Why did the banlieues burn?

Commentary Why did the banlieues burn? Colin falconer The violence on French housing estates in November 2005, which saw thousands of cars burnt, attacks on public buildings, occasional Belfast-style confrontations between police and young rioters and police helicopters overflying residential suburbs, sent shock waves through French society. The scale of the violence and repression was […]

‘The journalists of Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’: The Danish cartoon controversy and the self-image of Europe

Commentary ‘The journalists of JyllandsPosten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’ The Danish cartoon controversy and the self-image of Europe Heiko henkel As the controversy over the Danish ʻMuhammad cartoonsʼ gathered momentum, the apparent ease with which the cartoons – or rumours about them – were able to mobilize ʻcivilization-speakʼ, and occasional violence, around the […]

Voting for hope: Elections in Haiti

Commentary Voting for hope Elections in Haiti Peter hallward Late in the night of 29 February 2004, after weeks of confusion and uncertainty, the enemies of Haitiʼs president Jean-Bertrand Aristide forced him into exile for the second time. There was plenty of ground for confusion. Although twice elected with landslide majorities, by 2004 Aristide was […]

Shack dwellers on the move in Durban

Commentary Shack dwellers on the move in Durban Richard pithouse Shack settlements began to be constructed in the South African port city of Durban following the loss of land and the imposition of various taxes after the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by English colonialism in 1883 and the simultaneous movement into the city of […]

A fundamental agreement: The French presidential elections

Commentary A fundamental agreement The French presidential elections Colin falconer After twelve years of a relatively weak right-wing presidency under Jacques Chirac which saw several waves of mass struggle (beginning with the publicsector strikes of December 1995), a five-year period of cohabitation with Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002 and, more recently, […]

The sacralization of secularism in Turkey

Commentary The sacralization of secularism in Turkey meyda yeg˘enog˘lu Religion is back in Turkey! This is the prevalent secular fear, anxiety and apprehension that finds various expressions in the social, cultural and political context of today’s Turkey. But where has religion been all this time, to warrant the allegation that it is ‘coming back’? Why […]

Secularism and politics in Iran

that, unlike the secularism of the 1920s, which was imposed top-down, these demonstrations signified the reclaiming of the principles and ideology of secularism by the people themselves. This diagnosis is mistaken. First, it is dubious to regard these demonstrations as popular. Second, if Turkey’s political and social conjuncture reveals a significant transformation of the modernizing […]

Who’s afraid of gay parents?

Commentary Who’s afraid of gay parents? Sylvie duvergersymbolic order (dated): see Sexual difference (will never go out of fashion). … Sexual difference , cultural, natural, in a word anthropological. Republican value. Universal. Intellectual buffer, impossible to go beyond, like day and night. Not to be gone beyond in any event, or at least not in […]

Managing the present

COMMENTARY Looking Back on ’68 Managing the present Kristin Ross The problem with the past is that it is unpredictable. This may be one reason why French president Nicolas Sarkozy has recently generated a series of bizarre decrees – the precise legal status and implementation of which are uncertain, if not unimaginable – that attempt to manage the memory […]

Mexico 1968: The revolution of shame

‘This is what you should think’, ‘This is what you shouldn’t think’, ‘This is what’s possible or impossible, old or new, relevant or irrelevant.’It is within this murky inverted present and swamp of bad memory that the various social movements that make up the slow reassertion of the radical Left in France have had to […]

‘Liberate socialist eminences from their bourgeois cocks!’: Women ’68ers, marching on alone

It is hardly news that history has its blind spots, hidden even from those attentive to its most neglected byways. These are often within emancipatory struggles that are swiftly disregarded once their fervour fades. When disputed legacies originate in confrontational, often anarchic challenges to the prevailing order of just about everything, systematic accounting tends to […]