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CONTENTS

  1. Volodymyr Ishchenko: Ukraine's Fractures Antecedents and aftershocks of the Maidan protests. A Ukrainian sociologist discusses the riven political and ideological landscape laid bare by the fall of Yanukovych, and the tensions being stoked in the country’s east by Russian interference and Kiev’s ongoing military assault.
  2. Wolfgang Streeck: How Will Capitalism End? Its challengers apparently vanquished, the main threat to capitalism may now come from disorders that lurk within the system itself. Wolfgang Streeck diagnoses its crisis symptoms, from persistent stagnation to global anarchy, and asks what lies in store as they multiply.
  3. Aminata Traoré, Boubacar Boris Diop: African Impostures Exchanges between two West African intellectuals amidst the latest French incursion in the region, this time on Malian soil. The recurrent delusions of humanitarian warfare, and continued submission of local elites to Paris.
  4. Sean Starrs: The Chimera of Global Convergence Has the rise of the BRICs weakened the West’s grip on core sectors of the world economy? Sean Starrs weighs impressions of Western decline against the empirical evidence, finding plentiful signs of enduring US and European corporate power.
  5. José Emilio Burucúa, Nicolás Kwiatkowski: The Absent Double What images arise when representation reaches its limits? Two cultural historians explore the emergence since classical antiquity of a series of visual devices for depicting massacres: from hunting scenes and martyrdoms to infernos and Doppelgänger.
  6. Sven Lütticken: Cultural Revolution Mutations of an untimely concept, in a period when capitalism has arrogated to itself the power of radical transformation. From Debord and Marcuse to the contemporary art world, by way of punk rock and hip hop.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Francis Mulhern on Rob Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel. The protean cult of Eric Blair finds its latest iteration.
  2. Robin Blackburn on Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning. Victorian Britain’s anti-slavery crusade as accomplice of imperial expansion.
  3. Barry Schwabsky on Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Episodes from a history of modern art, from Winckelmann to Mallarmé to Vertov.

Articles:

  1. Francis Mulhern,
    ‘Forever Orwell’ Francis Mulhern on Rob Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel. The protean cult of Eric Blair finds its latest iteration.

Editorials:

  1. Annexations, After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.
  2. 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?
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.