Doug Saunders

The bus was pulling away from its stop on the King’s Road as I piled out of the pub. I ran behind it as it gained speed, leapt, and hoisted myself onto the wooden platform. Gripping the metal pole and hanging out the back, I waved to my mates, then tossed 50 pence to the conductor and bolted up the stairs into the smoke-filled upper deck.

That was 1987. It would be a quarter century before I would again go home aboard a Routemaster, London’s legendary red double-decker bus. It was, as Londoners often say, more than a bus. It was a lifestyle. Its clattering diesel engine and perilous non-safety features symbolized Britain’s tough era of do-it-yourself survival, a soot-stained time of stiff upper lips and working-class honour. It was soon to be obsolete.

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If a bus can be sexy, this one is. If it can produce a political victory, it just might. This sleek three-door, two-staircase beast is officially known as the New Bus For London, but everyone knows it as the Boris bus.

It was, after all, a quixotic and economically unlikely gamble on the Routemaster that brought Boris Johnson, London’s ragdoll Tory mayor, to power in 2008. And with a close-fought election pending on May 3, it may well be the bus that brings him back.

Ken Livingstone, his perpetual Labour Party challenger, must be fuming. As mayor from 2000 to 2008, he was a champion of public transit, and spent much of his time talking about buses. He famously made Trafalgar Square traffic-free, introduced the Congestion Charge (in which drivers are automatically charged $16 a day to drive downtown), and launched a new east-west Underground line.

Mr. Livingstone was a great champion of buses, and strove to bring better-off Londoners back above ground and onto them. He introduced new routes, launched a smart instant-payment card, made the buses wheelchair accessible and safer, and, in what seemed to him a progressive move, eliminated the old Routmasters in one fell swoop in 2005. They were, he argued, bad buses: Last built in 1968, they were dangerous, ecologically horrible, and most important inaccessible: Two-thirds of London bus riders (heavily dominated by seniors and pram-pushing parents) were unable to board them.

If Mr. Livingstone had a fault, it was that he tended to listen to transit experts rather than the deeper chords of history. His replacements on most routes were practical, well designed and box-like double-deckers with one staircase and one door, making the conductor obsolete and the driver a bundle of nerves. On high-traffic routes, London made use of the ever-unpopular bendy bus: While it had the highest capacity, the idea of a single-storey bus seemed an affront to the city’s self-identity.

Mr. Johnson was widely mocked for his obsession with the Routemaster. Economists pointed out that the cost of its design and construction made little sense, given the slim margins of the companies that operate the buses. But he seemed to have grasped something: City dwellers tend to favour things that seem destined to last forever. Nobody ever loved the above-ground light-rapid-transit train lines introduced under Margaret Thatcher, or the ever-practical Hungarian-made bendy buses. Only a full-fledged subway line or one-of-a-kind bus will make people remember the politician who introduced it.

So the high-intensity election campaign will be a showdown between two genuine public-transit geeks. Both have very strong, very intelligent ideas about how to keep London moving. Only one managed to get a bus named after him.

Original Article

If you have watched the footage from Homs, Syria this week, you cannot help feel that you have been a witness to a serious crime. By unleashing a months-long barrage using the most crippling weapons, Bashar al-Assad has killed and maimed hundreds of families, children and citizens, and has turned an internal struggle into a global atrocity.

Our rage and horror produce two responses. On one hand, we wish Mr. Assad would disappear: Fled, unseated, defeated or killed, whatever it takes to make the killing stop. This is the political approach. On the other, we want to see him pay for his crimes. This is the legal approach. If only there were a white-suited sheriff who could read him his rights and bring him to trial.

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His name is Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Argentinean jurist who is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Mr. Moreno Ocampo, in almost a decade running the world’s first permanent international court, has made himself known for his sudden arrival by helicopter, surrounded by TV cameras, in conflict zones. And for his big, ambitious claims: that Saif Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan dictator, “will face justice, that’s his destiny,” months after announcing incorrectly that Mr. Gadhafi had been captured, or that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir would soon be brought to justice for the Darfur slaughter.

This should be the ICC’s moment. It now has its first head of state, Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast, behind bars in The Hague; his trial will start later this year. The case involving the court’s first arrest, made in 2006 against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, is likely to reach a verdict soon.

