The Overlooked Besieged Alternative in the Middle East
The Rojava Cantons
In my previous article I wrote about how both soft and hard Islamists render a very dark future for the Middle East. I finished my article by stating that the Kurdish Movement may provide a salient alternative for the whole region. However, this alternative is currently under attack by ...
Adding Injustice to Injury
One year on from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey
Our colleague, Zeyno Ustun, is back in Istanbul this month. We corresponded about the situation there on the occasion of the anniversary of the Gezi protests. She reports political paralysis with maximum police presence and sent a report from Amnesty International that she judges to summarize the situation ...
Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables
The new always appears in the guise of a miracle
This is the prepared text answering the question "What do we really know about transitions to democracy?" for the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014.
It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that ...
Aesthetic Community in Detroit
In the Huffington Post, author and community organizer Yusef Bunchy Shakur and co-author Jenny Lee write: "Detroit is modeling life after capitalism." One of the ways this is happening is through the work of artists who are helping to envision what that life might look like. These artists ...
Limiting Democracy: The American Media’s World View, and Ours
This article was originally published in Social Research, Vol. 7: No. 3: Fall 2010.
One of the difficulties in discussing the notion that it is the media that limits our idea of politics is that we all have an inherent resistance to believing that our own understanding of the political world ...
Gezi Resistance: Re-claiming Democracy
A prominent political theorist, Judith Shklar, once said that the rule of law has become “a self-congratulatory rhetorical device” [1] used by the politicians, who try to legitimize whatever they do just by uttering the word “the rule of law.” I think we can say the same thing for democracy ...
Can Europe Learn from Latin America about History and Justice?
Can Latin America change European political memory? Can a long history of European silence be dealt with from across the Atlantic? The current investigations of Argentine courts into the crimes of the Franco dictatorship have brought these questions to the fore. As we have seen this week, many in Europe ...
Torture and Dignity
This lecture to the New School's General Seminar was originally published on the above date. Given the recent revelations concerning the CIA's program of torture, we are highlighting Bernstein's reflections today, Dec. 12, 2014. -J.G.
I. The Abolition of Torture
Human beings are the sorts of being who can undergo devastation: they ...
The American Dream Comes to Life in Denmark
The following is the prepared text of the speech given by Minister Haekkerup on September 28, 2013, at The New School, with an introduction by William Milberg.
Introduction
The word “capitalism,” describing our market-oriented economic system of wage labor, private ownership and the endless drive for wealth accumulation, was invented in the ...
Towards the Next Default Threat?
This week The New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) hosted three New School economists to discuss the economic and political fallout of the government shut down and the possibility of a default. Professors Teresa Ghilarducci, Rick McGahey and Christian Proaño discussed possible scenarios in case the United States ...