Tangled up in metaphor

Reivew of Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic
Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 144pp. £86.00 hb., £21.00 pb., 978 1 51790 012 0 hb., 978 1 51790 013 7 pb. Taking to task the metaphor of the body politic that she claims is central to the concept of the state […]

Justice and the Gulf War

Justice and the Gulf War Michael Rustin This article is concerned with the Gulf War in relation to the theory of just and unjust wars. The morality of the war was of course strongly contested, and it seems valuable now that its violence (although not its consequences in suffering) lie in the past to reflect […]

Cultural clash

Commentaryculture clashsimon bromley Almost as soon as the Cold War framework of Western and United States foreign policy began to dissolve in the early 1990s, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and such conservative periodicals as The National Interest and The Atlantic Monthly began to feature articles about ʻThe […]

Against security

We live, apparently, in insecure times. Sociologyʼs current ʻgrand thinkersʼ, for example, all highlight the issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is variously described as ʻrisk societyʼ, ʻreflexive modernityʼ and ʻpostmodernityʼ. For Anthony Giddens, existential anxiety is generated by the collapse of ontological security in the late modern age, while Zygmunt Bauman suggests […]

Anti-Americanism and realignment in the two Koreas

Commentary Anti-Americanism and realignment in the two Koreas Hyun ok park For all their differences, the expressions of anti-Americanism that erupted this winter in South Korea and North Korea convey a common desire. They were distinctly post-Cold War events, not just because Koreans are pursuing national sovereignty independently of the USA, but more importantly because […]