Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This is the text from The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up here to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

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Anybody who tuned in to Donald Trump’s prime-time speech to the American people last night hoping to hear that he plans an end to the US attacks on Iran and will focus instead on reaching an agreement over opening up the Strait of Hormuz would have been bitterly disappointed. I know I was.

Instead of a strategy to restore the vital flow of oil and gas through the strait – something which would have immediately calmed the markets and started to bring down energy prices – the US president opted for a familiar mix of revisionism, self-aggrandisement and bloodcurdling threats.

So we heard that it was never his intention to force regime change in Iran (despite having said exactly that on day one of the special military operation). We had the miraculous achievements of his administration over the past year which had restored “a dead and crippled country after the last administration” to what is now “the hottest country anywhere in the world by far”.

And instead of seeking a deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump promised to “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

Along the way, the US president took a potshot at America’s Nato allies who have been reluctant to get involved in this war, exhorting them to “build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us as we asked.”

In the event, Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte and many of Nato’s European leaders will probably feel as if they have got off lightly. Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have been outspoken in their criticism of Nato in recent days. Rubio told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the US would “reexamine the value of Nato”, while the president, when asked if the US was reconsidering its Nato membership, said the question was “beyond reconsideration”, adding that the alliance is a “paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

Trump is not the first US president to question the operation of Nato and worry about the outsized burden borne by the US. But none before has done so much to publicly undermine the alliance. But then, as Andrew Gawthorpe explains, Nato’s focus on European security has been a huge benefit to the US over the decades. Gawthorpe, an expert in American foreign policy at Leiden University, presents us with a cost-benefit analysis of US leadership of Nato, spelling out the many advantages which he says “generations of American strategists, military officers and diplomats have viewed as worthwhile”.

It’s not as if the US-Israeli military operation in Iran is a matter for Nato in any case, writes David Galbreath. Nato is a defensive alliance. Article 5 of its founding treaty holds “an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members, and triggers an obligation for each member to come to its assistance”. This is clearly not the case in Iran.

To be sure, as Galbreath notes, Nato’s focus has shifted at times over the years. From aiming purely at collective defence – defined as coming to the aid of a fellow member whose territory is threatened by a third party – at times Nato has intervened in issues of regional security, most notably in the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

But an individual member’s foreign policy adventures have never mandated nato’s involvement: indeed the US actively opposed the UK and France during the Suez crisis in 1956 and in turn UK minister, Harold Wilson, resisted pressure from US president Lyndon Baines Johnson to get involved in the US war in Vietnam. It would, Galbreath concludes, be tragic if – having weathered these storms – Nato falls apart over this war of questionable legality.

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Read more:
Nato has survived some serious rifts but the Iran war shows how the US has soured on the transatlantic alliance

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Israel’s forever war?

Not just questionable legality, either. After the US president’s speech last night the world is no wiser as to how long this might continue. But Trump’s enthusiasm for Operation Epic Fury will, to an extent, be calibrated by how he and his close advisers judge it might affect his party’s chances in the midterm elections in November. High gasoline prices and inflation (as well as continuing entanglement in a war – something he pledged not to do on the campaign trail in 2024) are likely to lose him votes.

For Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the calculation will be different. He also faces an election in the autumn. But when Israelis cast their ballots on October 27, they’ll be voting on different issues. Netanyhu’s appeal to voters on security grounds is a potent one. There’s a clock in Tehran which counts down to 2040 by which time the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei swore Israel would no longer exist.

A leader who could neutralise that threat for good could use that accomplishment to good purposes on the campaign trail, whether or not his methods are deemed legal in international law.

Leonie Fleischmann, a scholar of Israeli politics at City St George’s, University of London, has researched Israeli security policy over decades, particularly when it comes to the way it has been enacted by Netanyahu. The current prime minister, she writes, is a disciple of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. For Jabotinsky, the watchword was “strength first, diplomacy second”.

But, Fleischmann notes, there is an important secondary concern for Netanyahu beyond the security of his people. That is that at present the polls suggest that while his party might be the most popular with voters, the support is not enough to enable him to form a coalition government. And if he loses, Netanyahu could face trial for bribery and corruption and a possible jail term. So arguably, his security is at stake, too.

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Read more:
Why Benjamin Netanyahu needs the Iran conflict to continue

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On the Russian front

There’s a bizarre twist to the US-Israeli operation in Iran. In the initial years of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was relying heavily on Shahed drones supplied by Iran. Now Russia is returning the favour, supplying its drones to Iran and – as a bonus – providing data to help Iran identify and hit its targets.

Meanwhile Kyiv is understandably increasingly concerned that US involvement in the Middle East has inevitably meant that US munitions previously available for purchase by Ukraine’s allies are instead being used against Iran. If so – and it seems a reasonable assumption – it will seriously undermine Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to control rising oil prices, the US has removed some sanctions preventing Russia from selling its oil. So the war in Iran has the potential to be an utter disaster for Ukraine.

The one silver lining towards the end of last year was that Russia was losing far more men on the battlefield than Ukraine. But Charlie Walker and Bettina Renz have been following Russia’s recruitment and write that good salaries and lavish signing on bonuses continue to attract plenty of new soldiers.

Walker and Renz believe that Vladimir Putin has worked hard in recent years to repair and enhance conditions in the Russian military, prompting the in-house newspaper of the defence ministry to trumpet that “contract soldiers are becoming the country’s middle class”. Needless to say, the in-house defence ministry newspaper is bound to take a rosy view of conditions in the military, but the confidence with which this has been asserted suggests that anyone hoping for a collapse in Russian military morale in 2026 might be disappointed.

