Notes from the Margins

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Friday, April 19, 2013 4:51 - 1 Comment

Notes from the Margins | Three Cheers for Hsiao-Hung Pai

In his latest column, Matt Carr celebrates the brilliant investigative journalism of the Taiwan-born reporter Hsiao-Hung Pai and her new book on Chinese rural migration.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Monday, February 25, 2013 15:05 - 2 Comments

Notes from the Margins | Spain’s New Picaresque

In his latest column, Matt Carr looks at the disastrous impact of Spain's economic crisis and finds parallels in Spanish history.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 21:59 - 3 Comments

Notes from the Margins | ‘The Invisible Dead’: The victims of US wars Obama forgot to mention

barack obama inauguration 2013 - Ceasefire

In his presidential inauguration speech, Barack Obama praised the U.S. Armed Forces and the 'price' American soldiers have paid in defence of 'liberty.' Matt Carr reflects on the 'other' victims of these wars, who went unmentioned in the president's address.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Friday, December 14, 2012 21:54 - 4 Comments

Notes from the Margins | Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffiths and today’s Far-Right Imagination

In his latest column, Matt Carr looks at the contemporary resonance of D.W. Griffiths' racist epic The Birth of a Nation.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Thursday, October 11, 2012 4:10 - 2 Comments

Notes from the Margins | Europe Cracks Up

In his latest column, Matt Carr argues that Europe's obsession with preserving the single currency through brutalist austerity politics threatens to de-rail the European Union itself.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 13:10 - 14 Comments

Notes from the Margins | Israel’s Extreme Tourism: War and Occupation for Fun and Profit

American tourists training with wooden guns during an introductory course to handle firearms at the Caliber 3 shooting range near the West Bank settlement of Efrat (photo: AFP)

In recent years a number of Israeli companies, many of them staffed by former soldiers, have attempted to promote Israel as a destination for extreme tourism with a military component. Matt Carr looks at the phenomenon and considers the overlap between entertainment, voyeurism and propaganda that has transformed Israel into a military themepark.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Tuesday, July 10, 2012 4:30 - 2 Comments

Notes from the Margins | The Border Between Us

"the rhetoric of border enforcement and border security has tended to reinforce the general perception of (poor) migrants as criminals, dangerous people and parasitical intruders."

The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted the more optimistic proponents of globalisation to hail the advent of a new "borderless" world. Two decades later, however, borders and boundaries have acquired a political importance not witnessed even during the hottest period of the Cold War. Matt Carr considers why this has happened.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Wednesday, June 6, 2012 0:00 - 3 Comments

Notes from the margins | A new kind of barbarism: the ‘non-people’ of Patras

Protest in Athens against Greece’s decision to build a fence along a section of its border with Turkey April 2011 (Photo AP Photo)

In his latest column, Matt Carr looks at the brutal persecution of undocumented migrants in the Greek port-city of Patras, a continuum of violence that spans militarised law enforcement, the policing of protest, immigration control and the battlefields of the "war on terror"'.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins, Olympics Watch - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 18:34 - 4 Comments

Notes from the Margins | Let the Games begin: London’s Dystopian Olympics

The official slogan of the London Olympics is to ‘inspire a generation’. But it is difficult to imagine who can be inspired by this dystopian marriage of corporate profiteering and a paranoid and overwheening national-security complex, argues Matt Carr in his latest column.

New in Ceasefire, Notes from the Margins - Monday, April 16, 2012 12:03 - 6 Comments

Notes from the Margins | The Madness of Anders Breivik

Anders Behring Breivik arrives for a detention hearing at a court in Oslo, Norway, Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. (Photo: HEIKO JUNGE/AP)

In this month's column, Matt Carr looks at the case of Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the Oslo Massacres of last July, whose trial starts today.

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