Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

On April 16 th , Turkish voters will go to the polls to cast their ballots in a referendum on whether to give (even more) extraordinary powers to their current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Or at least that is the ostensible purpose of the plebiscite. But seen from a broader perspective, what the Turkish people will be voting on is democracy itself. The advances that Erdogan has made toward an autocratic takeover of political power in Turkey over the past three years have been dizzying. Toward the end of 2013, when he was still the country’s prime minister, it looked as if his political career might melt down and end in scandal, after a series of taped conversations appeared to leave no doubt that he and his son Bilal were involved in a vast (and personally lucrative) network of corruption. But clever and undeniably able politician that he is—with a career spanning two decades, from his days as mayor of Istanbul—and armed with the flourishing power that his profile as an ally...

The issue of gender equality has achieved, on a worldwide scale, very much the same position as the issues of slavery and torture. That is to say, while it is now generally accepted around the globe that gender equality is a burning issue that must be dealt with and while, in general, the inequality of women, abuse of women’s rights and gender violence are all considered to be throwbacks to barbarism and aberrations in modern society, the fact is that there is still a very long way to go in creating a world in which men and women are, indeed, on an equal footing. The fact of the matter today is that, while the world has undoubtedly made serious advancements toward gender equality, and while the empowerment of women has grown within the context of year 2000 global Millennium Development Goals (including increased equal access to primary education between girls and boys), the surface has barely been scratched, and women and girls continue to suffer discrimination and violence in...

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101 st Airborne Division. According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the...

The sudden rise of the latest expressions of populist nationalism has triggered panic in both democratic and wholly capitalist organizations worldwide. It is a phenomenon that traditional pundits failed entirely to foresee but that erudite democrats from Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz on the left to Robert Kagan and George Will on the right have been warning about for some time now. But as that phenomenon has burgeoned over the past few years, taking strong root in both Western Europe and the United States, first think-tanks and then major multilateral organizations have had to start accepting it as real and as a clear and present danger, not only to capitalist democracy as a systemic Western framework, but also to liberal economics as the world has known it up to the present. Lagarde One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in this case an institution about which one might add, “Better late than never.” In all fairness, ever since the worldwide crisis...

This past week, the foreign ministers of African Union (AU) member countries of the International Criminal Court (ICC) publicly announced that they had decided to recommend withdrawal en masse from the court. Thirty-four of the African Union’s 54 member nations subscribe to the ICC under the provisions of the Rome Statute, the court’s founding charter. If leaders of the African States Parties to the Rome Statute all decide to accept the joint recommendation of their foreign ministers, it will be a major blow to the ICC, since their nations form the single largest regional group of countries subject to the jurisdiction of the court, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (27 States Parties), Western Europe and Others (25), and the Asian Group (19). Indeed, the Rome Statute does make provisions for withdrawal from the court’s jurisdiction. Article 27 provides that once a country formally notifies the United Nations of its decision to pull out, effective withdrawal from the ICC...