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Read more:
Despite massive casualties in Ukraine, Russia is unlikely to run out of soldiers anytime soon – here’s why

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– ref. Will row over Iran conflict spell the end of Nato? – https://theconversation.com/will-row-over-iran-conflict-spell-the-end-of-nato-279898

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Luke Parry, Associate Professor of Palaeobiology, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonised almost all environments on Earth – from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents.

But the planet was not always teeming with complex animal life. For the first 3.7 billion years after it originated, life was small, simple and largely confined to the oceans. This microbe-dominated world was a tumultuous place, with several major swings in its climate.

But all this appears to have changed about 538 million years ago (mya) during the Cambrian period. This critical juncture in the history of life saw animals bursting on to the scene in an event known as the “Cambrian explosion”.

All sorts of animals easily recognisable as groups alive today appeared in the fossil record, from echinoderms (starfish, sea cucumbers, urchins) and arthropods (spiders, crustaceans, insects) to various types of worm. This seemingly abrupt appearance of animals in a geological “blink of an eye” has puzzled scientists from Charles Darwin onwards.

Many of these new lifeforms belonged to a group of animals called Bilateria, so-named for their symmetrical left and right sides. This group now contains all animals with brains and complex musculature.

However, a longstanding question for palaeontologists has been whether this astonishing diversification event happened all at once during the Cambrian explosion – or if ancestors of Cambrian and modern animal groups can be traced further back in time. Our new study, published in the journal Science, could help to resolve this question.

Strange bodies

The preceding Ediacaran period (635-538 mya) was much more enigmatic than the Cambrian. Many organisms from that period have defied efforts to classify them. Their strange bodies – often resembling shapeless sacs or thin, quilted pillows – have no obvious counterparts among living species, let alone modern animals.

As a result, interpretations of Ediacaran creatures have encompassed almost all multicellular forms of life – from fungi and lichens to an extinct kingdom unrelated to anything multicellular alive today. These Ediacaran organisms lived in close association with mats of microbes that smothered the seafloor – a type of ecosystem that did not survive the advent of grazing bilaterians.

More recent evidence relating to their reproductive strategy and how they grew and developed has suggested they were, in fact, animals – albeit very simple ones without any direct, living descendents.

It isn’t until the very end of the Ediacaran period that the fossil record gives hints that more complex – and recognisable – animals were around. And most of the evidence for these bilaterian animals has come from fossilised burrows and trails, suggestive of complex animal life but telling us little about the animals that made them.

This has led to much debate about the nature of the transition from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian period – the start of which geologists have defined by the action of complex animals churning up ocean sediment for the first time.

A discovery to fill the fuzzy gap

In spring 2023, one of us, Gaorong Li – then a PhD student at Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology (YKLP) – made a discovery that helps to clarify this fuzzy gap between the weird Ediacaran world and the recognisable, complex animal-dominated Cambrian period.

Along with my PhD supervisors Wei Fan and Peiyun Cong, we explored Ediacaran rocks in the Chinese region of Eastern Yunnan. We were principally looking for fossil algae (seaweeds), the focus of my PhD thesis, in rocks known for well-preserved fossils called the Jiangchuan biota.

What we found in addition was a bizarre worm that lived tethered to the seafloor by an anchoring disc, and which could turn its strange proboscis inside out to collect food. These specimens were clearly complex animals, but not as they are known today.

We nicknamed it the “bugle worm”, and our team are still figuring out exactly where this strange beast fits into the classification of animals. Previously, it had been described based only on the disc anchoring it to the seafloor and named Cycliomedusa – but we found the whole organism, revealing it as something unexpected and strange.

As we continued splitting more and more rocks, it became clear there were more animals hiding in the Jiangchuan biota. In 2024 – now joined by a team from the University of Oxford including the co-authors of this article, Luke and Frankie – we went back into the field and pieced together this new fossil community.

We found some fossilised organisms characteristic of both the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. But surprisingly, we also found some that had previously only been known from the time of the Cambrian explosion. These included a primitive animal similar to the Cambrian organism Mackenzia, as well as various worms and swimming predators called ctenophores.

Most striking of all, we found the oldest evidence for the group to which we humans belong: the deuterostomes.

Several of these specimens have a stalk and tentacles, and closely resemble a group of Cambrian fossils called cambroernids. These now-extinct animals are related to living starfish and acorn worms – the closest invertebrate relatives to humans. This shows our own evolutionary story has its roots in the Ediacaran period.

The discovery of diverse, complex animals in the Jingchuan biota suggests several animal groups shared the world with the weird and wonderful Ediacarans for millions of years. Diverse complex animal life has a more ancient heritage than the Cambrian explosion.

Luke Parry receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Leverhulme Trust.

Frankie Dunn receives funding through an NERC Independent Research Fellowship.

Gaorong Li 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. Humans’ closest invertebrate ancestors date back much further than thought – how we discovered the fossils that show this – https://theconversation.com/humans-closest-invertebrate-ancestors-date-back-much-further-than-thought-how-we-discovered-the-fossils-that-show-this-279793

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stacey Pope, Professor in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Durham University

It’s one of the clearest things about me. I’m black and white … I think I cried for a month when we lost the FA Cup Final in 1974. I was only ten and it was near my birthday as well. I was absolutely gutted. [Jo, Newcastle fan since the 1970s]

Sexism in football, according to a recent BBC report is “a problem that isn’t going away”. When working on my book The Feminization of Sports Fandom, I discovered that the increasing opportunities for women to become football fans over the last three decades has not automatically led to equality.

Now a University of Durham exhibition based on my work will play a role in challenging negative attitudes and help reimagine a more positive future for women football fans.

