On March 21, 2013 in the symbolic Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, on the symbolic new year’s day of Newroz, in front of a crowd composed of almost a million people and broadcast live by most Turkish news channels, a letter from the imprisoned Kurdistan Worker’s Party’s (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan was read. The letter urged Kurds to end their nearly 30-year armed struggle against the Turkish state and open a new page for democratic politics within the framework of Turkish sovereignty.
Turkish foreign policy throughout the Cold War was limited and largely predictable: narrowly focused on national security and preserving the sanctity of its borders while hewing to a predominantly Western orientation. Turkey’s foreign policy reflected the constraints of the bipolar international system, which granted little room for smaller powers to adopt independent policies. As such, Turkey pursued membership in key Western multilateral frameworks (the Council of Europe 1949, the OECD 1948 and NATO 1952) in order to improve its negotiating capacity; to enhance its security and status; and to compensate for its relative lack of an independent foreign policy. Membership in these Euro-Atlantic institutions also enabled Turkish policymakers to assert their affiliation with Western culture.
Today, the crisis of Turkey is both a crisis of capitalism and a crisis of the Republic.
To the extent that it is a crisis of capitalism, of a financialized regime of accumulation, its own internal business cycles are synchronous with the cycles of global capitalism. Even though the current economic crisis takes the form of stagflation (a high inflation rate combined with recession), its driving factor is the increased default risk of the highly-leveraged corporate sector. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), governing an economy fully-integrated to the international financial system since 2002, enjoyed the benefits of global liquidity as it consolidated its hegemony. Today, as the crisis hits corporations and households alike, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP resort to anti-imperialist jargon to pass the proverbial buck, and cover up their helplessness in the face of the vast scope of the crisis.
Turkey has undergone a dizzying array of crises over the last five years. Beginning with the repressive crackdown against the Gezi Protests during the summer of 2013, the country has gone from being cited as a model Muslim democracy to taking pride of place on the growing worldwide list of democratic reversals. Pundits now lump Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in with populist authoritarian leaders ranging from Hungary’s Victor Orbán to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. On some indices Turkey leads the pack, jailing more journalists than any other country, throttling the independence of the judiciary and establishing a near total stranglehold on the media.
Since the failed July, 2016 coup attempt, Turkey has weathered a series of measures aimed at consolidating the unfettered power of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). This rather erratic counter-coup has been undertaken...
The war in Eritrea is one of the least studied contemporary conflicts. Only the recurrence of massive drought and famine in the region has prompted the cursory media attention now given to this 24-year-old national liberation struggle. These two books add significantly to the sparse literature on the region. Nationalism and Self-Determination is the first work since Bereket Selassie’s Conflict and Intervention in the Horn of Africa (Monthly Review Press, 1980) to discuss the self-determination struggle there within a theoretical framework. The book, a collection of essays from a workshop funded by the Ford Foundation and the Anti-Slavery Society, is worthwhile reading for persons interested in contemporary practical and theoretical aspects of self-determination, even if their focus is not the Horn. These essays, for the most part, will not interest the general reader. With titles such as “Language, National Consciousness and Identity” (Hussein Adam) and “The Changing Idiom of Self-Determination in the Horn of Africa” (Sally Healy), most are dense and scholarly. There are three exceptions: Patrick Gilkes on “Centralism and the Ethiopian PMAC,” Paul Baxter on “The Problem of the Oromo” and David Pool on “Eritrean Nationalism.” The contributions of Baxter and Pool were not presented at the conference, but were solicited afterwards to balance the “vigour and comprehensiveness” of Gilkes’ essay (p. ix). While I would disagree with most of Gilkes’’interpretations, he does offer a more sophisticated argument against Eritrean self-determination than any of the Ethiopian regime, and the contributions of Baxter and Pool are two of the more lively essays in the collection.
Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, a prominent intellectual and a lecturer in political economy at the University of Khartoum, presents here much new material for a cogent analysis of the political and economic role of the bourgeoisie in Sudan’s development from 1898 to the present. In her view, the origins, affiliations and strategies of the highest echelons of the Sudanese capitalist class show its clear links to British colonial capital and continued ties with international capital. As a result, Sudan’s bourgeoisie, a dependent and “comprador” class, has failed to contribute to the country’s development, and even has acted as an obstacle to it.
Cairo, July 2. The National Progressive Unionist Party (Tagammu‘) held its second national congress in Cairo on June 27-28, 1985. The Tagammu‘, Egypt’s principal left opposition party, is a united front formation including members of illegal communist organizations, independent Marxists, Nasserists, enlightened religious elements and a number of newer, less politicized members who have joined the party since the parliamentary elections of May 1984. The Tagammu‘ did not win any seats then in the People’s Assembly, due to an undemocratic election law and some falsification of the election results. [1] But the nationwide campaign and the presence here of some 750 representatives from throughout Egypt—including women, workers and peasants—indicates that the party has substantially increased its size and organizational capacity since its first congress in 1980.
