Category: Uncategorized

by ANATOL LIEVEN & ARTIN DERSIMONIAN

The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), agreed in principle on 8 August at a mini-summit in Washington between Trump, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, consists of a joint US-Armenian project to construct and administer road, rail and energy connections between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan to its west, across the Armenian region of Syunik (see map below). Running along Armenia’s southern border, the 27-mile corridor forms a key part of a new approach to a diplomatic settlement of the decades-long conflict between the two countries.

If built, the TRIPP would create the conditions for a continued link between Azerbaijan and its ethnic relation and close partner, Turkey. It would also establish a second route for trade and energy – alongside the existing one across Georgia, to the north – running from Europe to Central Asia and China, bypassing Russia. Caspian energy has become more important to the US and Europe as a result of the sharp reduction in Russian supplies since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Whether another east-west pipeline is commercially viable remains an open question, as does much about the TRIPP as a whole. Concrete plans for the route have yet to be developed, and it can only be built as part of a final and comprehensive peace settlement, to which there remain significant obstacles. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the Trump administration has the coherence, expertise and stamina to bring the TRIPP and the peace process to a successful conclusion.

Yet the advantages of the proposed corridor are obvious. For Azerbaijan, an overland link to its exclave and to Turkey. For Armenia, the prospect of ending – at least for a considerable time – Baku’s threats to seize and establish an Azerbaijani-controlled corridor by force, annexing Armenian territory and dealing a crushing strategic defeat to Armenia and Iran. The TRIPP, as currently envisaged, does not involve US troops, but a large-scale US infrastructure and commercial presence would be a huge deterrent to Azerbaijani aggression in the region. The TRIPP and a peace settlement would lead to the normalisation of relations between Armenia and Turkey, which have a fraught, centuries-old history, punctuated with violent episodes, reaching a monstrous apogee with the massacre of some 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Turkey closed its border with its eastern neighbour in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan, which was then facing significant losses to Armenian forces. The new corridor would re-open the border, allowing Armenian trade through Turkey to Europe and the Middle East.

New Left Review for more

by MARYAM TAMOOR

This language trap assumes sombre gravity in today’s era

Language seems just a word, but it shapes us, our conduct, our relationships, and our worldview of the beings. What is language, after all? A combination of words, but where do the words come from? And how do some of these words evolve into “terms” that encapsulate and convey a certain meaning? More importantly, who defines these terms? And what happens when these terms become a part of world discourse and are embraced uncritically by the 8.2 billion population across the globe? Once part of the worldwide daily lexicon, these terms carry immense weight. As Judith Butler would say, words are ‘performative’, implying that language does not just describe, it enacts reality.

Nietzsche identified language as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’, and Foucault went a step ahead and described language as a part of discourse, defining terms treated as truth and knowledge. Knowledge, for him, has a direct nexus with power. Whoever coins and defines the ‘terms’ embodies a power structure, shaping the social reality we reside in. Just take the linguistic framing of two similar yet different terms — Antisemitism and Islamophobia — which exemplify these loaded concepts that bend the minds with their esoteric conception and twist the tongues with their phonetics.

Both terms encapsulate, albeit in a varied manner, hatred or prejudice against certain religious communities. However, framed in a way that one is identified as a direct assault on one religious populace, while the other is cast as a psychological phenomenon, a ‘phobia’, a fear of people belonging to a religion or belief system. Not coincidence but choreography. These terms lay bare the ‘discursive power’ of terms and open windows to their historical trajectories while organising prejudices and hostilities into consciously constructed categories.

Another aspect that adds an extension to this language trap is the endless pursuit of labelling. Why is there a need to put labels and branding on something when, even to the naked eye, it can be seen as either wrong or right? Though this branding makes the complexity of human affairs relatively simple, it also complicates and distorts. If it helps in navigating the world mosaic, it also divides.