My research draws on more than 200 interviews with women sports fans in the UK. These accounts demonstrate that sexism and misogyny have been, and continue to be, rife in football. This work has contributed to several UK parliament select committees, with findings providing evidence for the urgent need for safer, more welcoming and inclusive environments for women fans.

It shows how various strategies are used by men to undermine the status of women as “real” or “authentic” fans, and that women are routinely required to “prove” themselves as such. This is supported by statistics from football’s anti-discrimination organisation Kick It Out, which received reports of more than double the number of sexist incidents at football matches this season (2025/26) compared with the same point last season.

Colleagues and I also undertook the first research on UK male football fans’ attitudes towards women, surveying 1,950 men. It revealed that openly misogynistic attitudes still dominate football fandom in the UK. Three-quarters of men held either overt or covert misogynistic attitudes towards women in football.

To address this, we wanted to stage an exhibition that would call out common misperceptions of female fans. Away From Home: The Untold Stories of Women Football Fans is in equal measure about celebration and challenges. Co-designed with David Wright from Durham University’s Museum’s Galleries and Exhibitions Team, it recognises women’s memories and experiences as football fans – past and present – preserving these stories for the future.

Raising the profile of female fans

The lack of visibility of female football fans in popular and academic accounts, combined with assumptions that women did not attend football matches in the past, has contributed to the widely held views that women fans are less “authentic”. Or they are perceived as newcomers to football with less knowledge and thus treated with less respect.

Our exhibition, currently on show at the Beacon of Light in Sunderland, shares personal accounts of women fans of Newcastle United and Sunderland AFC from the 1950s to the present day, and reveals such assumptions and prejudices to be completely false.

This pop-up show is also about opening up challenging conversations regarding the work that is still needed to create safer spaces for all girls and women. Giving a platform to the experiences of female fans – both positive and negative – can help lead to changes in attitudes and a new appreciation for these women.

Despite football playing such an important part of culture, exhibitions on football are rare. Exhibitions with a fan focus even more so, and those focusing on female fans almost non-existent until now. Designed in the style of matchday stalls, the exhibition is popping up at sports centres and supporter fanzones such as Sunderland’s Beacon of Light.

Each fan featured is represented by a homemade football scarf, produced by supporters in a reference to an age before mass-produced official merchandise. Visitors can wear these scarves as they browse the stories, creating connection and emphasising the universal elements of football fan experiences. This familiar space and accessibility is critical if we are to unlock some of the challenging issues of sexism and misogyny that lie at the heart of this research.

Many of the stories emphasise the lifelong connections between fans and clubs that will be relatable to all fans, irrespective of club or gender. Margaret, a regular at Sunderland since the 1950s, sums this up:

Your football team gets into your heart and that’s where it stays. You cannot change that. My heart is with Sunderland Football Club, has been since my dad took me, and that’s the only place I would ever go.

Many featured fans describe gender inequalities in their experiences. This includes the expectation of giving up attending matches after marriage or starting a family, despite male partners continuing to attend.

There are also examples of sexism and extreme hostility towards women’s presence in the football stadium across all generations – as Beryl, a fan since the 1950s, describes: “The men just assume that you’re an idiot. Because they’re a man and football’s their game.” Lynsey, a fan since the 1990s, agrees: “We hear comments like: ‘What would you know about football? You’re a woman.’”

Creating better spaces for women

Highlighting these experiences can help us to reconsider negative attitudes to women fans today and imagine what the future could look like for them.

For a long time, women fans have felt they needed to accept what Newcastle fan Tracey describes as “football’s terrible sexist culture”, but there is a sense that this is changing.

As the exhibition tours, our work in collaboration with police and other major groups and organisations is developing solutions based on evidence that will help create safer, more welcoming and inclusive spaces for women fans. This includes improvements in national mechanisms for reporting and responding to violence and abuse.

Football can be an important force for positive social change. This exhibition and the research that underpins it forms part of these wider collective efforts to increase public awareness and understanding of the challenges women fans face. But crucially, it also celebrates these women’s lifelong memories, and the powerful sense of identity being a football fan can provide.

This exhibition work and article was co-designed and produced with David Wright from the Museums, Galleries and Exhibitions Team at Durham University.

Stacey Pope receives funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council and Foundation of Light National Lottery Heritage Fund.

– ref. The Untold Stories of Women Football Fans: celebrating memories, calling out prejudice – https://theconversation.com/the-untold-stories-of-women-football-fans-celebrating-memories-calling-out-prejudice-279703

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alastair Bonnett, Professor of Geography, Newcastle University

Speculative and futuristic visions of environmental calamity are being imagined globally through environmental fiction. Eco-dystopian novels can help people process their fears or mourn the loss of a more stable climate.

My forthcoming book, Nature’s Return, shows that while anti-environmentalism is gaining traction in the west, the diversity and urgency of environmental visions from across Africa and Asia are coming into view.

Here are my favourite examples from China and Taiwan, Nigeria and India.

China and Taiwan

“You are bugs” is the sobering message of the aliens in Liu Cixin’s bestselling trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Series two of Netflix’s adaptation, titled after the first volume, The Three Body Problem, is scheduled for release in late 2026. Liu’s vision of environmental retribution is anchored in a visceral portrait of Mao’s so-called “war against nature”, which reshaped the environment through things like mass irrigation and deforestation to boost economic production.

The trilogy is a leading example of a wide-ranging ecological turn in Chinese culture and Chinese science fiction. As the cultural critics Yue Zhou and Xi Liu explain, the story routinely takes aim at “rampant pollution, water shortage, natural resources depletion, overpopulation and electronic waste”.

Cara Healy, a professor of Chinese Studies at Wabash College in Indiana, US, argues that “for centuries, Chinese intellectuals wrote about the past as a way to critique the present”, but today it is the future that is employed and deployed “to comment on our contemporary world”.

In Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, readers are told that science fiction is “the greatest realism at the present time”. Set in a gang ridden island covered in tech trash, and populated by desperate migrants and mutant humans, Waste Tide is a bleak parable of China’s abundance of garbage: “This island has no hope. The air, the water, the soil and the people have been immersed in trash for too long.”

The themes of tech waste and contamination have a particular resonance in modern China, but are understandable to readers everywhere. This explains the lively translation market for comparable Taiwanese titles, such as Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes and Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes.

Nigeria

Climate catastrophe frames the drama and ethical vision of Lost Ark Dreaming, by Nigerian author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Lagos has been drowned, and people are crowded inside the Pinnacle, a vast, partially submerged, high rise in which the wealthy and powerful live on the upper levels, trying to keep the poor and the rising waters at bay. In Nigeria as in China, the eco-dystopian imagination is animated by images of injustice and cruelty, often in ways that refract colonial history. Other Nigerian-American examples include Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor and Tochi Onyebuchi’s War Girls.

India

Indian contributors to the genre include Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s
Analog/Virtual and Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay. The latter is set in the year 2041 in a post-Mumbai in which the population has also crowded into a towering redoubt, though this one is called the Bombadrome and is surrounded by a barren wasteland.

The mistrust of technologically driven change is a distinctive feature of Indian science fiction, but the new wave of eco-dystopias is part of a global conversation. They are diverse but united in their effort to make use of the future to register loss, yearning and possibility.

Malformed landscapes, biodiversity loss and tides of industrial debris are encountered throughout the genre, though climate change looms large in many examples from south Asia and Africa.

The Egyptian science fiction author Emad El-Din Aysha once speculated that dystopia was a distinctly western genre because those with “real-life anxieties around every corner” have no need to invent them. But it appears that real-life anxieties are not a brake but an engine for the imagination. Today’s dystopian imagination is ecological and urgent and asks us to travel far into the future and into every part of the world.

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

Alastair Bonnett 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. How ‘eco-dystopian’ novels from Asia and Africa are pushing boundaries – https://theconversation.com/how-eco-dystopian-novels-from-asia-and-africa-are-pushing-boundaries-275264

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Linda Woodhead, F.D. Maurice Professor of Religion, King’s College London

In the same week that a new archbishop of Canterbury was installed, YouGov admitted that a poll suggesting there was a “quiet revival” of Christianity was a dud. It had been inflated by fraudulent results and should be ignored.

To those of us who study the bigger picture of religion in Britain, this comes as no surprise. There are good reasons to doubt that Britain is experiencing a Christian revival today – but that does not mean it is dying out.

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Read more:
Is there really a religious revival in England? Why I’m sceptical of a new report

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To understand what is happening in Britain, it is helpful to compare it with the US, which has has long been viewed as exceptionally religious in comparison. Recent evidence suggests something less clear-cut.

In a major recent study, sociologist Christian Smith assembles the data. In the 1970s and ’80s, only around one in ten Americans identified as “nonreligious”. But from 1991, the proportion of people who identify as such has risen steeply, reaching 29% in 2021.

Today, 43% of young American adults aged 18-29 say they are nonreligious, and only a quarter of generation Z are regular church attenders.

In Britain, being nonreligious was much more common, much earlier. Today, around half the population say they have “no religion” – a proportion that has remained rather stable since the 2010s, according to the reliable British Social Attitudes survey.

By contrast, the proportion saying they are Christian has fallen steadily to around 40% today. Levels of regular weekly churchgoing are around 5%.

In other words, the decline of Christianity started later in the US than in Britain, and has not yet gone as far. But in America, it has been swifter, more dramatic and shows no sign of slowing down.

American-style Christianity can no longer be assumed to be the future for the churches in Britain. Such religion has always been more enthusiastic, congregational and separate from the state.

When Christianity last experienced a revival in the US, with the rise of the New Christian Right and televangelism in the 1980s, conservative and fundamentalist churches were prominent, and megachurches did well. Some blamed the decline of churches in Britain on the fact that they were not more like American ones. They were said to be insufficiently enthusiastic and self-promoting.

Megachurches never really took off in Britain, except for a few examples in big cities that tend to serve diaspora communities. And though the last archbishop, Justin Welby, hoped that an evangelical revival would reverse church decline, this failed to materialise.

The resilience of old churches

But Britain’s churches are not doomed. In light of the recent Christian decline in America, the stately power and traditional ways of the UK’s older churches may turn out to be an asset.

Though few people attend regularly, the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland are still the largest and most powerful of the UK churches. Institutional embeddedness matters.

The Church of England is constitutionally established, and all these churches play a central role in the school system by way of state-supported faith schools. Although the Church of England is not funded through taxation like some of its sister churches in Scandinavia, its considerable wealth – around £11 billion – protects it.

If generation Z show an interest in religion, it is traditional forms that appeal to them as much as the trendier forms that seek the attention of youth. We see this not just in Christianity, where both the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Churches are reporting new interest, but also in Orthodox Judaism and, to some extent, in Islam.

Still, the traditional churches are unlikely to return to a position like they held in society as recently as the 1980s. Today, revival is virtually impossible. When American evangelist Billy Graham won converts in Britain, he was not winning over people who had grown up nonreligous, he was speaking to people with a Christian background.

It is sometimes suggested that war or social collapse could lead to a revival of Christianity. That is possible, but history suggests that a plethora of different intense, sectarian kinds of religion and spirituality emerge in such situations.

Others argue that the Holy Spirit stirs individual hearts and minds, irrespective of the state of the churches. That is how Protestant Christians have often thought about revival, perhaps recalling Methodist enthusiasm or the chapel movement in Wales.

