In 1998, Claude Lefort received the Hannah Arendt Prize given by the City-State of Bremen and co-sponsored with the Heinrich Boell Stiftung of the German Green Party. I was asked to deliver the Laudatio before a mixed public consisting of …
Editor’s Note: Nick Cohen’s best-seller, What’s Left? How The Left Lost Its Way was published by Forth Estate in 2007. It was hailed by Martin Kettle as ‘A roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the …
Professor Mary Kaldor is Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament and founder and Co-Chair of the Helsinki Citizens …
In a wide-ranging interview Mary Kaldor argues that peace and human rights are the twin foundations of a progressive foreign policy. She maps the terrain of contemporary politics: as she sees it, a global mismatch between the ‘militarised unilateralist character …
Bret Benjamin promises a more ‘careful,’ ‘nuanced’ and ‘sophisticated’ analysis of the World Bank (pp. xi-xv) by understanding it as a ‘cultural as well as an economic institution (p. xii).’ He is only partly true to his word.
Newsfeed from Afghanistan: A woman sets herself on fire in protest to a forced marriage to a man three times her age; a six-year-old girl is given as repayment for her father’s gambling debt; a daughter is killed by her …
Consider the following claims about American and Israeli foreign policy, all of them fairly typical of left discourse on foreign affairs [1]: (1) ‘The violence of the Iraq War, the chaos that has come to Iraq, can be traced directly …
Visiting Havana is like travelling in a time machine to a film-noir inspired past. From the classic American cars to the sunglass-wearing secret police and the city’s crumbling visage, Havana looks and feels stuck in the Cold War. Disembarking from …
It is an odd business to have opinions about whole nations. Even if it makes sense at all, the epistemological problem remains: how to know what country X ostensibly feels about country Y? The Pew Global Attitudes Project conducts surveys …
Since 2000 there has been a global surge of anti-Semitism that has taken the form of a rise in the number of physical attacks upon Jews and a growth in anti-Semitic discourse. These phenomena depend upon hostile constructs of ‘Zionism’ …
“It is my pleasure to meet with you in the new Middle East,” said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a speech to the Syrian Journalists’ Union on August 15, 2006. [1] But Bashar’s new Middle East was neither the one …
The past six years have found progressives, liberals, and socialists busily rethinking their ideologies, allegiances and priorities. The tumult of the post-9/11 world has shaken up the certainties of the right as well. The result has been what Tony Blair …
In The Truce, Primo Levi describes a cruelly protracted train journey, following the liberation of Auschwitz, from Krakow to a transit camp at Katowice in Upper Silesia. When the train makes one of many unexplained stops, at a place called …
Editors: On April 9th 2007, a commanding officer of the Saqez security forces appeared at Mahmoud Salehi’s work and asked him to attend at the office of the prosecutor to negotiate with the governor and the prosecutor about this year’s …
The current political landscape of the Muslim community is one that is dominated by Islamist groups. The South Asian Jamaat-e-Islami finds its outlet via the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, the UK Islamic Mission and a …
