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Our latest openDemocracy Quarterly, 50.50 Women Writers, Politics and Voice, edited by Rosemary Bechler, is out now. You can buy online here.

Just published Afghanistan: a misread war, Paul Rogers Lawfare after Israel-Gaza , Eyal Weizman Paramilitaries throw Bangladesh into chaos, Kanishk Tharoor Russians don’t much like the West, Susan Richards Arthur Miller: depression's fortune, Christopher Bigsby Who exactly is cleaning up?, Tony Curzon Price

Afghanistan: a misread war, Paul Rogers The war in Afghanistan is reaching a pivotal moment. A range of diplomats, politicians and military analysts from dozens of countries is now paying the conflict the intense and concentrated international attention that it long seemed to lack while events in Iraq took centre-stage. But as the earlier combat-zone in the "war on terror" returns to the forefront, there is a notable tendency to misconstrue the story of the years since October 2001 in Afghanistan - in ways that might... more » Lawfare after Israel-Gaza , Eyal Weizman If, therefore, a conclusion can be drawn from military violence it is that... there is a lawmaking character inherent in it. Walter Benjamin  The scale of Israel's twenty-two-day attack on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 - which killed 1,300 people and damaged or destroyed about 15% of all its buildings - led to widespread international accusations that Israel has committed war crimes. A prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague is currently considering a... more » Paramilitaries throw Bangladesh into chaos, Kanishk Tharoor According to Bangladeshi government officials, an uprising by paramilitaries that flung the country into chaos and confusion for a day has ended. At a meeting on Wednesday between army officials and paramilitaries at their Dhaka headquarters, members of the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) revolted. Their mutiny led to the deaths of upwards of 50 people, including several civilians trapped in the BDR's Dhaka compound and caught in the crossfire elsewhere as the rebellion spread to other... more » Russians don’t much like the West, Susan Richards   Russian attitudes to the West are known to have soured in recent years. But it may surprise Western readers that the majority of Russians now express a positive dislike of the West in general, and particularly of America. Nor do most of them regard liberal democracy as a model towards which Russia should aspire any more, either. These are the findings of an ambitious new socio-economic study entitled ‘Are Russians Moving Backwards?'  by Sergei Guriev of the prestigious New... more » Arthur Miller: depression's fortune, Christopher Bigsby In 1980 a new play by Arthur Miller opened. It was called The American Clock and was set during the United States's Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. It seemed an odd moment to turn the clock back. I asked him why he had written the play at this time. He replied that he wanted to remind people that it could all go away. As it happened, it nearly did. Soon afterwards, at the start of the Ronald Reagan era, America entered a deep recession. What was really in Miller's mind,... more » Who exactly is cleaning up?, Tony Curzon Price The UK government has discovered its metaphor for the bail-out: the banks need to clean-up their balance sheets; the government is cleaning-up the financial sector ... the Augean metaphor should be suitably heroic. But what is truly extraordinary is that it is the banks that are cleaning up, not the government. And the repeated failure of governement -- here and in the US -- to do the obvious right thing needs explanation. Here is a good picture from Krugman representing the assets... more »