But it is impossible to see the ICC as a serious solution, and even though there have been some calls to get it involved in Syria, few believe it would help, and it might make things worse. The court is no longer seen as a major international force, in good part because of Mr. Moreno Ocampo.

One problem is that Mr. Moreno Ocampo’s desire to be seen threatening leaders with trials runs the risk of keeping those leaders in power longer. “If figures in the Syrian leadership were to be under investigation by the ICC, they might be less willing to cede power,” writes American legal scholar John Quigley. “The Syrian opposition might well oppose ICC action, as an ICC investigation might keep them from getting the voluntary departure of the top leadership.” This was certainly the case with Robert Mugabe and his generals, and is suspected elsewhere.

But the larger problem is that Mr. Moreno Ocampo has made his court’s legal process part of the political process. If countries aren’t signatories to the ICC’s treaty (and most, including Syria, aren’t), then the only route to justice is for the United Nations Security Council to refer them to the court. That’s what happened last year in Libya.

It quickly became apparent, however, that the superpowers on the Security Council (who aren’t ICC signatories themselves) were using the court’s investigation to marginalize Moammar Gadhafi and clear the way for a military solution; there was no real interest in bringing him to The Hague. “There is a largely untold story about how the ICC has been getting closer and closer to the power politics of the UN Security Council by accepting its referrals, which are politically tailored,” says Mark Kersten, a researcher into international-law politics at the London School of Economics.

That’s a serious problem, because the court is widely viewed in the developing world as an instrument of Western intervention in Africa. Indeed, all 22 cases currently before the court have involved African states, despite atrocities elsewhere. Mr. Moreno Ocampo’s image as a white-suited outsider, tied to the superpowers, has poisoned the idea of international justice and made it seem like a crusade. Mr. Kersten, researching the court’s work in northern Uganda, found that “many thought the ICC was a man.” Unfortunately, they weren’t all that wrong.

Crimes against humanity are increasingly rare. That is because of better politics and economics, not because international justice serves as a deterrent. It has an important role in bringing lethal disputes to a close and preventing vengeance, but is not an instrument of rescue or prevention.

Later this year Mr. Moreno Ocampo will be replaced by Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer known for her firm but professional approach. We can hope that she will put an end to the ICC’s age of heroism.

Photo of Luis Moreno Ocampo from the documentary “Prosecutor”

Original Article

A propped-up government whose popular support has vanished, a guerrilla insurgency tied to al Qaeda, a patchwork quilt of regional warlords, and an awkward international coalition that can’t agree how to intervene: In so many ways, Somalia has become another Afghanistan.

As senior ministers from 55 countries, including Canada, gather in London on Thursday for a day-long summit to try to deal with Somalia’s multiple crises and confront its seething terrorist threat, the underlying worry is that the mistakes of Afghanistan are being repeated.

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Somalia has now gone 22 years without a legitimate national government, and into that vacuum have fallen warlords, pirates, militias, and most recently al-Shabaab, the rebel army that has threatened to take over the country and has become a Horn of Africa branch of al Qaeda. Their war with the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has inflamed military conflicts with neighbouring states, provoked teroror attacks across Africa and caused a famine that has killed tens of thousands.

“It’s a very complex situation, and in many ways it’s similar to Afghanistan,” says Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, a Kenya-based Somalia analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The transitional government can be compared to the Karzai government: It’s endemically corrupt, it cannot govern beyond Mogadishu, it doesn’t enjoy broad support, it has multiple deficiencies - - there is a lack of a central authority holding together Somalia, and that is why we have piracy, warlords and now al Qaeda.”

Western countries now face the puzzle they confronted when Afghanistan became a breeding ground for terrorism and the site of humanitarian disasters in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Does the solution involve humanitarian or nation-building assistance on a large scale, or a larger military campaign to oust the threat?

Less than 24 hours before the summit began, the military option loomed larger. On Wednesday the United Nations Security Council voted to increase the size of the European Union-funded African Union fighting force in Somalia by almost 6,000 troops, to 17,731. The soldiers, coming from neighbouring African countries that are threatened by Somalia’s instability, have pushed al Shabaab out of the capital Mogadishu and many of their strongholds.

For the first time the UN and the EU will be providing airborne weapons - - nine utility helicopters and three attack helicopters – and there were reports in the British media that NATO has contemplated the use of a Libya-style air-support mission for the Somali soldiers, though there has been little political appetite for this.

