Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Manning, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Science, Newcastle University

Storm Floris made landfall in northern parts of the UK on the morning of Monday August 4 2025, bringing intense rainfall followed by severe winds throughout the afternoon. The Met Office issued an amber weather warning for much of Scotland and yellow alerts for parts of Northern Ireland and northern England.

Affected areas can expect 20mm–40mm of rain on average, with some areas of Scotland potentially receiving up to 80mm. Wind speeds in exposed and elevated regions could reach 80mph–90mph, while gusts of 50mph-60mph are forecast for much of Scotland.

The storm’s defining characteristic is the unusually strong winds for August, a time typically less prone to severe wind events. The odd seasonal timing has increased the risk to the public, as more people are outdoors, travelling for holidays or staying in campsites. In addition, trees remain in full leaf, making them more likely to be brought down by high winds.

Authorities are anticipating significant disruption to transport and electricity networks largely due to falling trees. This is underlined by recent research showing an increased risk of large power outages during windstorms that occur in summer. A large amount of debris on the ground from trees may also block drainage systems and contribute to localised flooding.

Persistent strong winds will combine with periods of heavy rainfall for the duration of the amber alert, which expires at 23:00. This will create difficult conditions for emergency workers and prevent access to affected locations if roads are blocked, potentially prolonging disruptions to travel and power networks.

Is this typical of summer months?

Storm Floris carries all the hallmarks of a classic mid-latitude storm. These develop due to sharp temperature contrasts between the northern and southern Atlantic Ocean and intensify under the influence of a strong jet stream. This is a core of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere that stretches across the Atlantic and often steers storms towards the UK.

Such conditions are unusual for the summer months, when warmer Atlantic sea temperatures typically weaken these temperature gradients and shift them farther north, closer to the polar regions. However, it is not uncommon for such storms to occur in August.

Notable ones in the past five years include Storm Ellen, which extensively damaged electricity distribution infrastructure in Ireland and led the Irish meterological service to produce and red and amber weather warning for southern parts of Ireland. Previous storms in August cancelled the Boardmasters music festival in Cornwall in 2019 and closed two stages of Leeds festival in 2024.

Floris is classified as a Shapiro-Keyser cyclone, a type distinguished by a warm core encircled by colder air on its north, west and south sides. This structure is visible in the way the storm’s frontal system wraps around its centre, forming a characteristic comma-shape in the clouds around the cyclone centre. Storms of this kind are responsible for a significant number of the UK’s most damaging wind events.

These cyclones often feature sharp pressure gradients and strong low-level airflows, particularly an air stream known as the cold jet, or cold conveyor belt, which can produce severe surface winds. In some cases, they can also generate a sting jet, a narrow stream of air that descends rapidly from around 5km above the land surface, delivering intense, damaging gusts.

Fortunately, satellite imagery suggests that Storm Floris is unlikely to have produced a sting jet. However, the cold jet alone may still drive wind speeds high enough to cause widespread disruption.

These types of storms can also produce intense rainfall along their frontal boundaries, as seen with Storm Floris. Warmer summer temperatures allow the atmosphere to hold more moisture, increasing the potential for heavier downpours. In addition, the heat contributes to a more unstable atmosphere, encouraging strong convective ascents of air that can yield extremely heavy and localised rainfall.

Floris in the future

Research shows that climate change will influence the characteristics of storms like Floris, though not all aspects will be affected equally. Warmer temperatures are expected to make future storms wetter, as increased atmospheric moisture and convective activity enhances rainfall, particularly along frontal systems. However, projections of wind extremes remain more uncertain.

Climate models generally suggest a modest intensification of winter storms over the UK and a decrease in the intensity of summer storms, implying that systems like Floris could become less common. These projections are largely tied to expected changes in Atlantic temperature gradients and the behaviour of the jet stream.

That said, most long-term climate projections rely on relatively coarse-resolution models which often fail to capture key features that drive storm intensification. These include the gulf stream (a warm Atlantic Ocean current) and drivers of extreme winds including the cold jet and sting jet.

A higher-resolution model, like that used in real-time forecasting for Storm Floris, predicts more intense winter windstorms in a warmer climate. Much of this intensification is linked to stronger cold jets and a potential increase in storms that generate sting jets.

Many powerful summer and autumn storms in the UK originate from tropical cyclones such as hurricanes, as seen with Storm Ophelia in 2017. These systems are poorly represented in lower-resolution climate models, yet they contribute significantly to Europe’s most extreme windstorms.

While Storm Floris has no tropical origins, a variety of storms can affect northern Europe at this time of year. The complexity of assessing their risks remains an area of ongoing research.

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Colin Manning receives funding from UKRI.

– ref. Storm Floris: the weather is rarely this windy in August – which makes it more dangerous – https://theconversation.com/storm-floris-the-weather-is-rarely-this-windy-in-august-which-makes-it-more-dangerous-262535

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam J Smith, Associate Professor in 18th-century Literature, York St John University

From the pompous vanity of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion (1817), to the shallow reading habits of Isabella in Northanger Abbey (1817), few characters in the works of Jane Austen are spared the gentle satire of her famously ironic narrative voice. Similarly, some of her best remembered characters, like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813), are more than willing to share a sarcastic retort or wry observation.

And yet, Austen, like many other women writers of the period such as Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood and Mary Robinson, are almost always missing from histories of satire. This is less to do with whether their works were satirical – because they blatantly were – and more to do with our problematic understanding of satire.

Satire, as writer Dustin Griffin states, is typically defined as a work designed to “attack vice or folly”, using “wit or riducule” and engaging “in exaggeration and some sort or fiction.”

