on the brink of catastrophe.

As an expert on subversive and dissident Russian writers, I find it fascinating to see how satirical brilliance and deep courage can both emerge from the everyday messiness of young lives. The film poses urgent questions for the viewer about how to resist an oppressive state, how to support your family, friends and colleagues, and how best to judge the moment when it’s time to run.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I is available to watch on Mubi

Julie Curtis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. My Undesirable Friends: Part I – an extraordinary portrait of young Russian journalists fighting to report the truth – https://theconversation.com/my-undesirable-friends-part-i-an-extraordinary-portrait-of-young-russian-journalists-fighting-to-report-the-truth-280188

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London

Writing a biographical novel about one of modern European history’s most skilled liars – whose fame rests almost entirely on his own self-crafted stories – is, to say the least, a difficult task.

So it’s not surprising that Jean-Noël Orengo has approached this challenge by making his superb novel about Nazi architect and war criminal Albert Speer, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, a work of metahistory. This means the book, translated from French by David Watson, is not just a historical narrative – it also reflects on the act of storytelling itself. Orengo examines the who, when and especially the why of the stories we tell about history.

For a decade Speer enjoyed a unique position as courtier and protege to Adolf Hitler. He may in fact have been the closest Hitler ever came to an actual friend – or, as Orengo’s title suggests, even a romantic partner in some strange, asexual way.

Speer flattered the dictator’s self-image as a frustrated artist, indulging Hitler’s fantasies of a thousand-year Reich. Later, as minister for armaments from 1942, Speer was responsible for supplying the military equipment that allowed Germany to carry on fighting its doomed struggle against the allies to the bitter end.

He became one of the regime’s most powerful figures. Yet in the popular imagination, Speer has never occupied quite the same place in the public imagination as Hitler’s other leading henchmen, such as Göring, Goebbels and Himmler.

If anything, for many years Speer enjoyed a wholly undeserved postwar reputation as a “good Nazi” – almost entirely through his own deft manipulation of unreliable memory and selective confession. At the Nuremberg trials his disingenuous and partial “confessions” helped him escape the hangman’s noose. Subsequently, his bestselling but deeply unreliable “memoir” Inside the Third Reich, written between 1946 and 1966 as he served a 20-year sentence for war crimes, recounted his relationship with Hitler as a kind of Faustian tragedy of blind ambition.

Speer’s self-mythologising

Orengo does not focus on exposing Speer’s many evasions and bare-faced lies. Historians have long established that despite his claims to the contrary, Speer was fully aware of Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust. As overlord of munitions production, his hands were steeped in the blood of a multitude of enslaved concentration-camp workers.

Orengo’s principal concern, rather, is Speer’s endless self-mythologising itself. He draws an implicit parallel between Speer’s spectacular orchestration of the Nuremberg rallies – the grand, impressive but ultimately hollow architectural spectacles that first made him famous – and the elaborate web of excuses and self-justifications Speer built to rehabilitate his image after the war. The novel is also shaped by the ideas of philosopher Walter Benjamin, a witness to and victim of Nazism, who warned against reducing politics to aesthetics.

Orengo maintains a critical detachment from his protagonist. He fully anatomises Speer’s ambitions and desires as he carefully charts the stages of his descent into the Nazi maelstrom. Yet he never invites us to identify with this fundamentally shallow figure, a stranger to himself who can only manifest through others’ reactions to his own refracted image.

There is little dialogue. Most encounters between Speer and Hitler in particular are reported speech. Speer himself is most often referred to simply as “the architect” (and later, enjoying his celebrity, “the star”). Hitler is “the guide” – a literal translation of führer.

In the novel’s last third, Gitta Sereny, the German-British writer who tried over many years’ enquiry to see through Speer’s moral evasion and self-deceit, is “the historian”. By rendering his principal characters in these archetypal terms, Orengo underscores the studied elusiveness in which Speer shrouded his crimes and depersonalises his story to explore its wider implications.

The novel is structured in layers of perspective. For the first two-thirds, we see the world through Speer’s eyes. Then the focus shifts to Sereny, as she attempts to uncover Speer’s moral evasion and self-deception. Yet Orengo shows that Sereny, too, has her own blind spots. Finally, the narrative adopts Orengo’s own viewpoint, that of a 21st-century writer reflecting on what the horrors of Nazism still mean for us today.

Orengo’s real subject is the struggle over memory itself. Who remembers, what is included, what left out and how and why some ways of remembering prevail over others. In genre terms, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love might be regarded not as a whodunnit but a “whotoldit”; and as in any good mystery the question “who benefits?” is key.

Like a mystery, the novel is concerned with guilt and accountability. Orengo’s stylistic elegance and complex perspective never collapse into the relativism Speer himself – a postmodernist in life if never in architecture – deployed. The novel also never loses sight of its real subject, the urgency of moral reckoning.

The reader of this lucid, elegant novel is left to reflect on the many ways in which, in the wrong hands, art and memory can conspire to obscure as well as to illuminate.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love by Jean-Noël Orengo is a masterful take on Nazi memory, myth and moral reckoning – https://theconversation.com/you-are-the-fuhrers-unrequited-love-by-jean-noel-orengo-is-a-masterful-take-on-nazi-memory-myth-and-moral-reckoning-280083