CONTENTS
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Tariq Ali: Mid-Point in the Middle East?
As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
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Yoav Peled: Zionist Realities: Debating Israel–Palestine
A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
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Virginia Tilley: The Secular Solution: Debating Israel–Palestine
Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
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Francis Mulhern: Conrad's Inconceivable History
The fascination of Joseph Conrad’s novels with the transformative pressures of capitalist modernity threatens a revelation so intolerable, Mulhern suggests, that it can only be contained within dense narrative strategies of deferral and disavowal.
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Peter Wollen: Necessary Love
Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.
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Robert Wade: Choking the South
Charting the impact of fluctuating currencies, volatile stock markets and interest rates on the developing world since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Robert Wade contends that untrammelled mobility of capital—private funds above all—reinforces dynamics of debt and underdevelopment.
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Susan Watkins: Toryism After Blair
Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.
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David Laitin: Caucasian Crucibles
David Laitin on Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. Can world-system theory and sociological fieldwork explain the bifurcating fates of the post-Soviet Caucasus?
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Sebastian Budgen: Liberal Francophobia
Sebastian Budgen on Timothy Smith, France in Crisis. Spirited critique of the imbalances of the French model—coupled with liberal proposals for a ‘Dutch miracle’ in the Hexagon.
Articles:
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Yoav Peled,
‘Zionist
Realities’
A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
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Jean Baudrillard,
‘Pyres of
Autumn’
Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
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Tom Nairn,
‘The New Furies’
Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.
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Julian
Stallabrass,
‘Spectacle and
Terror’
After Gopal Balakrishnan’s engagement with Afflicted Powers in NLR 36, Julian Stallabrass turns to the Retort collective’s conception of spectacle and its Islamist antagonists. Does a Debordian optic occlude the oppositional potential of modern technologies?
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Forrest Hylton,
‘Landslide in
Bolivia’
What made the greatest Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a masterpiece of world literature? The strange fate of realism in an ex-colonial society, in which liberalism was a ruling ideology, modernity a universal ideal, and slavery still an everyday fact of life.
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Virginia Tilley,
‘A Secular
Solution’
Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
Editorials:
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Europe,
Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.
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Chechnya,
Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
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Iraq,
With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
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New Labour
Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.
Articles:
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Sabry Hafez,
‘An Arabian
Master’
The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.
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Patrick
Cockburn,
‘The Abyss
in Iraq’
A panorama of Iraq two and a half years after the Anglo-American invasion. Britain’s leading reporter on the country talks about the life conditions of the population; the springs of the resistance; the relations between Sunni and Shia communities; the position of the Kurds; the performance of the us military; and the historical precedents and possible outcomes of the second Western seizure of Iraq.
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Leo Panitch &
Sam Gindin,
‘Superintending
Global Capital’
The end of US hegemony has been announced more often even than that of neoliberalism. Yet American power persists, with little resistance so far from rival centres of accumulation. Rationales and indices of the continuing role of the United States as overlord of world capital.
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Malcolm Bull,
‘Limits of
Multitude’
What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.
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Andrew Glyn,
‘Global
Asymmetries’
Wide-ranging account of the growing disequilibria within an increasingly integrated global capitalism. Andrew Glyn takes the measure of China's still gigantic catch-up potential, in comparison to previous Asian NIEs, and assesses the impact of its rise across different sectors of the world economy.
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Mike Davis,
‘Planet of Slums’
Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.
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Giovanni Arrighi,
‘Hegemony
Unravelling’,
parts I
In the first part of a major engagement with David Harvey’s New Imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi sets out the interlocking dynamics, spatial and temporal, of capitalist development and imperialism. Should US difficulties in Iraq and the ballooning current-account deficit be read as symptoms of a deeper-lying crisis, a shift from hegemony to dominance presaging the rise of a new East Asian challenger?
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& II
In the conclusion to his major two-part essay on the new US imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi situates the contradictions of the current American ‘spatial fix’ for the problems of overaccumulation in the context of a longue durée of systemic cycles. Have Washington’s attempts to secure its world role through the invasion of Iraq instead hastened the rise of China?
