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    • Category: Pick

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • Colonial versus anti-colonial transgressions of the civilian–combatant divide

      Nicola Perugini, “Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, November 2025, 1–14, doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214.

      Perugini highlights a major blind spot in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as to how it has recognised anti-colonial wars. Perugini points out that IHL’s limited recognition of anti-colonial violence – enshrined in the 1977 Additional Protocols which institutionalised the right to fight against colonial occupation through armed struggle – rests on a static state-centric framework where the civilian is imagined only as a passive, nonpartisan victim in need of protection, while it is the combatant who engages in violently dismantling colonial occupation and domination through anti-colonial resistance. However, historically we know that anti-colonial movements have challenged this IHL principle of distinction between civilians and combatants by blurring the line between the two in a collective struggle. Adopting the perspective of the colonized, Perugini thus calls for “decolonizing the civilian” in international law. To Perugini, this perspective “forces us to rethink the civilian as a figure of resistance rather than passivity” (p.2).

      In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the stakes around the distinction between civilians and combatants decide over life and death for most Gazans, and certainly for all males and even male children. As Perugini points out, Israel uses precisely this distinction to kill with impunity all those who dare to blur the line between civilians and combatants. The recent example of a local ZDF contractor also illustrates, how targetting of journalists is justified by Israel and German media by questioning the civilian status of journalists.

      More specifically, by drawing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Perugini highlights two dialectically entwined forms of transgression that are at odds with IHL. On the one hand, anticolonial forces merge the civilian and the combatant in their anticolonial struggle through, for instance, the network and infrastructure of tunnels which have a commercial and a military purpose. Through tunnelling, Palestinian resistance groups have undermined the distinction to be able to “challenge the asymmetry of the battlefield” through “subterranean warfare” (p.7). On the other hand, the state of Israel uses this very indistinction in order “to destroy the colonised people as people”. To Perugini, both transgressions of international law allow us to better grasp the limits of international law, as well as the relationship between colonial genocide and anticolonial resistance in settler-colonial contexts.

      Perugini’s call to decolonize the civilian in IHL thus allows us to better understand why anticolonial resistance necessitates the indistinction, and how IHL allows Israel to justify self-defence as a coloniser by denying the colonised their own right to self-defence. “This inversion of aggression and defence is central to the colonial logic of genocide.” (p. 10).

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214

    • Federal Ministry of Education and Research ignores expert opinions when awarding funding

      Stella Hesch: “Despite criticism: Ministry of Research funds controversial project against anti-Semitism”, Correctiv, October 30, 2025.

      Stella Hesch’s investigation at Correctiv reads like a political tragedy: The Federal Ministry of Research has awarded nearly nine million euros in funding to a project run by Ahmad Mansour’s company MIND, based on political considerations and without adhering to scientific standards and award criteria. This decision reveals a highly problematic understanding of academic research among the leadership of the responsible ministry and across all parties involved in the Bundestag committee’s decision. The fact that the funding decision was supported despite negative expert opinions from three science ministers from different parties—Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP), Cem Özdemir (Greens), and Dorothee Bär (CSU)—speaks to a broad cross-party consensus on circumventing quality standards in the allocation of funding.

      Mansour’s company was awarded extensive funding from the ministry, although the unanimous conclusion of the experts commissioned by the ministry was that Mansour’s project was “not eligible for funding”. This was explicitly communicated to the ministry in several negative expert reports, and both the experts and the ministry’s technical staff had expressed considerable doubts about the scientific quality and ethical implications of the project.

      The political awarding practices documented in the investigation are unworthy of a federal ministry. They ignore the peer review process necessary for quality assurance and violate the scientific standards inherent in the awarding of funding. This undermines confidence in good and ethical scientific practice and awarding procedures.

      Moreover, this approach is reminiscent of the funding scandal in the summer of 2024, when the then minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, had it examined whether funding could be withdrawn from undesirable scientists. Here, too, political positioning seemed to be more important to the ministry than scientific standards.

      ↗ https://correctiv.org/aktuelles/integration-gesellschaft/2025/10/30/antisemitismus-mansour-foerderprojekt/

    • Disgust and eroticism of the new fascist body

      Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper (The New Fascist Body), with an afterword by Alberto Toscano, (Wirklichkeit Books) 2025.

      “In a context in which propaganda is often no longer easily distinguishable from enlightenment, documentation, and serious research,” the debate about the authenticity of images showing hunger and starvation in Gaza reached its low point in the summer of 2025: Not only did journalist Tobias Huch deny that the images circulating at the time documenting the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli military, he used the case of the emaciated boy Mohammed Zakarias al-Mutawaq as an opportunity to accuse Palestinians of provoking genetic diseases and having low IQs due to their sexual behavior. Unimpressed by medical assessments that clearly identify signs of starvation despite the boy’s pre-existing condition, and indifferent to countless other images showing underweight children, Huch’s X-Post aimed to degrade the Palestinian population by establishing a link between disability and sexual morality.

      This very connection is at the heart of the new book by Holocaust researcher and gender studies scholar Dagmar Herzog. “Der neue faschistische Körper” (The New Fascist Body, 2025, Wirklichkeit Books) adds an important piece to the puzzle of current theories of fascism. The focus of what she calls postmodern fascism is on the “confusing connections between sexual and disability politics” (35), with the intersectional categories of gender, race, and class being supplemented by the important category of disability.

