The New Cold War – Reviewing Gilbert Achcar’s latest book

In his latest book The New Cold War (The Westbourne Press, 2023) Gilbert Achcar provides a fascinating account of the triangular relationships between the USA, Russia and China from the early 1990s onwards. Two chapters published at the end of the 1990s are complemented with up-to-date assessments of current conflicts between the US and NATO with Russia over Ukraine and US – Chinese rivalries in the South China Sea. In this blog post, I will assess Achcar’s many insights, but also add a notion of caution re the theoretical framework underpinning his book.

 

A Vital Frontier - Review of Andrea Muehlebach's book on Water Insurgencies in Europe

In her new book A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) Andrea Muehlebach explores the struggles over water at the financial frontier. In this remarkable book she is able to combine in her analysis the highest and most abstract level of profit-making, i.e. financialization, while at the same time working from the bottom up, assessing the implications this has got on people’s everyday lives as well as revealing the continuing struggles against this predatory model of exploitation and expropriation. As she points out, ‘I am as an ethnographer most committed to historically grounded, contextually specific, often also nonlinear and surprising social struggles. I am thus more interested in attending to the granularities and specific genealogies of political protest’ (P.23). It is this granularity which especially sets her book apart from other recent publications in the area of water struggles. The reader can almost feel the atmosphere of heated debate, strong determination as well as utter frustration by those, who find themselves at the wrong end of the water industry.