A Desperate Empire Crashes in Venezuela
The April 30, 2019, coup attempt in Venezuela has come and gone. The coup has failed. “Failed state” theory just got a lot more complicated. No longer can…
Tag: democracy
The WikiLeaks Case: Democracy Dies in Empire
In the avalanche of news reports that have washed over the globe since the abduction of Julian Assange, this conversation struck me as containing numerous points of importance.…
Julian Assange, Political Prisoner: A Dark Day for Citizenship
After a day of following RT’s live coverage of the outrageous arrest of Julian Assange, abducted from the Embassy of Ecuador in London by British police agents, and…
Fiction Plus Coercion Makes Reality: The Illegitimacy of the US-led Coup in Venezuela
After considering the economic foundation of current US intervention, designed to erase Venezuela’s economic sovereignty, the purpose here is to focus more on the political side of the…
Speaking with Silence
Silence can be a powerful communicative tool in today’s political landscape. Words take center stage in the verbal sparring of the Twitter age. Against the backdrop of Trumpian…
Syria: The New Terra Nullius
SYRIA, seat of an Islamic Caliphate. Syria, site of the Middle East’s newest liberal democracy. Syria, socialist paradise. Syria, a corrupt and murderous dictatorship that practices genocide. Syria,…
Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
The revolution in information and communications technologies, which had so much promise for broadening access and participation in scholarship, certainly seems much darker and more ominous now. Socia…
The Nerds’ Turn: Battling for a Democratic Academia in Poland
As students and academics in Poland are fighting to defend democracy and autonomy of the universities, this post is a battle cry. It outlines the threats to intellectual…
Meddling
When the news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III indicted a Russian “troll farm” and 13 individuals associated with it, news and commentary reacted with outrage over…
Populism and the Conundrums of Democracy in Italy
There is one pattern that characterizes post-Cold War Italy: new political figures emerge, espousing an anti-establishment rhetoric, but end up bringing the people more of the same. Whether…
Book Review: The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on ‘the People’ in Late Modern Democracy by Péter Csigó
In The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on ‘the People’ in Late Modern Democracy, Péter Csigó argues that the financial crisis of 2008 has prompted the development of novel forms of sense-ma…
REDUX: “Cleaning Up the Streets” #AnthroState
Hillbrow, Johannesburg: It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow…
The Price of Eggs: Iran’s protests beyond democracy and capitalism
As the dust settles on Iran’s recent bout of protests, the surge of commentary, punditry, and analysis is likely to continue, no longer working to explain these apparently…
Democratization vs. Liberalism in Canada
Many North Americans (leaving aside Mexico), would likely not know that the official acronym for “North Korea” is “DPRK,” and if they did then fewer still might realize…
Colonialism’s Orchestrated Disasters in Puerto Rico
“María, María, perdí la esperanza, María, María, perdí la esperanza.” I am reminded of these lyrics from the bomba group, Yuba Iré, when I see the pictures and…
Trump’s Wall and the Dictator Aesthetic
Well, look, we’re going to have a border. It’s going to be a real border, and we’re going to build a wall and it’s going to be a…
Alan Bradshaw: On the prospect of a Tory majority!
This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bern). As an Irishman living in England, I…
Animating Resistance
Anthropology as Public Pedagogy The horned serpent serves as a witness to the events that unfold during the Pueblo uprising. Warren Montoya On January 25, President Trump signed…
Whose Populism? Which Democracy?
“Populism” conflates widely disparate political projects under one conceptual category. The term demands closer anthropological analysis. “The new enemy.” In a recent column in El País, the Peruvian…
Populist Protest and Counter-Protest in Germany
Protesters disrupt Pegida-inspired rallies with their own rowdy demonstrations. The sound of a man yelling rapidly and angrily into a microphone pierced the silence in my car as…
All Populisms Are Not Created Equal
Venezuelans chose between two competing populist projects with starkly different visions of inequality and privilege. Hugo Chávez is back. A seemingly endless stream of commentators insists that the…
Turkey Votes
The Turkish referendum could extend President Erdoğan’s one-man rule. A piece of bicolored paper. On the left is printed EVET (YES), in black font over a white background,…
Bruce Kapferer: Ideas on populism: The paradox of democracy and the rise of the corporate state
“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.” — Karl Marx, Critique…
From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America
Since signing a petition to end state violence against Kurds in southeast Turkey, academics critical of the Turkish regime have come under increased scrutiny. These “dopey academics” as…