Commentary archive

Commentary Unborn mothers The old rhetoric of new reproductive technologies Lisa guenther If nothing else, the new reproductive technologies produce fabulous headlines. One of the most impressive comes from the Guardian: ʻProspect of babies from unborn mothers.ʼ [1] A team of researchers in Israel led by Dr Tal Biron-Shental have been attempting to grow viable […]

Commentary You let her into the house? Reflections on the politics of aid in Africa Lara pawson There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. […]

COMMENTARYPhilosophizing post-punk Ben watson Philosophers are talking more about music than they did in the past. This is partly to do with the rise of Adornoʼs star in the philosophical firmament and the fact that over half of his writings are devoted to music. But it is also because a generation that imbibed punk in […]

Commentary Quite the opposite The EU crisis and the Left The dominant message of the French ʻNoʼ campaign in the recent referendum on the EU was opposition to an Anglo-Saxon neoliberal Europe, and the Left played a key role in mobilizing a popular movement in towns and villages across France. The Dutch Socialist Party was […]

A salutary shock for bien pensant Europe To judge the significance of the French and Dutch rejections of the so-called EU Constitution, we need some assessment of what the nature of the current EU project actually is. Mainstream academic answers to this question take for granted two ideas about the EU: first, that there has […]

Commentary England, whose England? Jon Beasley-Murray By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaedaʼs September 2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by George W. Bushʼs 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions of March […]

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 […]

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 […]

Commentary From stillness to movement and back Cartoon theory today Esther leslie Just as in recent months caricatures have thrust themselves forcefully into public awareness, in the reaction to Danish newspaper cartoons of Muslim religious icons, their moving cousins, animated cartoons, are likewise more present in the world than ever before.* Cartoons have infiltrated cinema […]

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 […]

Commentary Profit, plague and poultry The intra-active worlds of highly pathogenic avian flu Chris wilbert In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears […]

Commentary A Mediterranean way for peace in Israel–Palestine? Étienne Balibar and Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond A stateʼs origins do not determine its destiny, which always opens on to various possible histories even though some of them – depending on the circumstances – seem after the event to have been more likely than others. And yet the way […]

Commentary Datamigrants Biometrics and the global security complex James C. Ross Immigration politics has historically involved talk about whom to include in the body politic, and how to keep the rest out. Modern states, whose sovereign rights assume a monopoly over the legitimate movement of people across borders, have long sought ways to ʻnormalizeʼ the […]

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 […]

Commentary Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness Reading Lolita in Tehran in Connecticut Simon hay Azar Nafisiʼs bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003) has become a popular choice for required summer reading for incoming students at many colleges and universities across the USA, including my own. It has […]

Commentary Mexico’s long transition to democracy Pilar villela mascaro Mexico was not only the first country to have a revolution in the twentieth century; it also built its most long-lasting one-party government. When Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party) was elected in 2000, he was the first president not to belong to the […]

Commentary The day after tomorrow Making progress on climate change Mark hoffman In November 2006 over six thousand officials from 180 countries, along with representatives from international business and labour movements, NGOs and faith groups, schoolchildren and a host of other observers, gathered in Kenya for two weeks of discussion. They were there to attend […]

The upper hand The eviction at the Youth House in Copenhagen Mikkel bolt rasmussen Around seven oʼclock in the morning on 1 March, Danish police stormed the Youth House at Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen. Helicopters dropped police onto the roof of the building while others were lifted in small containers to the top windows, gaining […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]