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CONTENTS

  1. Daniel Finn: Ireland on the turn? In a landmark study, Daniel Finn surveys the political and economic consequences of the 2008 crash, on both sides of the Irish border. Looming austerity and entrenched sectarian divides in the North; with the demise of the Celtic Tiger in the South, the unravelling of Fianna Fáil’s long dominance and emergence of a new-model Sinn Fein as the one all-Ireland party
  2. Jules Boykoff: The Anti-Olympics Always an avatar for the international order of the day—Victorian imperialism, Cold War rivalry, Pax Americana—the Olympics have joined the wto and G20 as focus for alter-globo protest. Lessons for London from the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, where artists, activists and indigenous organizers took on the spectacle of the five-ring circus.
  3. Benno Teschke: Decisions and Indecisions Where liberal thought has tried to quarantine the ‘dangerous mind’ of Carl Schmitt, recent revisions have found portents of contemporary imperial hubris in his analysis of victors’ justice. Warning against such 'rehabilitations', Benno Teschke detects a unifying set of preoccupations that render the thinker's transition from hyper-authoritarianism to fascism logical.
  4. Yoav Peled, Horit Herman Peled: Post-post-Zionism? The elisions and occlusions of three recent works on the character—past, present and future—of Israel and its occupation regime. Behind Deleuzian explorations of a ‘control system’ or reconstructions of ‘pioneer’ discourse, attempts to insulate Zionism and its founding myths from examination of their settler-colonial origins.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Ronald Fraser on Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War. Sober reassessment of the Republic’s brief flowering and embattled fall, as a new generation of scholars wrestles with its contested history.
  2. Gregory Elliott on Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World. Britain’s foremost Communist historian surveys the Marxist tradition. Implementation, legacies and prospects of the Moor’s ideas.
  3. Etienne Smith on Gérard Prunier, From Genocide to Continental War. Ambitious attempt to make sense of Congo’s decade of war, from a Francophone observer-participant of the continent’s high politics.

Articles:

Editorials:

  1. 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.
  2. New Labour, As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.
  3. 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.
  4. US Hegemony, 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Cameron‘s Coalition, Anatomy of the UK’s new crossbreed government, and the uneven electoral geography that produced it. Amid the ruins of New Labour’s economic model and spreading Euro-turbulence, what prospects for resistance to austerity’s impending axe?