Hazem Kandil: Sisi's Egypt
Anatomy of a counter-revolution and its epigonic figurehead. Shifting relations of military, state security and business networks, in the ad-hoc construction of a regime more repressive than its predecessor. Hazem Kandil discusses the merciless crackdown on the Bedouin in Sinai, and consoling myths of the Muslim Brothers.
Rob Wallace, Rodrick Wallace: Ebola's Ecologies
Across the zones of Southern monoculture and deforestation, the environmental impacts of agro-economic restructuring can be traced down to the level of the virion and the molecule. A case study of West Africa’s Ebola virus, responsible for over 11,000 deaths in the last three years, illustrates this epidemiological shift.
Efrain Kristal: Sarmiento's Masterpiece
Fiction, history or sociology, documentary or fabrication, the explosive rhetoric of Sarmiento’s classic was formative in Spanish American literary culture. Kristal examines the composition and reception of a unique work from Argentina.
Antonio Gramsci, Jnr: My Grandfather
As the world of Soviet Communism disintegrates around him, a young Russian discovers the thought and moral example of the great Italian revolutionary who was his grandfather. Antonio Gramsci Jnr on his legacy, and the remarkable family of his grandmother, Giulia Schucht.
Leszek Koczanowicz: The Polish Case
Within the new topology of conservative regimes emerging from the Great Recession, that of Poland’s Law and Justice government has a distinctive character. Leszek Koczanowicz describes the fracturing of the neoliberal-nationalist formula that had persisted since the 1990s, the second term turned as anti-Western social critique against the first.
Fredric Jameson: Badiou and the French Tradition
How to locate an energizing philosophy of activity and production, and of fidelity to past revolutionary ruptures, in relation to the line that runs from Sartre, Althusser and Lacan to Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze? A critical interrogation of the return to philosophical tradition, from metaphysics to ethics, in Badiou’s major systematic works.
Francis Mulhern: Burke's Way
Francis Mulhern on David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke. Thought-world of the liberal ideologue of counter-revolution.
Kate Stevens: An Eco-Contrarian
Kate Stevens on Joachim Radkau, Age of Ecology. Global history of environmentalism by a Weberian green.
Anders Stephanson: Road to Globalism
Anders Stephanson on John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power. Rise of American globalism, from Wilson to Truman.
Nancy Hawker: Lessons for Eavesdroppers
Nancy Hawker on Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic. Language as an instrument for the reproduction of the securitized state.