Tidings of comfort and joy! With a bumper double issue of the magazine – guest-edited by Brian Cox and Robin Ince – sent to press, it’s time to reflect on the year.
Over the Christmas and New Year period, the NewStatesman.com team will be bringing you the 12 Days of Blog-mas, with links to some of the best content of 2012 that you might have missed the first time round. (Please forgive the fact that there are actually only 11 days of Blog-mas, and that they have started too early).
Today’s theme is The New Statesman Abroad. Foreign reporting is – compared with domestic news and opinion – difficult, expensive and sometimes dangerous. It’s also vital.
In some of the places we’ve covered this year, the country’s own media are unable to report honestly because of corruption or censorship. In others, the stories which usually reach Britain are simplistic and one-dimensional. Here are six stories which we hope get close to uncovering the truth about some fascinating parts of the world.
The cold choice – jobs or jihad
Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the NS has commissioned Olivier Roy, a professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence, to write a series of essays on the uprising. His first piece of 2012, The Cold Choice, looks at the rise of Islamist parties in Egypt in the wake of the removal of Hosni Mubarak from power.
His most recent piece for the NS, The Myth of the Islamist winter, was published this month.
Greece: The austerity laboratory
The NS assistant editor, Daniel Trilling, has written several longform pieces for the magazine this year after completing his book on the British National Party. In a recent dispatch from Greece, he considers the rise of Golden Dawn and the social effects of austerity. In a final coda, he visits a food bank near his house in London and asks: what can Greece’s example tell us about Britain’s austere future?
India after the blackout
William Dalrymple considers the contradiction at the heart of India: that its seemingly meteoric rise has divided the country even more sharply between the haves and have-nots.
For, even at the height of India’s boom, amid talk of space missions to Mars and fleets of nuclear submarines, and as the country tripled its defence budget to become one of the world’s top ten military spenders, it has also been home to one-third of the world’s poor. A full quarter of its population – about 310 million people – live in poverty.
Mexico’s drug war: the battle without hope
Malcolm Beith, author of the book Narco, reveals the incredible toll of drug violence in Mexico and wonders why the one solution the US won’t consider to the “war on drugs” is decriminalisation.
In 2009, a man nicknamed El Pozolero – “the stew-maker” – was arrested and confessed to dissolving the remains of more than 300 people in vats of caustic soda for a drug kingpin. Later that year, a man working for rivals of the powerful Sinaloa cartel was found; he had been beheaded and his face had been carved off and delicately stitched on to a football.
Israel’s endless war
In November, the New Statesman‘s editor Jason Cowley visited Israel, just as it began a renewed assault on Gaza. He found a country unwilling to question its actions.
The message from inside Israel was one of profound and unyielding unity. “There can be no peace,” it is said, “until Hamas stops trying to kill us,” irrespective of the context in which Hamas acts or the suffering of the Palestinians inside Gaza.
Earlier in the year, the NS had looked at the fading possibility of a peaceful two-state solution, with Jonathan Freeland’s essay Yearning For the Same Land, and Ali Abunimah’s response.
Ai Weiwei: If someone is not free, I am not free
In October, the NS was guest-edited by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who wanted to draw attention to the routine censorship of dissenting voices by the Chinese state.
Features editor Sophie Elmhirst visited him in his studio, just outside Beijing, and wrote a long profile of a complex man:
Ai lives like a king, though not in the clichéd sense. It’s more that he lives like an embattled medieval monarch, trapped in a palace that is half power base, half prison. Every day, visitors pass through to pay their respects or in the hope of finding favour. In the week I’m there, journalists, fans, gallerists, film-makers, photographers, artists, old friends and new all make their pilgrimage to the studio, and Ai patiently entertains them, having his picture taken or answering the same questions he has answered in the scores of other interviews he has done this year. One asks him to play “Water” in an experimental art film; Ai shrugs and agrees.
If Ai’s studio is his court, then Twitter is his kingdom. He might not be able to leave China, and rarely leaves his neighbourhood, but he can encounter his population directly through the social media site. He tweets to his 170,000 followers continuously; commenting on the latest political twists, retweeting support from followers and championing the causes of fellow dissidents. In 2005, he was invited to set up a blog by the internet company Sina Weibo, to which he contributed regularly until it was shut down four years later. Since then Twitter has been his platform of choice.
In his guest-edited issue, Ai used his leader column to issue a call to China to “recognise itself”. “Right now, in China, we are living in conditions that no other generation has ever experienced – of great economic growth and expansion, but also great oppression of freedom of speech and human rights,” he wrote.
Content from our partners
Related
