What is Samandal? Samandal is about comics, a trilingual publication dedicated to comics from the region and abroad that comes out quarterly in Arabic, English, and French. All the comics in Samandal are published under a Creative Commons license. And how does Creative Commons change commons? To answer that, we need to look at […]
Geography Archives: France
End Times with Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010. Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in […]
A Nuclear Revival?
Justin Pemberton, dir. The Nuclear Comeback. DVD. New York: Icarus Films, 2007. 53 minutes. Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival? Should we be? The Nuclear Comeback, an absorbing documentary video, is titled declaratively but sprinkles question marks. The Nuclear Comeback embarks on a tour of some of the high and low […]
Genocide Denial and Genocide Facilitation: Gerald Caplan and The Politics of Genocide
In his June 17 “review” of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali’s New Times described as a “leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,”2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3 Caplan says virtually nothing about […]
Après moi, le déluge: War, Debt, and Revolution
Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 415 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 U.S. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems. First, […]
Austerity: Why and for Whom?
Clearly, the global capitalist crisis that started in 2007 will be neither short nor shallow. The government rescue of the US financial industry pumped enough extra money into the economy and sufficiently reduced interest rates to give banks and the stock market the heavily hyped “recovery” that started March 2009 and is now over. What […]
Eurozone Crisis: Beggar Thyself and Thy Neighbour
Excerpt: The mechanisms of crisis Gains for German capital, losses for German workers and periphery i. Monetary union has imposed fiscal rigidity, removed monetary independence, and forced economic adjustment through the labour market. Workers have lost share of output relative to capital in Germany and peripheral countries. ii. The German economy has performed poorly, with […]
Iran Sanctions: An Obsession Explained in Five Acts and a Poem
Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma. To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]
Climate Crisis: A Symptom of the Development Model of the World Capitalist System
Speech to the Panel on Structural Causes of Climate Change, World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 Good afternoon, compañero presidente Evo Morales, thank you for this initiative, for this invitation, and for your hospitality. Thanks to the people of Bolivia and the people […]
BP and the Other Gulf
The name BP is now forever ingrained in people’s minds as the oil giant responsible for what has become the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. But the mammoth oil spill resulting from the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t the first time British Petroleum has brought disaster […]
Brazil and Iran: Our Motives and the Bullying Trio
Despite what the experts of barefoot diplomacy1 never stop repeating, there is nothing even remotely anti-American in the Brazilian position on Iran: our motives, unlike those of the bullying trio (USA, France, United Kingdom), are clear, transparent and openly stated several times. We support the peaceful development of nuclear energy. We do not believe […]
A Threatened Blow
On Tuesday, June 8, I wrote the Reflection “On the Threshold of Tragedy” around midday; later I watched Randy Alonso’s “Roundtable” television program, broadcast at 6:30 p.m. as usual. That day, the eminent and distinguished Cuban intellectuals taking part in the Roundtable replied to the program director’s acute questions with eloquent words which greatly respected […]
Excerpt from “Whither Maoists?”
“The sheen of Maoist political ideology seems to be wearing off . . . do we have an instance where Maoists have stopped mining operations in affected areas or have taken up the cause of the tribals for higher wages or better living and working conditions for them? If they have done so sometimes, the […]
Iran and the United States: Next Steps on the Brazil-Turkey Deal?
On May 24, Iranian representatives, accompanied by Brazilian and Turkish counterparts, met with the IAEA’s Director General, Yukiya Amano. The purpose of the meeting was to present a letter to Amano — as called for in the May 17, 2010 Joint Declaration by Iran, Turkey, and Brazil — formally notifying the IAEA of the Islamic […]
ElBaradei: Brazil-Iran-Turkey Nuclear Deal “Quite a Good Agreement”
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an inter-governmental organization under the auspices of the United Nations, from December 1997 to November 2009. Dr. ElBaradei and the IAEA were awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for […]
How to Make Peace with Iran
There seems to be a growing international consensus that the search for a “cold peace” with Iran is a desirable, even essential approach on the part of the international community. Indeed, successive “war games” at specialised institutions in the United States have shown that bombing Iran’s nuclear installations is militarily unviable. Even some Israeli and […]
Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Working Hypotheses
Listen to Étienne Balibar: Étienne Balibar: . . . I will be trying to reverse the implicit rule of this kind of event. Far from coming with positions for which I would argue, I mean already established positions for which I would argue, trying to convince others that they can be shared, I’m coming […]
Class Struggles and National Debts
The political conflicts and street battles in Greece today foretell what is coming to many countries including the US. The struggles are basically over what the government spends on and who pays the taxes. In today’s class-divided societies, classes differ over what governments should do and who should pay the taxes. Governments in such societies […]
Earth Day in Israel: Apartheid Showing through the Greenwash
On April 22, as part of the global Earth Day celebrations, homes, offices, and public buildings in 14 Israeli cities turned out the lights for one hour in an effort to “increase awareness of the vital need to reduce energy consumption.” The Earth Day celebrations included scenes of green fields, wind generators, and rainbows projected […]
“It’s All about Reconciliation”
I had the opportunity to sit for a conversation with the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan at the end of the 2009 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal. Ramadan is a public intellectual who has been a figure of both much praise and much condemnation, occasioned by controversial statements and positions that […]
