In NLR 12, Georgi Derluguian:
‘Recasting Russia’ What do the West’s belated plaudits for Putin’s gage to the war against terrorism—the Caucasus as proving-ground for the Hindu Kush—signify for Russia’s future in the world-system? Georgi Derluguian looks at the longue durée, from the Golden Horde to the IMF.

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CONTENTS

  1. Georgi Derluguian: Recasting Russia What do the West’s belated plaudits for Putin’s gage to the war against terrorism—the Caucasus as proving-ground for the Hindu Kush—signify for Russia’s future in the world-system? Georgi Derluguian looks at the longue durée, from the Golden Horde to the IMF.
  2. Mike Davis: The Flames of New York Premonitions and hallucinations of the fate of the Twin Towers, from H. G. Wells to Ernst Bloch, John Dos Passos to Sayyid Qutb. Today’s Palmer raids and tomorrow’s ‘security cities’ as first instalments in the globalization of fear.
  3. Michael Mann: Globalization and September 11 How far might the current conjuncture alter received notions of globalization? Michael Mann considers the pattern of ‘ostracizing imperialism’ and the springs of Islamic resistance to it, amid wider shifts in the sources of social power—military, economic, political, ideological—at the threshold of the new century.
  4. Kuan-Hsing Chen: America in East Asia On one side of the Pacific the Cold War is not yet quite over. So long as decolonization of minds remains deferred, strange dreams persist—foreign longing as post-national belonging. America in the looking-glass of Taiwan’s ‘Club 51’.
  5. Jose Bove: A Farmers' International? The demolisher of McDonald’s explains his personal background, the history of the Peasants’ Confederation in France, and the international objectives of Via Campesina. Struggles in the countryside of the Massif Central or Karnataka as spear-points in the anti-globalization movement.
  6. Roberto Schwarz: City of God Brazil’s leading literary theorist discusses the novel whose formal innovations trace the emergence of the ganglands of the neo-favela in Rio de Janeiro today—a world away from the now etiolated recipes of magical realism.
  7. Peter Wollen: An Alphabet of Cinema The author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and Raiding the Icebox offers a beguiling A–Z of his engagement with films: from Aristotle through Bambi and Godard to The Passenger and the Underground.
  8. Deborah Cook: The Talking Cure in Habermas's Republic To what extent do liberal democracies rest on the will of their citizens? Deborah Cook assesses how far Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to bridge the gap between their nominal pretensions and actual workings provides a convincing account of the way Western societies live now.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Jacob Stevens on Jeremy Harding, The Uninvited; Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees; and Teresa Hayter, Open Borders. The blockading of Europe’s frontiers against the arrival of those in fear or need, and the reasons why ‘aliens’ should be welcomed.
  2. Alan Milward on David Calleo, Rethinking Europe’s Future. Parallels with the epoch after 1873, as the EU seeks its role between the single currency and enlargement, America and Russia.
  3. Tom Mertes on Richard Posner, Breaking the Deadlock. The first lucid analysis of the upshot of the US Presidential election, and its setting in the West’s most backward democracy.