Adam K. Webb
Adam K. Webb grew up in England, Spain, and the United States. He is now Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre, an overseas campus of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He has authored three books, including Beyond the Global Culture War (2006), A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow’s Economy of Values (2009), and Deep Cosmopolis: Rethinking World Politics and Globalisation (2015). His interests range broadly across political thought, and efforts to recreate room for traditions and liberty on the emerging global landscape. He divides his time among urban China, rural England, and other corners of the world.
Articles by Adam K. Webb
Past, Future, and Breeding Out of Captivity
Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century.
Pawns On the Board, on Both Sides of the Pacific
The last few years have shown that liberty and truth are felt less in the bones by each new cohort of educated élites who will go on to craft policy.…
Palmyra, Centurions, and Fighting ISIS from the Bottom Up
The fact that the chattering classes outraged by ISIS’s atrocities would unleash the latter-day centurions of the air so eagerly, while leashing ordinary people so cavalierly, should give pause to…
Liberty and Circuits of the Sacred
A few days ago was the first time I heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent. Given the tenor of our times, one might expect this to have…
Memory and the Damming State
The family’s life in this village had come to an end when the lake was dammed in 1958. One wonders who would consider such things worth it.
A Sheeshah Pipe for the Porch?
I came to Cairo to get a better sense of the prospects for such a global conversation. If the battle over values is likely to play out globally in this…
Driving Around the Panopticon
Plenty of space, I concluded with a glance at the approaching headlights in my left mirror. I let the clutch out smoothly and started what felt like a routine merge…
Mafia Among the Mountain Folk, Part II
“I don’t care if you bring the president of Peru and a thousand police—we’ll be carried out dead before you dig here!” Thus was the position of the twenty or…
Mafia Among the Mountain Folk
What ironies of fate converged that morning, such that a mob was about to come out on a march against us?
Untaxing the Virtues
What the political mainstream ignores, unsurprisingly, is that any change in how we raise revenue cannot be only about balancing the numbers. It also involves judgements about the texture of…
Of Dragons and Crescents
A revised foreign policy true to the principles of the Porch should turn the present one upside down.