As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?
Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.
The fascination of Joseph Conrad’s novels with the transformative pressures of capitalist modernity threatens a revelation so intolerable, Mulhern suggests, that it can only be contained within dense narrative strategies of deferral and disavowal.
Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.
Charting the impact of fluctuating currencies, volatile stock markets and interest rates on the developing world since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Robert Wade contends that untrammelled mobility of capital—private funds above all—reinforces dynamics of debt and underdevelopment.
Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.
David Laitin on Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. Can world-system theory and sociological fieldwork explain the bifurcating fates of the post-Soviet Caucasus?
Sebastian Budgen on Timothy Smith, France in Crisis. Spirited critique of the imbalances of the French model—coupled with liberal proposals for a ‘Dutch miracle’ in the Hexagon.