Geography Archives: France

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 […]

  A young boy sits on rusted tank tracks in the desert bordering Iran and Iraq.  His head is bowed, and he’s sobbing.  A few yards away, a dozen bearded men gather around a Shiite cleric.  The men weep as the cleric recounts the story of a fearless martyr killed during the Iran-Iraq war.  He […]

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.  […]

By giving Israel veto rights and threatening more sanctions, the U.S. is squandering the best chance we have for a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. Ordinarily, it would have been easy to dismiss the latest resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency censuring Iran as a text, drafted by idiots, full of sound […]

December 3, 2009 To Whom It May Concern: A modest set of financial transaction taxes could raise a substantial amount of needed revenue while having little impact on trades that have a positive economic impact. The cost of trading financial assets has plummeted over the last three decades as a result of computerization.  This has […]

  Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.”  Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]

  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s controversial visit to Brazil further underscored the independence of this country’s diplomacy, and gave Tehran a chance to defend its points of view on the construction of a lasting peace in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad’s one-day trip to Brasilia Monday was the third visit to Brazil by a Middle Eastern […]

OK, so the Palestinian Authority will not unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state.  In fact, the whole issue seems a misunderstanding.  Concerned that the US has backtracked on a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and that Israel was getting the world used to the “fact” that the settlements and the Wall, rather […]

  North versus South Cf. SOURCE: Financial Times, 18 October 2009 Laz (Humberto Lázaro Miranda Ramírez) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Juventud Rebelde. | | Print  

The End of Poverty? is a kind of bookend to Capitalism: A Love Story: if Michael Moore’s movie examines how private enterprise operates at home, writer/director Philippe Diaz ‘s documentary explores what happens when that economic system is exported to the Third World.  As scathing exposes of exploitation these nonfiction films share much — ironic […]

The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009 In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global Crisis.  This was not its original title.  We had proposed the title, Crisis, What Crisis?  The U.S. publisher did not like that title, but we […]

  Some religious communities are not reciprocating the tolerance and respect they insist on from others when it comes to gay rights, particularly in Muslim and some Christian communities.  That seemed to be the bleak message at the heart of To Be Straight with You, which was performed at the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin last […]

  Ilana Feldman.  Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xii + 324 pp. 84.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4222-9; 23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4240-3. Governance at some level is collectively and discursively conducted in the sense that the whole of society has a share in the making of its […]

  Click on the image to watch excerpts from Bassidji. In 2000, 16 years after my arrival in France, I decided to go back to live in Iran for a while to gain a better understanding of my country. In 2002, a combination of circumstances gave me an opportunity to attend a ceremony of national […]

  Laurent Dubois.  Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.  384 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-01304-9; $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-01826-6. Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World builds on a body of Caribbean scholarship that has been torn between trying to place Haiti’s independence from France […]

US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s.  Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009.  Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]

  Oliver Grant.  Migration and Inequality in Germany.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.  416 pp.  $190.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927656-1. Leo Lucassen.  The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.  296 pp.  $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07294-9. Elia Morandi.  Italiener in Hamburg: Migration, Arbeit und […]

  The history of the West Asia for over a century is one long history of how colonial and imperialist powers, both old and new, have arrogantly plundered, looted, dismembered, manipulated and raped a region for their unbridled self interests.  It is a history of total disregard and callous disrespect for the peoples of this […]

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 […]

  David Jan Sorkin.  The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.  xv + 339 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-13502-1. On January 14, 1791, the Comte de Mirabeau delivered a speech to the National Assembly in defense of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the controversial project […]