CONTENTS
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G. M. Tamás: Words from Budapest
A dissident philosopher traces his path from Ceaușescu’s Romania to Orbán’s Hungary, and from liberalism to Marxism. Memories of a vanquished world and premonitions of a bleak future in Eastern Europe, amid a downgrading of citizen equality.
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Régis Debray: Decline of the West?
Mired in recession at home, pledged to perpetual warfare on the periphery—in what shape is the global sheriff? Régis Debray draws up a balance sheet of its vital symptoms.
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Asef Bayat: Revolution in Bad Times
Euphoric celebrations of the Arab uprisings have skated over their profoundly ambiguous character. Asef Bayat explains the failure to make a clean sweep of the old order in terms of a self-limiting programme that stems from the discredit of traditional revolutionary models.
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Tariq Ali: Between Past and Future
Responding to Asef Bayat, Tariq Ali argues that any adequate analysis of the outcomes of the Arab Spring must reckon with Washington’s tight defence of its interests in the region. The dynamics of the revolts located in a long history of Western intervention.
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Peter Nolan: Imperial Archipelagos
While China’s maritime aspirations have been widely criticized, little attention has been paid to the UN compact that guarantees Western imperial powers exploitation rights over vast expanses of the world’s oceans.
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Benedict Anderson: The Unrewarded
Capricious patterns of distribution for the Nobel prize in literature as a reflection of changing geo-political currents, from belle époque to Cold War to globalized present.
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Sven Lütticken: Performance Art After TV
Relations between TV and performance art since the 1960s as a tangled skein of complicity and contestation. Sven Lütticken traces shifts in modes of acting, working and self-presentation, within a televisual world itself now being absorbed by cybernetic and digital systems.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Kozo Yamamura on Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation. Can flagging growth in the US be explained by closing technological frontiers?
- Kheya Bag on Rani Singh, Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny. Flacking for the world’s longest-running electoral dynasty.
- Ian Birchall on Christoph Kalter, Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt. The French left’s discovery of the Third World.
Articles:
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Régis Debray,
‘Decline of the West?’
Mired in recession at home, pledged to perpetual warfare on the periphery—in what shape is the global sheriff? Régis Debray draws up a balance sheet of its vital symptoms.
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Peter Nolan,
‘Imperial Archipelagos’
While China’s maritime aspirations have been widely criticized, little attention has been paid to the UN compact that guarantees Western imperial powers exploitation rights over vast expanses of the world’s oceans.
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Kheya Bag,
‘Delhi’s Dynasts’
Kheya Bag on Rani Singh, Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny. Flacking for the world’s longest-running electoral dynasty.
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Sven Lütticken,
‘Performance After TV’
Relations between TV and performance art since the 1960s as a tangled skein of complicity and contestation. Sven Lütticken traces shifts in modes of acting, working and self-presentation, within a televisual world itself now being absorbed by cybernetic and digital systems.
Editorials:
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2011,
Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?
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Arab Concatenation,
From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.
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Concert of Powers,
A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.
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NPT,
What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.
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Afghanistan,
Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.
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Wall Street Crisis,
Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.
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NLR at 50,
What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.
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Force and Consent
As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
