October 13, 2010 Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics — the capacity of “getting others to want what you want,” which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or […]
Geography Archives: Africa
Countries in the continent of Africa
Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003
Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003 Excerpt (Footnotes Omitted): Several incidents listed in this report, if investigated and judicially proven, point to circumstances and facts from […]
Interview with Hooman Majd: US-Iran Relations in the Age of the Ayatollah
Equally at home in Tehran or New York, Hooman Majd benefits from a background as intricately woven as any Persian carpet. The son of a diplomat under the shah of Iran, Majd attended schools in California, India, Iran, North Africa, and England. After the tumultuous 1979 Islamic Revolution, return to Iran for Majd and others […]
Somalia Aid
Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was published in his blog on 2 October 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. See, also, Merle David Kellerhals, Jr., “United States to Strengthen Engagement with Puntland, Somaliland” (America.gov, 27 September 2010); Sophia Tesfamariam, “Ethiopia: It Is in the Minority Regime’s Interest to Perpetuate […]
The Global Water Crisis Should Be a Top Priority Issue
In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the No. 1 global problem. But the alarming problems of water — increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water and sanitation, pollution, flooding — are equally important and an even more immediate threat. On 28 July, the UN General […]
Radical Black Women, Leadership, and the Struggle for Liberation
Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ix + 353 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8313-9; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-8314-6. In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has complicated conventional representations […]
As’ad AbuKhalil: “The Shift from a Unipolar US World to a Multipolar World Is Overstated”
As’ad AbuKhalil, or Angry Arab as he is more commonly known after his blog The Angry Arab News Service, is in real life a most friendly and forthcoming man. A Lebanese-born author of four books on the Middle East, he is professor of political science at California State University and is visiting professor at […]
The Language of Power: Interview with Jean Bricmont
Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal. He is the author of Humanitarian Imperialism and co-author, with Alan Sokal, of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. He has written critically about ‘humanitarian interventionism’ since the Kosovo war in 1999. In […]
The Future of Islamic Feminism: Interview with Margot Badran
Margot Badran is one of the most widely known scholars of Islamic feminism. A historian by training, she has authored many books including: Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences(Oneworld Press, Oxford, 2009); Feminism beyond East and West: New Gender Talk and Practice in Global Islam (New Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2007);as co-editor, Opening the […]
The Rwandan Patriotic Front’s Bloody Record and the History of UN Cover-Ups
On August 26, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report on the most serious violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven-year period (1993-2003).1 The massive draft report states that after the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to […]
Against the Stream: Interview with Gideon Levy
For decades Gideon Levy has used the platform provided by the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz to shine a light on the brutal realities of Israel’s occupation. His journalism, along with that of his colleague Amira Hass, has been an invaluable resource not only for Israeli readers but, through the Ha’aretz website, for international audiences seeking […]
Blue and White: Where Uri Avnery Has It Wrong
Once again Uri Avnery is using his blog to criticize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Under the title “Red and Green,” Avnery comments on the long and interesting program recently broadcast on Israeli Channel 10 on the growing international isolation of Israel. Avnery, the veteran journalist and activist, repeats his main […]
Loyalism and Mau Mau
Daniel Branch. Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 250 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-11382-3; $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-13090-5. The two related themes in Kenya’s history that have drawn the most debate and interpretations are land and the Mau Mau war. Daniel Branch’s study […]
Prosperity or Plunder? Nigeria Slipping at an Oily Crossroads
“Disaster” doesn’t begin to describe the troubled oil scene in Nigeria. Last June, in the immediate wake of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the New York Times ran an article exposing a crisis in Nigeria that should have been capable of piquing the conscience of even the most hardened oil barons. It […]
Challenging Islamophobia: An Assessment of the “Ground Zero Mosque” Debate
Depending on the poll one consults, anywhere from 54 percent to 61 percent, and as many as 68 percent of Americans, oppose the building of an Islamic community center two blocks from “Ground Zero,” the site of the World Trade Center. Polls, of course, are notoriously inaccurate measures of public opinion. Depending on the framing […]
Who Will Allow Brazil to Reach Its Economic Potential?
The biggest economic question facing Brazil, as for most developing countries, is when it will achieve its potential economic growth. For Brazil, there is a simple, most relevant comparison: its pre-1980 — or pre-neoliberal — past. From 1960-1980, income per person — the most basic measure that economists have of economic progress — in Brazil […]
Israel/Palestine and the Apartheid Analogy: Critics, Apologists and Strategic Lessons (Part 2)
I. Apartheid of a Special Type In the previous section I made a distinction between historical apartheid (unique to South Africa) and apartheid in its generic form — a structured system of political exclusion and social marginalization on the basis of origins (including but not restricted to race). I concluded that Israel is different from […]
South African Public Sector Strike Highlights Society’s Contradictions
The two major civil service unions on strike against the South African government vow to intensify pressure in coming days, in a struggle pitting a million members of the middle and lower ranks of society against a confident government leadership fresh from hosting the World Cup. Along with smaller public sector unions, teachers from the […]
Israel/Palestine and the Apartheid Analogy: Critics, Apologists and Strategic lessons (Part 1)
I. Introduction In the last decade, the notion that the Israeli system of political and military control bears strong resemblance to the apartheid system in South Africa has gained ground. It is invoked regularly by movements and activists opposed to the 1967 occupation and to various other aspects of Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinian-Arab people. […]
Adam Jones on Rwanda and Genocide: A Reply
Like Gerald Caplan’s hostile “review” of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones’s aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones’s deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false — one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still […]