And there is the very Afghanistan-inspired worry that an escalation of the military operation will only make things worse. The EU-backed military operation, known as ANISOM, has reportedly been responsible for its own atrocities, is divided among member nations with very different goals, has reportedly weakened support for the transitional government, and its intensive warfare has forced most aid groups to flee the country.

Many of the humanitarian and aid groups attending Thursday’s summit are urging governments to focus on the nation-building effort instead of the military thrust, arguing that extremism will intensify if the underlying problems aren’t dealt with. “Policies focused more on international security concerns than on the needs, interests and wishes of the Somali people have inadvertently fuelled both the conflict and the humanitarian crisis,” the charity Oxfam said in a briefing to the summit Wednesday.

Most of Somalia’s underlying problems are rooted in the lack of a legitimate national government, a situation that has prevailed more or less continuously since the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre collapsed in 1991. The Western-backed TFG’s mandate will expire in August, and one of the purposes of Thursday’s summit will be to find something to replace it.

Some observers point to the breakaway Somali regions of Somaliland and Puntland, which have become semi-independent statutes governed by distinct clans; Somaliland is now recognized by some organizations as an independent state. Some analysts argue that a loose federation of tribal regions is the only workable model, and are pleased to see Somaliland attending the summit, for the first time, perhaps to offer advice.

But this, others say, is simply a way for outsiders to avoid the hard work of rebuilding the Somali state that must accompany any military endeavour.

“We cannot just fight militarily against al Shabaab - - because al Shabaab is a symptom, it is not a disease. The disease is the lack of a functioning authority,” said Mr. Halakhe. “It’s complex but it needs to be done, and this is the moment to make it work - - the Western countries want to end the threat of terrorism, Kenya and Ethiopia want stable borders, everyone wants Somalia to stop being an expensive problem. And it will have to involve talks with al Shabaab, just as the Americans are recognizing that the Taliban needs to be in talks about Afghanistan.”

Indeed, one of the few countries to have made progress in Somalia is Turkey, which surprised many observers last year by sending hundreds of aid workers to Somalia in an intensive, hands-on nation-building effort at a moment when many agencies were withdrawing. “They’ve brought a really strong political force to bear,” Britain’s ambassador to Somalia, Matt Baugh, told the BBC Wednesday. “They’re intimately involved—a real force.”

Original Article

We always knew it could happen: A devout Muslim heads a conservative political party that takes office in a multicultural Western country, then leads a campaign to enforce mandatory prayer and to lobby for religious-based values and laws. How will people react?

Well, it happened in Britain this week, and here’s how they reacted: Judges and leading thinkers fought back in the name of a secular state, but the Queen, the Pope and Britain’s right-wing newspapers all spoke up in support of the Muslim party leader’s campaign.

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Her campaign began Monday, after Britain’s High Court ruled that the practice of holding prayers during municipal council meetings is unconstitutional (as, by extension, may be those held during sittings of the House of Commons). Prayer, the judge ruled, is a private matter that has no place in the formal proceedings of a legal assembly.

The Baroness shot back, saying her country is falling prey to “militant secularization” and arguing that religious belief should be “a voice in the public sphere.” She went to Rome and met the Pope, who appeared to give her arguments his blessing. Religion, she said, should be a basis of public life: “To create a more just society, Britons must feel stronger in their religious identities.”

Right-leaning newspapers laid on the two-inch headlines known by insiders as “Jesus type” and backed her: “Britain being taken over by ‘militant secularists,’ ” screamed The Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mail and The Times used their front pages to charge that religion was “under attack” and “on the rack.” Then the Queen joined in, using a meeting with representatives of nine major religions to make the case: “We should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life.”

Only months before, many of those newspapers (and some Tory MPs) were expressing equally loud alarm at the prospect of Muslim prayer rooms in universities or the existence of sharia divorce tribunals. Now, in the face of secularism, they’re taking the opposite position. In the fast-moving heart of the religion wars, you can feel the ground shifting beneath your feet.

In truth, no one is calling for a religious state or attacking faith. Rather, we are witnessing a showdown, across the West, between two competing definitions of “freedom of religion.” In one definition, the public sphere is a wide-open space: Citizens are free to try to impose religion, to invoke their gods in legislation, to wear whatever symbols they like. It’s a marketplace of beliefs, and may the strongest prevail.