The Express Tribune for more

From enslaved workers in the 19th century to agricultural, industrial, and professional workers in the 20th and 21st centuries, African Americans have always been a vital part of the American workforce. The photographs from the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture below document African Americans at work from the 1860s to today.

Before and During the Civil War

Few photographic images of early American workplaces exist. After all, photography was not invented (in France) until the 1820s, was not introduced in America until the 1840s, and did not become an affordable amateur hobby until the 1880s. Most photographs of African Americans at work before and during the Civil War depict enslaved or recently emancipated workers on farms or plantations slide 1 of 3

Charleston Slave Hire Badges

From 1800 to 1865 in Charleston, North Carolina, slave hire badges were worn by enslaved individuals who were hired out by their enslavers to work for others. The enslaver paid an annual fee for the badge, providing revenue for the city of Charleston. Wages earned by the enslaved were often kept by the enslaver, but sometimes were shared with the enslaved. The badges served to identify those African Americans who were allowed to move about the city and to ensure that they only worked at jobs for which they were qualified, thus limiting competition with white workers. While some enslaved individuals learned skilled trades (“Mechanic”) useful to their enslavers in the plantation economy, a more common occupation was “House Servant.” These badges were public symbols of the hiring out system which allowed enslavers to allow their slaves a sense of autonomy, while maintaining control over them and profiting from their labor. slide 1 of 4

Civil War Soldiers

During the Civil War, approximately 179,000 African American men served in the Union Army as U.S. Colored Troops and over 20,000 in the Union Navy. Although Black soldiers were involved in forty major battles and hundreds of skirmishes—and 16 were awarded the Medal of Honor—a disproportionate amount of Black soldiers were assigned work as laborers, digging ditches, building fortifications, and burying the dead.

NMAAHC for more

by BHIM BHURTEL

Dollar-pegged stablecoins touted as digital payment ‘revolution’ but could easily be de-pegged and devalued to offload national debt

If you are a central banker entrusted with managing your nation’s foreign exchange reserves or a steward of a sovereign wealth fund in a developing country, heed this urgent warning: act decisively and swiftly to safeguard your assets, or risk catastrophic losses.

Delay could see the value of your reserves collapse by as much as 95%, thrusting your economy into a maelstrom of devaluation and instability. The foreign exchange you oversee is on the brink of a new kind of crisis, driven by the fragility of the US dollar.

Long the bedrock of global finance, it’s now a potential harbinger of economic ruin for nations tethered to its flagging fortunes.

Anton Kobyakov, a senior adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, delivered a bombshell revelation at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week that should have jolted every reserve manager.

He warned that the United States is orchestrating a systemic reset, wielding cryptocurrencies and gold as tools to erase its staggering US$37.4 trillion debt burden. This is not mere speculation, but a calculated alert from a high-ranking official, sounding the alarm on a scheme that could upend the global financial order.

Kobyakov’s assertion is clear: America is preparing to rewrite the rules of the market, using stablecoins and gold revaluation to offload its fiscal liabilities onto the world, leaving foreign creditors—central banks, sovereign funds and investors—holding devalued assets.

The US faces a “buyer’s crunch,” a crisis of confidence as major creditors like China, Japan and others divest from US Treasury securities, once considered the gold standard of safety, and pivot to gold to shield their reserves from a potential dollar collapse. This shift is not merely a precaution, but a direct response to the erosion of trust in the dollar’s stability.

The fewer buyers of Treasuries, the higher the yields the US must offer to sustain its debt-ridden system, creating a vicious cycle that deepens the crisis. With debt servicing costs spiralling and traditional economic measures failing, Washington is turning to unorthodox tactics to preserve its financial dominance.

Central to this strategy is the GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 18, 2025. Ostensibly, the legislation establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar to maintain value stability, akin to a digital equivalent of cash.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has trumpeted the act as a bold step toward embracing a “digital payments revolution,” positioning the US as a leader in financial innovation

Asia Times for more

by ASHRAF JEHANGIR QAZI

To be weak is to be wrong/ To be right is not enough/ To be good/ You need to be strong.

