Progressive Geographies

I once spent a year studying all the violent international conflicts between 1945 and 1995. Fifty years of people killing, raping, torturing, terrorising and brutalising each other. It was research for an encyclopaedia of international conflict. It was a great opportunity for a grad student to co-publish a book with a well-known professor, a real boost to my academic career. I had to carefully catalogue who attacked who, how many people died, where all the refugees fled to, when they finally stopped killing each other, which countries sent arms to the protagonists, what was done to try and stop it. All the gory details of organised political murder.

To this day I can remember reading a story about the Korean War in Keeings Contemporary Archives. I was sitting in the university library. It was a bright Autumn day. There were students all around me. I could hear them writing, turning…

Edward Said died ten years ago in September, and earlier this month Noam Chomsky delivered the 2013 Edward Said Memorial Lecture in London: Violence and dignity: reflections on the Middle East.  The text that formed the basis for the lecture is here, and you can watch a video of the lecture here with introductions by Omar Al Qattan and Mariam Said.

It’s a wide-ranging lecture, but Chomsky returns again and again to the plight of the people of Gaza – and to the disgraceful actions of all those (inside Israel and out) who would rob them of their dignity, their independence and even their life.

Throughout these years Gaza has been a showcase for violence of every imaginable kind. The record includes such sadistic and carefully planned atrocities as Operation Cast Lead — “infanticide,” as it was called by the remarkable Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert who worked tirelessly…