Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Colonial constructions of the ‘threat’ and who are considered to be of ‘good character’.” A threat to a modern construction called the nation state. Would a Labour government undo so many of cruel anti-migration laws and mark a more ‘progressive’ chapter in migrant rights? The    Migrants’ Rights Network is not optimistic

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido...

The EU as a vassal of a hegemon. A hegemony that wants to satisfy both Israel’s desires and objectives and the ‘normalisers’ – the reactionary regimes in the region.  The argument ‘ the US’s standing in the Arab world’ is permanently damaged is misplaced. With whom has that decades-long standing taken place? Has it been with the people struggling against authoritarian regimes and the plunder of the resources of the region? Conjuring trick      

The military industrial complex The NGO-industrial complex And now the ‘citizenship industry’ ‘Citizenship provides the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality can be built’.  —Thomas Humphrey Marshall, 1950

On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti declared independence. “Haiti offered asylum to enslaved people who could reach its shores. The Haitian Revolution inaugurated an independent Haitian trade, which sent free Haitians on business around the Caribbean and encouraged enslaved sailors to desert to freedom. Enslaved people also escaped to Haiti by other means. For example, in the Bahamas in 1822, slaveholders complained that more than 100 enslaved men and women from the island of Grand Caicos had overwhelmed their drivers and overseers, taken their children with them, and stolen open boats to flee to Haiti. Once on land in the Black republic, any person of African descent was free and eligible for citizenship. It was Haitian policy never to permit the re-enslavement of Haitian citizens or refugees. Robin Blackburn writes that ‘Haiti had saved the honor of the New World revolutions’, coming closer to realising the universal rights proclaimed by American revolutionaries than American fo...

Writings on the column: "We want to burn your palaces" "Lebanon is ours" Heading for a meltdown?

Rohingya's ethnic cleansing Villages destroyed for government facilities

A very engaging review The students were  furious . For the first week of class, they read the polemical first chapter, which argues that human rights are not eternal universal truths, but rather a set of political claims that emerged in the 1970s amid a crisis of the moral authority of communism. They simply would not believe that their own highest ideals dated not to the Bible or “the golden rule” but to the age of disco. As it turned out, the students had a preconceived notion of what it meant to have their preconceived notions challenged, and it did not include historicizing their own moral commitments. This provoked reflection about what historicizing something means and how legitimacy for moral claims is constructed. The Inequality of "Human Rights"

“ Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen , are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community ... This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community , to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egoistic homme , that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen , but man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true man.” — K. M.

If people themselves have been commodified, what is surprising in commodifying citizenship? "Jalal is an Iraqi telecoms executive with fluent English and a Harvard degree. His wife is a surgeon. Well-off by any standards, they have always loved to travel, and have a particular fondness for Lake Como in Italy. But their Iraqi citizenship has often caused them visa problems. So, a few years ago, Jalal (not his real name) and his wife applied to become nationals of a second country: Antigua. After ten months of form-filling and “due diligence” (background checks and the like), they ploughed several hundred thousand dollars into property and a development fund on the Caribbean island, and in return got passports which entitle them to visa-free travel to 130 countries, including most of Europe. They send the citizenship consultant who helped them become Iraqi-Antiguans a card whenever they are in Como, to show their continued gratitude." — the Economist magazine, 02 July 2018 ...

Very good! I recommend it to "Westerners" and non-Westerners.