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This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

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Austen, like so many women, used satire and humour to critique her situation in a patriarchal society and, in so doing, persistently challenged deeply ingrained assumptions about women’s status as the passive, subordinate property of men. As literary critic Rachel Brownstein memorably put it, women at the time experienced a constant doubleness that frequently became “the ironic self-awareness of a rational creature absurdly caught in a lady’s place”.

And yet, when asked to name 18th-century satirists, it is so often the case that we are confronted with the same list of authors: Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Alexander Pope, author of The Dunciad (1728), and sometimes Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones (1749). Typically the thread isn’t then picked up again until a century later, when we are offered Charles Dickens (in works such as The Pickwick Papers (1837), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875).

However, there are so many examples of brilliant satire written by women at the time.

Take for instance, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) by Jane Collier. A satirical conduct book which, rather than advising young women on how to become delicate, feminine creatures, instead gave them tips on how to torment their husbands. Why kill your spouse, it cheerfully asks, when it will be far more satisfying to “waste them by degrees”, effectively killing them slowly across a lifetime of nagging.

There was also Eliza Haywood’s satirical periodical The Parrot (1746), which adopted the perspective of a green parrot in a cage, tired of being objectified and written off as a “pretty prattler”.

Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1782) is about a group of women deciding to abandon patriarchal society altogether and establish a women-only commune. It is full of withering observations. While Mary Robinson’s Walsingham (1797) exposes the many contradictions of 18th-century Britain’s sexist society by telling the story of a girl raised as a boy by parents anxious to have a male heir.

As a girl, Austen loved Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), a novel about a young woman who, upon arriving in Bath for the first time, cannot stop laughing at the utter absurdity of fashionable society. (Evelina is also a novel in which a monkey wearing a suit appears out of nowhere, goes berserk, and is never mentioned again. You should read it immediately.)

Similarly, the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour (1808), sees a young heroine born in Jamaica, Olivia Fairfield, travelling to England to secure her inheritance only to discover the high society she’d been raised to admire is in fact barbarous and stupid. As both spectacle and spectator, Olivia becomes a powerful engine for satire.

Even Charlotte Brontë deployed satire. Brontë was an admirer of William Makepeace Thackeray and dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre (1847) to his famously satirical novel Vanity Fair (1848). As 19th-century literature expert Jo Smith has recently observed, Brontë also used her persona, Currer Bell, to enact satire across her career, even articulating her own theory of satire.

The subtle barb instead of the violent attack

That these women’s names don’t come up in lists of great satirists of the period is partly due to the availability of their writing. Many of the texts I’ve mentioned have only been recovered and made publicly available again over the last 50 years. But it is also to do with how we talk about satire.

The purest definition of satire is that it performs a critique of something that the author finds to be ridiculous, stupid or dangerous, and uses some kind of distortion as part of this critique. This usually takes the form of exaggeration, but can also be inversion or allegory.

However, you’ll notice that when people talk about satire they often describe the lash of the satirist’s whip, or the slash of the surgeon’s scalpel. Satire is talked about as biting, skewering and violent.

The satirist, from the Roman poet Juvenal through to John Dryden and Jonathan Swift, is often imagined as a heroic aggressor, whose righteous indignation drives him to lash out at a fallen world. This is an image born of Renaissance theories of satire, and one slightly modified (but heavily promoted) during the endless, rarely objective, debates about what satire should be that dominated the 18th century.

As a result, we end up with a definition of satire that is coded in masculine language. So many definitions, even today, talk about satire “attacking”, rather than “critiquing”. But in Austen, and the work of her female contemporaries, we see another kind of satire. The joy of so many of the quips and rejoinders issued by characters like Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet is that often their targets don’t even realise they have been satirised, so subtle is the critique.

Virginia Woolf said it best when called upon to describe Austen’s juvenilia, in particular her early novel Love and Freindship sic:

What is this note, which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of 15 is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and contains 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.

Adam J Smith 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. Jane Austen was a satirist – why isn’t she treated like one? – https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-was-a-satirist-why-isnt-she-treated-like-one-262274

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anastasia Topalidou, Research Fellow (Perinatal Biomechanics and Health Technologies), University of Lancashire

Maternal and newborn deaths are rising globally, not just in low- and middle-income countries, but in wealthy nations too. Researchers have described the situation as a “global failure” and a “major scandal”.

In the UK, more women are now dying during pregnancy and childbirth than at any time in the past 20 years, despite a fall in the birth rate. A national maternity investigation has just been launched, and public concern is growing.

Yet while politicians and healthcare leaders debate staffing levels and service delivery, one major contributor to poor outcomes is being almost entirely overlooked: biomechanical complications during labour.

Biomechanics refers to how the body moves and responds to physical forces. During pregnancy, it describes how the body adapts to the increasing demands of carrying a growing baby. During labour, it involves some of the most physically intense and complex actions the human body can perform, as it prepares for and facilitates the delivery of a baby.

After analysing 87 studies from around the world, we discovered that not a single one had ever investigated the biomechanics of labour. None examined how women’s bodies actually move, adapt or respond during birth. All the research focused solely on pregnancy. And despite rising maternal deaths in the UK, not a single antenatal biomechanics study had been conducted here either.

This isn’t just an academic oversight. Labour is biomechanically intense, involving force, posture, motion, muscle control and joint loading. Without evidence on how positions, manoeuvres or techniques affect the birthing body, maternity care relies largely on tradition, anecdotal evidence and outdated assumptions.

A dangerous lack of diversity

Some pregnancy-related biomechanical changes have been documented, but these vary widely from person to person. There is no “typical” pathway. Yet standard guidance assumes a one-size-fits-all model, often failing to account for these variations.