We are at a turning point of regional and global history because of several seminal developments. The moral, institutional, political, and economic degeneration of the US. The berserk aggression of Israel, which has finally destroyed the credibility of the US as a force for regional and international stability.

The realisation among Arab elites that they can no longer rely on a trade-off between national humiliation and external protection against Arab streets. China’s recognition that its diplomacy will not significantly postpone a day of reckoning with a fearful and implacable US. The emergence of a vast Afro-Asian Muslim playground waiting to be co-opted by the East as deliverance from the West. India’s failure to transition from regional power status to international power status, and become a credible partner for the US against China.

Above all, climate change in the Anthropocene age, in which human activity becomes a principal determinant of the rate of global warming and the fate of plant and animal species, including human beings. Because of the irresponsibility of the principal industrial powers, climate change will shortly become irreversible.

Management of and adaptation to climate change may at most delay, but not avert the demise of human civilisation — possibly within this century. As a result, Noam Chomsky observed that far from the noblest of God’s creatures, mankind will be the stupidest and most short-lived of animal species. All of the above is reflected in the last reset of the Doomsday Clock, which at 89 seconds to ‘midnight’, is the closest yet to doomsday. The next reset next January will be even closer.

Dawn for more

by AJIT KUMAR JHA

The Muslim consolidation of votes strategically against the BJP has been higher in Bihar since 2015, given the overwhelming hegemony of the BJP across North India in 2014 and 2019.

There is a certain myth that moves around Indian elections as smoothly as the holy river Ganges through Bihar – a myth insistently simple and yet quietly complex. That the ‘Muslim vote’ is a single, easily counted thing you can herd into a booth and, like cattle, brand with the mark of a single party.

Walk through Phulwari Sharif in Patna late at night or stand by a chai stall in Siwan at dawn. Mingle among minorities in Sakri (a Nagar Panchayat in Madhubani district) or among shoppers and shopkeepers of Glesan Bazaar (named after British administrator and linguist George Abraham Grierson) in Madhubani town. Or wander along the small lanes of Kishanganj.

And one sees the absurdity of that simplicity. Voting is unequivocally strategic and intimate; it is a conversation between memory and fear, between grievance and hope. It is also arithmetic and algebra.

The Caste Within The Minority

While travelling across Bihar, learn to look for the small inner maps a place keeps of itself: the way a city will remember a river, a language, a habit.

Bihar keeps such maps within its Muslim population – not one map, but many: the old, vertical lines of ashraf/ajlaf/arzal; the newer political edges traced by the Persian word Pasmanda; the scattered geography of Seemanchal and Mithilanchal, where numbers change the rules of the game.

To ask ‘how do Muslims vote?’ in Bihar is to ask a question that wants a single latitude and longitude but will only accept a constellation of answers.

Muslims Vote According To Caste, Numerical Strength In Constituency

Two insightful and useful rules have been argued by scholars who specialise in minority voting behaviour.

The pioneering work was conducted by Yale Professor Harry W Blair, now at Bucknell University, who explored the intersection of caste and religion in Bihar. Writing from an older, careful, and empirical perspective, he argued Muslim voting in Bihar tends to be shaped by caste divisions and by numbers.

NDTV for more

by B. R. GOWANI

Pakistani poet Munir Niazi (1923 – 2006), equally loved and respected in India as in Pakistan, used to write in his mother tongue Punjabi as well as, in Hindi/Urdu, national languages of India/Pakistan respectively. He also wrote film songs such as:

jA apni hasratoN per ANsooN bahA ke sau ja / kahin sun na le zamAnA ae dil khamosh ho jA

cry your heart out over all your unfulfilled desires and go to sleep / the heart should remain silent lest the world comes to know your weep

Film: Susral. Playback singer: Noor Jehan. Music: Hassan Latif Lilak. Actress (on whom the song is picturized): Nighat Sultana.

kaise kaise log hamAre jee ko jalAne Aa jate haiN / apne apne gham ke fasAne humeiN sunAne Aa jAte haiN

to make my life miserable, strange sort of people come to me / to tell me their own tales of sorrows, they come to me

Film: Tere Shehr Men. Playback singer: Mehdi Hassan. Music: Hassan Latif Lilak.

