Eternal Euskadi, enduring ETA
The association of the Basque country with political (and often violent) conflict in the eyes of much of the world is at first sight belied by the sense of tranquil prosperity exuded by its capital,...
View ArticleCyprus’s risky stalemate
On the three-and-a-half-hour flight eastwards from Rome to Larnaca, I re-immerse myself in the details of the "Cyprus question". As I read again the half-truths, self-indulgent rhetoric and bogus...
View ArticleIslam and Europe: a debate in Amsterdam
Over the past three years, the accidents of academic travel and a certain curiosity about historical sites have taken me to most, if not all, of the places in the western world where jihadi terrorism...
View ArticleJustice in Madrid: the “11-M” verdict
A dark, rainy, early autumnal, 6am outside my hotel on the pavement of Calle Goya is perhaps not the most obvious place or time to begin an encounter with what is to be, in the history of Spain - and...
View ArticleThe mysteries of the American empire
The debate on the future of American power – and what is increasingly (even casually) referred to as the American “empire” – is almost as old as the United States itself. It was Alexis de Tocqueville...
View ArticleThe assassin’s age: Pakistan in the world
The consequences of political assassinations - what in Spanish are termedmagnicidios - are variable and unpredictable. Some radically change history and inaugurate a new phase in the politics of the...
View ArticleIslam, law and finance: the elusive divine
A controversy over the relationship of what is termed sharia or "Islamic law" to wider legal systems was ignited on 7 February 2008 from an unlikely source: an academic lecture by the spiritual head...
View ArticleFidel Castro's legacy: Cuban conversations
The announcement of Fidel Castro's serious intestinal illness at the end of July 2006, and the occasion of the Cuban leader's 80th birthday on 13 August, inevitably have raised a mountain of...
View ArticleSovereign Wealth Funds: power vs principle
The world's financial press has a new obsession to succeed the "sub-prime mortgage" craze of autumn 2007: "sovereign wealth funds", those state-backed investment bodies whose accumulating assets (often...
View ArticleTwo feminist pioneers: Iranian, Lebanese, universal
The intellectual, moral and historic confusions that mark the contemporary age - and the middle east as much as any other region - make the loss of thoughtful and humane voices all the more bitter....
View ArticleTibet, Palestine and the politics of failure
Two current and high-profile events - the crisis in and around Tibet following the Lhasa riots of 14 March 2008, and the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment on 14 May 1948 of the state of Israel...
View Article1968: the global legacy
"With the coming of the dawn, the promises of the night fade away". In politics, as in love, the old Spanish saying sounds a pertinent warning; not least in regard to the memorialisation and assessment...
View ArticleMediterranean mirage: Europe’s sunken politics
"They only went to Paris because they wanted to meet his wife". An Arab diplomat friend with an inexorable grasp of the realities of international relations is a vital source of wisdom in separating...
View ArticleThe miscalculation of small nations
The brief and vicious war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia has killed an untold number of people and displaced and traumatised many thousands more; promised a lengthy and abrasive...
View ArticleThe revenge of ideas: Karl Polanyi and Susan Strange
During the two decades or so that I taught "international relations" as an academic discipline at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the most challenging and rewarding part of...
View ArticleArmenia’s mixed messages
Armenia should be smiling. The trend of events in the region might seem at last to be going in the favour of the small, landlocked south Caucasian republic. The short war between Georgia and Russia in...
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The futures of Iraq
What will happen in Iraq between 2008 and 2012? The agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad on a plan for the withdrawal of United States forces by...
View ArticleThe greater middle east: Obama’s six problems
The inauguration of a new United States president is a moment of unusually high hopes the world over as well in the homeland. This is understandable in view both of the legacy Barack Obama inherits...
View ArticleIran’s revolution in global history
The months of strikes and demonstrations that convulsed Iran in 1978-79 reached a dramatic culmination in the first eleven days of February 1979, when an epic tide of revolutionary fervour brought the...
View ArticleIraq in the balance
After the fire, a cautious optimism about the future of Iraq has begun to show itself as the country passes the sixth anniversary of the United States-led invasion of March 2003. Indeed, the...
View ArticleThe Dominican Republic: a time of ghosts
Hispaniola may have the distinction of being the only island in the world shared between two entire states (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), even if their intimacy belies very different...
View ArticleIran's evolution and Islam’s Berlusconi
The boisterous weeks of meetings, regional tours, demonstrations, and TV debates make for an impressive spectacle. But as the first round of voting in Iran's presidential election on 12 June 2009...
View ArticleIran's tide of history: counter-revolution and after
It is already five weeks since the presidential elections on 12 June 2009 in Iran, whose official results and handling by the authorities provoked an immediate and nationwide outbreak of popular...
View ArticleAndorra’s model: time for change
The principality of Andorra has long resisted the encroachments of the outside world. "We fought off the Arabs, we survived Napoleon, two world wars, and the Spanish civil war. Do not underestimate...
View ArticleWhat was communism?
Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary,...
View ArticleThe other 1989s
The great events in Europe in 1989 had a worldwide impact - and of a more destructive kind than is often acknowledged, says Fred Halliday. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the...
View ArticleFred Halliday
Author: Fred Halliday First name(s): Fred Surname: Halliday Fred Halliday (1946-2010) was most recently Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats / Catalan Institution for Research and...
View ArticleBarcelona i Catalunya: the real thing
The scholar of world politics and openDemocracy columnist Fred Halliday lived and worked in - and fell in love with - Barcelona. In a warm essay written five months before he died on 26 April 2010,...
View ArticleMemorandum to the London School of Economics Council warning it not to accept...
Fred Halliday (1946-2010), openDemocracy author and Director-Designate of the LSE Middle East Centre, 2006-2008, did not want the LSE to accept a £1.5m grant. He wrote this memo to the University's...
View ArticleLibya’s regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy
The fortieth anniversary of the Libyan "revolution" of 1969 - more accurately a coup d'etat by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and some of his associates and relatives - brings to mind a conversation I had...
View ArticleYemen: travails of unity
Yemen is in the news, and for all the wrong reasons. A spate of kidnappings and killings of foreign tourists and aid workers in the first months of 2009 has highlighted the dangers of a country whose...
View ArticleThe Left and the Jihad
The approaching fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States highlights an issue much in evidence in the world today, but one that receives too little historically-informed and critical...
View ArticleSolidarity: trails, perils, choices
The idea of solidarity retains its moral force. Yet it is vulnerable to the same manipulations as any category of modern politics. Fred Halliday examines the paths of solidarity under colonialism,...
View ArticleTerrorism in historical perspective
Terrorism is the defining issue of the post 9/11 world. It is also one of the most confusing and contested words in the political lexicon. The route to understanding, says Fred Halliday, is through...
View ArticleFidel Castro's legacy: Cuban conversations
From the archive: first published in February 2008. "What comes after Fidel" is a well-worn topic of op-eds, but the focus should be on an assessment of the character – a combination of the...
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