If an arrest warrant against Modi is suggested on the grounds of ‘universal jurisdiction’, will the author extend the same argument for a similar intervention on the part of the Indian judiciary, say, on war crimes committed by the western powers across the globe?
The war in Syria is illegal. If a criminal had poisoned someone, our concern would be how to protect the public from future poisonings and how to arrest the criminal and bring him (or her) before a court of law. And civil society needs to be directly involved in the talks.
Rapid, punitive airstrikes two and a half weeks ago, while certainly displacing some Syrians, would have been less likely to lead to larger numbers of refugees.
The contrasting treatment of those accused of verbal insults of the monarch and those responsible for violent repression casts a sorry verdict on the process of justice in Thailand, says Tyrell Haberkorn in Bangkok.
Failure to consider the potency of sectarian identities in Syria may produce the opposite effect intended for a strike, pushing parties further away from negotiations, and closer to the brink.
In the United Kingdom a tendency that reached its nadir with the concept of ‘The Big Society’, can be seen in the extent to which ‘participation’, whether in the affairs of the community, the city or the nation, has come to be considered a responsibility of citizens.
Coming together can make it possible to live more and work less. Doing things collectively is the only way we can be free from the obligation to work so hard as self-exploiting individuals. This is not primarily a question of politics or protest.
Perhaps it is impossible to create a participatory democracy through participatory means. The solution developed here, in any case, was to draw on the external authority of a famous urban planner.
A good life, in this context, is not immortalised in either great poetry or grand monuments to heroic men, but is defined by how we go about our daily lives, our unremarkable habits and routines of life.