(The above video doesn’t have the entire poem, for that visit Rekhta.)

us bevafA kA shahr hai aur hum hain dosto / ashq-e-ravAN ki nahr hai aur hum haiN dosto

this is my betrayer’s town and here I am, friends / a stream of flowing tears and here I am, friends

Film: Shaheed. Singer: Naseem Begum. Music: Rashid Attre.

(The above video doesn’t have the entire poem, for that visit Rekhta.)

Here is a translation of one of Niazi’s beautiful poems:

Original Urdu version:

hameshA der kar detA hoon meiN …

hameshA der kar detA hooN meiN har kAm karne meN

zaruri bAt kehni ho koi vAdA nibhAnA ho
usey AvAz deni ho usey wApas bulAnA ho

hameshA der kar detA hooN meiN

madad karni ho uski yAr ki DhAras bandhanA ho
bahot derinA rAstoN par kisi se milne jAnA ho

hameshA der kar detA hooN meiN

badalte mausamoN ki sair meiN dil ko lagAnA ho
kisi ko yAad rakhnA ho kisi ko bhool jAnA ho

hameshA der kar detA hooN meiN

kisi ko maut se pehle kisi gham se bachAnA ho
Haqiqat aur thi kuchh us ko jA ke ye batAnA ho

hameshA der kar detA hooN meiN har kAm karne meNO

Translation:

I always am late …

I always am late — in everything I do

in saying an important thing, in keeping a promise
in calling her, in asking her to return back

I always am late

when wanting to help a friend, when wanting to lift her spirit
when wanting to meet someone at a faraway location

I always am late

getting immersed strolling through changing seasons
wanting to remember someone, wanting to forget someone

I always am late

wanting to save someone from sadness before their death
wanting to inform her that reality was different than what she believed

I always am late — in everything I do

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY

The Columbia professor’s new book argues that Gaza is the measure by which any moral framework must be judged

Hamid Dabashi’sAfter Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization is a book that does not nudge; it wallops. 

Written in the long shadow of Gaza’s devastation, it refuses euphemism, demolishes the polite fictions that anaesthetise Western consciences, and insists on a simple thesis: Gaza is the ethical ground zero of our time.

What we call “the West” has been revealed, not as a civilisational high point, but as a system of domination that dresses barbarism in moral drag. 

Read it if you’re ready to stop pretending. Read it if you want language equal to the horror, and a map for thinking, and acting, beyond it.

Published by Haymarket Books, it opens not with hedging but with the unvarnished vocabulary of genocide. 

Dabashi peppers the book with quotes from Conrad to Ayelet Shaked, showing how the injunction to “exterminate all the brutes” is not a relic of empire but a living operating system, retooled for a besieged strip of land that has become the world’s moral mirror. 

The result is a searing, scandalously explicit indictment and a celebratory defence of Palestinian life and culture as a generative, life-making force.

Gaza as the new categorical imperative

Dabashi’s most provocative move is philosophical: he rewrites Kant from the rubble. The book argues that Gaza has overturned the “metaphysics of morals” and exposed a metaphysics of barbarism at the heart of the West. 

If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten. 

Gaza, he insists, is the test: either we orient our ethics from there, or our ethics are counterfeit. 

If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten 

This isn’t ivory-tower wordplay; it’s a demand for a total reframing of moral philosophy in the wake of livestreamed atrocity.

The chapter-length meditations hammer the point: from official language that brands Palestinians “human animals”, to policy choices that starve and bomb civilians with impunity, the book refuses to let philosophy float above the blood. 

