Geography Archives: Colombia

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 […]

Iranians are writing their history.  The pen of the revolutionaries of the 1970s has been supplemented by the keyboard of a new generation.  Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters perfected clandestine pamphleteering and the distribution of audio cassettes to subvert the regime of the shah; today’s activists use Facebook and Twitter to get their message across.  This is […]

According to Ervand Abrahamian, a scholar of Iran’s contemporary history, George Rudé’s observation that “perhaps no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the crowd” is particularly true about the Middle East.1  While European journalists have invariably portrayed oriental crowds as “xenophobic mobs” hurling insults and bricks at Western embassies, local conservatives […]

July 19, 2009 The talks are finished for now, with no resolution.  The coup regime in Honduras, which ousted President Zelaya exactly 3 weeks ago, has rejected the 7-point proposal put forth by designated mediator Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica.  Zelaya’s delegation in Costa Rica had earlier stated they had accepted the proposal, but […]

  Monday, July 13, 2009 7:30 pm The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets), New York Please join us for a roundtable discussion with three leading Iranian analysts: Ervand Abrahamian, Hamid Dabashi, and Arang Keshavarzian.  The discussion will be moderated by Leili Kashani and be opened up to the public.  Come […]

Political power is never good or bad, never really just or unjust; political power is arbitrary, discriminatory, and most of the time violent.  In Iran, the ongoing demonstrations sparked by the election results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicate that such power can never really be monopolized by the state.  Iran’s civil society is fighting; […]

Monday 8 June 2009 We are a group of Iranian academic and antiwar activists in Europe and the United States who, in the past few years, have consistently defended Iran’s national interests in all areas including its right to develop peaceful nuclear technology.  Our varied activities in the face of anti-Iran propaganda by the neoconservatives […]

  Peter Sluglett.  Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country.   New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.  318 pp.  $24.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4. The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq’s history.  As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue […]

  Humanism and Human Rights Who or what is the ‘human’ of human rights and the ‘humanity’ of humanitarianism?  The question sounds naïve, silly even.  Yet, important philosophical and ontological questions are involved.  If rights are given to beings on account of their humanity, ‘human’ nature with its needs, characteristics and desires is the normative […]

C. Wright Mills created the concept of a “power elite;” he imported the term “New Left” from Europe to the United States, and he was among the first to catch the phrases “paradigm” and “postmodern.”  A global thinker in a square era, he was everything postwar America was not: radical, original, and hip.  His work […]

Detlev Claussen.   Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius.   Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.  440 pp.  Illustrations.  ISBN 978-0-674-02618-6; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-02618-6. “At bottom, the concept of life as a meaningful unity unfolding from within itself has ceased to possess any reality, much like the individual himself, and the ideological function of biographies […]

Nancy Fraser‘s analysis of the obstacles to social and political justice represents an advance at a theoretical level for those who face the dilemmas of social practice.  In this sense, her work reinforces the importance of the role of the intellectual, not only when it comes to dealing with moments of crisis, but also with […]

Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is one of the internationally recognized specialists on the Taliban.  Author of Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2008) among other books, this academic divides his time between London and Afghanistan.  Talking to Le Monde in […]

  5 May 2009 — It has finally happened right here in the United States.  Citizens who believe healthcare is a human right have been arrested and are being processed like criminals through the Southeast District of Columbia police station.  Their crime? Asking for single payer healthcare reform — publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare — […]

A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

Any recession by definition is associated with an excessive liquidity preference.  An ex ante excess supply of goods and services, i.e. the demand for goods and services falling short of the base output at the base prices corresponding to that output, which is what a recession is, must be associated with an ex ante excess […]

Despite some hopeful signs in the last two years, the Korean peninsula is again teetering toward crisis.  The Six Party Talks are stymied.  Progress toward normalizing relations between the United States and North Korea has stalled.  Relations between the two Koreas have deteriorated. In this context, North Korea’s rocket launch this week and the overreaction […]

Background Raymond Deane, “A Public Stoning in Germany,” Electronic Intifada, 6 March 2009; and Yossi Bartal, “The German Left and Israel,” Alternative Information Center, 18 March 2009. We are peace activists of Jewish background.  Some of us typically identify in this way; others of us do not.  But we all object to those who claim […]

  Chestnut Hill, MA — After administrators at Boston College forced the cancellation late Friday afternoon of an academic lecture featuring Professor Bill Ayers, student organizers of the event have decided that the show will go on — off-campus.  Student groups and faculty at Boston College drew criticism from a right-wing talk radio show host […]

  The global economic crisis was the main protagonist on the first day of Globalización 2009, the 9th International Conference of Economists on Globalization and Problems of Development, presided over by First Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura; Dominican President Leonel Fernández Reyna; Cuban Vice President Esteban Lazo Hernández; Nobel Laureates in economics Edmund Phelps […]