Worse still, almost no studies included data on ethnicity. Only one mentioned participants’ ethnic background, but it did not analyse the data by group or explore any differences. That is a serious gap, given that anatomical features like pelvic shape, joint mobility, spinal alignment and culturally shaped movement patterns can vary across populations. These differences could significantly affect how women move and give birth, yet they remain completely overlooked.

This is a serious problem, especially in the UK. Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK (MBRRACE-UK) – the national programme that investigates maternal and infant deaths – along with other official reports, consistently show that Black and Asian women are nearly three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. If all the biomechanical knowledge we have is based on white bodies, yet clinical guidance is applied universally, we may be missing important risks or needs. This lack of inclusive data could be contributing to the persistent racial disparities in maternal outcomes.

We also found that even widely used techniques such as squatting or the McRoberts’ manoeuvre – a common emergency intervention – have never been biomechanically validated during labour. This means that no one has scientifically tested how these movements affect the body’s joints, muscles, and bones during actual childbirth. So, we don’t know if they help, hinder, or have no measurable impact on the birthing process.

A handful of studies tested some of these positions on pregnant women in static, controlled conditions, but none included women in active labour. Those studies revealed no measurable advantage for any of the positions tested. Even the McRoberts’ manoeuvre did not significantly change pelvic or spinal alignment.

That means decades of advice, clinical practice, and emergency response protocols may be based on theory and biomechanical guesswork, rather than evidence. And while these techniques are used every day – often in urgent situations – they have never been scientifically tested on women in active labour. So no clinical studies have examined how these interventions actually affect the birthing body in real time. We don’t know if they work as intended, or if they could be refined to improve safety.

Tradition over science

The consequences of this blind spot are not theoretical or a matter of academic curiosity. They’re about safety, dignity and fairness. Maternal and neonatal outcomes are getting worse. Stillbirths and deaths shortly after birth have increased. Behind these statistics are real families and real tragedies. Many of which may have been preventable.

So why haven’t we filled this gap? Part of the reason is technical: traditional biomechanical systems are difficult to use in clinical settings. But that’s no excuse. New technologies are being developed all the time. If we have the capability to launch rockets and explore space, we should surely be able – and arguably obliged – to understand the basic biomechanics of human birth.

The real barrier is structural neglect. Women were routinely excluded from clinical research until the 1990s, and even now, research into women’s health remains massively underfunded and overlooked. As a result, childbirth, one of the most common yet life-altering events in medicine, is still shaped by untested ideas.

This isn’t just a research gap. It’s a failure of safety, equity and scientific responsibility. We are delivering babies in the dark, and those most at risk are often the ones who are left behind.

Dr Topalidou received a Pre-Application Support Fund Award from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (NIHR ARC NWC) to support this work. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR, NHS, or the Department of Health and Social Care.

– ref. Why we still don’t understand what happens to women’s bodies during labour – https://theconversation.com/why-we-still-dont-understand-what-happens-to-womens-bodies-during-labour-261803

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ryan Davey, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Cardiff University

You get a payment reminder through the letterbox, maybe for a credit card, an overdraft, a bill, or a parking fine. You ignore it and leave the envelope unopened, or put it to one side to deal with later. Many of us will recognise this scenario.

Ignoring debts and other payment commitments is often dismissed as being irresponsible. But a closer look reveals that many people see things differently, reflecting a deeper point about inequality in Britain today.

To understand people’s experiences of debt problems better, I lived in a low-income community in the south of England for 18 months, where debt problems were commonplace. I also interviewed debt advisers and their clients across the UK. It gave me a unique opportunity to understand their situation and how they respond to debt, something which I detail in my new book.

While debt relative to income is falling, the total amount of unsecured household debt now far outstrips its peak during the 2008 global financial crisis.

Amid big rises in the cost of living, more and more people have been borrowing money to cover essentials like food, energy, rent or council tax. In October 2024, 4 million low-income households held loans they took out for this purpose, and nearly nine out of ten of them were going without essentials anyway.

Meanwhile, lenders continue to charge the highest interest to those least able to afford it. In 2024, an estimated 5.5 million people were falling behind on their bills or credit repayments.

In the community where I lived, many people worked, but their wages were not enough to afford what they needed. So residents borrowed money to make ends meet, claimed welfare benefits or did cash-in-hand work. This reflects a broader reality with labour markets in Britain today, where 4.5 million wage-workers are paid below the real living wage.

As a result, most of the residents I worked with were in arrears with one or more payments. They received phone calls, letters and knocks at the door from debt collectors, threatening court orders, or they had to deal with bailiffs trying to seize their possessions. Some worried about being evicted.

This is a distressing situation that can easily lead to mental health problems. Debt problems are strongly linked to diagnosed mental health disorders and even suicide. All of the debt advice clients I interviewed had experienced anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts or other mental health issues.

Making light

However, in the community where I temporarily lived, many residents had found ways to try to stay optimistic despite the threats of debt enforcement. Some made light of their debts by joking about how bad they were at repaying or how poor their credit ratings were.

Many people focused on their home and family life. One woman worried about it being “a skint few weeks”, saying: “We’ll get through it. We always do. You just focus on what’s around you.”

An unemployed man in his late forties told me how his pride in his 12-year-old daughter kept him from “going suicidal”.

Most of all, though, people avoided their creditors. Residents often strained to meet repayment demands, but just as often they ignored them. They hung up the telephone when debt collectors called, left envelopes unopened or stashed away, or pretended not to be at home if bailiffs visited. One man said when he received a demand to pay his water bills: “Well, they can fuck off,” and threw the letter in the bin.

Trying to deal with debt head-on, in the sense of paying what debt collectors were demanding by the exact time they demanded it, could create immense anxiety and even physical health problems. One man told me: “You know, for a while I was trying to keep on top of them and eventually … well, it was making me ill [because of worrying about it]. So I couldn’t keep on like that. I just left them and got on with things.”

