Geopolitics

featuredimage Iran: A Bazaari Bonaparte?

Few countries have remained so opaque to objective scrutiny, so resistant to coherent analysis, as Iran. Recurrently characterized as the most hostile of all Middle Eastern regimes to the West.

Currents

featuredimage Drones command the skies

The US is planning a future in which pilotless drones do the killing, remotely controlled. It looks and plays like an Xbox game, but it’s for real. It may not defeat its intended enemies, though.

History and Culture

featuredimage Jameson and Form

Identifying Fredric Jameson’s literary style as one of his signal achievements, Eagleton asks whether his formal emphases also serve to stave off questions of content: morality, sexuality, subjectivity.

Reviews and Interviews

featuredimage Rivals: Misconceiving Asia

The mass of recent literature on the ‘rise of Asia’ largely focuses on the implications of this development for the West. It rarely stops to consider the impact on inter-relations between the Asian states themselves.

Theory

Speculation on the stationary state of Capitalism

Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.

Perspective

India: a giant in full flight?

ndia is modernising fast to face the perceived threat of China, not just on its northeastern borders but across the Indian Ocean. And within the army, Nehru-inspired traditions of non-aligned ‘moral diplomacy’ are giving way to pragmatic realism

Science

Before the Big Bang

Maverick cosmologists contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world. The Catholic Church, which put Galileo under house arrest for daring to say that Earth orbits the sun, isn’t known for easily accepting new scientific ideas.

Media

Noam Chomsky on Human Rights in the 21st Century

Noam Chomsky is the west’s most prominent critic of US imperialism, yet he is rarely interviewed in the mainstream media. He gave a speech on Human Rights and discussed global issues last week in London at SOAS.