The striking thing about such revivalism, however, is how quickly it can fade. The chapels are mostly closed now. The Methodists are dying out. “Nonconformity” as a whole, still a major force in England in the 1950s, is almost forgotten.

Though the Christian nationalists on the American right are currently very loud, they have had no impact on the continued decline of Christianity in the US or the alienation of young people. Attempts by some on Britain’s political right to talk up Christianity are even less likely to succeed. They are reviving words, not religion.

What we have in Britain today is a landscape in which the historic churches appear a little stronger than once thought, and revivalist forms of Christianity weaker. Overall, however, Christianity occupies a much diminished space. Other world religions, especially Islam, are stable or growing.

“Nonreligion” is the biggest affiliation after Christianity, but that label hides diversity. Some of the nonreligious are atheist, some agnostic, and some are actively interested in new forms of spirituality, magic and supernaturalism. Although old landmarks remain, like church steeples on the horizon, the religious landscape of Britain is greatly changed.

Linda Woodhead receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK research councils)

– ref. There may not be a Christian revival, but Britain’s traditional churches aren’t doomed – https://theconversation.com/there-may-not-be-a-christian-revival-but-britains-traditional-churches-arent-doomed-279291

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Leonie Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City St George’s, University of London

Before Donald Trump delivered his prime-time address to the American people on April 1, many commentators predicted he would claim victory and signal that the US air campaign against Iran would be wound down – even without a deal with Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz. As it turned out, Trump said he would double down on the violence, promising to hit Iran “extremely hard” in coming weeks.

The White House simultaneously released a document headlined: President Trump’s Clear and Unchanging Objectives Drive Decisive Success Against Iranian Regime. “From day one,” it stated, “the objectives have been clear: obliterate Iran’s missiles and production, annihilate its navy, sever its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure it never acquires a nuclear weapon.” These objectives, Trump said, were nearly complete and he expected to finish the job “very fast”.

For the US president, the key marker of the success or otherwise of this foreign policy gambit will come in November’s midterm elections. So his strategic decisions are likely to be heavily influenced by the need to be able to claim victory, while also limiting any negative outcomes from the energy price shock engulfing the world. To do this, he must declare victory fairly soon.

But Trump’s partner in the war, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has a markedly different set of strategic priorities (although electoral politics will also play a big part in his thinking).

Launching Israel’s air campaign on February 28, Netanyahu said the goal was to “put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran”. He framed this as having been an existential threat to Israel for all of the 47 years that the Islamic Republic had been in existence, insisting that regime change was “not the objective, but … could certainly be the result”.

In the five weeks of the conflict, Israel’s strategic goals have both widened and lengthened. In Iran, while clearly working in partnership with the US, it wants to reserve the right, unilaterally, to “go back and hit Iran every time the nuclear and missile programmes are being rebuilt”.

Meanwhile, Israel has responded to attacks from Hezbollah forces in Lebanon by occupying the southern part of the country up to the Litani river. This area was designated by UN security council resolution 1701 in 2006 as a buffer zone in which only the Lebanese national army and UN peacekeepers were authorised to operate.

The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, has warned that Lebanese citizens who had fled would not be allowed to return “until the safety and security of northern Israeli residents is ensured”.

It appears that Israel plans a long-term occupation of the region. It already maintains a buffer zone in southern Syria, which it occupied after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. This, it says, is also to deter Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel.

Netanyahu’s war aims

The focus of Netanyahu’s security policy has consistently been directed at Iran and its proxies. My research with Amnon Aran has demonstrated that in perpetuating an “Iran-as-evil” framing, the Israeli prime minister effectively precluded any possibility of engaging with the regime diplomatically.

Netanyahu’s political worldview has been enormously influenced by the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Under Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall doctrine”, reinforcing the might of Israel is the only responsible response to the threat posed by Iran and its proxies. It is a strategy of strength first, diplomacy second.

In the past, Netanyahu has talked of defeating Israel’s enemies as his “supreme objective”. But more recently, analysts are describing what they refer to as the “Netanyahu doctrine”. According to this security stance, Israel must be prepared to launch “pre-emptive” attacks against any perceived threats, maintaining a permanent readiness for war.

So regime change of the Islamic Republic is not a direct goal – even if, as noted, the Israeli prime minister believes it might result from the pressure he is putting on Tehran. He is aiming to “create conditions that will enable the brave Iranian people to cast off the yoke of this murderous regime”.

But there is another important dimension to this “permanent conflict”. Netanyahu must call a national election before October. Polls suggest Israeli public support for the war in Iran could give him a boost in time for the election. Unlike the war on Gaza, which polls showed a majority of Israeli citizens wanted to end, there has been overwhelming support in Israel for the war on Iran.

Even ministers in Netanyahu’s government recognise that domestic politics has formed a big part of his motivation for launching this conflict now, saying that – as far as Netanyahu is concerned – “the road to the polling stations runs through Washington and Tehran”.

So far, however, there is little evidence that support for the war is translating into electoral support for Netanyahu. A lot depends on how the conflict plays out. A long war with heavy casualties and significant damage to civilian areas in Israel has the potential to damage Netanyahu’s election chances.

A poll taken on March 19 found that while the prime minister’s Likud party would receive the most votes, he would find it difficult to form a ruling coalition. And if he loses power, there is the prospect of his corruption trials proceeding.

So, a lot hangs on the outcome of this conflict. An early and decisive victory might have given Netanyahu the confidence to call a snap election. But this now looks unlikely. And if Trump decides to bring an end to hostilities without achieving the far-reaching change Netanyahu has promised, things could go badly for Israel’s longest-serving leader.

