Meera Pillai
Meera writes on elections, sanctions and statecraft, translating the machinery of governments into plain language for readers on every continent.
Articles by Meera Pillai
An Election Calendar Is a Volatility Calendar. Here Is the Rest of 2026.
Markets do not fear elections. They fear not knowing the result, and the weeks before a vote are when that uncertainty is priced. What is left on the calendar this year, and what each contest tends to move.
The UN Charter says substantive Security Council decisions need “the concurring votes of the permanent members”. Since 1946 the Council has read an abstention as concurrence anyway
Article 27(3) was amended once, in 1965, and the amendment raised the vote threshold without touching the concurring-votes phrase or mentioning abstention. Yet the Council's own records show dozens of non-procedural decisions adopted while a permanent member sat out, and in 1971 the International Court of Justice rejected a challenge founded on exactly that practice. The gap between the text and the practice is where a great deal of Council business happens.
The Antarctic Mining Ban Does Not Expire in 2048. What Becomes Possible That Year Is a Meeting Nobody Is Obliged to Call.
Article 7 of the 1991 Madrid Protocol prohibits any activity relating to mineral resources other than scientific research, with no end date. Article 25 allows any Consultative Party to request a review conference 50 years after the Protocol entered into force on 14 January 1998 — and sets conditions that make repeal harder than the date's reputation suggests.
Two UN Member States Are Sitting in the General Assembly Without a Vote. The Assembly Never Voted to Take It Away.
Article 19 of the UN Charter withdraws a member's vote automatically once arrears reach two years' assessed contributions. The only thing the General Assembly can vote on is giving the vote back.
A Red Notice Is Not an Arrest Warrant. Here Is What INTERPOL Actually Circulates.
INTERPOL held 223,641 valid notices in circulation in 2024, fewer than 18,000 of them public. The organisation has no power to arrest anyone, and its constitution forbids it from undertaking activities of a political character — a prohibition policed by a task force of lawyers, police officers and operational specialists, and by a seven-member commission that received a record 2,586 admissible requests in 2024.
A Court With No Police Force: How the International Criminal Court Was Designed to Depend on the States It Judges
The ICC can issue an arrest warrant against a sitting head of state. It cannot serve one. That is not a flaw that crept in — it is the bargain that made the Court possible at all.
How Sanctions Actually Work — and Why They So Often Don't
The world's most-used foreign policy tool sits between talking and shooting. Its record is more complicated than either its fans or critics admit.
Washington's Midterms Are a Domestic Election With a Global Blast Radius
Control of Congress shapes trade, aid, alliances and tariffs. Here is how the rest of the world reads an American midterm.
BRICS Keeps Adding Members. What the Expanding Club Can — and Cannot — Do
The bloc now spans major energy exporters and most of the Global South's heavyweights. Its ambitions are large; its machinery is loose.