A weekly digest of selected geopolitical storylines
A historian helping you keep track. IR Lens follows selected storylines in geopolitics and places each week's significant events in the larger, evolving stories they add to. One email a week, Sunday morning. Free, no tracking.
The news is not short of information; it is short of context. IR Lens puts each week's events back into the long storylines they belong to and reads them through theory that has been tested for decades. Transparent about its method, and honest enough to report a quiet week as a quiet week.
The storylines
Each storyline is a long-running thread the digest follows week over week. Every new analysis adds to the tapestry, so you follow the bigger picture instead of the headline of the day.
- US–China power transition
- Europe's struggle for strategic autonomy
- Russia's pursuit of great-power status
- The Ukraine war
- US–Iran confrontation and Middle East realignment
The lenses
The lenses are well-known International Relations theories. Every analysed event is read through the lenses attached to its storyline: the security dilemma, deterrence theory, power transition and the Thucydides trap, alliance politics between entrapment and abandonment, and economic interdependence and its weaponisation.
How a week becomes a digest
- Gather. Every week, hundreds of articles come in from eighteen curated feeds, from BBC World and Foreign Affairs to War on the Rocks, Meduza and The Diplomat.
- Distill. They are clustered into events and everything routine is discarded. Only the five or six developments that move a storyline survive. A quiet week is reported as a quiet week.
- Analyse. Each key event is read through its storyline's lenses, against the storyline's accumulated history: what happened, what it rhymes with, what it changes, and what to watch next.
- Deliver. One email, Sunday morning, covering the storylines of your choice.
Who makes it
IR Lens is built by Koen, a military historian, Navy reservist and software developer from Amsterdam. He built it for himself: a helicopter view on current events for the geopolitical stories that interest him.
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