These accounts reveal a deeper point about inequality in Britain. Financial lending tends to extract wealth from those with less and transfer it towards the better-off. Debt is a systemic feature of our economy, and debt problems have complex causes. However, the threat of enforcement convinces many people they are single-handedly responsible for being in debt. This places the blame for poverty on the shoulders of those experiencing it, subtly implying the wealthy are morally superior.

Stigma

More than mere personal prejudice, the stigma around debt is hard-wired into the legal system. If we assume that every legally valid debt must be paid as a moral duty, no matter what, then we ignore the economic realities that make borrowing a necessity for so many. This simplistic assumption only reinforces the hardship of those in debt.

Take the example of people ignoring their debts. Usually they are labelled as irresponsible or lacking financial skills. But ignoring debts is often a deliberate response to a situation that people find immoral or harmful to their health.

It is tempting to think that if debt is the problem, the remedy is to reform it. Subsidising credit so lower-income groups pay lower interest, restoring funding for debt advice, amplifying the voices of those who have been in debt and widening access to insolvency and debt cancellation could all improve things.

But reliance on borrowing is also a symptom of broader issues. These may be better addressed by efforts to redistribute resources and curb coercive sanctions, such as taxing wealth, guaranteeing higher incomes (both wages and benefits), controlling the cost of rent and other essentials, protecting against eviction and abolishing bailiffs.

In the meantime, many indebted people on low incomes will continue to ignore debt collectors’ demands. Through their actions, I believe they question the widely held assumption that there is always a moral duty to pay in our unequal world.

Ryan Davey has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the William Wyse Fund and the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust at the University of Cambridge, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Bristol.

– ref. Why people ignore debt letters – and what it says about inequality today – https://theconversation.com/why-people-ignore-debt-letters-and-what-it-says-about-inequality-today-256293

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Faek Menla Ali, Associate Professor in Finance, University of Sussex

More than a decade of devastating conflict has left Syria’s economy in tatters, its infrastructure in ruins and its population deeply fragmented. The fledgling transitional government in Damascus, which came to power following a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024, often speaks of a “new Syria”. But the pressing question remains: how long will recovery take?

The numbers are stark. In 2011, the year war broke out, the World Bank estimated Syria’s GDP at around US$67.5 billion (£50.7 billion). Its most recent estimate, for 2023, puts GDP at US$20 billion – a drop of more than 70%. And these figures don’t tell the whole story. Inflation and currency collapse make it difficult to compare over time.

Some organisations offer rough inflation estimates for Syria, but these are obscured by currency depreciation. The Syrian pound has lost more than 99.5% of its value against the US dollar since 2011, falling from 50 pounds per dollar to around 10,375 pounds per dollar today. This severe depreciation distorts the real domestic price picture.

To get a better sense of on-the-ground price trends, I recently conducted an informal survey of non-tradable goods and services across Syria. It included things like rent, haircuts and private clinic fees. The results of this exploratory approach suggest that, in US dollar terms, prices for such items have risen by about 50% since 2010.

In other words, inflation in Syria has been real and significant – not just a side effect of exchange rate collapse. Patterns varied sharply across the country. While prices have increased in areas of relative stability and refuge, they stagnated or declined in cities devastated by war.

With this inflation adjustment, I estimate that Syria’s real GDP in 2024 – measured in constant 2010 US dollars – is closer to US$13.3 billion, an 80% drop from its pre-war level. This figure more accurately reflects the economy’s actual performance, including wellbeing, living standards and productivity.

To put this figure in context, Syria’s GDP would now be around US$121.3 billion – excluding the anomalous pandemic year – had the economy continued growing at its pre-war average of 5% per year. The gap between this counterfactual and current output reflects the immense toll of the war.

Rebuilding Syria’s economy will be a monumental challenge. At a high growth rate of 7% per year, it would still take over 30 years for Syria to catch up to its pre-war trajectory. Even with exceptionally strong growth of 10%, the process would stretch over two decades.

Jump-starting growth

The causes of Syria’s economic collapse are well known. The war resulted in the destruction of much of its physical capital, the displacement of labour, the erosion of institutions and the imposition of sweeping international sanctions.

Some US and EU sanctions have been eased. But this alone won’t be enough to reverse Syria’s economic decline. Meanwhile, the Trump administration in the US has announced 41% tariffs on Syrian imports, hindering future trade with the US.

The Syrian government is betting heavily on foreign direct investment (FDI) to jump-start growth. This approach comes with risks. In weakly regulated markets, FDI can raise both operating and consumer costs – particularly in monopolistic or oligopolistic sectors such as utilities, telecommunications and ports. This may contribute to rising inflation and worsening inequality.

Syria’s pre-war economic model, which was characterised by crony capitalism and limited competition, raises further concerns about whether FDI will genuinely broaden opportunity or simply entrench existing elites. Without transparent policy frameworks, there is a danger that liberalisation could crowd out local firms, undermine capacity building and fail to diversify the economy.

The privatisation of state-owned enterprises in Syria is already underway, though the future of the social safety net remains unclear. Greater openness may attract capital and expertise, but it will also expose Syria to global market volatility. This is an unfamiliar dynamic for a country that has long been insulated.

The critical question is whether the Syrian government’s strategy can generate an export-driven recovery. A stronger current account and healthier foreign currency reserves would boost the capacity of Syria’s economy to withstand future economic shocks.

Agriculture, once a major contributor to GDP, should be a policy priority. So too should revitalising Syria’s once-globally competitive manufacturing sectors, such as the textile industry in Aleppo.

