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 […]
Geography Archives: Iraq
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 […]
Choosing the Path of Critical Debate on Iran
Tariq Ramadan just got purged from not only his position as “integration advisor” to the city of Rotterdam but also his visiting professorship at Erasmus University. — Ed. An Open Letter to My Detractors in the Netherlands Tuesday 18 August 2009 Once again I have come under attack in the Netherlands. Last May and June, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ecological Revolution for Our Time
John Bellamy Foster. The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. 328 pp. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains. Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns […]
Purloining the People’s Property
Every week, Marcia Carroll collects examples of privatization (that is, corporatization of the peoples’ assets). Looking at her website, Privatizationwatch.org, will either make you laugh helplessly or make your blood boil. The “off the wall” giveaways at bargain-basement prices of what you and other Americans own eclipses imagination. The latest escapes from responsible government are […]
The Politics of the UNDP Arab Human Development Report
On Tuesday, July 21st, the United Nations Development Program launched its 5th Arab Human Development Report (AHDR). The independently prepared report was not presented to the public prior to its publication, but criticism began to surface even before it was released, both from researchers involved in the report and from observers. Wujohat Nazar (Perspectives) […]
Petroleum and Energy Policy in Iran
Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption. This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]
Who Wants Sanctions on Iran?
In a recent congressional hearing, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman called the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act “a sword of Damocles over the Iranians” that will soon come down if President Obama’s diplomatic overture did not show signs of success by the fall. That sword is no mere metaphor and might kill more […]
Mr. Mousavi’s Gas Embargo on Iran?
In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium. A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called “Israel Lobby.” But it’s a […]
Uneven Development Is the Root of Many Crimes
Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The phrase, responsibility to protect, brings to my mind painful memories of lack of protection of many people who died of ethnic cleansing in Kenya earlier this year. The incidents of ethnic cleansing […]
Reply to the Campaign for Peace and Democracy
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy1 has chosen to interpret our “Riding the ‘Green Wave’” article2 as a “vitriolic and dishonest attack” on its authors, and an “offensive impugning of [their] integrity.” In fact, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is concerned with issues of central importance to the left in the United […]
Responsibility to Protect?
On July 23, a debate concerning the Responsibility to Protect took place in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a notion agreed to by world leaders in 2005 that holds States responsible for shielding their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes […]
“Come Over and Help Us”: A History of R2P
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 […]
Truth and Reconciliation for Iran
We are a group of university educators and antiwar activists with diverse political views who are based in Europe and North America. During the past few years we have been active in defending Iran’s national rights — particularly those relating to the peaceful use of nuclear energy — against the pervasive deception created by western […]
Iran’s “Leftist” Don Quixotes
In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]
Iraqi Government Moves against Iranian Mojahedin
Play now: Patrick Cockburn: I think the government would have liked to have done it earlier, but the Mojahedin-e Khalq, these dissidents, were protected by the Americans in Iraq really since 2003 because the Americans, one way or another, saw them as an ally against the Iranian government. Marco Chown Oved: And does this […]
Mapping a Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration
Ana S. Trbovich. A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 522 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-533343-5. Ana S. Trbovich’s A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration is a valuable intervention in the long running and, at times, torturous debate over the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. The […]
Independence Is a Hard-earned Reality in Iran
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 […]
