Susan Watkins,
‘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.

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NLR 86 was mailed out to subscribers on 24 April.

CONTENTS

  1. Susan Watkins: 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. Suleiman Mourad: Riddles of the Book A scholar of Islamic history discusses the formation and trajectory of the last great Abrahamic religion. Tensions between ecumenicism and jihad, pan-Islamism and division of the umma, and a bleak present of recrudescent sectarianism.
  3. Nancy Fraser: Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode Behind exchange there lurks production, but what is more hidden still? The disavowed conditions of capital’s possibility—in reproduction, politics and nature—as sites for expanded anti-capitalist struggle.
  4. Robin Blackburn: Stuart Hall, 1932–2014 Founding editor of NLR, pioneer of Cultural Studies, early analyst of Thatcherism, theorist of Caribbean identities, nuncio of New Times—Robin Blackburn remembers Stuart Hall.
  5. Peter Dews: Nietzsche for Losers? Opening a symposium on Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, Dews retraces the logic of critical supersession in European philosophy before taking issue with the author’s account of Nietzschean will to power and the reading strategy to be pursued in the face of it.
  6. Raymond Geuss: Systems, Values and Egalitarianism Perspectivist or systematic, transcendental or not? Geuss considers the character of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, the meanings of valuation and the question of equality in Marx’s thinking.
  7. Kenta Tsuda: An Empty Community? Beyond property rights to Bull’s negative ecology: Tsuda asks whether this is not an unavowed theory of distributive justice, one crucially lacking a theory of needs.
  8. Malcolm Bull: The Politics of Falling In conclusion, Bull replies to his critics, discussing the status of valuation and the scope of will to power; Heidegger and the question of nihilism; and the logic of extra-egalitarianism.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Rob Lucas on Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?. A utopian capitalist proposal to rewire the web and save the middle class.
  2. Christopher Prendergast on Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois and Distant Reading. What can digital research tools add to the palette of a justly renowned critic?
  3. Anders Stephanson on George Kennan’s Diaries. Reflection and self-flagellation from the strategist of the Cold War.
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Articles:

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.
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