I’m going to discuss the utility of non-violent resistance as it applies to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and, specifically, the occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip. Even more specifically, I’m going to discuss the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), of which I’m one of the organizers. But before discussing Palestinian non-violence, several things must be […]
Geography Archives: Asia
Countries in the continent of Asia
Washington’s Two Lost Wars
The United States has already lost the war in Afghanistan, just as it has lost the war in Iraq. President Barack Obama’s vast expansion of the Afghan war announced Dec. 1, and the extension of the violence into neighboring Pakistan, are intended to camouflage the reality of defeat, as was the Bush Administration’s “surge” in […]
The Current Conjuncture: Short-run and Middle-run Projections
1. Where We Are: a) The world has entered a depression, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). b) The United States has entered a serious decline in geopolitical power, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). c) The world environment is entering into serious […]
Open Letter from U.S. Trade Unionists to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: Boycott Apartheid Israel
“Sanctions alone cannot eradicate apartheid; that task is ultimately left to the people of South Africa themselves. But economic pressure and political isolation of the South African government can hasten the day when justice and freedom reign in that troubled land.” — Richard L. Trumka, June 23, 1987 “We call on other workers and unions […]
China Wins Struggle for Pipelinestan
A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington’s interest in Central Asian fuel sources — natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow […]
Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three-percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and […]
US-Iran Talks: The Road to Diplomatic Failure
The talks between the G5 plus 1 and Iran are careening toward a premature breakdown. If they do fall apart, it will be due in large part to a serious diplomatic miscalculation by the Obama administration. Along with its European allies, the Obama administration seized on a plan that cleverly asked Iran to divest […]
International Politics & Contemporary Art: A.S. Dhillon’s World Party/Model UN
A.S. Dhillon’s recent decision to paint again has to be seen not as his abandonment of creating public installations but as a step towards extending his social practice by specifically addressing the specialized audience of contemporary art. This transition from the outside to the gallery, the specialized space of art, is a process that began […]
The Impact of the Crisis on Women in Central and Eastern Europe
1. Impact on Women in Different Social Groups Financial and economic crises and a rapid loss of existential security are nothing new for women and men in the former socialist bloc countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). These crises have been a permanent condition of everyday life for the majority of populations in […]
The Future as History
A Historical Perspective We all know that when a glass of tea is three quarters full, it is also one quarter empty. I would like to dismiss the empty part of this dialectic first, the history that pertains to the self, to me, and then to talk a bit more of the history concerning […]
Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Take a look at the map. Afghanistan is next to or near Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India. These are all countries that are vitally important to the United States as key allies or enemies, and as potential economic and political competitors. Afghanistan is also next to Turkmenistan and other Central Asian Republics that are […]
The Crisis of Identity in the Postcolonial State
Farzana Shaikh. Making Sense of Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ix + 274 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14962-4. Farzana Shaikh offers a scholarly and erudite study of the competition to define and establish a “national” identity for Pakistan. The author argues that contested visions of the religious nature of the postcolonial state […]
The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez
On November 7, 2009, the Western media devoted ample space to the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. The news from Havana about the dispute between the dissident and Cuban authorities circled the world and overshadowed the rest of the news.1 Sanchez recounted her mishap in detail on her blog and in the press. In doing so, […]
The Impact of the Crisis on Women in Developing Asia
Introduction: As developing Asia is the most “globalised” region of the world in terms of both trade flows and financial flows, it was expected that the global crisis would adversely affect the region. However, while the impact has indeed been strong, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has, as of yet, not been negative; rather, the […]
Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists? Part 1
The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to radical secular universalism. The result has been twofold: identity politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but subverted it with a brand of […]
End Monopoly Capitalism to Arrest Climate Change
Human societies have created the bases of our survival, sustenance and advancement through the use of our natural resources in production with rudimentary tools and rising levels of science and technology. Yet in no time in history has environmental destruction been systematically brought about in most parts of the world. The people of the […]
In Response to the Bosnia Genocide Lobby
The original title for the article that follows was “Response to ‘Raoul Djukanovic’.” “RD” is the Internet pseudonym of Daniel Simpson, who we mention in our second paragraph (below), and who, as a member of what we refer to as the Bosnia Genocide Lobby, assails us wherever we publish something related to the former Yugoslavia. […]
Index: The Privatized War in Afghanistan
Additional number of American troops President Obama plans to deploy to Afghanistan: 30,000 Total number of U.S. troops that will be there after the deployment: 98,000 Number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Afghanistan as of September 2009: 104,101 Percent by which that number grew between June and September: 40 Percent of […]
Electoral Gore: Warlord Violence, Oligarchic Decay, and US Neocolonial Domination in the Philippines
The mass slaughter of 57 civilians in Maguindanao, the Philippines, on November 23 by a local warlord may seem a minor incident compared with the much more heinous destruction of whole villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan by US drones. In the Philippines, however, it acquires symbolic density by the resonance of contextual historic factors linked […]
Global Imbalances: Remarkable Reversal
An important feature of the global monetary regime of the last three decades is the imbalance in the distribution of current account balances across countries and country groupings. Recently, the most glaring discrepancy is the fact that a huge US balance of payments deficit is being substantially financed by developing countries and not largely by […]