I arrived in Khartoum on April 15, nine days after the coup, as soon as the borders opened. In Cairo, I had watched film clips of the noisy, jubilant crowds that had brought down Numairi, but Khartoum was eerily silent now. The high of the revolution” had given way to the sense of crisis that once again grips this country. While political skirmishes went on concerning who would be in the civilian cabinet, the abiding, bedrock realities that pervaded the country were the civil war in the south and the drought and famine in the west and northeast.
Khartoum. The hand-painted sign on Nile Avenue here best captured the attitude of urban Sudanese toward the visit of Vice President George Bush to their country in early March, just four weeks before the popular overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi. “Vice-President and Mrs. Bush,” read the sign, “are mostly welcome.” The millions of Sudanese starving in the countryside would have been much less hospitable.
Mass demonstrations in Khartoum at the end of March 1985 initiated a series of events which culminated in the overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi’s regime in Sudan by the Sudanese military. What began as popular protest against increases in the price of basic commodities was transformed within a week into a broad movement of political opposition. The rise in food prices was only one manifestation of the deep economic problems facing Sudan. The outbreak of overt opposition to the regime was a clear indication of the political bankruptcy of Numairi’s economic and social policies. The question nevertheless remains as to whether the political changes that have taken place will significantly affect the underlying structural causes of Sudan’s continuing economic and political crisis.
Ten years ago, Sudan was described in a Food and Agriculture Organization report as a potential “breadbasket of the world.” Hopes for the development of Sudan’s economy were running high at the time: the investment of Arab oil-generated revenues in Sudan’s agricultural sector seemed to hold immense promise. Vast quantities of hitherto unused arable land could be brought under cultivation. This would transform the Arab world from an area of food deficit into one of food surplus, laying the basis also for the development of extensive processing industries in Sudan.
Colonel John Garang’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) played no direct role in the April 6 coup in Khartoum. But as the only organized, fighting resistance to the regime of Ja‘far Numairi, it laid the groundwork by chipping away at the state in a guerrilla campaign that cost the government one million Sudanese pounds ($400,000) a day. The new military rulers have given top priority to ending the rebellion, which has paralyzed vital economic projects and drained army morale and resources for more than two years.
Khartoum, April 23. General ‘Abd al-Rahman Siwar al-Dhahab, in power since April 6, was expected to name an interim cabinet on Monday, April 22, to govern the country under army supervision for a transitional period of one year. In the meantime, General Siwar al-Dahab appointed an interim cabinet for southern Sudan, headed by General James Lawrence Marou, a member of the Transitional Military Council. Two high level officers of the Sudanese Army traveled to Libya on Sunday, April 21, to try to improve relations between the two countries.
The attack on UNWRA is part of a full-spectrum assault on the Palestinian people’s rights and capacity to engage in politics undertaken by the Trump administration since entering office in 2016. While the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is reportedly developing a Middle East peace plan, dubbed the “deal of the century,” the administration has been preempting negotiations by imposing “resolutions” to final status issues such as Jerusalem and weaponizing financial aid to coerce the Palestinians into compliance with the US and Israel’s demands.
Baconi, Tareq. Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). Berda, Yael. Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). Blumi,...
Abboud, Samer. Syria (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). Adalet, Begum. Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University press, 2018). Abul-Magd, Zeinab. Militarizing the Nation: The Army, Business, and...
Operation Sur cannot be reduced to the destruction of an old walled city. Beyond the deaths, destroyed buildings and compensation payments, what has been lost are the potentialities—the wish-images—that Kurds imbued in Sur and with which they defended it.
In June 2014, the self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) launched an assault on the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Within days, the Iraqi army collapsed and ISIS proclaimed its sovereignty over the city. An anonymous blog named Mosul Eyebegan reporting on life under ISIS rule. With details about daily life alongside social and historical analysis, Mosul Eye documented the transformations that ISIS imposed on Mosul—including the expulsion of Shiites and Christians, the enslavement of Yazidis, strict gender segregation, rape, torture and executions—as well as the impact of air strikes by the US, Turkish, and Iraqi militaries.
Israel’s settler-colonial project has been premised on a set of racial and spatial assumptions that require the dispossession—even the elimination—of the native Palestinians. Over the seven decades of Israeli rule in Jerusalem and throughout historic Palestine, the state has produced abiding landscapes of loss for Palestinians, while enabling mass Zionist settlement on lands and in homes wrested from the indigenous population.
