Over on humanrights.ie ILR contributor Illan rua Wall has put up a very interesting and wide-ranging podcast interview with Wendy Brown; the Heller Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkley.
About the interview, which was recorded earlier in September, Illan writes:
Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to [...]

The question of populism and radical change has re-emerged in American politics, first with Obama and now with the tea party movement. However, it was another story that recently caught my eye. The New York Times carried a story about Republican ‘agents’ (or ‘operatives’) encouraging homeless people to stand unopposed in the Green Party primaries. [...]

Details of the one-day conference and how to get regular updates on the situation in Columbia from Grupo Raíces can be found at the end of this article.
When Alvaro Uribe stood down as president of Colombia in August 2010, the BBC’s correspondent claimed that the right-wing leader “may go down as one of Colombia’s [...]

Last Tuesday, Sept 7th, France virtually came to a standstill through large scale strikes and demonstrations against the intentions of the Sarkozy elit to increase the pensionable age from 60 to 62 !! For many of us living in Ireland, and in the UK, facing the prospect of pensions at the age of 65, 66, 68 [...]

José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

The Irish Times on Saturday 17th July published an article about Colombian claims that Venezuela is sheltering members of the FARC guerrilla group. This is an old chestnut that Colombia and the US revive from time to time, especially if there’s need to draw attention away from other news and particularly if it’s embarrassing news. [...]

The first decade of the 21st century has been a difficult one for the UN, as its credibility has taken a serious battering. Incidents such as the international furore provoked by the Volker report on the UN administration of the Iraq sanctions prior to the 2003 invasion, accusations of corruption against the previous UN Secretary [...]

It’s an old cliche that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity. In Haiti however, business and political leaders are not concerned with originality. The catastrophic earthquake was quick to be seen as an opportunity to rebuild the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, with the US thinktank the Heritage Foundation famously writing that [...]

The current violence errupting in the southern region of Kyrgyzstan is deeply troubling.
If we are to go by the news reports given by the BBC, the violence is the culmination of long standing ethnic tensions.  If we are to believe The Economist’s recent article “Stalin’s Harvest” we are seeing the inevitable fruits of Stalin’s labour.
According [...]