Drug addiction in Russia has reached epidemic proportions, but the government is refusing to address the problem head-on, preferring instead to inveigh against external forces like the USA, NATO and the war in Afghanistan. On current problems and their implications for the future.
A couple of weeks ago when it became clear that Barack Obama has reneged on his campaign promise to close the Guantánamo Bay facility, Hendrik Hertzberg inveighed against the result in the New Yorker. Torture was a “vile offense to elementary morality” on George W. Bush’s watch, and there were sundry other “crimes against American and international law” from which Obama’s new policies do not sufficiently depart.
Nils Gilman's coedited book Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century has been published.
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There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy.
A few people have asked my how my recent account of the history of human rights connects to the contemporary events in Middle Eastern politics. While I have no expertise with respect to the latter, I have a new post at Dissent magazine applying to the events a distinction between the rights of man and human rights on which my book is based.
I explore that question in a new article in the American Historical Review.
Humanity editorial board member Paul W. Kahn has recently published a new book.
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Humanity editorial board member Robert Meister has recently published a new book.
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As Sam Moyn has pointed out in his previous post, the events in Tunisia and Egypt have triggered a revival of sorts of “democracy promotion.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a feature about “the return of pushing democracy” that explored how current events are used by some supporters of the previous administration to suggest that George W.
One of the interesting features of the current events in Egypt is that they have driven Barack Obama and his administration to a far more significant embrace of human rights language than ever before. Recall that during the last outburst of Middle Eastern protest, in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama -- having suggested he had learned the lessons of neoconservative universalism -- relied on religious language of "bearing witness" to what happened as repression abroad happened. We might stand idly by, he implied, as repression beckoned, but we should shed a tear and remember the victims.