In the other definition, that sphere is a neutral space: Religion is private and public places are unencumbered by competitions for divine supremacy. This definition recognizes that freedom of religion depends on a strongly defended freedom from religion. And freedom from religion is just as important for non-believers, who don’t want public life to be corrupted with spiritualism, as it is for devout believers, who don’t want their sacred beliefs to be sullied by the vicissitudes of politics.

Baroness Warsi’s intervention is a positive development for both sides. On the religious free-for-all side, she has shown that Muslims can join the other two Abrahamic religions in pressing for privileges without being accused of engaging in a “clash of civilizations:” her Muslim faith was almost a secondary issue in this debate.

At the same time, she helps people realize that the problem in public life isn’t Islam but religion itself.

Britain might follow the lead of Ontario, where public outcry over proposed Muslim sharia tribunals led the government to realize that Christians and Jews had been allowed similar religious-based tribunals (drawing on almost identical religious codes, all built around the Ten Commandments), and that the whole thing was a bad idea. By putting an end to the practice of religious law, Ontario relegated religion to the place it works best, as a philosophy of private enlightenment (if only the same could be done for schools).

We’re entering an age when Muslims are no longer seen as alien outsiders but as ordinary participants in public life. If earlier public hysteria over their beliefs had a benefit, though, it was in making us all realize the value of a neutral, secular public life.

Photo of Baroness Warsi: Press Association

Original Article

If you woke up in Rotterdam or Warsaw this morning, there’s a good chance you opened your local paper to be confronted with a big black tulip.  Once again, Holland’s most famous floral export is at the centre of an international battle — this time, entirely the result of one man’s obsession.

For the past several years, the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders has been Europe’s ultimate single-issue politician:  He likens Muslim immigrants to Nazis, and he wants them to leave. Amid bitter mood of intolerance that dominated the early years of the economic crisis, this was enough to launch his Party For Freedom (PVV) into third-place status, but now there are signs that Dutch voters are getting tired of the blond-maned firebrand’s distinct flavour of xenophobia.

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“Reporting Central and Eastern Europeans,” his party’s new site, urges residents of theNetherlands to report their Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovakian and (especially) Polish neighbours to the authorities, and offers forms with which to do so. It accuses these migrants of “many problems, nuisance, pollution, displacement” and the stealing of Dutch jobs, and features headlines claiming that Europe’s Slavs are criminal threats. As with his earlier attacks on Muslims, the site uses images and rhetoric reminiscent of darker periods in Europe’s history.

Polish leaders launched complaints with the EU, but the Warsaw media went straight to the stem of the issue, publishing big signs reading Tulipan To Lipa – “The Tulip is a Fraud,” and urging Poles to boycott the great variety of Dutch products and services available in their country. Slovakian and Bulgarian media denounced the racist “virus” that they saw overtaking Dutch politics and society as an “odour from Amsterdam.”

Central European countries are mainly members of the European Union, which means their citizens have the legal right to live and work, without any paperwork, in any of the 27 EU countries — as do Dutch citizens. When hundreds of thousands of Poles moved to Britain and Ireland after they joined the EU in 2004, for example, they were generally welcomed — the young, industrious easterners proved popular with both employers and customers and were generally well accepted.

But Mr. Wilders is attempting to appeal to a rather different mood, one partly born of rising unemployment and partly of a new strain of nativist politics in northwestern Europe, one that has seen right-wing racist parties win parliamentary seats in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands.

The campaign seems to have struck a nerve in the Netherlands. “A black tulip is the blackest possible PR for the Netherlands,” the conservative Amsterdam daily Trouw wrote this morning, before blasting Prime Minister Mark Rutte for failing to condemn Mr. Wilders. The liberal daily NRC Handelsblad published an open letter to Mr. Rutte: “We hope that our government will decide to clearly distance itself from this despicable website after all.”

Photo: Evert Elzinga / AP

Original Article

London

Now Canada, too, has had its senior moment. When Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested that Canada would soon join most other Western countries in raising its pension age to 67, he triggered an angry round of debate. We were late entering this argument: Europeans have been having it for a decade.

And it is only the beginning, because pensions represent only a tiny part of a much larger global problem. At its core are set of non-problems: People around the world are living longer, and having far fewer children — a consequence of increased female education rates and declining absolute poverty. Countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Iran are now having so few children that their populations are on the verge of shrinking — as would Canada’s if we didn’t take immigrants.

