We lead this weeks report with a message from the Drug Policy Alliance's Executive Director, Ethan Nadelmann, on the correlation between America's 40th anniversary of the war on drugs and prohibition related violence in Mexico. Ethan also discusses President Obama and recent U.S. medical marijuana
The Côte d’Ivoire now needs to enter a period of demilitarisation. This faces challenges in the long and the short term arising from the sort of resistance that developed under Bédié and Gbagbo. But there is hope that genuine republicanism might emerge from Ouattara’s violent victory
We present the eighth of ten weekly episodes from a brutal novel by an acclaimed British author
The ritual slaughter of animals has become the last of many areas of contention that are changing the shape of our public domains. The way in which Islamophobia is becoming a part of our public ‘common sense’ has complex knock-on effects, not least for our Jewish minorities.
Europe’s civilizing mission is humanitarian - its duty to intervene to spread the good word, protecting the oppressed against local tyrants. The conditions by which this protection is granted are always dictated by the protector and never the protégé. Though this is not said, it is a given.
The campaign to give Soviet Jews the right to leave their country brought two diasporas and a world superpower together in an unlikely alliance. Yet while it was a brilliantly fought battle, it could hardly be described as a total triumph for human rights, writes Oliver Bullough.
The afterglow of Osama bin Laden’s killing fuels the United States’s confidence in its shift towards integration of military and security policy. But it is another grand illusion and missed opportunity.
There are particularities of fear in a post-communist Europe bewildered by the demands of neoliberalism, which also tap into a legacy of aversion matured during Communism.
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
This week we lead with news that as tens of thousands of people in Mexico take to the streets to demand an end to the war on drugs, a coalition of nearly two dozen organizations in the United States have signed an open letter supporting the protesters’ calls for a new strategy ~ MW & CS
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
