Articles

9/11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed exploited his trial to remind the court of its own human rights obligations, while Osama bin Laden’s video statements include appeals to religious pluralism. Al-Qaeda’s use of liberal categories is central to its rhetoric on war and justice, writes Faisal Devji.

The International Court of Justice ruling on Kosovo’s declaration of independence will not herald a sea-change in Serbian public opinion, but it is likely to facilitate a general coming-to-terms with the fact that Kosovo is “lost”, writes Florian Bieber. The much-feared “domino effect” is also unlikely to occur.

“The fact that peole who were working freely in the 1990s now work in a way that is no longer free is the result of fear.” Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of independent Russian radio station “Ekho Moskvy”, tells Maria Eismont about dealing with death threats, censorship and the Kremlin.

Les Back learns a few lessons about the importance of paying attention from the examples of Primo Levi, radioman Studs Terkel and literary traveller Flemming Røgilds. They animate an alternative way to live, achieved through two people hearing each other. This active listening can create another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society.

“There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster tourist, to sail the seven seas looking for injustices to denounce. Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand, they are in the grain of everyday life.” Conceptual artist Victor Burgin launches an excoriating attack on documentary art as the “new doxa”.

The digitisation of the book has brought a new balance of power in the trade, with established publishers locked in struggle with the new digital distributors for control of production. Pascal Fouché, author of an encyclopaedia of the book, discusses whether publishers are prepared for the challenge posed by the dematerialisation of the printed word.

Lithuania’s capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it “home”. Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova.

During the twentieth anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic wall consisting of dominoes was toppled. The dominoes were painted on both sides, something that could only have been done with a great deal of forgetting, writes Jacob Kimvall. In reality, there was graffiti only on the western side of the Wall, and that was put there illegally; but during the anniversary, unity seems to be more important than historical accuracy.

The much anticipated US finance regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.

Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary’s hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.

It’s ironic, says a Latvian art critic, that the current saturation of the visual world by infinitely reproducible images via the Internet has driven artists back to older forms of representation.

The student and staff walk out at UCLA in September 2009 in response to announcements of fee hikes, cuts and layoffs sparked a wave of protests at universities across California that lasted months. In an article written in the spring of 2010, Evan Calder Williams considers connections between the financialisation of the university and communisation – “a practice of secession from capital that doesn’t wait for a communist revolution”.

In the UK, pressure from government to transform university programmes outside elite institutions into vocational training programmes creates a situation where “employability” becomes the sole goal of higher education, writes Jeremy Gilbert in an article first published in January 2010. What is offered under the guise of “university education” will soon be no more than a form of tertiary training for the service, retail and media industries.

In Germany, scientific and professional bodies acting on behalf of the state have traditionally mediated between the academic and professional sectors in order to keep academia and the commercial sector separate. Now, independent accreditation agencies certify BA and MA courses according to market-based criteria. The result of the exposure of German universities to purely economic demands will, like elsewhere, be an increasing hierarchization of educational institutions.

Today, a new struggle for control of Russia’s universities is underway between a “black”, private model and a centralized and seemingly more transparent state model. Yet the two are but different expressions of the same thing, writes Alexander Bikbov: spontaneous capitalist neoconservatism. What’s more, governments elsewhere in Europe are seeking to emulate the successful example of the Russian state in extracting profit from the public university.