ReadingList

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror

From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared.

Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”

Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

Get your copy: Pantheon Books

Read a review: The Darfur Diversion: “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The Electronic Intifada

Notes on the Author: Mahmood Mamdani, a third generation East African of Indian origin, was born in Kampala, Uganda. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1974. Since 1999 he has been the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. In 2001 he presented one of the nine papers that were delivered at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium.

Wikipedia page on Mahmood Mamdani

Read and interview with Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslims, Bad Muslims

Mahmood Mamdani on DemocracyNow: Darfur: “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”

Watch a video: Prof. Mahmood Mamdani and John Prendergast, “The Darfur Debate”

Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer

By Phyllis Bennis

If you have ever wondered “Why is there so much violence in the Middle East?”, “Who are the Palestinians?”, “What are the occupied territories?” or “What does Israel want?”, then this is the book for you. With straightforward language, Phyllis Bennis, longtime analyst of the region, answers basic questions about Israel and Israelis, Palestine and Palestinians, the US and the Middle East, Zionism and anti-Semitism; about complex issues ranging from the Oslo peace process to the election of Hamas. Together her answers provide a comprehensive understanding of the longstanding Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Get your copy: InterlinkBooks

Read recent works of Phyllis Bennis

Notes on author: IPS (Institute of Policy Studies) fellow Phyllis Bennis is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. While working as a journalist at the United Nations during the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War, she began working on U.S. domination of the UN, and stayed involved in work on Iraq sanctions and disarmament, and later U.S. war and occupation in Iraq. In 1999 Phyllis accompanied a group of congressional aides to Iraq to examine the impact of U.S.-led economic sanctions on humanitarian conditions there, and later joined former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, who resigned his position as Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq to protest the impact of sanctions, in a speaking tour. In 2001 she helped found and currently co-chairs the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement.

Watch a video: Phyllis Bennis on the Israeli occupation of Palestine

In Defense of Lost Causes

By Slavoj Zizek

A witty, adrenalin-fuelled manifesto for universal values by the maverick philosopher. Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In the postmodern world, ideologies of all kinds have been cast in doubt. In this combative new work, renowned theorist Slavoj Zizek takes on the reigning postmodern agenda with a manifesto for several “lost causes.” From a provocative redemption of Heidegger’s engagement with the Third Reich as “a right step in the wrong direction,” to reasserting class struggle as the underlying reality of global capitalism, to a defense of the emancipatory legacy of Christianity against New Age spiritualism, Zizek confronts the failures of contemporary theory and proposes unexpected resolutions.

Get your copy: Verso

On Suicide Bombing

By Talal Asad

Like many people in America and around the world, Talal Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, largely through the media and the emotional response of others. For many non-Muslims, “the suicide bomber” quickly became the icon of “an Islamic culture of death”—a conceptual leap that struck Asad as problematic. Is there a “religiously-motivated terrorism?” If so, how does it differ from other cruelties? What makes its motivation “religious”? Where does it stand in relation to other forms of collective violence?

 

 

 

 

 

Drawing on his extensive scholarship in the study of secular and religious traditions as well as his understanding of social, political, and anthropological theory and research, Asad questions Western assumptions regarding death and killing. He scrutinizes the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” the claim that “Islamic jihadism” is the essence of modern terror, and the arguments put forward by liberals to justify war in our time. He critically engages with a range of explanations of suicide terrorism, exploring many writers’ preoccupation with the motives of perpetrators. In conclusion, Asad examines our emotional response to suicide (including suicide terrorism) and the horror it invokes.

On Suicide Bombing is an original and provocative analysis critiquing the work of intellectuals from both the left and the right. Though fighting evil is an old concept, it has found new and disturbing expressions in our contemporary “war on terror.” For Asad, it is critical that we remain aware of the forces shaping the discourse surrounding this mode of violence, and by questioning our assumptions about morally good and morally evil ways of killing, he illuminates the fragile contradictions that are a part of our modern subjectivity.

Get your copy: Columbia University Press

Notes on Author: Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York. For more than three decades Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West’s knowledges-especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges-of the non-Western world.  He is interested in the phenomenon of religion (and secularism) as an integral part of modernity, and especially in the religious revival in the Middle East. Connected with this is his interest in the links between religious and secular notions of pain and cruelty, and therefore with the modern discourse of Human Rights.

