Skip to content Skip to footer

The Withered State

Disaster is the only news of the day. It was providential that a sinkhole has opened up in Guatemala. It is 100-feet deep with a circular chasm of 66 feet. An act of nature, it is felt, is so much easier to deal with than the many, too many acts of human despoliation. Oil plumes…

ByVijay Prashad

Landscapes of the Green Line of Cyprus: Healing the Rift.

Landscapes of the Green Line of Cyprus: Healing the Rift. From a deep wound to a beautiful scar. The UN controlled Green Line occupies approximately 3% of the land mass of the island of Cyprus. Frozen in a military status quo for the past 35 years, this strip of land swallows up abandoned…

ByDr. Anna Grichting

A Cypriot’s Problem, or How Not to Deal with Existential Anxiety

A Cypriot’s Problem, or How Not to Deal with Existential Anxiety What’s our problem? What’s in a problem? There is an old joke that participants to Cyprus conflict seminars probably heard more than once. It pokes fun at a peculiar Cypriot fixation, still highly topical, and goes like this. Three men are sentenced to death in a…

ByCostas Douzinas

Beirut Diary

Beirut Diary, April 2010 Walking into Beirut this spring was like walking into history. Not ancient history, necessarily, but the history of the city which is the history of Lebanon, pulled apart between “western” and “eastern” poles. Being in the city evokes the memory of people who lived there. Writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists from all…

ByMagid Shihade

Aid is not a substitute for politics : unmaking Gaza as a humanitarian casualty

“The occupied territories have the dubious distinction of having become a failed state before even becoming a state.” (International Crisis Group, 2007). The international spotlight is back on Gaza. Israel’s 31st May attack on the six-ship flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip has dominated news headlines in the West and beyond; from…

The New American Imperialism

Interviewed by David Barsamian MIT, Cambridge, MA 2 April 2010 (Article Courtesy of Alternative Radio : www.alternativeradio.org) One of the themes that Howard Zinn tried to address during his long career was the lack of historical memory. The facts of history are scrupulously ignored…

‘Islam, Colonialism, and Resistance’ – Zia Sardar

Zia Sardar Interviewed by Bux Qalandar Memon (forth-coming in NP 14 - Summer 2010). 1 - In your recent book Balti Britain you recall racist encounters that you had as a child growing up in East London. Could you explain the operative dynamics behind the racism of your youth and how it operates today? Has…

Come back to Pleasure

Despite his image as the sober genius of high modernism, T.S. Eliot often speaks of art as essentially amusement. The poet, says Eliot, "would like to be something of a popular entertainer,..would like to convey the pleasures of poetry...As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a…

ByRICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex

Report on the Anti-Cuts Campaign at the University of Sussex Images: Catarina Neto Carvalho This report is for information. - HEFCE Strategic Plan, 2010-2011 We begin with a comparison of two proposals. In January 2009 the Vice Chancellor’s Executive Group (VCEG) issued, in an attractive high-gloss brochure, a new strategic plan. Titled Making the Future, the document…

ByCollectively Written

Chhattisgarh: The Future of India?

NANDINI SUNDAR Chhattisgarh: The Future of India? Interviewed by David Barsamian New Delhi, India 29 November 2009 Nandini Sundar is a professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Let’s start with Chhattisgarh, a state in India where you have spent a great deal of time and you’ve written about. There is an…

ByNANDINI SUNDAR