January/February 2013 cover

Medicine has always been implicated in torture. In this issue of Briarpatch, Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay looks at the role of doctors in national security and the politics of pain. Isabeau Doucet and Justin Podur discuss Canada’s role in Haiti’s new dictatorship, and Briarpatch editor emeritus Dave Oswald Mitchell tackles the topics of drugs, gangs, and Harper’s war on the poor.

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  • Magazine

    Letter from the editor

    The shift in modern warfare toward counterinsurgency carried out by states against diffuse populations, rather than organized armies, calls for new instruments of domination.

  • Magazine

    Defining who is Métis

    “I will never know exactly why and when my own family’s Métis history was buried; I only know that it was.”

  • Magazine

    Killers in high places

    If the drug war is a tool of social and territorial control and capital accumulation, it’s not enough to simply accuse Harper’s Conservatives of pursuing a misguided strategy.

  • Magazine

    When a bone breaks

    “It’s going to be very painful without the anaesthetic in your toe.” My face twists in anticipation. “Maybe we could give you something to relax a little, send you off to sleep.”

  • Magazine

    The olive grove

    The annual olive harvest is a key economic, social, and cultural event for Palestinians. The olive oil produced makes up 14% of agricultural income in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and helps support 80,000 families.

  • Magazine

    Outsourcing sovereignty

    Haiti is an avant-garde microcosm of the privatization, deregulation, and loosening of state structures and protections that is happening everywhere.

  • Magazine

    Responsibility to protect?

    The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a new name for the old concept of humanitarian intervention, or humanitarian imperialism.

  • Magazine

    Amulet

    when time is army marshalled / against you starved and alone / I write in celebration your survival / each molecule of courage you collect / sunrise and sundown.

  • Magazine

    Reduced, refused, reignited

    In 2006, the Conservative government cut the funding of Status of Women Canada (SWC) by 38 per cent, to the tune of $5 million, in a move to enhance “fiscal responsibility.”

  • Magazine

    “Dreams are the worst right now”

    After a decade of captivity, Omar Khadr, the first child ever convicted of a war crime, became the last Western citizen to be repatriated out of Guantanamo Bay.

  • Magazine

    Conversations on ecological justice, healing, and decolonization

    If those of us who care about the earth are to have a chance at actually stopping its destruction, we need to expand environmentalism way beyond its conventional boundaries.

  • Magazine

    Monkeywrench murder mystery

    The Slickrock Paradox, by Alberta-based mystery author Stephen Legault, wraps its twisting plot around one central mystery. There are crimes for the protagonist to solve, including more than one murder, but they are almost peripheral; the core riddle is the absence of a body.

  • Magazine

    From abortion rights to reproductive justice

    It’s been nearly 25 years since the Supreme Court decrim­inalized abortion in Canada, but the dust has yet to settle on Parliament Hill.