Niall Ferguson in Newsweek: In Samuel Huntington’s version of the post–Cold War world, there was going to be a clash between an Islamic civilization that was stuck in a medieval time warp and a Western civilization that was essentially equivalent to modernity. What we’ve ended up with is something more like a mashup of civilizations,… Read More »
My years as Gaddafi’s nurse – Oksana Balinskaya ‘…what will ultimately replace today’s dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a tripolar system organized around the dollar, the euro, and the Chinese renminbi’ – Barry Eichengreen ‘The left love being provoked by me … they think I’m a reactionary imperialist scumbag’ Niall Ferguson Why about 75% of… Read More »
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret. Joseph E. Stiglitz. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for… Read More »
Madonna’s Charity finds out that charity is hard to do An interactive map on the politics of the Libyan no-fly zone decision European leaders agree on euro rescue fund ‘Saif al-Qaddafi is not just a dictator’s son turned international party boy turned charismatic reformer turned brutal paranoid headcase, he’s also a painter’ The world’s best-designed… Read More »
… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.
Gideon Rachman of FT writes: It is ironic that the democratic movements in the Arab world broke out just as autocracy seemed to be coming back into fashion. Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” thesis epitomised the democratic triumphalism of 1989, recently wrote an article for this newspaper that lauded China’s ability to “make large… Read More »
This is a guest post by Keith Hart (cross-posted). It is partly in response to Benson Eluma’s piece here on Achebe and Hart. You can leave your comments here or at Hart’s blog. Benson’s post refers to my previous one, Africa’s hope, which in turn took off from Chinua Achebe’s NYT oped piece. I will not… Read More »
On 11.01.10, I had a public defense of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The questions were firm but fair, and I came away with a nice grade (yes, German Ph.D. dissertations are graded). Thanks to everybody who in one way or another made writing the dissertation less… Read More »
In her latest column, Gillian Tett draws attention to the research of Anne Jefferson, an anthropologist who is studying how mortgage foreclosures are unfolding in the United States. This caught my attention: In the past century, American culture has developed a well-entrenched, commonly shared national narrative to explain and justify success – the myth of… Read More »
When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara. Read it all here. HT to @johnkeithhart