Read one of his recent writings: Thinking about “Just War” 

Watch a video: Thinking about Religion Belief and Politics

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 

By Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn’t just some relic from the bad old days. It’s alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you. 

“At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq” civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the ‘War on Terror’ to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened.” Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes “produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.” Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld. 

There’s little doubt Klein’s book–which arrived to enormous attention and fanfare thanks to her previous missive, the best-selling No Logo, will stir the ire of the right and corporate America. It’s also true that Klein’s assertions are coherent, comprehensively researched and footnoted, and she makes a very credible case. Even if the world isn’t going to hell in a hand-basket just yet, it’s nice to know a sharp customer like Klein is bearing witness to the backroom machinations of government and industry in times of turmoil.

Get your copy: shockdoctrine.com

Read a review of the book: Power, Passion, and Neoliberalism: A critical review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Walden Bello

Read profile of the author: Outside agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left.

Visit Naomi Klein’s website

Shock Doctrine’s video channel

Watch a short film on the book by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein

Israel’s Occupation

By Neve Gordon

Applying the work of Michel Foucault to the contemporary Middle East, this highly theoretical book examines the means of control used to manage the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Gordon, a professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University, begins by exploring the diffuse mechanisms of power—in the political, civilian, geographical and economic arenas—used to normalize the occupation in its first years, making the ostensibly temporary occupation permanent. Later chapters take a more specific historical approach, examining a series of events that radically transformed these power structures: the first intifada, the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, which, the author argues, required a reorganization of Israeli power in the Occupied Territories, leading to the disregard of the Palestinians inhabiting those territories.

Get your copy: California University Press

Read a review

Notes on author: Neve Gordon is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He is coeditor of Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics, and the Case of Israel, editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, and a regular contributor to publications including The Nation, In These Times, and the National Catholic Reporter.

Fore more details visit the Wikipedia page on Neve Gordon

Links:

Visit Neve Gordon’s website 

Read his article: What is Israel’s goal in Gaza

Watch a video: Israeli Professor Neve Gordon Condemns Israeli Invasion of Gaza

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

By Ilan Pappe

 

Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In our communicative world few modern catastrophes are concealed from the public eye. And yet, Ilan Pappe unveils, one such crime has been erased from the global public memory: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. The pervasive denial of the Nakbah, as Palestinians call the catastrophe that befell them, is still a mystery today. But why is it denied, and by whom? 

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine offers an investigation of this mystery, and Pappe puts forward a ground-breaking – if controversial – interpretation of the relationship of Nakbah to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, naming Nakbah as the conflict’s very origin. Portraying Israeli-Palestine relations in a revolutionary new light, this book is guaranteed to spark fierce debate throughout the world.

Get your copy: Oneworld Publications

Download a sample chapter

Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer in Policital Science at Haifa University. He is Academic Director for the Research Insitute for Peace at Givat Haviva and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies, Haifa. He is also author of the bestselling /A History of Modern Palestine/ (Cambridge), /The Modern Middle East/ (Routledge), and /The Israel/Palestine Question/ (Routledge).

Wikipedia page on Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappe’s official website 

Watch video: Ilan Pappé Speaks on Anniversary of al Nakba

Endgame

By Derrick Jensen

Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen’s intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy’s Black Ship to Hell.

In Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, Jensen lays out a series of provocative premises, including “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable” and “Love does not imply pacifism.” He vividly imagines an end to technologized, industrialized civilization and a return to agragrian communal life.

If Volume I lays insightful framework for envisioning a sustainable way of life, Volume II: Resistance catapults this discussion into a passionate call for action. Using his premises as guidelines for exploring real-world problems, Jensen guides us toward concrete solutions by focusing on our most primal human desire: to live on a healthy earth overflowing with uncut forests, clean rivers, and thriving oceans that are not under the constant threat of being destroyed.

