COMMENT

FRED: Awarding the Peace Prize to South Africa could be part of a necessary settlement with the less peaceful role Norway has internationally – after, among other things, the attack on Libya.

Freedom of expression is the last barrier against the dominance of media moguls.

POLICY: SV once stood for a third position in the Cold War: Weapons were not the way to peace, and security should also be sought for the opposing party.

SV:MODERN TIMES publishes here an open letter to the SV leadership. Why is the previous work program's claim that NATO is not primarily a defense alliance being deleted? And why should SV no longer believe that NATO is "a tool for promoting Western economic and foreign policy interests"?

THE ARMS INDUSTRY: The largest US arms manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and RTX (Raytheon), have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide under the Rome Statute. After three years of investigation and documentation of the major arms manufacturers, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal issued its final report in January.

DESTITUTION: The triumphant narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism and socialism have become exhausted. Today we see new mass protests as destitutive acts. They no longer take place with reference to the labor movement's models of social transformation, neither social democratic, Leninist nor Eurocommunist. The resistance does not coalesce into a recognizable and redeemable political demand, instead it grows into a hatred of the entire political system.

PHILOSOPHY: In her acceptance speech for the Adorno Prize this autumn, the philosopher Seyla Benhabib recently highlighted Adorno's concept of the "non-identical" as an anti-authoritarian force. In an interview with Till Schmidt in the German Philosophie Magazin on 31 October 2024, the philosopher explains how Adorno can be used to counter right-wing.

UTOPIA: Without a belief in the glow of utopia, Bloch writes, we end up like TS Eliot's cavemen with a «hollow world space in a disenchanted atheism.» Has the constant work focus, busyness and the search for security and comfort sucked the life out of us and thus also the utopian glow and search that keeps us awake as human beings, asks Alexander Carnera in this essay.

LANYARD: What can a philosopher like French Gilles Deleuze tell us today, 42 years later, regarding Israel's treatment of the Palestinians — and settler colonialism?