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Israel: The Palestinians Held Captives

“Jacobin, a radical left wing website, uses ‘international community’ and ‘international law’ without even putting them in inverted commas. Israel’s prison system forms an oft-overlooked dimension of its apartheid rule. The treatment of Palestinian prisoners can involve arbitrary detainment, administrative detention without trial, and conditions that the international human rights community has said constitute “cruel and blatant” and even “ sadistic ”  violations  of international law.”

Israel: Protests to Save Apartheid

“ A meticulous examination of the messages coming from the spokespersons for and participants in these demonstrations, however, reveals that their true purpose is to turn the clock back far enough so that the apartheid regime in Israel can once again be  marketed as a functioning democracy , allowing the international community to continue turning a blind eye to the crimes it commits.” —  Orly Noy, the chair of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

True Cost of Our Tea

A practice that exists in ‘peripheral’ as well as in ‘advanced’ capitalist power relations. Sexual abuse on Kenyan tea farms Related Italy: raped, beaten and exploited Spain: ‘If you don’t want to work like a slave, you’re out’

Tom Nairn and the Decline of Britain

Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?  Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had  not,  however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed  that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the  Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conclusion: the inevitable c

Prosecuting Vladimir Putin?

“The question is whether the welcome justice mobilization around the horrors he [Putin] has visited on Ukraine will also be applied to crimes committed by powerful Western actors.” Here are the limitations of Reed Brody’s analysis : “ Any state could find a basis in law for almost any action, because ‘for every claim there is a counter-claim, and legalist opposition to war is therefore ultimately toothless ’.” Realists see the basis of global relations in the clash of state power. They are sceptical of ideas like globalisation and sceptical of the idea of international society. For them international law is no more than ‘a moralistic gloss on power politics’. It plays a useful role in obscuring the extent to which power is still the central determinant of how the world works. The US wants and needs international law – consider the issue of patent protection or intellectual property rights, and so on. Yet it also needs its own freedom of manoeuvre. Because the US is the world’s most pow