Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishrais an Indian essayist and novelist and a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIndia
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Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.
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I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
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As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
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The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.
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Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
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Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities - of class, region, ethnicity, and religion.
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In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.
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The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out - in 1949, after a four-year struggle - were keen to preserve their inheritance and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers.
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Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.
elemental forces
As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.
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Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
imperial power
Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained.
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Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.
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I meditate at airports because those are the places where I'm extremely tense, and I often meditate while I'm walking down the street. I have a thought and become aware of that thought and thereby create another level of awareness.