The article continued:
“Much of the military action has been directed against the police and security forces of the PNA, with substantial numbers having been killed and many more hundreds taken into custody. Police stations and barracks have been destroyed, as have intelligence and security centres. Moreover, and in some ways much more significant, there has been the destruction of the PNA’s administrative infrastructure.
“Information on this remains incomplete but is... more »
The Alternative's alternative, Evgeny Morozov
Whatever their impact on the domestic politics in Greece, the youth riots that have besieged Athens and other Greek cities earlier this month have also given rise to a new global phenomenon - the "networked protest". While it was not for the first time that the Internet has made the planning and the execution of the protest actions more effective, it was probably the first time that an issue of mostly local importance has triggered solidarity protests across the whole continent, some... more »
Continuity in US foreign policy, Paul Rogers
The United States’s security policy under Barack Obama may be less of a departure from that of his predecessor than many hope. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracysince 26 September 2001.
The Barack Obama administration which will take effect after the new United States president’s inauguration on 20 January 2009 looks likely to be very different to George W... more »
Russia’s crisis: the political options, Vladimir Gelman
It is by no means a proven fact that economic crises weaken authoritarian regimes. Statistical analyses have shown that, however deep or prolonged these crises may be, the regime's duration in office is unaffected. Some authoritarian regimes are able to emerge from a crisis without major losses (Mexico in 1982), while others are swept away by protesting citizens (Indonesia in 1998).
The balance of supply and demand in any market is affected by economic crises: in the... more »
Paul Krugman Forecasts Dark Days,
A year after his first conversation with Big Think, Paul Krugman sat down with us again recently to look at the state of the US economy. Twelve months hence, things have not improved. Krugman described the economic fragility during his first conversation last December as a "near recession," an observation that is now a forgone conclusion. Krugman's sober critique of the market has won him wide respect among economic thinkers, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in... more »
Somalia: ends and beginnings, Georg-Sebastian Holzer
Much of the flurry of international media reporting on Somalia remains fixated on piracy-related stories. A previous article in openDemocracy argued that the root of the piracy problem lay in the collapse of Somali institutions as a result of war and ill-judged foreign intervention, and thus belonged to the land rather than the ocean (see "Somalia: piracy and politics", 24 November 2008).
Georg-Sebastian Holzer is a research assistant at the Johns Hopkins University School of... more »
Argentina: celebrating democracy, Celia Szusterman
The citizens of Argentina have not had much to celebrate in a year of economic difficulties and political tensions, but the end of 2008 brings a noble twenty-fifth anniversary: for it was on 10 December 1983 that the country returned to democratic rule (with the inauguration of a civilian president, Raúl Alfonsín) after seven years of military dictatorship marked by violent repression, torture, fear and thousands of "disappearances".
Celia Szusterman is principal lecturer in... more »
"The Cruiser", a tribute, Neal Ascherson
The great Conor Cruise O'Brien climbed unsteadily onto a table in the senior staff club of Edinburgh University. We had all spent most of the day with him, arguing (it was in the late 1970s) about Scottish devolution. Conor had been obstinate, witty and useless, his phobia about all European nationalisms rendering him deaf to any suggestion that these demure Scottish aspirations were not yet another blood-and-soil crusade for ethnic exclusivity. There had followed a big lunch with much... more »
"The Cruiser" - a tribute, John Horgan
When I first met Conor Cruise O'Brien some four decades ago, he already had a full career behind him. Yet it is a mark of the sheer richness of his life that most of the obituaries following his death on 18 December 2008 at the age of 91 have tended to focused on the equally full one that at the time lay ahead: as an Irish parliamentarian and government minister whose passionate and articulate opposition to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) helped to tilt the axis of Irish political... more »
Conor Cruise O'Brien and republicanism, Tom Griffin
Tom Griffin (London, OK): As a footnote to Neal Ascherson and John Horgan's excellent obituaries of Conor Cruise O'Brien, I thought I would post an extract from a document that I came across in the National Archives a while ago.
In April 1975, M. F. Daly of the British Embassy in Dublin wrote a letter to the Foreign Office entitled Conor Cruise O'Brien and Republicanism. It concerned an Irish Times article in which O'Brien argued that the attitudes of Ireland's Fianna... more »
Reshaping the dry stone wall of Irish history, Arthur Aughey
Arthur Aughey (University of Ulster) reviews Irish Protestant Identities Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge, Manchester University Press 2008 pp389 + xvii. In his careful response to the scholarly papers he concludes with a lesson for Gordon Brown that devolution, especially to Northern Ireland as it is now, has proundly altered what it means to be British - and that this can no longer be defined by the 'centre'.
This book of twenty-five chapters is a... more »
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