Geography Archives: Africa

In the long tradition of Jewish working class involvement in and support for liberation struggles, IJAN-Labor stands in solidarity with the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel, the National Committee of Local Authorities, and all parties, movements and institutions of Palestinian civil society in Israel, who have called a general strike for […]

Representatives of Iran and six of the world’s most powerful countries are scheduled to meet this week in Geneva, one of a series of events that increasingly looks like a rerun of the build-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As we prepare for a barrage of anti-Iranian media spin, it would be good […]

Hooman Majd Answers the Nuclear Question Question: How do you respond to concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Majd: Stop worrying.  Don’t learn to love the bomb, but stop worrying.  First of all, Iran is so far away from having a nuclear weapon.  I know there are all these reports, these alarmist reports: Iran has enough […]

  The recently concluded Congress of COSATU among other things declared to the world that COSATU will campaign for PUDEMO to be recognised as the genuine representative of the oppressed people of Swaziland. Further, that PUDEMO must be given diplomatic status accorded all liberation movements in various countries. This is a bold and very revolutionary […]

University of California faculty, students, and workers rallied against state budget cuts and unfair labor practices at 10 campuses and five medical centers from San Diego to Davis on September 24. As a boycott of classes to protest teachers’ unpaid days off (furloughs) and students’ double-digit fee increases unfolded across the state, members of the […]

25 August 2009 To the Editor The Economist Dear Sir, This is with regard to the review of my book Listening to Grasshoppers that appeared in The Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and […]

  The Arab and Muslim world is indeed in crisis.  This crisis, however, may give us a new opportunity to reclaim our fate from foreign powers, local autocrats, and religious fanatics.  To do so, we can benefit from recuperating the best elements from our great tradition of Arab nationalism. Under the banner of “Arab nationalism,” […]

  When I decided to teach Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness at Berkeley High School, it had been out of favor as an appropriate text because it was considered too controversial.  I wanted to do a whole unit on Africa and the Congo, including African authors, journalism, and history, and I figured we could start […]

  Lungisile Ntsebeza.  Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa.  Leiden: Brill, 2005.  300 pp.  $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-04-14482-8. One central question forms the backbone for this local study of governance in a rural district of the Eastern Cape: how is it that the chiefs and headmen, many of whom […]

It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).  But this […]

  There is growing anger in Swaziland as it emerges that the media have been forced to censor news that a group of King Mswati III‘s wives have been on another international shopping trip squandering up to E50 million (6 million US dollars) that should belong to ordinary Swazis. When the wives went on a […]

In a colonial conflict, the main protagonists are, on the one hand, the colonial power and, on the other, the colonized population, and, when it exists, the liberation movement of the latter.  This was the case in the Algerian liberation war, the struggle of the Vietnamese people, in Angola and in Mozambique.  The ability of […]

Doris “Dobby” Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90.  Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights.  The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant […]

  On Tuesday, July 21st, the United Nations Development Program launched its 5th Arab Human Development Report (AHDR).  The independently prepared report was not presented to the public prior to its publication, but criticism began to surface even before it was released, both from researchers involved in the report and from observers. Wujohat Nazar (Perspectives) […]

  Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption.  This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

How would you tell the story of your movie Rachel? It is a cinematographic inquiry into the death of a young girl who was crushed by a military vehicle in a diseased country.  This young girl was American, the vehicle was an Israeli bulldozer, and the country is Palestine and Israel — a region whose […]