A theatre director is stuck in Cairo waiting to hear if he and his partner have permission to enter Gaza. These letters capture ‘strange days’, as they are caught in stasis while extraordinary events unfold around them
Now the war has started, which side are you on? Should the intervention stop because the war will be long and bloody? Which means that instead the war will be short, Qaddafi will be victorious, and the aftermath will be bloody – probably as bloody as the war.
What is the “Arab spring” becoming? After three months of upheaval, repression and conflict, the democracy wave in the region, including Iran, is at a crucial stage. openDemocracy authors offer concise perspectives on a complex and fluid political moment.(The first contributions in this series wer
Human rights are undermined in the war on terror by the widespread use of blacklists.
The position of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) on the crisis in Libya has derailed the continent’s chance to support the revolutionary paradigm it should be spreading worldwide.
Both the west and the Gaddafi regime are assessing the prospect of a military stalemate in Libya. In any extended campaign, United States-Israel cooperation could offer Tripoli an unexpected gift.
The changing dynamics of the Libyan conflict highlight the contradictions of "humanitarian intervention" when pressed to serve the western way of war, says Martin Shaw.
Daniel Goldhagen’s book “Worse Than War” includes British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s among its case-studies of “elimination”. A close reading of the demographic evidence reveals the falsity of the argument, says David Elstein.(This article was first published on 4 March 2010)
Democracy is once again the challenge. Overcoming divisions through the development of new welfare systems will be vital to the success of this project.
The truth about western humanitarian interventions is a moral truth
Maybe saving the lives of civilians by taking away their fundamental political agency is the real problem with UN-NATO interventions, rather than some hidden economic self-interest.
The west’s military-political strategy against the Gaddafi regime echoes its flawed approach to Afghanistan and Iraq, says Paul Rogers in this, his 500th weekly column for openDemocracy.
