Commentary archive

Commentary The hungry of the earth Raj patel The price of food is soaring. The ability of the world’s poorest to pay for it isn’t. The results are predictably catastrophic. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has explained that the people starving and taking to the streets in countries like India and […]

Commentary Between imperial client and useful enemy Pakistan’s permanent crisis Justin podur Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition […]

On 30 October 2007, Giovanna Reggiani, a 47-year-old Italian woman, was robbed and murdered in a deserted area of northern Rome. The man accused of murdering her was a Romanian Roma, Nicolai Romulus Mailat, who had been living in one of the ‘unauthorized’ settlements in Rome. The media immediately reported horrific stories of torture and […]

2008, www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/les-roms-craignent-une-contagion-de-la-vague-de-racismeitalienne_546904.html?p=2. [archive] 5. ^ European Network Against Racism, Press Release, 19 May 2008, http://cms.horus.be/files/99935/MediaArchive/pdfpress/2008–05–19%20anti-Roma%20events&20Italy.pdf. 6. ^ Il Giornale, 5 September 2008. 7. ^ ‘Italy Reassures EU that Fingerprinting Gypsies is Legal and Not Racist’, International Herald Tribune, 24 July 2008, www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/24/europe/EU-EU-Italy-Roma.php. [archive] 8. ^ www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/ital-a06.shtml. [archive] 9. ^ ERRC et al., ‘Security a la […]

Commentary The war against pre-terrorism The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection Alberto toscano On 11 November 2008, twenty youths were arrested in Paris, Rouen and the village of Tarnac, in the Massif Central district of Corrèze. The Tarnac operation involved helicopters, 150 balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths were accused […]

Commentary symposium No New Deal is possible Antonio negri John Maynard Keynes was a gentleman – that is, an honest bourgeois, not a pettybourgeois like Proudhon, or an ideologue, but an easy man – and when political economy was still concerned with the political ordering of market and society every classical economist knew this. Keynes […]

Commentary Reckless trials? The criminalization of the sexual transmission of HIV Daniel monk In 1998 a report by the Home Office concluded that it would be contrary to the public interest to criminalize the reckless transmission of HIV. Moreover – and in keeping with received academic opinion – it also suggested that under the existing […]

Commentary Lash out and cover up Austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain Owen hatherley Britain has reacted strangely to the crisis of neoliberalism. The country’s seemingly endemic nostalgia, particularly for the Second World War, has long been exploited by Thatcherites and Blairites; but its recent political use shows, in an especially acute form, […]

On 8 July 2005, the day after the London bombings, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued its new guidelines on the detection and prevention of suicide bombings. The IACP is the primary organization through which senior police executives across the globe try to coordinate their powers and practices, and it does this through […]

Commentary ‘New providers’ The creation of a market in higher education Andrew mcgettigan At the end of 2009, the Labour government commissioned a review panel, led by John Browne, formerly chief executive of the London-based oil and gas multinational BP, to report on the financing of higher education in England. Its basic remit was to […]

On Saturday 13 June this year, hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of the Interior announced his landslide victory as Iran’s president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the religious head of state, prematurely and unconstitutionally embraced these results, Tehran and several other major cities became the stage for spontaneous, sporadic and widespread protests. Despite the government’s arrest […]

Commentary The global moment Seattle, ten years on Rodrigo nunes What are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and […]

Comment Rentier capitalism and the iranian puzzle dariush m. doust The word ‘Iran’ usually signifies unpredictability, offering either raw material for the narratives of news agencies, or a fascinating enigma. Recent events have once again underlined the fact that the 1979 Iranian Revolution is still poorly conceptualized. To state the obvious: the outcome of the […]

Commentary the Question of caster semenya Mandy merck Caster Semenya, the South African runner, won the 800 metre gold medal at the World Championships. What did Pierre Weiss, head of the world athletics governing body, say in response to questions about her sex?The Times Sport Quiz, 26 December 2009 What indeed? The question of Caster […]

Comment Hey! can’t you smile! Women and status in philosophy Babette babich What is the status of women in philosophy today? Before asking this question it is important to recall that when one speaks of status one speaks of prestige or value. Questions of status have nothing, by nature, to do with ‘truth’, objective or […]

Look at this place! It’s buzzing… [Bomb explosion. People screaming. Chaos] Were you caught off-guard? That’s the problem. Can you imagine life without the places where we congregate? These are convenient places, places where we want to go, are free to go. In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces […]

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]

Commentary Inside a charging bull Iceland, one year on Haukur már helgason After Iceland’s three banks collapsed in October 2008 – a bankruptcy bigger than Lehmann Brothers’ in a republic of 300,000 inhabitants – the public overthrew a neoliberal government through mass protest, precipitating a general election. On election day, 25 April 2009, the conservative […]

‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford. [1] Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January 2009: We are taking all the measures […]

Commentary Longing for a greener present Neoliberalism and the eco-city Ross adams In recent years, architects have found themselves increasingly commissioned to design entire new cities: a phenomenon that has been accompanied by a commitment to those terms of ‘sustainability’ which now seem inseparable from the urban project itself. While ‘sustainability’ remains a vague concept […]

What’s so great about ‘timeless’? Architecture and the Prince, again Victoria mcneile Whoever succeeds in redeveloping the Chelsea Barracks site will probably produce a small book to mark its completion. This will include an account of the site’s history, illustrated with maps and engravings, rather furry black-and-white photographs and a selection of press cuttings. There […]