Troika is a docu-drama about the Russian revolution, the romance of freedom, and the eternal dream of utopia. Between Stalin and Mau over a hundred million people have died in the name of communism. Where is the good in that?
The Collected Courses of the Xiamen Academy of International Law contain the Summer Courses taught at the Xiamen Academy of International Law by highly qualified international legal professionals. The Third Volume of the Series contains the following articles: New Trends of International Law in the Era of Globalization, Stephan Hobe; Tradition versus Harmonization in the Recent Reforms of Contract Law, Ole Lando; Constitutional Functions and Constitutional Problems of International Economic Law in the 21st Century, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann; International Law: A System of Relationships, Malcolm N. Shaw, QC; The International Law of Watercourses: New Dimensions, Patricia Wouters The Xiamen Academy of International Law aims to promote academic exchanges among legal communities across the globe, encourage examination of major international issues and, by so doing, seek ways to improve the possibilities for world peace and international cooperation. It seeks to achieve this aim by providing the highest level of education to individuals, particularly those from Asian countries, interested in the development and use of international law – persons such as young lecturers in international law, diplomats, practitioners of transnational law, government officials in charge of foreign affairs, and officials of international organizations.
Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society. Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"-but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sanchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
Salvages: doggerels and vignettes gathered in the twilight years dating from Manhattan's New School for Social Research in the mid-70's plus a non-fiction writing course to classes at Helen Waren Mayer's Double Image Theatre under playwriting with Bill Talbot, Senior Editor at Samuel French. Requisites: curiosity, desire, pencil, and paper.
As evidenced by the yellow vests protest movement that began in France in 2018, the state of the French nation inspires gloom among many of its citizens. Brigitte Granville views this malaise as a peculiarly French symptom of the difficulties experienced by many advanced industrial democracies in the face of globalization, technology, and mass immigration. Granville brings trenchant criticism to bear in this wide-ranging survey of the political economy of contemporary France, building her case for the prosecution on the self-reinforcing rigidity produced by a narrow Parisian oligarchy that is both entitled and intellectually hidebound. What Ails France? applies an economist's vision to the monetary and fiscal pathologies flowing from this ideologically motivated technocratic rule, reflected in Europe's flawed monetary union, runaway indebtedness, and chronically high structural unemployment. The author marshals academic research from a wide range of disciplines to fuel a provocative and at times contentious analysis, proposing various treatments for French ailments that would reinvigorate the republican value of liberté with a new local slant. A refreshing, ideologically freewheeling discussion, What Ails France? provides a positive take on the innovations of our digital age, exploring their potential to bring about a more representative democracy and a fairer society.
Globalization has become a widely used buzzword, yet popular discussions often miss its deeper realities. This book offers the first clear explanation of the impact of colonialist legacies in a globalized era defined by the "War on Terror." Sankaran Krishna explores the history of the relationship between Western dominance and the forms of resistance that have emerged to challenge it. He argues that we live on an interrelated globe, that history matters a great deal in constructing contemporary realities, and that others create narratives about the world based on their experiences just as we do based on ours. Presenting a lucid exploration of the intertwined histories of both globalization and postcolonialism, this book uses compelling real-world examples to make sense of this crucial relationship.