NM's blog

The genocide was committed primarily against Bosnian Muslims , who are ethnically known as  Bosniaks . The targeted campaign aimed to permanently remove Bosniaks from specific territories to create a contiguous, ethnically homogeneous Serb state. The broader war in Bosnia involved a campaign known as  ethnic cleansing . While Bosnian Croats were also targeted and displaced by Bosnian Serb forces in certain areas, the overwhelming majority of the victims of systematic slaughter, concentration camps (such as Omarska and Keraterm), and the longest siege in modern history (the Siege of Sarajevo) were Bosniaks. According to demographic data compiled by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and research institutes,  Bosniaks made up over 80% of all civilian casualties  during the Bosnian War, despite constituting roughly 44% of the pre-war population. The Target Demographic Ethnic and Religious Identity:  While the conflict is often desc...

It is possible to give many instances of how the rule of colonial difference—of representing the “other” as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior—can be employed in situations that are not, in the strict terms of political history, colonial.  These instances come up not only in relations between countries or nations, but even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights. Indeed, invoking such differences are, we might say, commonplaces in the politics of discrimination, and hence also in the many contemporary struggles for identity. This reason makes it necessary to study the specific history of the colonial state, because it reveals what is only hidden in the universal history of the modern regime of power. —Partha Chatterjee,  The Nation and Fragments,  1993, pp. 34-35

This short book “restores to the word "imperialism" the force that liberal commentary has tried to drain from it: not a relic of pith helmets and colonial maps, but the living logic of a capitalist world system hurtling through war, genocide, ecological plunder and great-power rivalry.” The first trap the author warns us of is the liberal hypocrisy , “which recognises Russian aggression in Ukraine or Chinese threats towards Taiwan as imperialist, while treating Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Gaza as tragic mistakes committed in the name of higher ideals. “The second is "campist" fantasy, which sees every enemy of Washington as progressive by definition. “ To oppose NATO expansion does not require prettifying Russian imperialism. To oppose US encirclement of China does not require pretending Beijing is a socialist alternative. To defend Palestine does not require outsourcing liberation to regional states whose own ruling classes pursue power, mar...