akia.de Blogs

On the 1 April 2012, landmark by-elections in Myanmar handed over a decisive victory to the National League for Democracy (NLD), Myanmar’s main opposition party, headed by the renowned Aung San Suu Kyi. Although […]

The Socialist Party’s victory in France’s presidential election says much about the state of the Left. The most basic problem remains that the Left has lacked a programme since the demise of Marxism in the […]

Smart phone plague, an epidemic that started only a few years ago, has already caused a secondary infection—stuffy moralising. Self-righteous luddites say smart phones are bad because people cannot socialise […]

This is a post by our new contributor, Loh:

The recent ASEAN summit in Cambodia, predictably failed to produce any concrete agreements despite all its usual fanfare. Notably, there was a lack of any […]

I’m a lefty, so of course I read The New Yorker (though one could debate how ‘left-wing’ relates on an international spectrum). I’m also a curmudgeon, so I find popular music these days a travesty. It’s a mess […]

This post has nothing to do with current events. Instead it is a new way of looking at an old and excessively studied subject: how Germans waged war in 1914–18. I’m studying environmental history, so I will be […]

Why am I writing about nationalism? During one of the debates (an unintentionally hilarious component of the Republican Party’s contest to find America’s biggest wingnut) Newton Gingrich said the Palestinians […]

There is an article by Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair on cultural stagnation, especially in the US, since the early 1990s. Basically, although there has been much technological, social, and political change in the […]

Few people bother to learn much about Canada (even its only neighbour seems to know little generally) as it is an unimportant, remote, and unsexy country. Although the contours of Canadian society may be vague to most foreigners, the overall impression is one of country that is fair, kind, co-operative with other states. In this [...]

It is a perennial complaint among lefty intellectuals that the working classes do not know their proper interests and are too often fooled by right wing politicians flaunting socially-conservative values. Examples of this are easy to find in history, but let’s stick to the contemporary tea party movement. I have a couple problems with the allegation [...]

Does modernity make us sick? Can stress due to society’s constant acceleration cause fatigue, nervousness (and neuroses), even mental disorders? Within this question lies a potent criticism of modernization—what is the use of wealth if one does not have their health? Before the nineteenth century people (if sources are to be trusted) were not…[Read more]

I never quite understood why books had to be updated for adaptation into film. Apocalypse Now is a good example; while was a good film, I always thought the setting of the Belgian Congo to be even more benighted than 1960s Vietnam. The problem is film-makers assume contemporary audiences only have a historical consciousness that dates back a [...]

I’m taking a course on disease in history, for which I recently read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year . The Journal is a cool source for several reasons: it is a bastard of historical-factual and fictional writing (a real Gordian knot to analyse), it is a subtle character sketch of a troubled narrator, and provides a detailed but [...]

Today I went to a local sustainability conference, ‘ Fife Futures Forum ’ (Fife is a county in Scotland), and during a brainstorming session my group debated political strategy. Although normally I detest lazy historical analogies, I will indulge myself today. Environmentalists may object to comparisons to nineteenth-century European socialist…[Read more]

I recently reviewed Corporate Power in Global Agrifood Governance for the Electric Green Journal . My review will be coming out in October, but I wanted to share some thoughts the book provoked. This excellent book focused on how transnational corporations (TNCs) have great influence constructing the global food system; TNCs to a great extent…[Read more]

Instead of accepting a big simple answer—because even simple answers are often difficult to enact—lazy people instead chose a small complicated response that is easy to carry out. What I’m thinking now are the Canadian tar sands, which have been vilified recently after Barack Obama signalled that he would approve the Keystone XL (Alberta-Texas)…[Read more]

I want to tie recent environmental crises in China with the grander themes of state legitimacy in history. The first example is an environmental protest in Dalian after a large storm breached a wall of a para-xylene (a chemical used to make polyester) factory on August 8. The second example comes from a diplomatic cable released by [...]