Before he was the disputed president, he was a US-trained economist, IMF official, and austerity-minded central bank director: the rise of Alassane Ouattara… [Fr]
An anti-corruption activist becomes a trendy cause celebre by fasting unto death in the middle of Delhi. Is Anna Hazare a grandstanding fool? A moral titan? And what does he want?…
This time last year, Turkey was the unreliable ZOMG JIHAD partner of Iran and Syria [e.g. this, and also]. Now it’s a trusted interlocutor for besieged authoritarian governments, Arab Spring rebels, and hapless Europeans…
Alassane Ouattara may have won an election, but it is the army of the Forces Nouvelles, slashing its way south, that has brought him to the brink of power…
In Guatemala, the promise of biofuels is mass eviction, farmland in the hands of government cronies, and chilling reminders of a long history of massacre…
Provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been held incommunicado for 24 hours now, after being detained at the Beijing airport while attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police have surrounded his house and raided his studio…
A vague populist is running ahead of a dictator’s daughter [recently] in Peru’s presidential race, causing Serious People to frown and markets to fret…
Bashar al-Assad, like his fallen cronies, speaks a language that reassures his oft-grudging Iranian and Israeli supporters: mild blather about economic progress, and near-total ignorance of a population [Fr] that sees a future beyond him…
A Franco-Algerian graffiti journeys to Tunis, presenting his cutout portraits of recent martyrs along the walls and pillars of the unfinished revolution… [via]
“The first thing that strikes you [...] beyond the rotary phones and the 29-cent burgers, is what a sad story it is.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasturns forty…
Women are constantly framed as conflict victims, not political protagonists. That goes double for women writing about war. Also: NYT journalist Lynsey Addario talks about sexual aggression during her Libyan captivity: “it sucks, it’s disgusting, but it’s part of the job”…
The epithet “Luddite”, noted Thomas Pynchon in 1984, is a convenient way to call someone “politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time”… [via]
A dictator and the IMF choked off Nigeria’s tiny middle class, universities, and intellectuals, and with them the country’s best hope for a progressive politics…
Mohammed Bamyeh beautifully decodes the sources of Egypt’s successful revolt: Marginality, spontaneity, civic solidarity, political rigor, and the ignorance of its rulers…
The force and source of unrest in the industrialized world isn’t the dispossessed. It’s the precarious, the insecure workers always just on the cusp of a real job…
