In London, we are the proud media partner for Shock and Awe: A Hundred Years of Bombing from Above, a series of lectures and debates designed to explore what the organisers argue was more than a military revolution – “a way of understanding differently the history of empire, nationalism and the racial ordering of humanity”. From Kobe in Japan, from the bombing of cities, forests and target boxes to putting 'warheads on foreheads' in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we trace the lines of descent, asking if this is the American way of bombing? and what it means to us today.

In the tense present, Arash Falasiri calls on the Iranian opposition, Tony Klug revisits the two-state solution, while two veteran political commentators,Susan George, and D.Mario Nuti, explain why the European Union should not be starting from here.

Meanwhile, we welcome many writers for the first time: Parval Wargan asking why Georgia’s young leaders are choosing imposing neo-classical buildings, the dying legacy of an occupier whom the Georgian people have come to reject; Andrew Mambondiyani on illegal diamond mining in Zimbabwe; Nigel Carter on the return of the underclass in Britain; and Sara ElGaddari on the tasks facing Libya’s National Transitional Council, and how these are not helped by a determined Western focus on the threat of Sha’ria law in North Africa.

Tony Curzon Price, prompted by Ivan Briscoe’s “powerful essay” and its take on Stephen Pinker’s “impressive new book”, meditates on violence and Rawls. He says, “I am appalled at the violence, vengefulness and blood-lust that was reported from the victorious forces in Tripoli”, and is taken up by the last new writer of the week, Samson A. Bezabeh, who selects as his philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the French.

Three links not to miss:

Alan Wolf interview in The European

Ulrike Guérot on the alarming politics of European disintegration

The launch of a Centre for Secular Space