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Only 36 days left to the major Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK 28 February 2009. Sponsored by openDemocracy and supported by fifty other organisations from across the political spectrum united by a concern over  attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms. Tickets are selling fast – buy yours today. openDemocracy has a vacancy for a part-time business development assistant Just published American void, lonely president , Simon Critchley Barack Obama: hope, fear...advice, openDemocracy Obama's six-problem region, Fred Halliday Russia: lurching between crises, Dmitri Travin Murder, Moscow-style, Mariana Torocheshnikova Modern Liberty and the politics of hope, Tom Griffin Susan Sontag: love's work , Angela McRobbie Advertise here American void, lonely president , Simon Critchley There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good". This is hardly news. We've known since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention that "there's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America - there's... more » Barack Obama: hope, fear...advice, openDemocracy We asked some of our authors around the world to respond to the following: "About the Barack Obama administration, please tell us: 1 one thing you hope for 2 one thing you fear 3 one piece of advice you would give" Paul Rogers Conor Gearty Antara Dev Sen Ehsan Masood Mariano Aguirre Ivan Briscoe Paul Gilroy Peter Kimani Dejan Djokic Emily Lau Andrew Stroehlein Michele Wucker John Hulsman ... more » Obama's six-problem region, Fred Halliday The inauguration of a new United States president is a moment of unusually high hopes the world over as well in the homeland. This is understandable in view both of the legacy Barack Obama inherits and his own striking qualities. But there is also - as ever, but perhaps more in view of the tendency to excess in much media coverage - a need for some proportion. Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of... more » Russia: lurching between crises, Dmitri Travin Crisis of mid-1980s At this time, the Soviet administrative economy was still fundamentally different from the market economy in the West. The problems were specific. We had to increase the effectiveness of the economy, though we lacked the tools used to solve these tasks in a market economy. However,  in the mid-1980s the Soviet Union faced a drop in world oil prices, and accordingly a reduction of revenue from export. In this sense, the Russian economy was already linked to the... more » Murder, Moscow-style, Mariana Torocheshnikova I learned of Stanislav Markelov's murder in the court room at the Moscow District Military Court, where the case of the murder of Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya is being heard. Journalists hardly ever switch off their mobile phones, even in the court room. When my colleague from the news agency RIA Novosti got an SMS that the lawyer, Markelov, had been killed in the centre of Moscow, the news flashed round the court room. Who did it, how, and why, we asked.  The... more » Modern Liberty and the politics of hope, Tom Griffin Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Convention on Modern Liberty could play a key role in  bringing a sense of Obama-style optimism to Britain, Mary Riddell suggests in the Telegraph today. (Anthony Barnett is particularly pleased to find the Convention compared to the abolition of Trident!). On freedoms, politicians across all parties are backing the Convention on Modern Liberty, an initiative launched last week in protest at an invasive state. On justice, Lord Phillips, who will head... more » Susan Sontag: love's work , Angela McRobbie The publication of selections from Susan Sontag's private journals and notebooks from the years 1947-64 opens her early inner life to a public readership. The fact that the volume is edited by her son, David Rieff, hints at the complexities surrounding the decision to publish this intimate and revealing work. Indeed, Rieff's introduction confesses his misgivings in this respect, before reflecting that - since Sontag had sold her papers to the University of California (UCLA) in 2002, two... more »

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