Notes on author: Derrick Jensen, activist, small farmer, teacher, and philosopher. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values. Jensen is often labeled an anarcho-primitivist, by which is meant he concludes that civilization is inherently unsustainable and based on violence. He argues that the modern industrial economy is fundamentally at odds with healthy relationships, the natural environment, and indigenous peoples. He concludes that the very pervasiveness of these behaviors indicates that they are diagnostic symptoms of the greater problem of civilization itself. Accordingly, he exhorts readers and audiences to help bring an end to industrial civilization. Jensen proposes that a different, harmonious way of life is possible, and that it can be seen in many past societies including many Native American or other indigenous cultures. He claims that many indigenous peoples perceive a primary difference between Western and indigenous perspectives: even the most open-minded Westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world works. Furthermore, these indigenous peoples understand the world as consisting of other beings with whom we can enter into relationship; this stands opposed to the more Western belief that the world consists of objects or resources to be exploited or used.

Get your copy: Endgame

Derrick Jansen’s website 

Wikpedia page on Derrick Jensen

Watch Derrick Jensen talk about Civilization & Resistance

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

By Eyal Weizman

Groundbreaking exposé of Israel’s terrifying reconceptualization of geopolitics in the Occupied Territories and beyond. 

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged.

Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon’s reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare. In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape itself into a tool of total domination and control, Hollow Landlays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Get your copy: Verso

Notes on author: Eyal Weizman is an architect and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has worked with a variety of NGOs and human right groups in Israel-Palestine. He is an editor-at-large of Cabinet magazine, and received the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006–7.

Read his The Politics of Verticality

 In this series of articles and photo-essays, he paints the extraordinary, three-dimensional battle over the West Bank: from settlements to sewage, archaeology to Apaches. None of us have a coherent mental map of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Architect Eyal Weizman explains why. We’re missing verticality. 

Visit the website of RESEARCH ARCHITECTURE: A Laboratory for Critical Spatial Practices

The Politics of Climate Change

By Anthony Giddens

 

Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a ?back of the mind? issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Politicians have woken up to the dangers, but at the moment their responses are mainly on the level of gesture rather than being, as they have to be, both concrete and radical. 

Political action and intervention, on local, national and international levels, is going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming, as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. At the moment, however, Anthony Giddens argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won?t allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security. 

Get your copy: Polity

Notes on Author: Anthony Giddens is British Sociologist and former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages. Currently Giddens serves as Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.

Wikipedia page on Anthony Giddens

Read one of his recent article: This Climate Crunch Heralds the End of the End of History

What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq

By Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt

In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America’s interest was in liberation—especially for women. The first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, What Kind of Liberation? reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the “new Iraq.” Based on interviews with Iraqi women’s rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women, What Kind of Liberation?speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country’s violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women’s rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.

Get your copy: University of California Press

Author Bio: Nadje Al-Ali is Reader in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Nicola Pratt is Lecturer in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of East Anglia.

Visit Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq, organization founded by Nadje Al-Ali

Metapolitics

By Alain Badiou

In this follow-up to his highly acclaimed volume Ethics, a searing critique of liberalism, Alain Badiou discusses the limits of political philosophy.

Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection. Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities.

Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible “political truth” be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision.

Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Rancière’s writings on workers’ history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

Get your copy: Verso

AuthorBio: Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent French philosopher, formerly chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy. Particularly through a creative appropriation of set theory from his early interest in mathematics, Badiou seeks to recover the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Alain Badiou is the author of many books, including Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, Handbook of Inaesthetic, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Polemics.  His The Meaning of Sarkozy is forthcoming from Verso.

Further Resources:

Writings of Badiou at Lacanian Ink

Cosmos and History

Wikipedia page on Alain Badiou

The Future of the Image

By Jacques Rancière

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies. He suggests that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution will always embrace egalitarian ideals.

Get your copy: Verso

AuthorBio: Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Paris-VIII. His books include Hatred of Democracy and On the Shores of Politics (both from Verso), The Politics of Aesthetics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People and The Nights of Labor.

 

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading “Capital” (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris. Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière’s book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

Wikipedia page on Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière’s recent writings and interviews

Read Politics and Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere interviewed by Peter Hallward

“Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver,” Critical Inquiry, 2008

Watch a video of Jacques Ranciere’s talk: Revisiting ”Nights of Labour”