Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Thank you Hatem Bazian for that article

Interview with Kevin B. Anderson Related A multi-polarity: a new alignment?

Still from The Battle of Algiers - British Film Institute “Everything that is happening now in Israel-Palestine is taking place within the context of colonisation, occupation and apartheid, which according to international law, are illegal. Israel is a colonising power and the Palestinians are the colonised indigenous population. Any reference to international law that does not recall these circumstances is a distortion of the story. The context of colonisation and occupation was brushed to the side with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was presented to the international agreement as a ‘peace agreement’ that put an end to the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. It, of course, did no such thing. The focus on the humanitarian element perpetuates aid dependency and sidelines demands for accountability and reparations. The laws of war were put together during colonial times to regulate the use of force between sovereign states. The colonies were obviously not considered sovereign...

Review of  The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance  

اضغط/ي على الصورتين لعرض النص كاملا غسان بن خليفة، تونس 23 أوكتوبر 2020

The unsevered umbilical cord that leaves large swathes of the Global South economically reliant on their old colonial powers, even after formally attaining national independence, is the  structural dependence  of these peripheral states on foreign credit and investment, which has long been provided to them by private banks, international investors and financial institutions in the advanced capitalist countries. Subjecting the nature of this structural dependence to closer theoretical and empirical scrutiny may therefore allow us to approach the problems faced by “the new debt colonies” from a somewhat different angle, enabling us to better understand the more subtle contemporary forms of financial subjugation operating at the structural and institutional level that serve to reproduce these deeply entrenched international power asymmetries over time, even in the absence of territorial control or outright military intervention. The New Debt Colonies should be read along with...

"We have flags, a national anthem, but everything else is decided by the West. It's all wrapped up in nice words, under cover of aid extended by such bodies as the WB and the IMF, that are nothing more than instruments of torture invented by the West to continue its domination." — Ahmed ben Bella, president of the Algerian Republic, 1963 to 1965. Quoted by Toussaint and Millet, 2010.

"Since 1988 each debt relief scheme for the poorest countries results in another, always too late and always ill-adapted. It must not be forgotten that debt is much mroe than finnancial mechanism: it is a powerful instrument of dimination that for decades has allowed the leaders and big business of rich countries, with the complicity of the South's ruling class, to impose an economic model that serves their interests." Toussaint and Millet, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank , 2010

"Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who with good reason translated moral idea into social fact, reserved ‘culture’ for primitive societies and ‘civilization’ for modern societies. So there is a good deal of  interference on the line and fog on the road. Let us try a clarification."   Civilisation, a Grammar

Power, violence, dominantion A decade after his death, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu still stands tall

Racism, Pure and Simple