Martha Mundy

Martha Mundy is a professor emerita of anthropology at the London School of Economics. She began her research career in northern Yemen (1973-77), then taught in Jordan, Lebanon, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In 2011-12, she returned to Yemen to work with agronomists on agrarian transformation. Since the start of the war in 2015, she has examined the impact of policy and war on Yemen’s rural society and food systems, including authoring the report “The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War” (World Peace Foundation, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 2018). She is a contributor to the Observatory.

September 9, 2026

Editor's Choice/Geopolitics

Why Tamil Nadu Keeps Killing Its Own Projects

The Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) government has announced the cancellation of a series of projects initiated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which governed Tamil Nadu from 2021 to 2026. Among them

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s Mathematical Breakthrough Triggers a Battle Over Credit and Ethics

OpenAI has claimed to have solved one of the most celebrated problems in the history of mathematics: the “existence and smoothness” problem of the Navier–Stokes equations, one of seven Millennium Problems identified by the Clay Mathematics Institute, each carrying a

September 9, 2026

Anthropic Researcher Resigns, Warning AI Race Could ‘Gamble With Our Lives’

Artificial Intelligence

A young researcher at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, has resigned from the company, warning that the race to develop increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems is

Germany’s Far-Right Surge Tests, But Does Not Upend, Democracy

Geopolitics

The German Embassy in Colombo has sought to clarify Germany’s political situation following news of a surge for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)

Yemen’s Socotra Archipelago: The UAE’s Occupation and Destruction of a World Heritage Site

November 29, 2023

History

Environmental destruction entails two intertwined processes: climate change and the destruction of biodiversity, which mutually reinforce each other. Both are human-caused. Climate change is not the lead driver of biodiversity loss; it is

Why the United Arab Emirates Is a Poor Choice for a Global Climate Summit

November 23, 2023

Columns

It is no joke; the man who will preside over the upcoming climate summit, COP28 (which will take place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), from November 30 to December 12), is the chief oil