The oil and gas sector, which historically underpinned fiscal revenues, will also play a key role if stability returns. Other possible growth areas include boosting the tourism sector and positioning Syria as a powerhouse for light manufacturing.

Yet FDI, and the broader surge in capital inflows, cannot deliver financial stability on their own. Many post-conflict countries experience balance-of-payments pressures and renewed economic crises if capital flows are not well managed.

Research on global capital flow dynamics over the past four decades has provided strong evidence of boom-bust cycles in these flows, especially in developing and emerging market economies.

Rebuilding effective institutions, the rule of law and accountability mechanisms in Syria will thus be critical. These are essential not only to attract investment, but also to prevent the corruption and rent-seeking that often characterise post-war transitions.

A credible path forward must also include the active mobilisation of Syria’s diaspora – a deep reservoir of capital, skills and entrepreneurial energy. Approximately 400,000 Syrians have returned from neighbouring countries since December 2024, most from Turkey. This has included a handful of prominent businessmen.

A final point is that any sustainable recovery depends on political inclusion, especially given Syria’s ethnic and religious diversity. Economies that embrace pluralism tend to be more resilient and prosperous. Long-term prosperity will depend not only on sound policies but also on the kind of state Syria chooses to rebuild.

The coming years will be decisive. Syria’s economic trajectory hinges on whether it can strike the right balance between opening to global markets and protecting vulnerable domestic economic sectors from the shocks of rapid liberalisation.

With prudent policymaking, transparent governance and inclusive political solutions, Syria can begin to lay the foundation for long-term economic recovery. Much depends on the choices made in this pivotal chapter.

Faek Menla Ali 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. Can Syria rebuild its economy from the ashes of war? – https://theconversation.com/can-syria-rebuild-its-economy-from-the-ashes-of-war-262271

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tony Milligan, Research Fellow in the Philosophy of Ethics, King’s College London

A sense of distance has always been part of romantic love. The experience of wanting to be with another person often requires separation, if only in the form of days apart for work and travel. Matters become more complicated, however, when that distance is mediated by technology – by dating app swipes, messaging on WhatsApp and FaceTime.

For myself, as a philosopher of love, there is no good reason to say that loving relationships of a mostly remote nature cannot endure – or that physical separation inevitably and eventually destroys love. Much of society’s collective understanding of love suggests this is simply not true. Longing for another human can continue at a distance, even if we want that distance to end.

That said, one of the most familiar uncertainties about romantic love is the fear that it is a drama played out within the self, and that the other person does not care in the same way. When technology mediates contact, this can strengthen familiar forms of scepticism about love – for example, about whether or not the other person is really who they seem to be. We want sincerity and depth of feeling. Not just a pleasing response.

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Dating today can feel like a mix of endless swipes, red flags and shifting expectations. From decoding mixed signals to balancing independence with intimacy, relationships in your 20s and 30s come with unique challenges. Love IRL is the latest series from Quarter Life that explores it all.

These research-backed articles break down the complexities of modern love to help you build meaningful connections, no matter your relationship status.

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If I am apart from my wife Suzanne for any length of time, I want our conversations over FaceTime and WhatsApp to be quite different from the interactions that might be possible with an AI girlfriend. I still want a real, tangible person at the other end of the technology, with whom I could share an embrace if only we were together.

In other words, our technologically mediated interactions do not stand alone – they are part of a life which is largely spent together. Location matters, and this is one of the aspects of love that accounts of the philosophy of love are generally bad at understanding (with the possible exception of some of the work on love by Japanese philosophers such as Nishida and Watsuji).

I do not mention shared places at all in my own book on love. Yet they are central to being a couple. People do not typically just want to meet in some random location. We want to be together in a determinate series of places, including our homes. Too much technological mediation can undermine this sense of being somewhere together physically. Being together online is not the same.

Love and its limits

My thought then is not that technologically mediated love cannot endure, but that it becomes something second-rate if there is too much mediation and not enough actual being together in a shared physical place.

This is an unpopular thought for two reasons. First, it involves saying that Plato and a long line of western philosophers have been right: some kinds of love really are better than others. “Better” in the simple and obvious sense that they are geared towards meeting our needs, smoothing out the bad parts of life, and making sure there are also enough high points.

Scientists can see this at a neurophysiological level. Some kinds of love activate the brain’s feel-good attachment and reward networks more than others. Romantic love and parental love activate more of these networks than love for pets, though the latter does trigger a genuine response.

Second, it involves saying that love is not infinitely plastic – it cannot be just anything we want it to be. Romantic love has a social history reaching back at least a couple of thousand years and perhaps a good deal longer. Our few surviving remnants of prehistoric tales deal with loss and longing, played out across the night sky.

Yet love has an even larger history which is shared with other social animals. It is a mark of our creatureliness, our physicality as a special kind of animal. We are not ghosts flitting across the glaciers, embracing only in cyberspace.

Our heavily constructed romantic ideas about what we can mean to one another still depend upon a solid evolutionary foundation of wanting to be somewhere familiar with a special someone – and grieving when this is no longer possible. Dogs do it, chimps do it, and so do we.

And so, if anyone wants to say that a largely remote and mediated relationship can be just as good as being together in shared places, or that a romantic relationship with a holographic anime character can be just as good as a romantic relationship with a real person, then my response is “not for beings like us”.

The fact we are human sets limits to the kinds of love that can work well. As I explore in my research, love is not a democracy. All loves are not equal. There are limits to the ways in which technologies can mediate (or even take the place of) romantic relationships of the most fulfilling sorts.

None of which will stop Suzanne from texting me, or me texting Suzanne, with a suitable range of emojis. And none of which will stop us from video-meeting at every opportunity when we are separated by an ocean or two.