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The world is on the threshold of what might be called “peak people.” The world’s supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking, causing a shift from surplus to scarcity. As with “peak oil” theories — which hold that declining petroleum supplies will trigger global economic instability — the claims of the doomsayers are too hyperbolic and hysterical. These are not existential threats but rather policy challenges. That said, they’re very big policy challenges.

Canada’s crisis is mild compared to most countries, but it’s still serious. There are currently almost five working-age Canadians whose income taxes pay the pension and health-care costs of each retiree; within 20 years, there will be only three. As a result, according to Ottawa, health-care costs will double, and social-service costs will rise by a third. Compared to, say, Japan, where pensioners will become a majority this century, that’s nothing.

But population ageing will affect us in far more profound ways, because it is global.

About 11 per cent of the world’s people are over 60 at the moment. In the next 25 years that will double, to almost a fifth, and one in six of those people will be over 80, according to a forthcoming book, Global Ageing in the 21st Century, by sociologists Susan McDaniel of the University of Lethbridge and Zachary Zimmer of the University of California.

“It is not hyperbole to say that the ageing of the global population will be among the most important phenomena driving policy around the world over the next number of decades,” they write. “What observers and interested parties do not always realize is that population ageing is taking place not only on a global level, and not only within certain countries, but it is occurring in nearly every country in the world, and certainly within every region of the planet.”

Even sub-Saharan Africa is now seeing a very fast rise in its proportion of seniors. But some countries are being hit very hard. While 12 per cent of Chinese are now over 60, in two decades they’ll be more than 28 per cent. Brazil faces a similar blow. It will be very difficult for countries that are only just emerging from poverty to suddenly face huge elder-care costs.

Peak people will be an age when jobs compete for workers rather than vice versa. The cheapest labour will vanish. We’re already seeing this: Because China is ageing very fast, its dwindling working-age population is turning down the lowest-paid jobs and pushing up the minimum wage sharply, as well as the once-minimal costs of social services: Stuff from China will stop being cheap, because the Chinese aren’t young.

This can have larger consequences than we imagine. For example, the United States appeared to be escaping the worst of the ageing trend because it has an unusually high fertility rate (averaging almost 2.1 children per family, half a child more than Canada and Europe). Most analysts assumed that this was the result of American religion or prosperity. But an important new study by economists Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi has found that the real reason for larger families is the unusually large supply of low-cost babysitters and child-care workers in the US - - mainly due to immigration, much of it “illegal,” from Latin America. But those Central American countries and Mexico are themselves ageing fast, which will soon choke off that cheap labour supply and drive up the cost of having extra kids - - which will cause the US to become less fertile and more elderly.

Peak people will also be an age when countries will be competing for immigrants rather than trying to limit them. Immigration has spared Canada from the worst of ageing, but immigrants adopt host-country family sizes very quickly, so they’re a temporary fix. And if their home countries are competing to keep them, then we’ll have a harder time finding young people who want to come. It will require nimble and clever policies to prevent us from becoming old and lonely.

Original Article

My book Arrival City was the subject of a generous double-page spread in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading newsweekly. The article’s title, Ein Paradies aus Beton, means “A paradise in cement.” The book’s German edition has generated a lot of excitement in a country where immigrant neighbourhoods are usually viewed rather differently.

Arrival City Der Spiegel

And Arrival City also received a terrific treatment in the Belgian newsmagazine Knack. They were interested in my journalistic research on Antwerp’s troubled 2060 district, a Moroccan and Turkish immigrant neighbourhood. Their interviewer came to London and I gave her a tour of Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Brick Lane, noting that 25 years ago these districts looked much the same as Antwerp’s troubled 2060 district does today — and noting how ideally positioned 2060 is to make a similar transition itself.

KnackMagazineDougSaunders

Original Article

Kurzman Muslim-American Terrorism in the Decade Since 9 11

Original Article

London

In a perfectly reasonable world, the entire economic future of Greece and Italy would not depend on provincial election outcomes in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Nor would the severity of Iran’s dictatorship be determined by the sensibilities of a small cluster of Republicans along some dusty road in Winnemucca, Nevada.

But this is not a perfectly reasonable world. It is, for the most part, a democratic world, and when the calendar turns from governing to campaigning, tactics tend to trump reason, and the global falls to the local.

