Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xiv + 288 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13846-8; (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-51101-8. Over the last couple decades, histories of the partition of India and its consequences have proliferated. But Vazira Zamindar’s study stands […]
Geography Archives: Asia
Countries in the continent of Asia
Pakistan: Will Land Leases Worsen Hunger at Home?
BAHAWALPUR, 22 September 2009 (IRIN) — Fears have been raised of a possible increase in food insecurity in Pakistan if a deal to lease out 202,342.8 hectares of farmland to Saudi Arabia goes ahead. Talks are reportedly under way between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to finalize an agreement. The land, to be acquired in all […]
The Financial Crisis and Imperialism
BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar? Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive? Will monopoly-finance […]
‘Encounters Are Murders’
Inquiries by magistrates into “police encounter” killings in India have mostly corroborated the police version of the situation and reality leading to the deaths. But the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S P Tamang’s investigation of the facts and circumstances leading to the deaths of 19-year olds Ishrat Jahan and Javed Sheikh and two others (25-year […]
Go East, Young Woman: The Khetagurovite Campaign in the Soviet Borderlands
Elena Shulman. Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv + 260 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-89667-2. The frontier as a theme in the development of Russian history has proven a useful means of analyzing the expansion of the state. […]
Food Supply in India: A Grim Outlook
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Its September 2009 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. We now face the immediate need of a qualitative change in our most fundamental economic relationship — delivery of food supply. The problem is not the variability of […]
Open Letter: We Condemn International Oil Companies in Bangladesh and State Violence against Bangladeshi Activists
On September 2, 2009, the members of a nationwide alliance in Bangladesh — the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports — were brutalized by the state police in Dhaka, Bangladesh. More than fifty members were injured. The national committee was conducting a peaceful demonstration and march as part of an […]
A Letter to The Economist
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 […]
Prison Poems
A Comrade’s Paper Blanket New books, old books, the leaves all piled together. A paper blanket is better than no blanket. You who sleep like princes, sheltered from the cold, Do you know how many men in prison cannot sleep all night? Autumn Night Before the gate, a guard with a rifle on his […]
Speaking Truth to Power: The Mythology of Imperialism
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 […]
The Japanese Elections and the Left
Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito in the 30 August 2009 elections, finally putting an end to Japan’s de facto one-party state. But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from […]
American Public Still Ahead of Its Leaders on Foreign Policy
Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography. But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts. The […]
Muslim in America: Identity and Isolation
An early morning flight to D.C., day-long conference and empty cityscape drained me of energy. Exhausted, I stepped out of my nondescript hotel into the street and felt a heavy air pregnant with moisture. Heading down the sidewalk to find dinner, I came across the shadow of a man who had the unmistakable gait of […]
The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights
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 […]
Swazi Queens’ $6m Shopping Spree
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 […]
A Crucial Factor in Colonial Conflicts: Opposition from Within
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 […]
Dear Shahid,
I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home. Rumors break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches us from border towns: […]
A Postcard from Vermont: Sanders Shows Congress How to Avoid Tar & Feathering at August Tea Parties
The Green Mountain state used to be a good place for retired union guys to get away from it all in August. Now, thanks to “Obamacare” — with its threats to the elderly everywhere — that’s not the case this year. I was sitting on the porch of Richmond’s On The Rise bakery last Thursday, […]
Beyond “Islam and Human Rights”?
Shahram Akbarzadeh, Benjamin MacQueen, eds. Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah. London: Routledge, 2008. x + 176 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-44959-5. Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah addresses a vexing theoretical issue: can contemporary human rights practically inform normative and political structures in the Muslim […]
Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants
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 […]
