If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

Arguably, the strong aid pessimism that persisted during the 1980s and 1990s had faded a little at the turn of this century. In 2000, at the Millennium Summit at the UN Headquarters (the only UN gathering in which all heads of state were present) all governments agreed upon the Millennium Development Goals as a grand strategy to markedly reduce extreme, deadly poverty. Its first goal was the reduction of the percentage of people living in extreme poverty by half until the year 2015. The other goals set targets for school enrollment, universal primary education, maternal health and a “global partnership for development”. The foundational thinking for this approach is to be found in what has been termed the “unofficial” book behind the goals, articulating the views of their architect – The End of Poverty by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Professor Sachs is a fervent advocate of the view that a drastic increase in development aid could achieve these goals, and the public largely bought these arguments.

It seemed like the days in which perceptions that aid would largely become embezzled, spent by gullible do-gooders or used by big powers to further their geo-political and economic interests dominated debates about development were numbered – a shift in perceptions that is has in recent years been incessantly challenged by New York University Professor William Easterly. His book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) left its imprint on the academic and public debate on development aid. (more…)

I was so eager to read the memoirs of this great Marxist historian that I could not wait to read it. Finished it on the plane last night. What a big disappointment. You can be a great historian and write a lousy memoirs. You don’t even learn much about who he is from reading it. You learn some about the times but I would rather read his The Age of Extremes (a history of the 20th century). Now that is a fine piece of work.

I think that the problems with this memoirs is this: to write a good memoirs 1) you need to think that you are somewhat interesting; 2) you need to be a good story teller; 3) you need to be comfortable talking about yourself. That does not apply here. (more…)

In 1986, a great deal had already been written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though most of this work was primarily concerned with the West Bank… and Gaza was almost an afterthought. As far as I know, Paul Cossali and Clive Robson’s Stateless In Gaza (Zed Books, 1986) was one of the first books to deal with Gaza in an informal, people’s history sort of way. And it remains the only effort… Of course, “first” and “only” do not necessarily imply greatness, but Stateless In Gaza is an interesting (if occasionally scattered) look into the opinions and attitudes of pre-Intifada Gazans.

“Abdel Salam was the first person in our village to build a house out of stone—he had lots of money and contacts with the foreigners.” Thus begins the inauspicious opening of Stateless In Gaza, from there continuing to anecdote after anecdote as a series of seemingly endless tales of hardship and personal sacrifice. In this way, the various Palestinian narrators describe aspects of Gaza’s history beginning with the nakba of 1948 and passing through the Egyptian and Israeli occupations up to (the present day at the time of the book’s publishing) 1986. (more…)