Leonie Fleischmann 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 Benjamin Netanyahu needs the Iran conflict to continue – https://theconversation.com/why-benjamin-netanyahu-needs-the-iran-conflict-to-continue-279777

Source: The Conversation – UK – By George Kafetzis, Research Fellow in Neuroscience, University of Sussex

It’s easy to take our eyes for granted. But our recent research shows they took an incredible evolutionary journey to reach their current familiar form.

It has long been known that our (vertebrate) eyes differ fundamentally from the ones of our distant relatives (invertebrates), because of their cell composition and how they develop before birth. However, answers to why or how these differences first emerged long remained elusive.

Our study suggests that our eyes descend from a worm-like ancestor that was roaming the oceans 600 million years ago. The same also applies to all bilateral animals, meaning animals whose bodies can be divided into roughly mirror-image left and right halves.

As part of our study, we surveyed 36 major groups of living animals (covering nearly all bilateral animals) to see where their eyes and light-sensing cells are located and what they do.

A pattern emerged. We discovered that eyes and light-sensing cells are consistently found at two separate locations: paired on both sides of the face, and at the midline of the head, on top of the brain. Across the animals we looked at, cells in the paired position are used to steer movements, while their midline counterparts tell day from night and up from down.

We concluded that an ancient worm-like ancestor of all vertebrate animals lost the “steering” pair of eyes when it adopted a mostly stationary lifestyle 600 million years ago, burrowing into the seabed. In becoming a filter feeder with no need to move around, the energetically expensive type of paired eyes was rendered useless and costly.

However, this lifestyle change left the light-sensing cells in the middle of its head unscathed, because the animal still needed to sense the time of day and distinguish between up and down. Although the paired eyes were gone, the light-sensing cells in the midline developed into a small midline eye.

Possibly within a few million years, this animal changed lifestyle again. A return to swimming reintroduced the need to control steering and measure its own body motion for efficient filter-feeding (sifting food out of water) and avoiding predators.

This pushed evolution to develop the midline eye by forming small eye cups on each side. These eye cups later separated from the midline eye, moved out to the sides of the head and formed new paired eyes: our eyes.

The loss and regain of vision happened between 600 and 540 million years ago. Components of the midline eye remained and became the pineal organ in the brain, which produces and releases the sleep hormone melatonin.

In many vertebrates, the pineal organ receives light through a transparent (unpigmented) region in the middle of the head. However, in the mammalian lineage the pineal organ lost its light-sensing capacity – possibly because early mammals were active at night and hid during daytime. So the eyes, which were more sensitive, took over the light detection which drives melatonin release and sleep.

Eyes of all shapes and sizes

Those animals that did not lose the worm-like ancestor’s original paired light-sensing cells comprise most invertebrates around today, since they descended from a branch of the evolutionary tree that never adopted a static lifestyle. Such animals include crustaceans, insects, spiders, octopus, snails and many groups of worms. These animals still have modern versions of the original sets of light-sensing cells.

The paired eyes of insects and crustaceans are compound eyes, with an array of tiny and densely packed lenses per eye. Instead of compound eyes, octopus and snails have camera-type eyes with a single lens.

In fact, octopus and snails independently evolved the same eye design and visual performance as us vertebrates. However, our retina – the light sensitive layer at the back of our eyes – has over 100 types of neurons (mice have even more – 140), compared to a mere handful in octopus and snails. This makes it almost as complex as our cerebral cortex – the outer and largest part of our brain.

Scientists have thought that in the evolution of our eyes, this complexity emerged fairly late. Similarities between light-sensing cells in the brain and paired eyes informed earlier hypotheses about a simple, pineal organ-like eye early in its evolution. In our work, however, we argue that a lot of this complexity predates the retina.

As such, it is likely to have been present already in the “cyclops” ancestor eye. This has broad implications for the origin and wiring of neural circuits in our retina and brain alike.

For us vertebrates, the evolution of our eyes and brain is intimately linked. The emergence of new paired eyes is a fundamental part of this picture, since the eyes allowed for the complex behavior that call for cognition and large brains. Without the eyes, we would not just be humans without eyes; we would not exist at all, nor would any of the other vertebrates.

George Kafetzis receives funding from the European Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Dan Nilsson receives funding from The Swedish Research Council, and The EU Horizons program.

– ref. Our modern vision evolved from an ancient one-eyed worm creature – https://theconversation.com/our-modern-vision-evolved-from-an-ancient-one-eyed-worm-creature-278120

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Benjamin Selwyn, Professor of International Relations and International Development, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex

The US-Israel war with Iran has sent shockwaves through the global economy and predictions of COVID‑era inflation are becoming hard to ignore. In many countries, these pressures are already being felt, as households struggle to afford essentials.

During and after the height of the pandemic, governments across the political spectrum experimented with price controls in a bid to protect people from soaring living costs. Spain and Mexico, for example, implemented such measures from the political left; Greece did so from the right.

They were a response to the pressures of inflation, weakened household finances and growing insecurity for large swathes of the population.

Among these examples, Greece’s “household basket” programme stands out as a detailed attempt to keep essential goods affordable. As consumers may once again be facing a cost-of-living price spiral, it is a case study worth examining.

Greece entered the inflationary period (2021-22) with some of the lowest wages in Europe. Its average pay is still just a third of that in Germany. When inflation hit 10%-12% in 2022, everyday necessities such as food, dairy products and basic household supplies quickly became more expensive.

In November 2022, the centre-right New Democracy government introduced the household basket, requiring major supermarket chains to keep prices low on more than 50 categories of essentials. These included bread, pasta, rice, dairy products, cleaning materials and baby food. Relevant items were highlighted clearly in stores, and the list was updated weekly.

