A new book uses an ethnological approach to shed light on the spaces of freedom and solidarity created by citizens in rural Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship. But these spaces, in some cases, also accommodate the regime.
In her study of the fate of the 100,000 or so airmen who fell during the Second World War, Claire Andrieu challenges the separation between civilians and soldiers, regular and irregular combatants, wait-and-see attitudes and active resistance, frontline and rear, through an empirical investigation that is destined to become a landmark work.
Slowness is no mere lack of speed, but rather the highest degree of resistance to a world that is spiraling out of control and trying to drag people into an endless race towards acceleration.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will resume its publication schedule on August 26. In the meantime, we present to you a weekly selection of articles published over the last year.
By enmeshing infrastructures, power is able to curtail local particularities, exploit resources, and fight group autonomy. Inhabiting territories engaged in struggle makes it possible to resist power. “Being a forest,” whether in Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Borneo, means becoming ungovernable.
From a “minor event”, the execution of two traitors from the Aosta Valley in 1943, Sergio Luzzatto offers us an extensive depiction of the history and memory of the Resistance against a backdrop of Jew hunts, denunciations, and civil war.
For two thousand years, according to James Scott, the mountains of Zomia were a place of refuge for the people of Southeast Asia. For the author, this region, as a centre of resistance to the state, holds up a mirror to our destructive and self-confident civilisation. A fascinating and intriguing anarchist history.
