Articles

9/11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed exploited his trial to remind the court of its own human rights obligations, while Osama bin Laden’s video statements include appeals to religious pluralism. Al-Qaeda’s use of liberal categories is central to its rhetoric on war and justice, writes Faisal Devji.

The International Court of Justice ruling on Kosovo’s declaration of independence will not herald a sea-change in Serbian public opinion, but it is likely to facilitate a general coming-to-terms with the fact that Kosovo is “lost”, writes Florian Bieber. The much-feared “domino effect” is also unlikely to occur.

“The fact that peole who were working freely in the 1990s now work in a way that is no longer free is the result of fear.” Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of independent Russian radio station “Ekho Moskvy”, tells Maria Eismont about dealing with death threats, censorship and the Kremlin.

Les Back learns a few lessons about the importance of paying attention from the examples of Primo Levi, radioman Studs Terkel and literary traveller Flemming Røgilds. They animate an alternative way to live, achieved through two people hearing each other. This active listening can create another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society.

“There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster tourist, to sail the seven seas looking for injustices to denounce. Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand, they are in the grain of everyday life.” Conceptual artist Victor Burgin launches an excoriating attack on documentary art as the “new doxa”.

The digitisation of the book has brought a new balance of power in the trade, with established publishers locked in struggle with the new digital distributors for control of production. Pascal Fouché, author of an encyclopaedia of the book, discusses whether publishers are prepared for the challenge posed by the dematerialisation of the printed word.

Lithuania’s capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it “home”. Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova.

During the twentieth anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic wall consisting of dominoes was toppled. The dominoes were painted on both sides, something that could only have been done with a great deal of forgetting, writes Jacob Kimvall. In reality, there was graffiti only on the western side of the Wall, and that was put there illegally; but during the anniversary, unity seems to be more important than historical accuracy.

The much anticipated US finance regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.

Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary’s hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.

It’s ironic, says a Latvian art critic, that the current saturation of the visual world by infinitely reproducible images via the Internet has driven artists back to older forms of representation.

What began as a row over the French government plans for “masterization” and the revision of the status of teacher-researchers escalated in March 2009 into a prolonged and explosive dispute over Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to overhaul France’s poorly-funded public universities, writes Françoise Benhamou. Though joined in some measure by students, who brought new demands to a conflict that was already very complex, the teacher strikes had the paradoxical effect of hitting the financially worse-off students.

The understanding of the role of higher education that characterized the Soviet era has been reborn in post-Soviet Lithuania as a blind drive towards utility, writes Almantas Samalavicius. The hard sciences have won the struggle over state funding at the expense of the humanities, while falling standards have caused an ongoing brain-drain to the West. The most recent reforms indicate that the only remedy on offer is based on the logic of the market, as Lithuanian universities steadily go the way of the rest of “common property” after independence.

Barbara Holub’s drawings prompt recognition without us having experienced the situations they represent, writes Ines Gebetsroither. They create an opportunity to reassess habitual ways of seeing, and tell us: there are no innocent images; the images are already in us.

Critique of Bologna in Romania is a pretext for academic complacency and professional self-preservation, writes Corneliu Balan. The problem is not the Bologna system as such but the subordination of education to political interests and the privatization of the universities.