Originally presented as a temporary tool, the programme has been extended repeatedly because of ongoing inflation – most recently due to concerns about conflict-related price spikes. It has become a central part of the country’s strategy to stabilise living costs, along with related measures including profit caps in the fuel sector.

A system based on transparency

What distinguishes the Greek model is how it combines regulation with consumer access to information via a digital platform. Large supermarket chains are obliged to publish the prices of their basket items online.

Once placed on the list, an item’s price cannot rise for seven days, though it may fall at any time. Retailers face fines of up to €5 million (£4.3 million) for violations. The scheme also requires supermarkets to submit supplier price lists, giving regulators insights into where mark‑ups occur.

The platform allows shoppers to compare prices across retailers and locate branches stocking specific items. All purchases must take place in person, maintaining the scheme’s focus on physical retail while improving transparency.

Beyond the basket itself, in 2025 the Greek ministry of development and retailers agreed price cuts of 8% on average for 2,000 goods – and profit margins on essential items were capped at their 2021 level. Inspectors conducted regular audits to enforce compliance.

Across many product categories, there were notable price declines. Among 56 breakfast foods and cereals, there was a price fall of up to 23%; among 34 cheese products, the fall was 5%-35%; and for fresh meat, the drop was 5%-7% across three products. On top of these, oils and fats dropped in price by 5%-16%, pasta by 3%-5%, and sweets and chocolate by 3%-17%.

The basket has gradually expanded to include pulses, fresh poultry, meat cuts, milk and cheese. The Greek government has also introduced short‑term “themed baskets” during periods of high seasonal demand. So far, Christmas and Easter baskets have included lamb, goat meat, turkey and chocolate Easter eggs to keep a cap on holiday costs.

Price controls remain controversial for some. Retailers in Greece have argued the system is unfair, and that they are unable to absorb the costs.

However, in the Greek case, supermarkets did accept reduced profit margins for the price-capped product lines. They responded with price wars to attract custom and boost market share, and with competitively priced own-brands. One consequence of these measures is that Greece now has a relatively cheap food basket compared with other EU countries.

In the UK at the height of the COVID pandemic, some large retailers raised prices above inflation – doubling their profits between 2019 and 2021-22. Under such circumstances, many may feel it is only fair to ask them to contribute to combating a cost-of-living crisis.

So, while price controls may not always please retail and other sectors, they are becoming more common. Many countries have been experimenting with ways to contain the cost of living, as practical tools to stabilise inflation and support citizens during unpredictable economic shocks.

Greece’s experience shows that such measures can be structured, transparent and enforceable. It also demonstrates that price controls need not be limited to one political tradition. They have been deployed by governments across the ideological spectrum when faced with inflationary pressures.

As the UK braces for further economic turbulence, triggered by conflict and volatile energy markets, Greece’s family basket offers a model worth studying. It is not a full solution to high inflation – nothing so simple exists – but it shows how governments can intervene to reduce pressure on households while maintaining oversight of essential markets.

A political party ready to champion measures that deliver immediate relief to struggling households could resonate widely at a moment when many people have yet to recover from the last cost‑of‑living crisis.

Benjamin Selwyn 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. Could the Middle East conflict open the door to price controls? Here’s how it works in Greece – https://theconversation.com/could-the-middle-east-conflict-open-the-door-to-price-controls-heres-how-it-works-in-greece-279696

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David J. Galbreath, Professor of War and Technology, University of Bath

The US president took the opportunity of a prime-time speech to the US public on April 1 to repeat his by now-familiar criticism of America’s Nato allies for not joining the war in Iran. He told them to “build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us as we asked.”

Trump’s anger at Nato in the past fortnight has been focused on the reluctance of the likes of the UK, Germany and France to land a hand in forcing Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. This vital waterway, through which ordinarily one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas transits, has been effectively closed by the threat from Iranian missile strikes to all but a few tankers approved by Tehran. The result has been dramatic, as energy prices have rocketed and supplies to countries dependent on Gulf oil have rapidly diminished.

The US-Israeli assault on Iran has failed to topple the regime or curtail its ability to pose a security threat in the region, leaving Tehran to wreak economic havoc. This flies in the face of the Trump administration’s claims of the overwhelming success of Operation Epic Fury. So the US president and his national security team are, at least in part, blaming Nato’s reluctance to get involved.

It’s important to stress that Article 5 of the Nato treaty mandates that Nato members must come to the aid of any fellow member which comes under attack. In the case of the US-Israeli military operation against Iran, Article 5 has not been invoked – nor does it apply. Further, many Nato members are mindful of the legacy of the disastrous war in Iraq. This sowed deep divisions within Nato after some members (notably the UK and Poland) lined up beside the US and others (France and Germany most vociferously) opposed the invasion. It also became a byword for an ill thought-out military campaign with dubious legitimacy and no exit plan.

As a result, most Nato member states are reluctant to get involved in the US-Israeli campaign against Iran. In any case, many of Nato’s European members are far more concerned about the war going on at their borders between Russia and Ukraine.

Nato reluctance has clearly stung Trump and his senior advisers. On March 31, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that: “We’re going to have to reexamine the value of NATO and that alliance for our country. If Nato is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked, but them denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement. That’s a hard one to stay engaged in.”

Asked by The Telegraph the following day whether the US was reconsidering its membership of the alliance, Trump said “Oh yes… I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration”. He went on to question the Nato’s effectiveness, saying: I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.“

Scepticism about Nato has been growing within senior US national security ranks for some time. At various times, Rubio, vice-president, J.D. Vance, and defense secretary Pete Hegseth have all questioned how an alliance based around the principle of US-led defence of Europe against Soviet aggression now fits America’s interests.

