oD Plugs

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH South Ossetia: Tskhinvali’s Apocalypse By , published in opendemocracy.net With the fighting over, Tanya Lokshina hitches lifts between checkpoints around South Ossetia's wrecked capital Tskhinvali chronicling the grieving and burying, looting and burning, the unexploded bombs, disenchanted militias and Russian troops struggling to protect what remains of abandoned Georgian villages.  

Illiteracy remained a problem within the gypsy community he argued, and had contributed to the community’s continued marginalization. “In a complex modern society, the level of education needed even for everyday navigation is increasing all the time: those who cannot meet the demand for basic literacy and numeracy risk being cut off,” he wrote in OpenDemocracy. The question of jobs touched upon a “fierce prejudice among non-Roma about Roma people: that they do not like working because they prefer to steal,” he claimed.

America's foreign policy election The United States party conventions open the last phase in an epic election campaign. But the world may have the final say on the result, says Godfrey Hodgson. By Godfrey Hodgson for openDemocracy (29/08/08)

The war leaves Russian ambitions for regime change in Tbilisi intact. But the Georgian nation and its society have survived a great test to emerge the moral victor, says Georgia's minister of education, Ghia Nodia.By Ghia Nodiawww.opendemocracy.net  Russia says it has started pulling back from Georgian soil, but there are few if any signs that it means business. Therefore, the war is not over yet. Despite this, Neal Ascherson and Ivan Krastev have on openDemocracy already started taking stock of the possible results of the war. I will join them in these attempts - though all of us should understand that while Russia continues trying to change the situation on the ground through military means, any such assessments can only be rather tentative. 

Of the many media outlets addressing the crisis, I think Open Democracy’s Russia page has some of the more interesting articles. I especially recommend Tanya Lokshina’s “South Ossetia: Tskhinvali’s Apocalypse.”  Here is a revealing passage about the ethnic situation:

On http://www.opendemocracy.net, in "From Zittrain to Aristotle in 600 Words" Tony Curzon Price sums up Zittrain's "communitarian" position from a recent presentation as: In the cyber-world, each web-site with a community around it becomes its own polis, and it is life in the polis that makes virtue and fulfillment possible. http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/tony_curzon_price/from_zittrain_to_ari... The thing that confuses me is that Zittrain's categories (for example in the image and text on Tony Curzon Price's site) are all jumbled. He uses tired useless terms like left and right as well as bottom-up and top-down. While he does describe both bottom-up and top-down hierarchies, he also speaks of bottom-up and top-down polyarchies, which is simply nonsensical because polyarchies are peer-to-peer and have no top or bottom at all. This is not his fault, it simply serves to demonstrate why political theory has yet to get its collective head around the emergent complex global system.

Wednesday, 27 August 2008 Sovereignty, status and the humanitarian perspective, Mary Kaldor I first visited South Ossetia in the summer of 1995, just as the end-game in Bosnia-Herzegovina was being played out. I was ushered in to meet the so-called foreign minister of the enclave and, to my surprise, a large portrait of Radovan Karadzic was prominently displayed on the wall. When I asked him about it, he said that the portrait had been presented to him by the Bosnian Serb delegation at a meeting of Eastern Christians and that he greatly admired the Bosnian Serb independent stance. ... more »

OpenDemocracy Georgia after war: the political landscape , Robert Parsons

The miscalculation of small nations Written on August 28th, 2008 in Society by Heidi Comments Off Linked with Fred Halliday - Ireland. Published on openDemocracy, by Fred Halliday, Aug 26, 2008. (The Russia-Georgia war emphasises the need for a nuanced understanding of international politics … ) … The puff of ideology:

The miscalculation of small nations Fred Halliday The Russia-Georgia war emphasises the need for a nuanced understanding of international politics that recognises the autonomy of local agents, says Fred Halliday.

However, Bobo Lo, director of the Russia and China programs at the London-based Centre for European Reform calls the alliance an "axis of convenience." Writing for openDemocracy, he argues that Russia and China have very different objectives in Central Asia. Russia, he says, wants to reassert its regional leadership there, while China seeks energy ties. Erica Marat, a research fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center writes that they also "envision relations with the West differently." Citing these differences, some experts say the SCO is unlikely to pose a significant threat to U.S. interests in Central Asia.

Head to a rural village and pull out a camera to take pictures of children and see how many show up. This photo by OpenDemocracy reminds me of my own experiences. It's a swarm. For an excellent film that shows what a rural school is like in China, check out Not One Less. It's about a 13-year-old girl who reluctantly becomes the teacher of a one-room school when the teacher has to leave for some reason.

Russia, Iran: Crisis of the West By: Paul Rogers | Open Democracy The military and political leaders of the United States and Europe could be forgiven in August 2008 for recalling the English phrase "it never rains, but it pours."

Even when tenacious amateur journalists with good intentions place themselves on the front lines of an event—rather than, say, snarking from afar à la Gawker—they can’t always be counted upon to produce accurate stories. At Open Democracy, Evgeny Morozov provides a thorough commentary on citizen journalists’ coverage of the Russia-Georgia conflict. While mainstream news organizations scrambled to get reporters to the Caucasus in the conflict’s first days, native bloggers began filing regular dispatches. But problems quickly emerged, Morozov argues. The first was trust: News reports have appeared on blogs with little or no credibility or previous reporting history. Furthermore, internet access and technological resources are scarce in the region, and average citizens lack the budget necessary to capture quality video footage.

openDemocracy 19.08.2008 (UK)In the long term the Georgian war will have fatal consequences for Russia, writes Bulgarian political scientist and director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Ivan Krastev: "Russia has no outreach whatsoever to Georgian society, and there is no legitimate political force in Georgia that is ready to challenge the pro-western orientation of the country. Russia can occupy Georgian territory, but only at the cost of its own international isolation and a perilous deterioration in its relations with the west. Russia's failure to oust Saakashvili and to instal a pro-Kremlin government in Tbilisi also means that Russia cannot gain control over the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project; thus Russia's military victory has no practical impact on Moscow's ambitions to establish a monopoly over energy routes in the ex-Soviet space."

Eteraz Online : اعتراض آنلاین A Bewildered Conscience Blindly Groping for Clarity : Dissent is the Only Response to Manufactured Realities. "Eteraz" means "protest" in Farsi and Arabic, and the aim of this blog is to both analyze and question received dogma and the obfuscations which so often blight and warp media coverage and discussion of Middle Eastern politics and culture. Monday, August 25, 2008 Russia and Iran: crisis of the west, rise of the rest

OpenDemocracy.net posts translations of posts by LJ user pepsikolka (Samira Kuznetsova), a blogger living in Poti, Georgia: here, here, and here. (Earlier GV translations of pepsikolka's posts are here and here.)

China Updates Was China truly ready for the Olympics? Posted Aug 25 2008 by Li Datong*

In Open Democracy, Fred Halliday wrote: "There is still a reluctance among many analysts of international relations to believe that local and/or 'small' actors in a political situation - in this case the Georgian leadership - have their own agency, freedom of manoeuvre, and responsibility (a flaw that is shared by that particular kind of American - and of course 'anti-American' - leftist for whom everything that happens in the world must by definition be the United States's responsibility: an understudied genre of vulgar imperialism).

Was China truly ready for the Olympics?by Li Datong*For China the Olympic Games were the most important event of the last few decades, a showcase for its organisational capacities and proof of its athletes’ physical prowess as they triumphed in the medal count. It was a show that the government in Beijing wanted “free of politics” but which itself “politicised” first. Here is an analysis by Li Datong, a Chinese journalist fired for criticising censorship.