But as we do these things, the promise is always there of a return to the places where we exist physically together. Using technologies when separated by great distances is not a substitute for sharing these places. It is a way of saying that we are coming home.

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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.

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Tony Milligan 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. Love in the age of WhatsApp – a philosopher explains how technology reduces the power of a relationship – https://theconversation.com/love-in-the-age-of-whatsapp-a-philosopher-explains-how-technology-reduces-the-power-of-a-relationship-254342

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stephen Lezak, Programme Manager at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford

During the cold war, the US and Soviet Union were locked in a desperate race to develop cutting‑edge technologies like long-range missiles and satellites. Fast forward to today and the frontiers of global technology have pivoted to AI and next‑generation energy.

In one domain, AI, the US has far outpaced any other nation – though China looks to be closing the gap. In the other, energy, it has just tied its shoelaces together. The reason isn’t technology, economics or, despite the government’s official line, even national security. Rather, it is politics.

Since returning to the White House in January, Donald Trump has handed out huge wins to the coal and oil and gas industries. This is no great surprise. Trump has long been supportive of the US fossil fuel industry and, since his reelection, has appointed several former industry lobbyists to top political positions.

According to the Trump administration, national security requires gutting support for renewable energy while performing political CPR on the dying coal industry.

The reality is that, since 2019, the US has produced more oil, gas and coal annually than Americans want to use, with the rest exported and sold overseas. It is currently one of the most prolific exporters of fossil fuels in the world.

In short, the US does not have an energy security problem. It does, however, have an energy cost problem combined with a growing climate change crisis. These issues will only be made worse by Trump’s enthusiasm for fossil fuels.

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has upended half a decade of green industrial policy. It has clawed back billions of US dollars in tax credits and grants that were supercharging American energy innovation.

Meanwhile, China has roared forward. Beijing has doubled down on wind, solar and next‑generation batteries, installing more wind and solar power in 2024 than the rest of the world combined. To China’s delight, the US has simply stopped competing to be the world’s clean energy powerhouse.

Roughly one-in-five lithium‑ion batteries, a key component in clean energy products, are made in China. Many of the newest high‑tech batteries are also being developed and patented there. While Trump repeats the tired mantra of “drill, baby, drill”, China is building factories, cornering the market for critical minerals such as lithium and nickel, and locking in export partners.

At the same time, household energy spending in the US is expected to increase by US$170 (£126) each year between now and 2035 as a result of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill, which includes sweeping changes to taxes, social security and more, will raise energy costs mainly because it strips away support for cheap and abundant renewables like wind and solar.

Household energy costs could go up even more as Trump threatens to make large‑scale clean energy development much more onerous by putting up bureaucratic hurdles. The administration recently issued a directive requiring the secretary of the interior to approve even routine activities for wind and solar projects connected to federal lands.

Meanwhile, climate change is hitting American communities harder with each passing year. As recent flooding in Texas and urban fires in California and Hawaii have shown, fewer Americans still have the luxury of ignoring climate change.

As the cost of these disasters mount – US$183 billion in 2024 – the grifting of the oil and gas industry will become an increasingly bitter pill for the nation to swallow.

China’s foresight

China, with its authoritarian government, is less susceptible to the petroleum-obsessed dogma fueling the Republican party. It does not have prominent leaders like US politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously warned that Democrats are trying to “emasculate the way we drive” by advocating for electric vehicles. Rather, China’s leaders are seeing green – not in the environmental sense, but in a monetary one.

It is generally cheaper nowadays to build and operate renewable energy facilities than gas or coal power stations. According to a June 2025 report by Lazard, an asset management company, electricity from new large-scale solar farms costs up to US$78 per megawatt hour – and often much less. The same electricity from a newly built natural gas plants, by comparison, can cost as much as US$107 per megawatt hour.

Across the world, utilities are embracing clean energy, choosing lower costs for their customers while reducing pollution. China saw the writing on the wall decades ago, and its early investments are bearing a rich harvest. It now produces more than half of the world’s electric vehicles and the vast majority of its solar panels.

The US can still compete at the leading edge of the energy sector. American companies are developing innovative new approaches to geothermal, battery recycling and many other energy technologies.

But in the battle to become the world’s 21st-century energy manufacturing powerhouse, the US seems to have walked off the playing field.

In Trump’s telling, the US may have simply exited one race and reentered another. But the fossil fuel industry – financially, environmentally and ethically – is obviously a dead end.

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Stephen Lezak 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 the US is letting China win on energy innovation – https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-is-letting-china-win-on-energy-innovation-261109

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Aoife Bowman Grangel, PhD Candidate in Health Psychology, University of Limerick

In developed countries, around 12% of young people provide regular, unpaid care for a family member. It’s work that’s essential, often invisible – and potentially devastating to their mental health. As more families rely on these young carers, many are left without legal protections, recognition, or the support they urgently need.

Across Europe, informal carers now provide up to 80% of all long-term care. This figure is rising sharply due to ageing populations, an increase in chronic illness, and advances in medical technology. Between 2000 and 2050, the demand for unpaid care is expected to grow by 50% in Europe alone, with similar trends emerging in the US and Australia.

As adult carers struggle to meet rising demand, children, teenagers and young adults are stepping into the breach. These young carers often take on domestic, emotional, practical and personal care tasks that would challenge any adult. While some report growing resilience, maturity and empathy, the long-term toll on education, mental health and physical wellbeing is increasingly hard to ignore.

Lost opportunities, lasting consequences

Globally, young carers face significant restrictions on their education and career prospects. In both the UK and Germany, research shows that young adult carers are less likely to complete university, less likely to secure employment and more likely to experience long-term unemployment than their peers. These disadvantages aren’t just financial – they’re linked to increased rates of depression and anxiety later in life.

