Last week we awarded our annual £500 prize for the best Loop blog piece in the previous calendar year, as judged by an independent jury. Here, Managing Editor Kate Hawkins presents the longlisted pieces — and revels who has taken this year's top spot
First ladies in Latin America are more than ceremonial figures. They influence public policy, advance political careers, and build power within the core of the executive branch – without a formal mandate, or accountability. Carolina Guerrero Valencia shows why ignoring them means misreading presidential power itself
Feminists all over Europe embrace solidarity as a form of political dissent – and face systematic repression as a result. Yet, Marta Rawłuszko argues, they continue to resist and offer deeply political and practical alternatives to capitalist and nation-state logics
In this year’s election campaign, argue Katinka Linnamäki and Emilia Palonen, Orbán is facing a formidable, new force. Emerging from the Fidesz cadres in 2023, Péter Magyar launched his attack on Orbán. He has since managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of polarisation that have favoured Orbán previously
The recent rescue of a US airman from Iranian soil obscures a deeper truth. As contested casualty figures emerge from America’s war, Kandida Purnell argues that what we see, count, and mourn in war is never neutral. Rather, it is carefully governed through a longstanding necropolitical logic that shapes public perception and sustains conflict
From the Strait of Hormuz to Europe’s gas crisis, energy dependence lets states project power through prices, not troops. This, says Ilan Kapoor, is reshaping geopolitical influence
Politically active people — including protesters and those engaging outside elections — are better represented than inactive citizens, write Jesper Lindqvist, Jennifer Oser, Ruth Dassonneville, Mikael Persson, and Anders Sundell. Images of placard-wielding protesters are a common feature in global media reporting. But do they affect policy outcomes any better than inactive people?
Swaptik Chowdhury argues that the postwar model of governing through economic growth and trade can no longer address planetary-scale crises. Drawing on deliberative democracy experiments and emerging AI tools, he makes the case for governance grounded in shared decision-making rather than market coordination alone
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