This post originally appeared on Adam Morton’s person blog.
Recently, myself and Andreas Bieler were jointly awarded the 2012-13 British International Studies Association -Higher Education Academy Award for Excellence in Teaching. One of the innovations we have introduced on our modules has been the idea of co-hosting a roundtable event revolving around the invitation of outside guest speakers …
Across ten densely packed but concisely organised paragraphs, Antonio Gramsci penned a piece of journalism entitled ‘Towards the Communist International’, printed in the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo on 26 July 1919. Although the egregious Michael Gove, UK Secretary of State for Education, may claim Gramsci as one of two individuals that have most influenced him (the other was reality TV …
‘. . . we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’ Walter Benjamin
This epigraph from the critical theorist Walter Benjamin prompts a number of reflections about the role of monumental architecture in shaping state-led projects of modernism. Architecture, after all, is a way of defining the ideas of an epoch as …
In the second and final part of his essay entitled ‘Los límites del neoliberalism’ in the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso (14 April), the historian Enrique Semo has delivered an excoriating critique of the iniquities of capitalism.
As detailed in my earlier blog entry, Semo has crafted the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico as the latest in a series of …
Following the June 2011 elections, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (pictured) stands as the most successful prime minister in Turkey’s history after winning, since 2002, a third successive victory as leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP, having won 50 percent of the parliamentary vote and 326 seats in the 550-member legislature, is poised to engage in further fundamental …
The current Arab ‘revolutions’, pose anew some venerable questions of revolutionary transformation, not least whether they will result in fundamental changes to economic life in the region or, as Antonio Gramsci might have recognised, a restoration of the old political order.
In 1917 one rather renowned contemporary revolutionary figure, V. I. Lenin, opined that, ‘The basic question of every …
This blog is produced by members of the School of Politics and International Relation at the University of Nottingham, and will include occasional guest pieces. The analysis contained in each entry is informed by our internationally-ranked research, and we hope it will help readers better understand the political dynamics that underpin the world in which we all live.
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