Three pieces in this issue of Democratiya confront the American left’s difficult relationship to patriotism. Todd Gitlin reviews What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States Since 9/11, a collection edited by David Farber. Anne-Marie Slaughter explores …
Landing in Iraq triggered in me an unattractive self-centredness. Instead of wanting to immediately strike out by foot and car to learn everything possible about the country, the very prospect of walking the streets – even in the Kurdish north …
Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her recent …
Editor’s Note: This lecture was delivered at a conference entitled ‘Sidney Hook and American Democracy: Current Crises, Future Challenges,’ on October 1, 2005. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Jean Bethke Elshtain and Social Democrats USA.
On the cover of this fine book is a photo of 10 men rowing a small boat. They’re looking ahead, perhaps at an oncoming threat. Amitav Ghosh, with prose as his oar, assumes a similar outlook toward the world, maintaining …
‘Even by the strictest definition, slavery’s soul-murder and slow death are facts of daily life for millions of people’ (p. x) say Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten of the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) in the excellent collection Enslaved. They have …
‘My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease,’ wailed the British novelist Margaret Drabble in 2003. Jean Baudrillard, the late French postmodernist philosopher, writing in Le Monde, also settled on the image of possession to …
While Western feminists and Western theoretical models of feminism have done a commendable job of deconstructing several age-old binaries that have characterised dominant philosophical and political thinking on gender, what is remarkable is the continued existence and even valorisation of …
Martin Shaw’s new study, What is Genocide, addresses the question: ‘how should we understand the idea of genocide?’ He offers a new definition of genocide which he claims represents a return to the spirit of Raphael Lemkin’s original formulation of …
Miall’s subject is ‘emergent conflict’ i.e. conflict resulting from social change. The book tries to analyse why some changes lead to violence and others do not and seeks to find ways in which change can be managed peacefully. Emergent conflict …
Most Americans, who have travelled to Europe, regardless of their political sympathies, race, class or gender, will be all too familiar with the topic of this wonderfully readable, sociologically powerful, and courageous new book by Andrei Markovits. The following scenario …
In the propagandist’s kitchen, an ideological heritage is like a cupboard full of ingredients. The chef selects a different combination of ingredients from his or her cupboard, depending on what kind of dish he or she is preparing. Similarly, a …
Ladan Boroumand is the research director at The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. A former visiting fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, she studied history at Ecole des Hautes Etudes …
Since 9/11, Americans have desperately wanted, or at least have claimed to want, to understand the workings of ‘the Islamic fundamentalist mind.’ Nothing seems more inscrutable to them than the sense that someone out there could so dislike them as …
Editor’s Note: We are pleased to make available extracts from Andrei Markovits’ Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton University Press, 2007). This book has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany, …
