Adam K. Webb

Adam K. Webb
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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.

Recent Essays

Past, Future, and Breeding Out of Captivity

Adam K. Webb -
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

Adam K. Webb -
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. Still, something more timeless does come through in the frustration that I see growing on the faces of young Chinese on my Zoom screen, as they say they feel more like pawns on a shrinking board than ever before, and in the firm handshakes of the stubborn activists who will not yield and who appreciate the chance to talk with anyone sympathetic.

Palmyra, Centurions, and Fighting ISIS from the Bottom Up

Adam K. Webb -
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 those of us suspicious of the modern state and jealous of society’s spaces.

Liberty and Circuits of the Sacred

Adam K. Webb -
A few days ago was the first time I heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent.  Given the tenor of our times,...

Memory and the Damming State

Adam K. Webb -
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?

Adam K. Webb -
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 century, how open are we to our natural allies?

Driving Around the Panopticon

Adam K. Webb -
Plenty of space, I concluded with a glance at the approaching headlights in my left mirror.  I let the clutch out smoothly and started...

Mafia Among the Mountain Folk, Part II

Adam K. Webb -
“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...

Mafia Among the Mountain Folk

Adam K. Webb -
What ironies of fate converged that morning, such that a mob was about to come out on a march against us?

Untaxing the Virtues

Adam K. Webb -
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 society and the virtues that habits of livelihood can inculcate or destroy.

Of Dragons and Crescents

Adam K. Webb -
A revised foreign policy true to the principles of the Porch should turn the present one upside down.

Class and Clerisy

Adam K. Webb -
Some ruling classes in history, more than others, deserve pitchforks.
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