Despite its criticism of Tehran’s handling of protesters, the EU shies away from a serious diplomatic conflict with Iran. Both the Swedish EU Council Presidency and individual EU member states will participate in the inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that, “given the circumstances surrounding the controversial reelection” of […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
“Human Beings Are Members of a Whole”: Protecting the Iranian Civil Society
Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain. — A poem by the Persian poet Sa’adi (1210-1290) gracing the entrance of […]
Mr. Mousavi’s Gas Embargo on Iran?
In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium. A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called “Israel Lobby.” But it’s a […]
The End of Chimerica?
Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice […]
Uneven Development Is the Root of Many Crimes
Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The phrase, responsibility to protect, brings to my mind painful memories of lack of protection of many people who died of ethnic cleansing in Kenya earlier this year. The incidents of ethnic cleansing […]
Honduran Resistance to the World: Organize a Boycott against the Military-Business Dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti
June 28th of the this year when the Honduran population was preparing to participate in a popular opinion poll about the installation of a fourth ballot box in which it would decide whether or not to convoke a Constitutional Assembly, thousands of military soldiers kidnapped the Constitutional President of the Republic, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, […]
“Come Over and Help Us”: A History of R2P
Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have […]
Responsibility to Protect?
On July 23, a debate concerning the Responsibility to Protect took place in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a notion agreed to by world leaders in 2005 that holds States responsible for shielding their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes […]
Reply to the Campaign for Peace and Democracy
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy1 has chosen to interpret our “Riding the ‘Green Wave’” article2 as a “vitriolic and dishonest attack” on its authors, and an “offensive impugning of [their] integrity.” In fact, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is concerned with issues of central importance to the left in the United […]
The World Left and the Iranian Elections
The recent elections in Iran, and the subsequent challenges to their legitimacy, have been a matter of enormous internal conflict in Iran, and of seemingly endless debate in the rest of the world — a debate that threatens to linger for some time yet. One of its most fascinating consequences has been the deep divisions […]
Truth and Reconciliation for Iran
We are a group of university educators and antiwar activists with diverse political views who are based in Europe and North America. During the past few years we have been active in defending Iran’s national rights — particularly those relating to the peaceful use of nuclear energy — against the pervasive deception created by western […]
South Africa: A Nation in Protest, a Moment of Hope
July 31, 2009 It is Friday afternoon, and I am in the Johannesburg Oliver Tambo Airport preparing for my journey back to New York where I will arrive Saturday morning. I left South Africa and Swaziland at the beginning of July, only to return two weeks later to put together the project that I am […]
U.S.-Brokered Mediation Has Failed — It’s Time for Latin America to Take Charge
The mediation effort that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arranged to try to resolve the Honduran crisis, which began when a military coup removed Honduran President Mel Zelaya more than four weeks ago, has failed. It is now time — some would say overdue — for the Latin American governments to play their proper […]
Is Israel Guilty of Piracy?
On June 30th, the Israeli Navy hijacked our small boat, the Spirit of Humanity, 19 miles off the coast of Gaza. They kidnapped 21 crewmembers and passengers, including a former US congresswoman and a Nobel laureate. Then, they forced them into a port in Israel. Was this an act of piracy? And did Israel break […]
Education and Its Cold War Discontents
Andrew Hartman. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 251 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]
Iran’s “Leftist” Don Quixotes
In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]
In Memory of Neda Agha Soltan
On the fortieth day after the killing of Neda Agha Soltan. . . . Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran Abbas Abad Street, Tehran Vali Asr Street, Tehran Shahr Park, Rasht
Iraqi Government Moves against Iranian Mojahedin
Play now: Patrick Cockburn: I think the government would have liked to have done it earlier, but the Mojahedin-e Khalq, these dissidents, were protected by the Americans in Iraq really since 2003 because the Americans, one way or another, saw them as an ally against the Iranian government. Marco Chown Oved: And does this […]
Honduras Coup Resistance Speaking Tour in U.S.A.
One month after the interruption of constitutional order in Honduras through a military coup d’etat and in the wake of widespread reports of human rights violations harkening back to events of the 1980s, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) is bringing a delegation of civil society representatives from that country […]
Mapping a Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration
Ana S. Trbovich. A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 522 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-533343-5. Ana S. Trbovich’s A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration is a valuable intervention in the long running and, at times, torturous debate over the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. The […]
