Philip Cunliffe is a regular contributor to Culture Wars. He co-convenes the Sovereignty And Its Discontents (SAID) working group, and is co-editor of Politics without Sovereignty: A critique of contemporary international relations (UCL Press, 2007). His interests are in film, history and the Continental traditions of social and political thought. He also writes widely on current affairs and his articles and essays have appeared in publications around the world, including Spiked, The American Prospect, Novo and Arena magazines.

I wanna be like you

What really emerges through Leonard’s discussion is how familiar rather than ideologically different China is. The concerns of China’s ‘New Left’ – the environment, inequality, welfarism – are very similar to those of the Western left.

Putting the hippies on the payroll

Everyone has gone green. Even reprobate oil corporations have stopped funding the ‘global warming sceptics’, as they retool their operations to cash in on the bonanza of carbon-trading. Bewildered by the sudden desertion of their corporate allies, a few isolated libertarians fight a rearguard action against the green tide.

Why not ditch genocide studies?

Daniel Chirot’s and Clark McCauley’s book is a recent addition to the burgeoning field of ‘genocide studies’ – an appropriately dismal new science for a pessimistic early twenty-first century. By understanding the sources of genocide, Chirot and McCauley want to suggest ways of mitigating carnage in future.

How to lose the war of ideas

Although it portrays a different era, the film has a timeless and universal quality: not in its depiction of the brutalities of war in some distant Eastern country, but in its portrayal of what is entailed in a genuine struggle for freedom.

Prisoners on the verge of spiritual implosion

Despite the title and plot, Rescue Dawn is not really a Vietnam war movie, and certainly not an Iraq movie in jungle drag – and much the better for it. For all the accoutrements of war and moments of almost unbearable tension, the film is not a thriller either.

Strategy of Deception

There is no consistent argument in any article, let alone any broader theme developed across the collection as a whole. Instead, it is a jumble of categories and neologisms (‘globalitarian’) with no analytical heft, mixed in with portentous quasi-mystical rambling about technology, and embarrassingly absurd predictions about the outcome of the war and its impact on international politics.

On the Shores of Politics

Jacques Rancière, one of the post-Althusserian generation of French philosophers, wrote the four essays that make up this collection at the end of the Cold War (1988-1990). They are: ‘The End of Politics or The Realist Utopia’, ‘The Uses of Democracy’, ‘The Community of Equals’ and ‘Democracy Corrected’. Although each of the essays stands alone, many of the themes and arguments overlap.

‘The Threat Posed by Iran has been Greatly Exaggerated’

Perhaps the underlying problem here, on both sides of the debate, is the attempt to claim a political consensus on the basis of narrow scientific or economic expertise.

‘The Time to Quit Iraq is Now’

The ‘squatters’ fall back on the claims that they impute into a phantom Iraqi state, producing the strange sight of a dummy ventriloquising the ventriloquist.

‘The Rise of China Spells the Decline of the West’

China may be able to export its way to prosperity, but whether it will forge the political movements and ideas of the future is still an open question, and one worth considering in debates such as these.

Etienne Balibar on Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal

Balibar’s proposition is that rather than focusing on the dialectic of the universal and the particular, we should focus on how universalism is produced through its internal contradictions.