NM's blog

“ Britain's oldest and most venerated political magazine has given innumerable column inches to unapologetic racist diatribe that has fanned the flames of Islamophobia.” Related The British establishment fuels anti-migrants pogroms

Is the argument of Western politicians that the MENA region is not ready of 'democracy' still prevalent? The explicit argument by Western politicians that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is inherently "not ready for democracy" has  largely receded from polite, official diplomatic rhetoric , but the core premise remains highly prevalent as an implicit driver of Western foreign policy. Rather than framing the issue as an cultural or societal deficit, contemporary Western leaders justify their backing of autocratic regimes through the lenses of  pragmatic stability, security, migration management, and economic self-interest .   The structural landscape of this political argument manifests through several distinct dynamics: 1. Shift from Cultural Incompatibility to "Crisis Management" The Post-Arab Spring Realism : Following the structural collapse of several democratic transitions after 2011 (e.g., Libya's prolonged instability and Tunisia...

“I  believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” —Albert Camus “The legacy of the most widely read Frenchman [as a 20th century novelist] in the world has been co-opted to present a flattering and false version of colonial history and is an obstacle to France coming to terms with its neocolonial present.”

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real. —Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension , 1978

The ‘day after’ the revolution has been a temporal distortion: a prolonged present bent back toward the past. Events have appeared less as ruptures than as echoes. Instead of discrete moments of dissent, the protests of 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026 have repeatedly reinterpreted the excesses and losses of the 1979 revolution. Likewise, the debris of the wars of 2025 and 2026 has lingered as re-inscriptions of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. In between these echoes, Iranians have found themselves in a contradictory condition, between wounds and dreams, hopes and fears, caught in a negative dialectic of origin and destiny, where both life and death are delayed.

 The first step towards a new curriculum Related British Imperialism – 1688-2015 by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, Routledge, 2016 Tony Norfield ’s book,  The City: London and the Global Power of Finance

The right today … is just as inconsequential as the left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no longer there. He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.” To me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can ev...

“The origins of nationalism lay not in the folk, nor in the individual's repressed passion for some sort of wholeness or identity, but in the machinery of world political economy.” Where do we find an elaboration on that? You can find an exact, word-for-word elaboration of that quote in  Tom Nairn’s classic 1975 essay,  “ The Modern Janus” , published in the  New Left Review .  [1, 2, 3, 4]  Nairn later integrated and expanded this thesis into his foundational 1977 book,  The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism .  [5, 6, 7]  Nairn's text provides a specific structural framework that elaborates on how the global economy—rather than romantic ideas of "the folk"—manufactured modern nationalism: 1. The Core Argument: The Uneven Development of Capitalism Nairn rejects the romantic view that nationalism naturally bubbles up from ethnic roots or a psychological need for belonging. Instead, he argues that nationalism was a structural byproduct...