This article investigates Qatar’s sustainability crisis of the high levels of water, electricity and food use. The high levels of consumption have been enabled by Qatar’s significant hydrocarbons wealth, a generous rentier state’s redistributive water governance, and structural dependence on imported food and food production subsidies. The water crisis is silent because it does not generate supply disruptions nor any public discontentment.

This special section seeks to extent our knowledge on teaching innovative methods in European Union (EU) Foreign Affairs in time of challenges, politicisation, and digitalisation. It shares the experience of established and early career colleagues on how they designed, implemented, and applied specific innovations in their teaching. The section focuses on these experiences and aims to provide guidance on how specific ideas were put into practice in a hand-on and reflective manner. It seeks to tip into what works and why and how we as educators deal with challenges.

In the aftermath of the 2017 UK General Election, some claimed that Labour performed unexpectedly well because of a surge in youth turnout. Polling estimates for the size of this ‘youthquake’ ranged from 12 to 21 points amongst 18–24 year olds. Using conventional and Bayesian statistical methods, we analyse British Election Study and British Social Attitudes random probability surveys and find no evidence of a shift in the relationship between age and turnout of this scale.

Rising inequality has caused concerns that democratic governments are no longer responding to majority demands, an argument the authors label the subversion of democracy model (SDM). The sdm comes in two forms: one uses public opinion data to show that policies are strongly biased toward the preferences of the rich; the other uses macrolevel data to show that governments aren’t responding to rising inequality.