When I was in graduate school in the 1990s—and this continued into the aughts and 2010s—the dominant idea in liberal foreign policy circles was that of “humanitarian intervention.” The claim was that though states should ordinarily respect the sovereignty of other states, under extreme circumstances, say of genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was not just the right, but the obligation, of the international community, to take coercive action, including using military force and violence, to stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing. Occasionally, the theory went, this might involve or entail toppling the regime that was engaged in the genocide. Thus Vietnam was allowed to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania was allowed to invade Uganda and topple the […]
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Categories
Foreign Policy, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The State, Violence
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Tags ethnic cleansing, genocide, Idi Amin, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam
Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American. Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context—and […]
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Categories
Education, Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, Violence
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Tags Edmund Burke, Eric Adams, Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, Peter Beinart, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zohran Mamdani