The social cost is high, too. Young carers are more likely to face bullying, isolation and limited opportunities for friendship or leisure. Chronic illness in the household can increase stress, leading to economic hardship, family breakdown and domestic conflict. Mental health is caught in the crossfire: many young carers experience psychological distress, depression and even self-harm.

Along with colleagues, I published a study that underscored the urgency of this issue. Our research showed that young carers in high-income countries are significantly more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health, including anxiety, depression and severe emotional distress.

Not all care is equal – and neither are its effects. The intensity, type and duration of caregiving matter greatly. Young carers who provide personal care, dedicate more hours each week, or have cared for a longer period are at the greatest risk of mental health difficulties.

Girls and young women are particularly vulnerable. They are overrepresented among young carers and are more likely to take on intensive or prolonged responsibilities. These disparities don’t end in childhood. As young adults, female carers tend to experience lower educational attainment and less workforce participation than their male counterparts – disadvantages that have ripple effects on their long-term mental and economic wellbeing.

Invisible and unsupported

Despite their growing numbers, young carers are often invisible to schools, healthcare providers and policymakers. Most European countries provide no formal recognition, rights or protections. Even though the European parliament addressed the issue in 2018 and 2022, young carers remain absent from key EU frameworks.

The UK is a notable exception, with specific rights and national interventions for young carers. But gaps remain. A 2016 report found that nearly one in three young carers identified by local authorities received no support at all.

In the US, the situation is worse: a lack of national data means young carers are missing entirely from most political conversations and care agendas.

Yet support makes a difference. Studies show that recognition and perceived support, whether from teachers, friends, professionals or government policies, can protect young carers’ mental health and improve their long-term outcomes. Support can take many forms: respite care, school accommodations, financial assistance, mentoring, or even a simple acknowledgement that their role matters.

Without intervention, the personal and societal costs are substantial: deteriorating mental health, lost educational and career opportunities and increased economic dependency in adulthood.

If we fail to support young carers, we fail an entire generation of quiet caregivers – and risk undermining the sustainability of our health and care systems for decades to come.

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Aoife Bowman Grangel receives funding from the Irish Research Council.

– ref. Young carers face higher risks of depression, anxiety and lost futures – and most receive no support – https://theconversation.com/young-carers-face-higher-risks-of-depression-anxiety-and-lost-futures-and-most-receive-no-support-260654

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amin Al-Habaibeh, Professor of Intelligent Engineering Systems, Nottingham Trent University

Technology firms have apparently suggested placing tracking devices or a microchip under the skin of convicted criminals to monitor them in prison or when they come out, according to a recent report in the Guardian. Though the idea raises questions about human rights, the technology is certainly developing that could make such an initiative possible.

Electronic ankle bracelets are already widely used forms of this technology. They normally use a radio frequency connected to a base station, similar to your home WiFi, to ensure the device is within a specific range in or around the house. Others use GPS to monitor the location of the person. Such devices require regular charging, however.

Anyone can use commercial technology such as AirTags from Apple or the Samsung SmartTag that allow people or items to be tracked. The monitoring technology is integrated with mobile phone applications. This includes the use of other people’s phones in an encrypted network of communications.

In the UK, there are different types of technologies available that utilise GPS and other wireless systems to monitor individuals who are subject to movement restrictions because of a court order.

The technology was first introduced in the UK in 1999 and it is normally used as an alternative to custody or imprisonment. According to a UK government website, there are three types of tagging: curfew tags, location tags and alcohol tags. A curfew tag checks the location of the tagged person from a base unit (such as their home) within a specific time period.

If the base unit cannot communicate with the tagged person, it will send an alert to the related monitoring centre. Location tags have more flexibility as they monitor the location and provide information about areas that the person should not access or should visit such as rehabilitation appointments.

The third most common type are alcohol tags where the alcohol level is measured from the sweat of a person. The aim is to reduce violence or crimes related to intoxication of alcohol. In 2022, the UK government reported that approximately 97% of offenders’ with these tags stayed off alcohol.

In general, greater use of electronic tagging could lead to more prisoners being released early and so help reduce the pressure on prison facilities. This could have other social benefits such as avoiding any disruption of employment or family commitments.

However, limitations such as problems with the device signal or false alarms for breaching court orders have been observed in several studies. A 2019, study by the Scottish Government highlighted some of the strengths and weaknesses of these technologies. However, with the continuous development of monitoring technologies, such limitations are expected to be addressed with more effective applications in the future.

Technology that involves implanting tags under the skin has been explored in in the past for applications such as proof of identity, contactless payment systems and the opening of secure doors.

One type of implant uses a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag and is about the size of a grain of rice. In theory, similar technology could be used with a base unit or distributed monitoring network to develop a tracking system to locate a person.

RFID tagging is used routinely in supermarkets to prevent theft. The tags are often attached to expensive items to prevent them from being taken from the store without payment.

However, human rights campaigners have called the proposals from the tech companies for microchip trackers and other devices “dystopian”. Forcing people to undergo invasive surgery to enable technology firms to gather what could become highly sensitive and personal data about them takes punishment a step beyond the temporary restriction of people’s freedom of movement.

Electronic monitoring technologies, with AI support, are advancing at rapid pace. In the future and globally, the technology is expected to play a vital role in enhancing public safety, supporting rehabilitation and minimising the cost to public funding. But questions also have to be answered about what role we want this kind of technology to play in our society.

Amin Al-Habaibeh receives funding from Innovate UK, The British Council, The Royal academy of Engineering, EPSRC, AHRC, and the European Commission.

