“Affirmative action won’t be around for much longer, ” said one of our professors twenty years ago, advising against writing a dissertation on this topic. The United States Supreme Court’s Schuette decision…
Willy Sagnol has been accused of ‘laid-back, anti-black racism’.
EPA/Etienne Laurent
French football has again become embroiled in controversy following comments by Bordeaux manager Willy Sagnol about black African players. In a question-and-answer session with readers of a regional newspaper…
Since 1990, GDP per person in China has doubled and then redoubled. With average incomes multiplying fourfold in little more than two decades, one might expect many of the Chinese people to be dancing…
Paul McCarthy, the granddaddy of shock conceptual art, has gone and done it again. In a globally reported move, part-installation and part promotional-stunt to mark the imminent opening of Paris’s Foire…
Well and truly in the spotlight now.
Ian Langsdon/EPA
To the English-speaking world at least, the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature to French author Patrick Modiano will probably have come as a surprise. Many won’t even have heard his name…
You remember my best angle! How sweet.
Troye Owens
Nicolas Sarkozy has returned to mainstream French politics by announcing his plan to run for the leadership of the main opposition party, the centre-right UMP. He faces tough opposition from within his…
The German army prepares arms for the Kurds in August.
Jan Woitas/EPA
An “initial gifting package”: the opaque label is wrapped around £1.6m worth of heavy machine guns and half a million rounds of ammunition, which has now reached the Iraqi town of Arbil courtesy of the…
Counting your blessings. A worker at a chocolate factory in Germany.
Jan Woitas/EPA
Germany’s strategy for export-led growth has set the Eurozone up for a fall. Plans to introduce minimum wages in 2015 might be too little too late for European countries locked in a futile game of beggar-thy-workforce…
A protest against the killing of journalists by the Islamic State
Mast Irham/EPA
Over recent weeks there has been a constant background noise that Islamic State and its ideology are some sort of throwback to a distant past. It is often framed in language used last week by the deputy…
Calais might be in France, but it is the front line of Britain’s battle to control immigration. Yet the governments of both countries continue to pass the buck between each other and very little progress…
‘Memorial diplomacy’, on display in June’s D-Day commemorations, is a mode of symbolic soft power politics which uses sites of memory and commemorative events to boost relations.
AAP
When French president François Hollande rose to deliver the keynote address for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings earlier this year, he set in motion an unprecedented five-year cycle of commemoration…
Mood Indigo has received a number of enthusiastic reviews. I’m not sure why. The film takes quirky to an all new extreme. And as the French literary and comic substance to it have been pretty much completely…
In recent years, the service of troops from France’s then-colonies in both world wars has been the object of sustained presidential attention.
EPA/Philippe Wojazer
In vogue among the political left during the events in Paris in May 1968, the French term récupération refers to the danger of “the Establishment”, be it the government or a political party, seizing on…
The oil depot fire raging near Tripoli airport.
EPA
Libya’s already edgy security situation is suddenly in a steep decline. France has announced it is evacuating its nationals from the country by sea, and other countries are doing the same with their embassy…
French soldiers guard the crash site of Air Algerie flight AH5017 near Goss in Mali.
STR/EPA
The wreckage of AH 5017 lies scattered in the Sahel near the border between Mali and Burkina Faso. As the black boxes of the Air Algérie flight head for France and Paris mediates the aftermath, the crash…
Built in France for Russia – the Mistral class warship.
EPA/Franck Dubray/Ouest France
When it comes to politics, there is a generally held belief that when it is working, it is boring. Europe’s foreign policy politics routinely breaks this axiom because while it can rarely said to be working…
The race remains world cycling’s crown jewel, despite the doping scandals.
EPA/ Kim Ludbrook
July in France means tourists, sunflowers, Bastille Day and the running of the national bicycle race. The Tour is one of the most recognisable symbols of France in the global imagination. But it is an…
Although one of sport’s biggest mega-events has now come to an end (the World Cup), we are still only halfway through another – the Tour de France. Already, there are clear comparisons to be made between…
On 1 July, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French legislation banning the face veil in public space. As Frederick Cowell has observed, this will keep the French government from criticising…
“Gender, it’s just not my thing,” argued protestors against the ABCD equality programme.
Peter Potrowl, Wikimedia Commons
Simon Massei, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Everybody in France has a view on ABCD de l’égalité. A controversial school programme aimed at combating sexism and gender stereotypes that was introduced in 275 schools last September as an experiment…
Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa and Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations, Utrecht University
Professeure de management stratégique, directrice des programmes du MSc Arts & Creative Industries Management à Paris et de la partie française de l'Institut Franco-Chinois de Management des Arts et du Design à Shanghai, Kedge Business School