Arena Journal articles from September 2002

Arena Journal archives from September 2002

Is this the end of history? The Iraq prospect.(Editorial)(Editorial)
September 22, 2002... It has been repeated ad nauseam that, especially for the citizens of the United States, the world changed on September 11. There can be no doubt that it did so, even if this was mainly by way of a profound apprehension that things were not as...

Terrorism, anti-terrorism and the globalization of insecurity.(Commentary)
September 22, 2002... Since September 11 terrorism and the 'war on terror' have dominated the world's headlines. Yet, heinous crimes though they were, the attacks on New York, Washington and Bali can hardly be classed among the more violent conflagrations of the...

Chechnya and the theatre of war.(Commentary)
September 22, 2002... An anti-terrorist state is taking shape in Russia. The gas attack in the Theatre Na Dubrovke set far-reaching political processes in motion. All of the state's activities are now centred around the war on terrorism. Any criticism of the special...

Terror on the beach.(Commentary)
September 22, 2002... Life under late capitalism already compels us to sift through vast networks of information in order to gain a minimum of ontological security. Terrorism, however, adds a new degree of intensity to our obsession with sign hunting. If the...

On global terror: September 11 one year on.(Commentary)
September 22, 2002... The attack by terrorists on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon continues to impact on global politics, drawing them in the direction of a military endgame commentators are refusing to contemplate. Event follows event with a rhythm that is...

Globalization and the unchosen: leaving America behind.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Leaving America Behind Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, Everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the...

Stem-cell alchemy: techno-science and the new philosopher's stone.(Commentary)
September 22, 2002... The current debate over experimentation on foetal stem cells implicitly goes to core questions about what it means to be human. When does human life begin? Is stem-cell science simply a technical matter of deploying abstracted body parts, or...

'Plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us'. Cultural studies in the shadow of catastrophe.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... My title refers to one of those wonderful witty faux-naif moments in Kafka. Walter Benjamin tells the story, in his essay on Kafka in Illuminations. In conversation with a contemporary, Kafka said that human beings are nihilistic thoughts,...

Left out? Marxism, the new left and cultural studies.
September 22, 2002... While the spectre that haunted Europe in 1848 seems to have been exorcised, at least for the moment and at least from the eastern half of the continent, its theoretical counterpart--marxism as distinct from communism--still haunts the...

Another world is possible: Prometheus or Pandora.(Excerpt)
September 22, 2002... Prometheus or Pandora? Driven by the ideal of private ownership of just about everything on Planet Earth, neo-liberal capitalism undermines social cohesion and justice for the sake of profits, competition, consumption and technological...

Can education challenge neo-liberalism? The citizen school and the struggle for democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
September 22, 2002... Introduction In this article, we want to situate the processes of educational policy and reform in their larger socio-political context. We describe the profound impact on local communities of a set of policies that are linked to larger...

Global capitalism and the return of the garrison state: rethinking hope in the age of insecurity.(Excerpt)
September 22, 2002... The democratic idea itself is perhaps best thought of as a utopian aspiration... we need such aspirations if we are to resist the notion, made plausible by the seeming inevitability of globalization, that democracy, self-determination and the...

Self-reliant citizens and targeted populations: the case of Australian agriculture in the 1990s.
September 22, 2002... Since the early 1990s the notion of 'self-reliance' has assumed a central place in agricultural and regional policy in Australia. Applied specifically to agriculture, rural producers have been told by governments and farm organizations that...