Before the Lebanese Civil War, Martyrs’ Square featured among Beirut’s most dynamic civic spaces. Over two decades after the war ended, the city centre’s reconstruction has all but cut the square adrift from civic life. However, Rania Sassine insists on its potential as a Lebanese laboratory of urban identity.
Swedish author and scholar Michael Azar weaves together a patchwork of narratives in which people matter just as much as the places in which they live; a practice that provides the key to the long overdue task of fashioning cities in accordance with human needs and hardships.
The triumph of the principle of competition among and within European member states has generated a continuous aggravation of disparities, writes Etienne Balibar. Not that the French philosopher allows this to stop him stubbornly envisioning a Europe other than that of bankers, technocrats and political profiteers.
Imogen Tyler looks at how the manufacture of an asylum invasion complex within the public sphere aided the passing of UK legislation that reconstituted the refugee as a “national abject”. That is, as a (likely bogus) asylum-seeker subject to destitution, detention and exclusion.
Greece doesn’t just need debt relief, it deserves it. Of this much Thomas Fazi is convinced. After all, most of the bail out money has gone to banks and creditors, which irrefutably puts to shame the claim that European taxpayers’ money was used to save Greece and the other reckless countries of the periphery.
How much longer can the European Union reasonably claim to guarantee the free movement of persons as a fundamental right? As the internalization of EU external migration policy starts to kick in, Peo Hansen examines the implications for the future of EU citizenship as we know it.
Offering undocumented migrants the assistance that they need is well within the means of EU member states, says Fabrizio Gatti in conversation with Glänta editors Göran Dahlberg and Linn Hansén. Instead, governments continue to bicker among themselves as to who is to pay and people continue to fall prey to the traffickers.
Thanks to a new wave of small intellectual magazines, an infectious buzz has returned to public debate in the United States. Roman Schmidt talks to David Marcus who, as a new editor at Dissent, is well placed to provide the lowdown what’s driving this genuinely critical movement.
Audre Lorde’s biomythography could not be more relevant to contemporary concerns about whiteness, forming feminist alliances across differences and intersectionality. Maja Milatovic celebrates Lorde’s visionary text and the spaces it opens up for mutual recognition, dialogue and growth.
Adrian Wooldridge’s recent book, co-authored with John Micklethwait, characterizes the global race to reinvent the state as “The Fourth Revolution”. Big corporations come and go, transnational institutions like the EU still alienate people. But the state will continue to adapt to the needs of today’s world.
Ideas tended to flow easily between the university and the movement during the era of second-wave feminism. But as feminism became academicized, the flow was disrupted. Nonetheless, says Nancy Fraser, given the hunger for new thinking in all arenas after the 2008 crash, this is changing once again.
Much as the media like to call Barack Obama a “lame duck President”, he’s begun to look pretty agile of late. So says George Blecher. A portrait of Obama, the most consistent US president in decades, dispatched from inside the land of the free.
In December 2014, the American film director Oliver Stone interviewed the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych; and then argued that events on the Maidan last winter were the product of CIA involvement. Historian Stephen Velychenko responds.