Tag: War

Montreal-based Iraqi-Canadian artist Sundus Abdul Hadi discusses art and identity in the context of the Iraq War and Arab diaspora.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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

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.

The presence of drug traffickers in Laguna del Tigre hasn’t affected oil production. In fact, there’s a renewed interest from oil companies in Guatemala’s oil.

Since the 2005 call for solidarity from Palestinian trade unions and civil society organizations, unions all over the world have responded with resolutions and actions to break ties with Israel’s apartheid regime.

Fifteen thousand people pack the seats of the sold-out MTS Centre in Winnipeg. They cheer wildly as the home team Jets rush the puck up through the neutral zone. Cheers erupt louder still as shots are fired on goal, bodies slammed brutally into boards, and pucks are buried deep in the visitor’s net.

Afghanistan, and the surrounding region, has been in the crosshairs of imperial expansionists for centuries. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I set the East India Company on its march northward through India. This expansion of the British empire was confronted in Afghanistan in the early 19th century by the southward expansion of the Russian empire, instigating a series of wars known as the “Great Game.”

In this book, you’ll meet Palestinians and Israelis whose struggles for peace, justice and an end to more than half a century of illegal dispossession and brutal occupation, belie the racism and harmful homogenising of history that fuel the current policies of the Zionist state.

In news coverage of violence, women are almost always portrayed as victims. Whether they are worthy, innocent victims in need of rescue (“virgins”), as in the case of Afghan women post-9/11, or unworthy, culpable victims to be ignored or incarcerated (“vamps”), as with Indigenous women in Canada, depends on their strategic value to the forces in power.

Butler’s theory of gender-as-performance remains her best-known contribution to academia, but for the last decade her attention has gradually shifted from gender to the politics of war. Now she’s struggling with questions like, whose deaths matter, and why are some deaths grievable but others not?

George Orwell wrote that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth can be a revolutionary act. Similarly, in an age of lies-passed-off-as-truth (the propaganda model), truth-passed-off-as-lies (satire) has a power all its own.

It was well after midnight when we got off the yellow school buses and stepped into a field of thick Alberta mud. The sides of the large field kitchen tents nearby were billowing in the cold wind. Our kit had just been chucked to the ground from the buses, each item landing with a wet thump. Maple Defender, a week-long training exercise, was designed to give us a taste of the war in Afghanistan, as far “down in the weeds” as it was possible to get without actually being there.

For the last 10 years, Juana López Nuñez (not her real name) has spent most of her waking hours making T-shirts for the Canadian company Gildan Activewear at the company’s San Miguel factory in Honduras. Today, at age 44, she has little use of her arms and experiences constant pain in her shoulders, neck and hands. She takes painkillers throughout the day, and has had one surgery, which didn’t ease the chronic tendonitis that keeps her up at night.

The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy
Yves Engler
Fernwood, 2009

It is commonplace even for critics of Canada’s role in Afghanistan and Haiti or of its vocal support for Israel’s recent military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza to suggest that Canada has abandoned a long-standing tradition of being an honest broker in international politics, nurturing the idea that there is a mythical past in which Canada was an even-handed arbitrator of international conflict.

High-minded rhetoric aside, Canadian foreign policy is largely designed to serve hegemonic Canadian corporate interests abroad. To bring Canada closer to the status of a “peacekeeper” or “honest broker” here are some specific policies that the peace and social justice movement should pursue.