Archive for the ‘politics’ tag
Notes on Graham Greene’s “Getting to Know the General”
Some four or five years after starting to read Graham Greene’s Getting To Know the General, I found the leisure to finish it on a trip to Brazil. Previously, I had brought a copy with me on a trip to Panama (the General of the book’s title is General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s military ruler [...]
Reflections on contemporary International Relations
On "The End of History"
In his article "The End of History," written on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama declares an "unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" and that the "total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism" spell the "end of history." That is, we have arrived [...]
New York Review of Books on pro-Bush media
One of the most pressing questions in contemporary international relations is how the world’s lone superpower, the United States of America, allowed its foreign policy (to say nothing of its record at home) to be hijacked by the ideological extremists of the Bush administration, and whether there’s any possibility of recovery from this situation in [...]
Some alternative economic and political visions
While filing away some readings from the first trimester of my graduate program in international studies–a period that included courses in international relations theory and international trade–I came across two items that concisely present powerful challenges to prevailing orthodoxies in economics and politics. They are, respectively, a summary of Norwegian economist Erik Reinert’s project [...]
Latin America’s turn to the left
NCM Online (though I’m not sure exactly what what that is) ran a reasonably good summary of the significance of Latin America’s currrent "turn to the left," the most recent evidence of which is Tabaré Vásquez’s victory in Uruguay’s presidential elections and the emergence of Mexico City’s leftist mayor López Obrador as the front-runner in [...]
Recently in the Atlantic Monthly
When I was in grad school I had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly. Later, the magazine would make the majority of its contents available for free online. Not anymore–now the only time I ever manage to read it is when I have a long-distance trip to make (i.e., to Argentina) and I manage to [...]