This is not a view shared by the alliance’s European members, who remain deeply integrated into Nato’s command and control systems and, until now at least, have placed a great deal of trust in its role as a key security and defence partnership with Washington. And not just Nato – the fact that Ukraine was being considered for membership was cited by Vladimir Putin as a reason for the Russian invasion in 2022.

Nato has changed – but it has endured

The alliance’s focus has shifted over the years, at times moving from being an organisation focused on collective defence to one aiming at collective security. This distinction can be summed up thus: collective defence is just what it says, pledging to come to the assistance of a fellow member whose territory is threatened by a third party. Collective security is more about mobilising to address sources of regional insecurity such as ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

But the 2014 annexation of Crimea (which raised the possibility of Russia’s “little green men” crossing the border into Narva in Estonia, a member state) and the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further underlined the need for Nato to have a strong focus on defence against a newly aggressive Russia.

The question is whether, as Rubio, Vance and Hegseth have all suggested – and as the national security strategy released by the Trump administration last November spells out – the US no longer sees European security as either its responsibility or its focus. Or, as Trump appears to believe, whether an alliance that won’t do his bidding is worth America’s while.

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Read more:
What the US national security strategy tells us about how Trump views the world

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But even in the cold war, Nato was not involved in its members’ military adventures. The US actively worked against the UK, France and Israel during the Suez Canal episode in the mid-1950s. Britain refused to join the US in Vietnam. Precedents such as these would suggest that the Iran war would ordinarily not be a place for Nato involvement, even if individual member-states could contribute.

Nato has been through crises before, but the fact that its European members have heeded the US president’s demands for them to increase their defence budgets shows that for them, at least, the alliance has enduring importance. For it to fall apart after nearly 80 years over Iran would be an unbecoming end to one of the most important collective defence arrangements the world has ever seen.

David J. Galbreath has received funding from the UKRI.

– ref. Nato has survived some serious rifts but the Iran war shows how the US has soured on the transatlantic alliance – https://theconversation.com/nato-has-survived-some-serious-rifts-but-the-iran-war-shows-how-the-us-has-soured-on-the-transatlantic-alliance-279799

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robin Evans, Postgraduate Researcher, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds

Almost 1 million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training. These so-called Neets – aged 16 to 24 – face a significantly higher risk of long-term unemployment, poor health and involvement in crime.

The proportion of 16- to 17-year-olds who are Neet is now higher than when the participation age was raised in 2014, requiring young people in England to stay in education or training until 18. The government has launched an inquiry into why so many are falling out of work and study.

Most research into this problem has focused on the characteristics of individual young people: low exam results, high absenteeism, socio-economic disadvantage. These factors matter, of course. But in our new research, we asked a different question: do the characteristics of the school itself make a difference to whether its leavers end up Neet?

The answer, it turns out, is yes – and it may have a lot to do with school culture and inclusivity.

We analysed publicly available data from over 3,000 secondary schools in England across three academic years, tracking how many of their school leavers dropped out of education or training within six months of finishing their GCSEs. Using statistical models, we controlled for factors like deprivation, special educational needs and prior attainment so we could isolate what the school environment itself was contributing.

Five school characteristics stood out. Schools with lower suspension rates, higher “Progress 8” scores (a government measure of how much academic progress students make during secondary school), and their own sixth form or post-16 provision all had a lower risk of students becoming Neet. Single-sex and faith schools also showed lower rates. Together with our control variables, these characteristics explained over 80% of the variation in dropout rates between schools.

We believe these characteristics may be markers of how inclusive a school is. Take suspensions. The rate at which schools suspend students varies enormously – in our sample, some schools barely used suspensions at all, while others issued the equivalent of nearly four per student per year.

Research shows that schools with the lowest suspension rates tend to have a more supportive culture, with clear strategies for keeping students connected rather than pushing them away. High suspension rates, by contrast, may signal an environment where some students feel they don’t belong.

Progress 8 tells a similar story. Schools where students make more progress than expected tend to be those investing in all their pupils, not just the high achievers. Research has linked high progress scores to a growth mindset among staff and effective professional development – hallmarks of a school that works hard for every student.

Previous research has found that many young people who become Neet feel lost and confused about what to do after their GCSEs. Having a sixth form on site may provide a default pathway – a familiar option for students who might otherwise drift away. Not every school can offer this, but strengthening partnerships between schools without sixth forms and local colleges could achieve something similar.

Faith and single-sex schools may benefit from a stronger sense of shared identity between students, staff and families, which research suggests fosters a feeling of belonging. That said, these schools can also have socio-economic advantages we couldn’t fully account for, so this finding should be interpreted with some caution.

Even after accounting for all the factors in our model, there was still meaningful variation between individual schools. Some had less than half the average rate of students becoming Neet; others had more than double. This tells us that something about individual schools – their ethos, their relationships, their everyday practices – is shaping young people’s futures in ways that go beyond what we can capture in published statistics.

Our study can’t prove that these school characteristics directly cause lower Neet rates. We are working with associations, not experiments. But the patterns are consistent, they hold up across three years of data covering the whole of England, and they align with a growing body of qualitative evidence about what makes schools effective.

The government has rightly made school inclusion a priority, and our findings support that direction. Rethinking zero-tolerance behaviour policies, investing in restorative approaches (which focus on building connections), and ensuring every young person has a clear and supported pathway after their GCSEs could all make a real difference. Nearly a million young lives hang in the balance – and schools have more power to help than we might have assumed.

Robin Evans receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Matthew Warburton receives funding from an anonymous donation to the University of Leeds to investigate NEET.

Nick Malleson has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Research Council (ERC)

– ref. The school you go to affects whether you become Neet – new research – https://theconversation.com/the-school-you-go-to-affects-whether-you-become-neet-new-research-279365