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doi: 10.1177/0306396808093298pmid: N/A
From competing in the Eurovision song contest to participating in the European Research Area, Israel is beneficially treated as a European nation. Yet its violations of international law against the Palestinians, attested in UN resolutions and in contravention of Europe's own humanitarian conventions, attract no international sanctions. The academic boycott of Israel, following the wide-ranging boycott of South Africa that helped to publicise and end the iniquities of apartheid, aims to focus attention on issues of human rights, in the hope of securing a just peace in Palestine/Israel. The parameters of the boycott and the opposition mounted against it are explored here by two of its leading proponents, even as they expose the double standards to which Israeli and Palestinian students and academics are subjected.
doi: 10.1177/0306396808093299pmid: N/A
The `global war on terror' is often represented as a struggle between incompatible opposites, of good versus evil, terror versus democracy and civilisation versus barbarism. The deployment of such dichotomies was part of the background to the onslaught on Fallujah in 2004, serving to provide the US military with the appearance of moral legitimacy, as it turned the city to rubble in order to `save' it. In the US media, the arrogant assumption that the US is civilisationally superior both to the `barbarians' its armies were fighting in the city and to the broader mass of the Iraqi population, was a recurring theme among neo-conservative and pro-war liberal ideologues. Yet, with the city's destruction presented as a moral imperative on behalf of civilised values, there has been scant examination of the allegations that US forces were guilty of war crimes. Moreover, the attack on Fallujah shows that civilisation and barbarism are not diametrically opposed concepts in a `global war on terror' which continues to cause more death and destruction than the violence it is supposedly intended to eliminate.
doi: 10.1177/0306396808093300pmid: N/A
The failure of its occupation of Iraq has provoked deep divisions among the US ruling elite over the future of foreign policy. The unilateralism promoted by the neoconservatives has been discredited, yet it is unclear whether the post-Bush era will be dominated by the `realists' or the `globalists', each of whom advocate different pathways for US imperialism. The `realists' — long the dominant trend in US foreign policy thinking — aim to maintain US leadership of the pro-western alliance formed during the cold war, whereas the `globalists', whose economic interests are those of transnational capital, seek to rethink US power within the context of an emerging polycentric world system, the parameters of which remain to be fully articulated. For the moment, there is a disconnect between the transnational economics of globalisation and the nationalist politics of the US ruling class, which remains committed to its belief that America has been uniquely chosen by history, culture and God to lead the world.
doi: 10.1177/0306396808093301pmid: N/A
Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, asbestos-induced diseases began to attract widespread attention as a result of labour activism, media coverage, government regulation, scientific research and extensive litigation in North America and Europe. The consequences of asbestos mining and manufacture in producer countries, such as South Africa, where the multinational industry operated, however, remained largely invisible internationally. Historians of the asbestos industry have demonstrated that suppression and manipulation of scientific knowledge played a central role in the industry's efforts to escape accountability. What has been neglected are the ways in which mainstream asbestos researchers in the early twentieth century separated the physiological from the social context of disease in both the metropole and the colonies, thereby narrowing understandings of disease causality. It is argued here that narrow concepts of disease allowed for limited visibility and, in Britain, fostered prevention policies based on technical `solutions'; whereas, in the racially segregated society of South Africa, a narrow notion of causality rendered asbestos-induced diseases almost completely invisible — as they still are today.
doi: 10.1177/0306396808093302pmid: N/A
In this hitherto unpublished wide-ranging and reflective interview from 1982 on the relationships between language, literature and political change, C. L. R. James examines what is specific to the Caribbean genus of imaginative writing in English. And he draws insightful comparisons between it and the rhetorical power embodied in Martin Luther King's great speech, `I have a dream'. As we go to press, the fortieth anniversary of King's death is being commemorated.
doi: 10.1177/03063968080500010602pmid: N/A
The West Indian Gazette, edited by Claudia Jones, and on which Donald Hinds was a writer, was one of the most influential pioneers of a genuinely independent black press in Britain. To say that Claudia herself was a communist, feminist and anti-imperialist does not express the dynamism and humanity of her politics, or their innovative nature — including the introduction of the first black carnival in Britain. She, and the Gazette, were immensely important in the creation of the black community in Britain from the late 1950s onwards, as it was beset by an ongoing and crude racism, including the riots of Notting Hill and Nottingham.
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