Julia Buxton: Venezuela After Chávez
As Nicolás Maduro clings on to the presidency, a leading analyst discusses the crumbling of Chavista hegemony and a revival of the right amid collapsing oil revenues, a malfunctioning economy, street protests, and the long-term corruption of state structures.
Göran Therborn: An Age of Progress?
Contradictions of social evolution: climate change, stagnant incomes and social exclusion entwined with rising per capita GDP and lengthening life-spans, challenges to racism and sexism, and a mounting capacity for the human species to take control of its destiny.
Joachim Becker: Europe’s Other Periphery
The fate of the East European economies in the transition from COMECON to EU. From post-communist slump to the politics of austerity, by way of industrial decline, wage collapses, external debt and buy-outs. The emergence of new dependencies, financial and industrial.
Manali Desai: Gendered Violence and India's Body Politic
Falling demand for female labour and rising dowry thresholds as factors behind mounting attacks on women; gang-rape as an instrument of caste-oppression; a culture of impunity in conflict zones; son-preference, girl-aversion and the missing. Manali Desai surveys the modalities of violence against women since Independence.
Rodrigo Ochigame, James Holston: Filtering Dissent
Hailed as organizational tools of the oppressed, social media have also emerged as powerful surveillance apparatuses, but could existing power structures be reinforced even by the very algorithms they use to order data? A history of algorithmic filtering and a case study of its role in the land struggles of Brazil’s Guarani and Kaiowá peoples.
Sven Lütticken: The Coming Exception
The artwork has long been understood as a political-economic anomaly, while art practice is sometimes seen as a stand-in for liberated human activity. With value itself seemingly in a state of crisis, might the artwork prefigure a world beyond it? From Ruskin and Whistler to Harun Farocki, Sven Lütticken charts the trajectory of an exception.
Ece Temelkuran: Good Enough for the Middle East?
Ece Temelkuran on Cihan Tuğal, The Fall of the Turkish Model. Unsparing dissection of AKP-Erdoğan rule.
Nicholas Dames: Fictions of Capital
Nicholas Dames on Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstractions. Periodizing study of financial fiction from Wall Street to American Psycho.