Political Journeys: The openDemocracy Essays

Political Journeys: The openDemocracy Essays

Fred Halliday

Language: English

Pages: 290

ISBN: B00796E8M4

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"Whatever the subjects . . . Halliday's knowledge, imagination, and intellectual independence illuminate them all."—Francis Wheen

"Fred Halliday's Political Journeys range over wide intellectual and political landscapes, with brilliant insights, absorbing narratives, lucid writing, and subtle humour."—Sami Zubeida

Fred Halliday always combined the broad sweep of modern history, its currents and ideas, with a profound knowledge of modern revolutions, the Middle East, and national movements. This collection of columns written for openDemocracy between 2004 and 2009 is proof of a subtle worldview that continues to generate questions: what is the relation between religion, nationalism, and progress? Is a new international order possible? When is intervention a force for progress?

From the big headline topics like the Iraq War or the Danish cartoons, to the unexpected comparisons of Tibet and Palestine, or Afghanistan and the Falklands, Halliday is a perennially surprising and enlightened guide to the major issues of international politics.

Fred Halliday (1946–2010) was a leading authority on superpower relations, the Middle East, and international relations theory. He was professor emeritus of international relations at the London School of Economics from 1985 to 2008 and a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies.

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom

Letters to a Young Activist (Art of Mentoring)

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (2nd Edition) (Open Media Series)

Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

become more prominent in several countries, evidenced by the recent elections of presidents Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia. Bachelet, a former political prisoner under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, was herself tortured, and her father died in prison. When she took power, crowds took to the streets of Santiago shouting: ‘Ya van a ver, ya van a ver! Cuando las mujeres tengan el poder!’ (‘They will see, they will see! When women have the power!’) In a range

he was poisoned by the Israelis. When King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was stabbed to death by a deranged young male relative in 1975, the Arab world was full of conspiracy theories: the Russians, the Americans; it seemed everyone was involved. In perhaps the most prominent assassination of the twentieth century, that of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, a vast industry of myth, plot and insinuation grew up, from the work of the lawyer Mark Lane (a tireless proponent of alternative

of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika gave way to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the wave of revolution in Eastern and Central Europe, Cubans were particularly interested in (and, it seemed, alarmed by) the uprising against Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania in December 1989, which they saw as a KGB-inspired military coup that could be a dry run for Cuba. This mistrust was evidently reciprocated. Soviet officials I met during those same years in Moscow seemed still to be anxious about the Cuban

ignorant of the fact that both national and global security requires alliances and cooperation with other states: it affects not even to care. ‘You are either with us, or against us’, is the refrain. The clearest exposition of this line of thinking is the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of September 2002. It argues, in line with what is generally termed ‘neo-conservative’ thinking, explicitly for a doctrine of US superiority and unilateral capability that dispenses with

there is a further element in the present deep crisis that needs to be registered: the centrality of violence. All societies rest, as Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci insisted, on a core of violence. We who live in Britain have special reason to recall this: this country has over the centuries visited its armies on much of the world, and has been involved in violent conflict in every one of the fifty-four years that the current monarch has ruled. Yet it is the violence of the rebel rather than of

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