South Asian states have obscured longstanding cross-border ties in order to consolidate national control. This history shows that dominant national identities crystallised only in the
Category: Book reviews
As early as 1864, Europe’s left was split by a Russian war of aggression against a democratic neighbour — namely Poland. For Karl Marx, the
From The Nation Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance by Melinda Cooper 2024 Ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, liberals and the left
About a decade ago, I was invited to a small private gathering of Jewish studies scholars to talk about the future of Zionism. One of
Ukrainian author and translator Artem Chapeye (Артем Чапай), whose books include the dystopian The Red Zone and the sardonically titled The Ukraine (article intended), has
China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial RivalryBy Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley SmithHaymarket Books, 2024 China in Global Capitalism
On Peter Beinart’s latest appeal to American Jews It’s hard to say where my anger came from, chiding Uncle Eddie at the Rosh Hashanah dinner
From New Humanist Opposing ideas about antisemitism threaten to split the anti-racist movement. A new book seeks to bridge the divides Many of us are
Soon after the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023, while Israel was bombing Gaza in retaliation but before it invaded, Aaron Bastani of Novara Media
I What’s wrong with this picture? We beg forgiveness for beginning this review with a block quote from a Wikipedia article: The horseshoe theory asserts that advocates
General Ne Win’s Legacy of Burmanization in Myanmar: The Challenge to Peace in the Twenty-First CenturyBy Saw Eh Htoo and Tony WatersPalgrave Macmillan, 2024, 225
The author’s pieces on Hindutva in the 1980s had forecast many of the trends that are visible today. K. Balagopal was a civil rights activist
In January 1918, two months after Soviet power was established in Petrograd, one of the Red Guard units tasked with securing that power on the
From the London Review of Books Review of: Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, by Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan. Hurst, 2023 What are the major wars
Gita Ramaswamy, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2022), 432 pp. Ammel Sharon is Assistant Professor of
From the Jewish diaspora to the Palestinians, R. Binyamin’s ideas show how alternatives to mainstream Zionism were imagined even in its earliest days. I spend
Lachlan McNamee’s short book on settler colonialism, Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, is nothing short of excellent. In just 163
Universities have no shortage of naked emperors enrobed in the finest of phantasmal silks and, here, Walter Mignolo endeavours to show off the latest in
From The London Review of Books The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai. Norton, 440 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 393 63416 7 In 1852,
Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization (London: Verso, 2021), 282 pp. Just over ten years ago, the Tunisian Revolution of
A new book uncovers letters by Jewish and Arab fighters from the 1948 war, highlighting the personal lives of those who fought to establish Israel
Andrew B. Liu is an associate professor in the Department of History at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA). His research interests include modern China, South and
Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Catherine Liu on the political spectrumThis essay
Apologists for capitalism like to point to its historically progressive aspects, like its supposed use of “free labor” rather than older forms of labor compulsion.
Review of: Dmitry Shumsky. Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. In a thought-provoking, evidence-based