by Rebecca Prentice There is for me a sad familiarity in the story of the Grenfell Tower fire. I have spent recent years researching garment factory fires and collapses in Bangladesh. Large-scale fires, no matter where they are, have a recursive quality to them. There is always the story of the spark that begins it, […]
by Magnus Marsden **Previously published at Hurst’s blog.** In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Manchester, the term ‘ungoverned spaces’ has returned to the forefront of public debate about the significance of countries ranging from Syria to Afghanistan for so-called ‘Islamist’ terrorist networks. By instigating regime change in Muslim-majority states without making rigorous plans for their […]
by Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani ** Review first published on LSE Review of Books ** Academic Conferences as Neoliberal Commodities. Donald J. Nicolson. Palgrave Pivot. 2017. While rarely interrogated for the role that they play, academic conferences form a significant part in the construction of an academic career. Any aspiring, or indeed expiring, academic has at […]
by Magnus Marsden The brutal killing of up to 140 Afghan Army soldiers on April 22nd at an army base located near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in the north of Afghanistan raises profoundly troubling questions about the state of the country and wider region. The killings in Mazar come shortly after an attack (claimed […]
by Rebecca Prentice May 1, 2017: On a rainy evening in Brighton, more than two hundred people took to the streets to protest economic precariousness. The ‘Precarious May Day’ march was led on bicycles by Deliveroo couriers, who deliver food to online takeaway customers. Accessing delivery jobs through an app on their phones, Deliveroo riders […]
by Nayanika Mathur **Reprinted from The Conversation.** The headline story from India’s recent provincial elections was the staggering victory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state of Uttar Pradesh. But a range of politicians and observers, however, have claimed it wasn’t Modi’s charisma that won it for the BJP, but rigged voting […]
Festival Culture: the Romanticisation of Informal Settlements?
by Tim Perkin The show ‘Borderline’, a PSYCHEdelight production, recently took part to an arts festival in the UK. The show portrayed a satirical account of the Calais Jungle, the informal refugee camp in France that hosted up to ten-thousand people. What made the political drama particularly poignant was that many of the members of […]