Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Inspired by critical postcolonial/decolonial studies and the interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, it problematizes and demystifies the many faces of the myth of ‘cultural exceptionalism’ in the context of contemporary MENA social movements.” Unfinished Social Movements

“ Europe’s military arsenal is not well prepared for war  … because for the last thirty years we thought that war was not coming back to Europe.”  But has war ever left Europe?

Political indoctrination for ideological uniformity

Evil Empires?

The Syria regime is “ filling the coffers of the State, making high-ranking members of the power structure even richer and preventing the return of the pariahs – political opponents, actual or alleged.” Systematic politico-financial purge

An interview with Amal Saad by Jeremy Schahill

Faiza Shaheen, an economist at the London School of Economics, surely knows there is a  Ralph Miliband  Centre at the School. Miliband has some insights to offer on the Labour Party. Same blade / the purge Related British elections and the Gaza war

A massacre and one soldier Wrath of the centurions

What does fascism mean today?

Revealing the human side of the Syrian revolution/war

[C]apitalism is historically coherent—if “vast but weak”—from the long sixteenth century; co-produced by human and extra-human natures in the web of life; and cohered by a “law of value” that is a “law” of Cheap Nature. At the core of this law is the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion). If the destructive character of capitalism’s world-ecological revolutions has widely registered—the “what” and the “why” of capitalism-in-nature—there has been far too little investigation of how humans have made modernity through successive, radical reconfigurations of all nature. How capitalism has worked through, rather than upon nature, makes all the difference. —Jason Moore,  Capitalism in the Web of Life

Although there is some hint to a historical background , role of the structure of the authoritarian regimes and women employment – the latter being probably the lowest in the world in the MENA region – and how they reinforce violence are excluded from the equation.

Transforming university students from intellectual participants into end users, who are anxious only to get the most value for their money

Foreign direct investment

‘ The decaying American empire ’ argument is disputable. The comparison with the collapse of the Soviet Union misses the different economic structures of the two countries. The US economic power has not been experiencing a long term stagnation, for example.  Actually, the argument should be the way around: in 1980s there was no ‘whip of external necessity’ compelling the US to outcompete the Soviet Union. The latter was not an economic threat to the US. Today China is the ‘external whip’ but to an already more powerful American economy – a dynamic one in terms of capital-intensive industries, productivity and an array of industrially-advanced allies and subordinates.

Available in 4 languages What and who enable Israel to carry on with killing and destruction Prospects for Israel’s war economy

“It operates like a food chain: the French at the top, followed by North Africans who run  the subcontracting companies, and at the bottom, the exploited workers .”

A list of demands by students has been circulated in an underground press release. Shahidul Alam puts the demands in a broader context and assess their validity and effectiveness.

Part 1 Part 2

On the murder of children