CONTENTS

1. Tariq Ali: Re-Colonizing Iraq The American expedition to Baghdad, and world-wide reactions to the new imperium. From mass demonstrations against the war to the diplomatic hypocrisies colluding with it. The UN as framework of blockade and intervention yesterday, and mask of reconstruction tomorrow.
2. Paul Ginsborg: The Patrimonial Ambitions of Silvio B Leading historian of contemporary Italy, and animator of civil resistance to Berlusconi, Paul Ginsborg offers a profile of the media magnate as political ruler, and the project he represents for the future of Italian society. The contradictions of the current regime of the Right, and the chances of a broad opposition to it.
3. Fredric Jameson: Future City After the dilapidation of urban modernism, what kinds of city and what forms of architecture await us? The author of The Seeds of Time considers their flowers in the dizzying work of Rem Koolhaas, the mega-developments of the Pearl River Delta and the conceptualization of ‘Junkspace’. Breaking back into history with a battering-ram of the postmodern?
4. Chittaroopa Palit: Monsoon Risings How the Indian version of the Three Gorges Dam—the great series of barrages planned by state governments and international financial institutions in the Narmada Valley—was fought to a provisional halt by village resistance, in a popular campaign with lessons for every society in the Third World.
5. Gregory Wilpert: Collision in Venezuela What has lain behind the massive social conflicts that have unfurled round the Chávez regime? The spurious and real reasons for the rampage of Venezuelan managers, media and middle class against the country’s elected President. Oil, land and urban rights as the stakes in a social war of colour and class.
6. Alain Supiot: The Labyrinth of Human Rights Dogmatic foundations as an invariant of all civilizations, and the religious origins of the contemporary doctrine of human rights in the West. Can, despite its undemonstrability, a particular creed become a common resource of humanity, appropriated in different ways across the planet?
7. Gabriel Piterberg: Hannah Arendt in Tel Aviv Gabriel Piterberg on Idith Zertal, Death and the Nation. The uses of the Shoah in the official construction of memory in Israel, amid the specif icities of time in the history of Zionism.
8. Peter Gowan: Instruments of Empire Peter Gowan on Andrew Bacevich, American Empire. A clear-eyed colonel examines the swords and deeds of the us state in the post-Cold War world.
9. Tony Wood: A Suprematist Cinema? Tony Wood on Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film. The reasons why Russia’s greatest avant-garde artist preferred Dziga Vertov to Sergei Eisenstein.