Youth in Rang De Basanti

“The youth will have to bear a great burden in this difficult times [sic] in the history of the nation. It is true that students have faced death at the forward positions of the struggle for independence. Will they hesitate this time in proving their same staunchness and self-confidence?”[1] Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2006 smash hit,[2]

Globalizing Palestine

The historian James L. Gelvin, in The Modern Middle East, claims that “in spite of the fact that the size of Palestine and the number of people directly affected by its political problems are minuscule in comparative terms, the dispute between Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinians and various Arab states, on the

Oil, Geopolitics, and Neoliberalism

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey makes an intriguing argument about why neoliberalism-in-theory did not equate neoliberalism-in-practice (neoliberalization).  For him, the neoliberal turn of late 1970s was, more than anything else, “a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (19).  This explains why

Faces of the Raj

In his brilliant essay State, Power, and Colonialism, Douglas M. Peers states, “The Raj might in some of its military and economic ambitions be characterized as modern, but it was decidedly pre-modern and perhaps even anti-modern in many of its social, cultural, and political aspirations” (31).  What, we might ask, does Peers mean by this