Politics Archives - Page 45 of 143

Feature

The Aspirations and Ambiguities of De-Colonial Politics

Imran Khan’s First Year as Pakistan’s Prime Minister

September 10, 2019 • by SherAli Tareen

Imran Khan’s ascension as Prime Minister of Pakistan in August 2018 preceded and instigated an avalanche of alarming prognoses issued by a range of motley characters. Their convergence made for an interesting union of otherwise incompatible bedfellows. Self-anointed Pakistan experts at neo-conservative U.S. think-tanks, editorials of mainstream Western media, South ...

Blue Monday

Is “Motherfucker” The Concept Political Science Now Needs?

An Immodest Proposal

September 9, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Is “Motherfucker” the concept that political science now needs? The question is a serious one. And the answer, I suggest in all seriousness, is “yes.” Kind of. We live in troubled times. The June 16, 2018 cover of The Economist stated the trouble clearly: “How strongmen subvert democracy.” The September/October cover of Foreign Affairs also puts it well: “Autocracy Now.” But ...

Feature

My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

Resisting gender conformity, coming out in the nineteen-seventies, and fighting for world liberation.

September 9, 2019 • by Theresa Smalec and Esther Newton

I interviewed Esther Newton about her new memoir, My Butch Career on June 20, 2019. Newton earned her PhD in 1968 and published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), the first major anthropological study of a gay-identified community in America. Though she researched drag queen culture and desired women sexually, Newton resisted the norms of ...

Democracy

The Story of Indian Democracy Written in Blood and Betrayal

BJP thinks it is going to Indianize Kashmir. Instead, we will see, potentially, the Kashmirization of India.

September 5, 2019 • by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The narrative supporting a radical move on Kashmir is familiar. Article 35(a) was a discriminatory provision and had to go. Article 370 was not a mechanism for integration but a legal tool for separatism. The Indian state, despite the horrendous violence it has used in the past, has never had ...

Art & Design

Blood for the Future

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” in Les Levine’s Resurrection

September 4, 2019 • by Max L. Feldman

These events form part of the Holy Cross Dispute, a period of eight months of acute sectarian tension in Northern Ireland. During this time, Holy Cross Girls Primary School, a Catholic elementary school in a Protestant enclave of Ardoyne, north Belfast, was picketed by hundreds of loyalist Protestant protestors trying to stop ...

Feature

David Koch, Bedbugs, and Breaking Up

Past Present Episode 194

September 3, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Billionaire libertarian and David Koch has died. Natalia referred to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article that first brought major attention to the political influence of the Koch brothers.Bedbugs are in the news these days with outbreaks at the Trump Doral Resort and the New York Times. ...

Feature

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

September 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

The way to have the most fun with the writings of Andrea Long Chu is to read them as satire. Most of her texts work by taking some familiar habits of thought and pressing them to extremes, to the point where they disintegrate. Their virtue, as texts, is what Chu ...

Art & Design

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

August 30, 2019 • by Kanad Chakrabarti

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...

Feature

Against the “Diversity of Tactics”

Why Antifa Street Fighting Is Not a Strategy to Defeat Fascism

August 29, 2019 • by Leo Casey

As democratic socialists we have always been anti-fascists, because the essence of fascism -- its authoritarianism, its racism, its misogyny, its homophobia and its suppression of independent unions, political freedom and civil liberties -- runs completely counter to the principles and moral values that are most important to us. The ...

Democracy

Hong Kong’s Twin Questions of Democracy and Self-Determination

The long summer of discontent in Hong Kong

August 29, 2019 • by Ho-fung Hung

Back in August 31st, 2014, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China decided that any future "universal suffrage" of the highest office of Hong Kong would be subject to strict candidate vetting by a nomination committee dominated by Beijing loyalists. It means such an election will be ...

Feature

Kashmir’s Silent Suffering

New Anguish in the Midst of an Old Struggle

August 28, 2019 • by Bizaa Zeynab Ali

In the meanwhile, Kashmir has been placed on a Genocide Watch and the UN has publicly called out India’s “Draconian Blackout” as a “collective punishment” for the people of Kashmir. with numerous people being killed and more than 4,000 people, mostly young men, being arrested and held without recourse under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a controversial law ...

Democracy

Further Thoughts on Antifa

Counter-Violence is not Self-Defense

August 26, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

On the one hand, my piece has generated some interesting discussions, the main point of contention of which centers on the question of whether “Antifa” is a form of self-defense in response to the presence of dangerous and armed racists. On the other hand, “antifascist” organizing continues apace in Bloomington. A rump market ...