– ref. Technology could open up new ways to track prisoners – https://theconversation.com/technology-could-open-up-new-ways-to-track-prisoners-261625

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Emma Newport, Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Sussex

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. An Austen enthusiast might attend the birthday ball at the Alton Assembly Rooms in Hampshire or take an Austen-themed walking tour. They might dance at the Pump Rooms in Bath, a city with strong Austen connections, or in Utah, which has none.

These kinds of immersive events tend to surge in times of social and economic fragility. In part, this may be due to a particular form of nostalgia that psychologists have noted helps to mitigate loneliness and forge social connection.

During the pandemic, the Netflix show Bridgerton marked a revival of Austen-adjacent worlds. Fandoms that invite participation function like virtual realities, offering the kind of immersion we might expect from a headset and game console. But is this merely escapism, or do such immersible worlds offer ways of experiencing the present differently and more reflectively?

My first encounter with the immersive potential of Austen came through science fiction. In series seven of Red Dwarf (1997), characters are dispatched into the fictional Pride and Prejudice Land. It’s part of the newly arrived crew member Kristine Kochanski’s (Chloë Annett) favourite game, Jane Austen World – a virtual reality simulation she uses to civilise the other characters.

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This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

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Kryten, the service droid, breaks into this Regency idyll aboard a second world war tank and detonates a tea party, roaring “Dinner is served!” The absurdity left a strong impression on my younger self about Austen’s perceived delicacy, and the chaotic energies that surround her cultural afterlives.

Written by Robert Llewellyn (who also plays Kryten), the episode leans hard into domestic satire. Kryten’s female-coded role as cook, cleaner, carer and emotional manager puts him at odds with the interloper Kochanski, a middle-class, degree-educated white woman determined to instil gentility into the racially diverse group who occupy the lowest rung of the ship’s hierarchy.

Kryten’s unvoiced rage culminates in literal explosion, his head detonating when his labour goes unacknowledged. The episode becomes unexpectedly dense: an examination of gender, class, race and post-human servitude. Beneath the explosive humour is a serious comment on immersion and gendered emotional labour.

Austen’s world of tea tables and letter writing, here rendered virtual, is shown to be both seductive and suffocating. It is a place where emotion is both cultivated and dangerously suppressed.

Austen’s claustrophobic worlds

Returning to Austen’s writing at university, I carried my own Dwarf-inspired desire to explode Austen – and to join Mark Twain in a desire to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone” when I had to read Pride and Prejudice (1813).

I mistakenly believed Austen’s novels offered an obsessive focus on narrow domesticity while ignoring war, revolution, poverty and the illiberal qualities of a supposedly enlightened age. However, in later life I came to realise that, like the confines of a mining ship in deep space, what Austen describes is less small than it is dense and claustrophobic.

Austen’s writing is sharply attentive to the relationship between imaginative freedom and physical constraint, especially for women. Her characters frequently reflect on travel and distance. In Persuasion (1817), Anne Elliot remarks that men “live in the world” while women like herself “live in it only by hearing of it”. In Mansfield Park
(1814), Edmund Bertram jokes that his cousin Fanny Price will “be taking a trip into China” through her reading.

His remark is inflected by Austen including reference to British author Samuel Johnson and his collection The Idler (1760), which Edmund lists among the books he imagines Fanny to be transported by. In an essay from The Idler, Johnson dismisses travel writing as disappointing, failing in immersing the reader for it so often only describes “the face of the country”.

Edmund and Fanny’s conversation takes place in the country house’s East Room, which Austen researchers have described as the most prominent metaphor for Fanny’s “spiritual distance” from the rest of the household. The room is filled with castoffs: faded embroidery, unwanted books, bad portraits. Fanny, too, is a penniless castoff, taken in by wealthier relations but frequently overlooked.

When her uncle sends her back to her lower-class family for refusing a lucrative match, Fanny is punished for her autonomy. She cannot leave Mansfield Park at will, and her imagined departures, whether into books, ideas or “China” – where she might enter a form of narrative virtual reality – offer no protection from real-life threats. Fanny’s reading in the East Room is abruptly curtailed by Edmund’s needs and the encroaching domestic chaos of an amateur theatrical production.

Yet this constraint is part of Austen’s point. The grand estate of Mansfield Park is funded by a shadowy West Indian plantation and enslaved labour, an economic foundation that goes unspoken and unseen. Those who travel there do so off the page.

When Fanny raises the question of the plantation’s ethics, she is met with silence. Who and what is not seen – Fanny, the plantation and its workers, the real costs of luxury – become as significant as what is. Fanny’s room, stripped of wealth, stands in quiet opposition to the brutal source of Mansfield Park’s comforts.

Immersible worlds – whether a Regency ball in Bath, a role in a household play, or a journey into “China” – can be a form of forgetting as much as imagining. The cast at Mansfield throw themselves into Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798), a sexually suggestive play, with little reflection on how their roles might influence or be influenced by their desires. Fanny, unwilling to participate, sees these risks more clearly, as she does with the larger social problems to which her cousins remain wilfully unseeing.

In Austen’s novels, the immersive imagination is double-edged: it contains the risk of abstraction and of losing touch with the present, even as it offers solace and self-making. What Austen reminds us, then, is to interrogate our relationship with immersible worlds.

As technology brings us ever closer to the virtual realities experienced by the boys from the Dwarf – and as our lived reality is growing more precarious, impoverished and violent – immersible worlds await the careworn. Yet we must beware simply rehearsing the silences which Austen so carefully wrote around.

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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.

Emma Newport 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. Enjoyed together, Red Dwarf and Jane Austen offer a lesson in immersive world building – https://theconversation.com/enjoyed-together-red-dwarf-and-jane-austen-offer-a-lesson-in-immersive-world-building-259612