Hugo Chavez came a long way from being a military officer attempting a coup to overthrow Venezuela’s corrupted politico-economic system to leading the “Bolivarian movement” which resulted in massive transformations and support from the Venezuelan people. His death means that his successor has huge shoes to fill, but all indications show that the political space…
The logic of “emergency” accompanying the policies of dealing with the crisis that we in Europe are currently experiencing is driving governments to adopt measures that bring them into opposition with the societies to and for which they are supposedly responsible. Austerity, neoliberal reforms, the dismantling of the welfare state, unemployment, the accumulation of wealth…
Historians of popular movements know that at some point institutional forms supercede continuous states of mobilization. The latter do not last for ever. Either new forms of routinized social reproduction are developed, or old ones are modified or return – sometimes in new and more vicious forms. Periods of heightened uncertainty surrounding major crises of…
Dr Allah Nazar is Balochistan’s most popular middle-class nationalist leader. Belonging from a modest family in Balochistan’s town of Mashkay, he started his political career from Baloch Students Organization (BSO). He founded his own faction of BSO in February 2002 that openly advocated an armed struggle for liberating Balochistan. In 2003, he went underground to…
He wondered if he did not want to take possession of what she knew, more by forgetting than by remembering. But forgetting… It was necessary that he, too, enter into forgetting.
Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion
Some twenty years ago, I remember taking a night stroll with my favourite uncle, an anarchist ideologue. It was a…
The funeral of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela took place on International Women's Day – a fitting day of departure for "the president of the poor" who was loved by millions, especially by women, the poorest.
When Chávez was elected in 1998, the grassroots movement took a leap in power, and women in particular were empowered. Women…
In this brief note I want to argue that the organised left needs to incorporate and support the indigenous working class movement and leaders. Further that the leaders of the orgnaised left must, in large part, be drawn from the working class movements, rather than, from the bourgeois. By the working class I mean those who…
Abbreviations Used
TWOTE: The Wretched of The Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon
TTAR: Toward The African Revolution (1964), by Frantz Fanon
Lx, RORTI: Lecture number, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934), by Muhammad Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal and Frantz Fanon remain to this day two of the leading thinkers from former colonies. Bound by a…
Q - Looked at as a doctrine what are you views on 'humanitarian intervention'? Is it a sound and workable concept and can and should it apply in the case of Syria?
V: The doctrine of humanitarian intervention developed among North Atlantic liberals in the 1990s as part of the elaboration of the “just war”…