A categorical imperative, Dabashi says, now lives or dies under the dust of collapsed apartment blocks. That’s not melodrama; that’s accountability.

Israel is not merely backed by “the West”, it is “the West”.

The book’s core political claim is blunt: Israel is the condensed, weaponised expression of western imperial history, a garrison state projecting imperial interests, not a normal country gone astray. 

From witness to martyr

This is more than the familiar settler-colonial framing; it’s an argument that Gaza exposes the DNA of the West’s self-exculpating myth, linking Indigenous erasure in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and European fascism to the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe.

Dabashi leans on Cesaire’s cold insight: the West only truly recognised “the crime” when the methods of empire were used on Europe itself. That recognition never translated into universal empathy; Gaza proves it.

The author is not asking to swap one victimhood for another. He marks the Holocaust’s specificity while rejecting the move that isolates it from the larger architecture of European genocidal practice.

In this telling, Zionism is not a prophylactic against antisemitism but a colonial project that keeps the region and Jews living within a militarised enclave that is permanently unsafe. 

Middle East Eye for more

by LETICIA GARCIA & PATRICIA RODRIGUEZ

Runways, influencers, and fast fashion are embracing an image that discreetly evokes a reactionary feminine ideal — and the look is proving seductive to younger generations

“Quiet luxury hinted at fatigue of the loud, anything-goes culture of the previous decade. Many women were simply tired of being told ‘sex sells’ or that empowerment means ever-shrinking hemlines. Quality over quantity, tradition, subtlety — these were back in vogue.”

The passage could have appeared in an old book about the perfect woman, but it actually comes from an April article titled How Fashion Predicted A Trump Triumph in the magazine Evie, a fashion and lifestyle publication that embraces and espouses conservative values. The influence of Evie in the United States has led even The New York Times to dedicate an extensive profile to its founder, Brittany Martinez.

The magazine is not the only one to have explored the links between fashion and reactionary shifts. A quick search on the subject pulls up dozens of articles in publications that are hardly MAGA. “If anyone says I didn’t know our country was going down a conservative path, I would ask you, have you been on the internet in the past four years at all?” joked TikToker Lindsey Louise in a viral video posted after the last presidential election.

@officialnancydrew

looking at trends, it has be obvious our climate was moving conservative for years, i wrote about this on my substack and i honestly could talk about this forever lol. from everything wellness to trad wife content to old money aesthetic to the constant need to be “edgy” we have seen the shift in culture online. also i note that some of these concepts have been taken from indigenous cultures and were constructed into ytness and “ luxury “ rebrand.

ffashiontrendsffashiontiktokssocialmediap#politics?

original sound – lindsey louise

Fashion is not just about clothes, as sociologist Diana Crane points out in her 2000 book Fashion and its Social Agenda. Rather, she says, it is a reflection of our norms and cultural values. As such, it has the potential to influence social attitudes towards body image and beauty standards.

The idea is perfectly applicable a quarter-century after her book’s publication. In recent years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of aesthetics inspired either by nostalgia or by the archetype of the billionaires have taken hold. From floral dresses meant to evoke a bucolic shepherdess, to beige suits that could be worn by Siobhan Roy in Succession, or the flawless (and highly desirable, like a donut) face with a slicked-back bun of Hailey Bieber and her followers.

At first glance, these elements might seem unrelated, if not for the fact that a deeper reading of these macro-trends reveals a kind of pursuit of perfectionism and discretion that fits like a glove with more conservative values.

“If we want to understand current trends, we can observe what is happening in the world in political terms,” reflects Daphné B., cultural journalist and author of Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture Under Late Capitalism. “There has been an obvious rise of the ultra-right, in Europe as well as the United States. In consequence, the values and aesthetic of conservative movements are appreciated, because they are those closest to power.”

Tags like #coquette, #cleangirl and #oldmoney now belong to the general slang of young people; so do words like Ozempic, tradwife and the lamentable “classic chic.”

El Pais for more