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We are at an unfortunate confluence: Just as the world is facing a set of grave and urgent crises, many of its largest and most influential countries have entered prolonged and close-fought election periods. The results are far from ideal.

Obama and Iran. The current showdown with Iran, involving escalating threats from Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran, began in earnest when Barack Obama’s strategy of engagement and negotiations broke down after a single attempt in October, 2010. It had been a well-considered strategy: Iran was in a position of weakness both domestically and regionally, and intelligence assessments showed (as they do now) that its nuclear programme was little more than a bargaining chip. Imitating Ronald Reagan’s approach to Moscow, Mr. Obama had the pieces in place to draw Tehran away from the brink.

But that would be the end: An election was pending, and American swing voters wanted shows of force, not attempts at détente.

As a result, “Obama has permitted the debate to take place on the Right’s turf,” writes Tritia Parsi, the Iran scholar who has just published a detailed analysis of the president’s diplomatic strategy. “In doing so, he has betrayed his own platform of pursuing ‘smart’ rather than just ‘tough” policies.’” We can only hope that reason will return in November.

Merkel and Europe. The German Chancellor fully understands what needs to be done to put the euro zone back in order, I’m repeatedly told by her advisors. But, they say, it’s just that she can’t: Not until after the next election. And in Germany these days, there’s always a next election.

So Ms. Merkel pretends that the risk to Europe is hyperinflation, and calls for spending cuts and tight money. Her response to the downgrading of debt in 9 euro zone countries last month was calls for more austerity, even direct German management of the Greek economy - - even though even ratings agencies had acknowledged that the larger problem was balance-of-payment inequalities and flagging competitiveness in the periphery. Instead of facing that, she has tried to win over voters with a new minimum wage and an anti-nuclear policy

Berlin political scientist Michael Miebach says Ms. Merkel is following “a clever strategy” in which her “Protestant poverty aesthetic” disguises a deliberate evasion of the expensive realities she must someday face: “The Chancellor is extremely flexible with regard to her political positions, and is able to use this to undercut opposition stances.”

But her coalition is in trouble, and she needs to regain a majority. There is an election in the state of Schleswig-Holstein on May 6, and then one in Saarland, and then a national vote next year. Talk of expensive realities would drive voters away. So Europe continues to hang in the balance.

Putin and Syria. Russia’s interests in the Middle East are not, by themselves, all that different from those of Western countries. Moscow seeks stability and functioning markets there, and doesn’t want extremism or smuggling, and wants some influence. It has different alliances, but is willing to acquiesce in the name of larger stability, as we saw in the United Nations Security Council Libya decision last year and in earlier cooperation with the United States around restraining Iran.

But stability is no longer Vladimir Putin’s goal. Not, at least, for the next month. Facing a March 4 election, he is selling himself to his Russian audience as a potential president who will fight for Slavic interests against the West - - and this often means siding with foreign autocrats. We saw that clearly this week, when he ruled out not only any Security Council resolution that threatens war with Damascus (probably a reasonable move), but also any that imposes serious sanctions, or even any that calls on Bashar al-Assad to step down and form a unity government: he is resisting anything that might end the bloodshed.

Mr. Putin is in an election bind, too, with his United Russia party facing unprecedented criticism. But unlike his American and German counterparts, he faces a larger democratic threat, one he shares with Mr. Assad: The prospect of a grassroots protest movement bent on bringing real democracy. That may keep him in campaign mode long after the March 4 vote, and put him permanently at war with reason.

Original Article

As you may know, my book Arrival City is very much concerned with China’s rapid urbanization. It contains field studies I conducted in a huge squatter city in Chongqing, an “urbanizing” village in Sichuan, and a group of frustrated dormitory workers in Shenzhen. (See my audio slideshow, below, chronicling the extraordinary settlement in Chongqing).

Now Chinese readers will have a chance to read it. Hangzhou MatrixBook, a very good publisher associated with Shanghai University, is publishing an attractive Chinese edition this month. And I will be visiting China later this spring to give a series of talks and to meet with scholars, officials and citizens interested in this book and its topics. Contact me if you’d like more information.

In this multimedia presentation, Doug Saunders and photographer Sun Shaoguang take you inside Liu Gong Li, the haphazard, improvised neighbourhood on the edge of Chongqing that opens the first chapter of Arrival City, and introduce you to some of the book’s personalities.

Original Article