France’s Left Is Finally Fighting Islamophobia

Jacobin, 14 November 2019. Read the original here. For decades, Islamophobia has been central to the exercise of political power in France. Now, after years of paralysis, the Left is finally starting to fight it. On October 28, two elderly Muslim men were badly wounded when a gunman attacked a mosque in Bayonne in southwest…

Lessons from the Yellow Vests? Some thoughts on unions, ‘recruitment’ and ‘mobilisation’

If the French Yellow Vests have had such impact in the absence of any of the usual structures of organised unionism, what are the implications for how those structures might need to be rethought?

Nuit Debout. A new bottom-up movement on the streets of France

Arena Magazine 142 2016, 130-134. Read the original here. Since Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park, the occupation of public space has imposed itself as the Left’s globally favoured mode of confrontation with the standing political order. The most recent example—the ‘Nuit Debout’ (‘Up All Night’) movement in France—captured public attention at the end of March…

The roots of Islamophobia in France

Jacobin, 29 August 2016. Read the original here. Read a German translation here. Read a Bosnian translation here. The “Burkini ban” pursued in Cannes and about thirty other towns might have just been overturned in the French courts, but it was only the latest and most absurd Islamophobic assault endured by Muslims in the country.…

Islamophobia, secularism and the French Left

Solidarity online, 19 August 2016. Read the original here. Introduction For as long as Muslim people have been living in modern France, they have endured violence and exploitation at the hands of French capital and the French state. The intensity of this violence has varied in different periods, but it has intensified since the jihadist…

Letter from Paris—from Charlie Hebdo to Paris killings: France’s ‘war on terror’ and the backlash

Solidarity online, 16 November 2015. Read the original here. Friday night’s horrifying carnage in Paris has caused justified revulsion around the world. But the unison response of French political leaders will only fan the flames of jihadist violence and retard the possibility of peace, whether in France or in the Middle East. The Paris attacks…

Refined crusaders – war and its propagandists

Sydney Review of Books, 20 November 2015. Read the original here. France is high on war. After last Friday’s abominable bloodbath, François Hollande declared a ‘pitiless war’ of retaliation on Jihadism. It would seem that for the president,  terror can still, in 2015, be bombed out of existence, and military intervention remains the key to…

France, its war on terror, and the intellectuals

New Matilda, December 2 2015. Read the original here. With the immediate trauma of the Paris attacks receding, the West’s latest war on terror remains the object of substantial public consensus in France, both in its military and its domestic ‘security’ components. Fear, shock and panic are not the only reasons. The government’s choice to…