Editors: I’m writing to ask Democratiya readers to sign a letter (see below) on behalf of the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of the pre-eminent intellectual figures in Iran today, who was arrested in Tehran in April 27 and has …
Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1997), Terror and Liberalism (2003) and Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (2005). Over …
This is a powerful book written by young feminists about their dreams. I am 51 years old, with three children the same age as some of the authors; a white Australian feminist academic who has worked primarily in universities in …
Editor’s Note: Gary Kent sends this Letter from Iraq. Gary joined a delegation of trade unionists and British members of parliament in April 2004. The group included Dave Anderson (Labour MP, chair of Labour Friends of Iraq, and past President …
Momentous events tend to shift political allegiances. They bring into sharp relief underlying affinities otherwise masked by more mundane preoccupations and they highlight the potential for reviving latent traditions and generating new movements.
The anti-caricature campaign started by attacking a newspaper. It then focussed on Denmark as a defender of the freedom of the press, and now it has all of Europe in its sights, which it accuses of having a double standard. …
Editor’s Note: This is a version of a speech given at a conference organised by MedBridge Strategy Center, Camus: Moral Clarity in an Age of Terror, in Paris, 25 February, 2006.
Editors: Mike Brennan’s review of Bad News from Israel (Democratiya 3) was a triumph of maliciousness over accuracy. It is a sorry day for sociology when a Research Fellow in the subject actually complains that ‘swathes of the book groan …
Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, and the President of The Iraq Memory Foundation. His books, The Republic of Fear: Inside Saddam’s Iraq (1989, written as Samir al- Khalil) …
The following article first appeared in Daedalus 111:3, Summer, 1982, pp. 17-28 (Copyright 1982 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). It is reproduced with the kind permission of MIT Press Journals. Parts of the article were reprinted in …
Ever since the parties of the Second International split over the First World War, national security has divided left-wing opinion as no other issue. The end of the Cold War might conceivably have marked a resolution to these disputes. I …
What is really at stake in the furore over the Danish cartoons? André Glucksmann argues it is nothing less than the defence of the distinction between fact and belief that lies at the heart of western thought. Rejecting the Islamists’ …
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an existential one in which the real issue has been the mutual denial of the other’s right to exist. [1] From the late nineteenth century Jews and Palestinians have battled over each other’s legitimacy more than …
Editors: Norman Geras (in Democratiya 3) has written the kind of review that an author can only hope for. The review is crystal clear and gets nearly all of the major theses and many of the arguments of the book …
No serious study of the modern history of Iraq can be undertaken without a period of immersion in Hanna Batatu’s massive The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, first published by Princeton University Press in 1978. It …