      Taking the success of the AfD as a starting point, Herzog discusses in the first chapter the extent to which anti-migrant racism is made “sexy” (9) by stirring up disgust for disabled bodies. Herzog traces the “fear-driven (…) devaluation of any vulnerability” (9), which is conveyed through the eroticization of (physical) superiority, for example in AfD election campaigns, using five scenes that, not coincidentally, also play on the keyboard of the German Staatsräson (raison d’état). Among other things, Herzog shows how the devaluation of the Arab-Palestinian body and intelligence goes hand in hand with German envy of alleged Jewish intelligence, infused with anti-Semitic motives. Based on a careful reading of statements by journalists such as Ulf Poschardt and Mathias Döpfner, she elaborates on how this affective coupling of disgust and envy is used, on the one hand, to court Jewish intellect for (reputational) economic gains and, on the other hand, to affectively forestall the potential immigration of Palestinians who have lost everything through genocide.

      In this sense, one could say that we are in a phase of preconditioning, which Herzog explains in the third chapter, drawing on George Mosse. Mosse had argued that the racist sensitization of Germans, who felt themselves to be a chosen people at the latest with the rise of the National Socialists, had already begun in the 1890s—along the “affective seam” (48) between the exterminatory hatred of disability and the sexual charge of “racial hygienic” procreation. Disgust and eroticism are the binding forces that work toward an ideal future, which is why Herzog speaks of “frontlash” (24) rather than backlash in relation to postmodern fascism: The attack anticipates and responds to a development such as the migration of Palestinians, which has neither begun nor is likely under the current political conditions of pacification of the “Middle East conflict.”

    • Antisemitism training at US universities

      Hannah Feuer: “Hundreds of Northwestern students can’t register for class because they won’t watch an antisemitism training video. Here’s what’s in it”, Forward, September 29, 2025.

      It was always to be expected that mandatory anti-discrimination training in schools and universities could also be used to spread propaganda and suppress unpopular positions. Universities in the US are now using this tool to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” of January 29, 2025. At the prestigious Northwestern University in Chicago, around 300 students have now been excluded from course registration because they refused to watch a mandatory “anti-bias” video that—in a slanderous and false manner—defines anti-Zionism as a denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. The video describes—again falsely—a Greater Israel as the only historical homeland of the Jewish people and equates—methodologically untenable—arbitrary and unverifiable “quotes” from “anti-Israel activists” with quotes from Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

      ↗ https://forward.com/news/772504/northwestern-antisemitism-training-jewish-united-fund

    • International Law in times of increasing authoritarianism

      Professor Schabas: “US, Germany, and Others Could Be Held Liable as Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza”, interviewed by Selcuk Gultasli, European Center for Populism Studies, August 30, 2025.

      With regard to Israel’s military actions and settlement violence in the occupied Palestinian territories, the norms of international law and international criminal law speak in clear terms, as hardly ever in law. However, inhumane policies not only in Israel but also in Germany are silencing these norms in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to debate on the basis of better arguments and, let’s be honest, even to name the overwhelming facts.

      In an in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor William Schabas—one of the world’s leading experts on international criminal law and genocide studies and a professor at Middlesex University—gives a detailed assessment of the escalating crisis in Gaza from the perspective of international law, populism research, and global governance. As a descendant of a family of Holocaust survivors, Professor Schabas warns that Gaza is a “litmus test” for the credibility of international justice and the authority of global legal institutions.

      Interviews in which those who have dedicated their entire lives to interpreting and clarifying the law have their say are more important than ever in times like these. They can make the pertinent norms of international law, their negotiation before various courts, and their relevance to the policies of states comprehensible to untrained readers, without losing much of the complexity. Schabas offers readers solid expertise and presents legally sound chains of argumentation.

      With regard to the allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, Schabas makes it clear that court and investigation proceedings such as those currently pending before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have and must have very concrete implications for the decisions of individual national authorities and politicians. Genocide is not an isolated event; it always consists of a series of actions and decisions by many actors, and preventing it is the responsibility of all states that have committed themselves to “never again” with the 1948 Genocide Convention. At the same time, as Schabas also notes, genocide existed long before this international agreement, particularly as part of colonial expansion and racist logic. These events defy the simplistic historical classification of a before and after of a supposedly peaceful and human rights-based liberal post-war order and continue to shape the current world situation.

      The case of South Africa v. Israel before the ICJ is “probably the most serious case of genocide ever brought before the Court.” Schabas argues that the intent to commit genocide can be inferred both from Israel’s military actions and from statements made by high-ranking Israeli officials, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s remarks about cutting off food, water, and electricity supplies to Gaza. “We have more than just a pattern of behavior—we also have statements and clear indications of a policy.” Referring to the ICJ’s established case law, these are all factors that must be taken into account in the final assessment.

      According to Schabas, third countries – the US, Germany, Canada, and others – may also be liable under Article III of the Genocide Convention for supporting Israel with military and political aid. He warns: “To the extent that they provide material assistance of significant importance, they may be held accountable as accomplices to genocide.”

      Now is a crucial moment for the entire future of international justice, such as the ICJ and the ICC. Failure to apply uniform standards in the case of the destruction of Gaza carries the risk of entrenching a “two-tier system of international law” and undermining human rights worldwide: “These institutions are absolutely vulnerable, and they are aware of this. Gaza is a test of their credibility and authority.”

      On all these points, Schabas not only takes the time to explain the legal issues in an understandable way, but also places them in the context of larger global political and legal disputes between individual states and their worldviews and value systems. The ICJ in particular, so Schabas, has recently, after periods of fundamental consensus, increasingly become the scene of such disputes, which increasingly reveal the contradictions and fragility not only of international courts, but of the entire normative and institutional basis of the United Nations—with a Security Council that could not be further removed from the ideal of representation of the entire international community based on equality.

      In a broader context of debates on populism, authoritarianism, and international accountability, the interview makes an urgent call for a rethinking of the legal, institutional, and political frameworks for preventing mass atrocities. Double standards, as currently applied more than ever in law and politics, are not just an unfair application of the law and an unequal distribution of legal responsibility and effective prosecution. Double standards promote and create the illegitimate power of the few over the many and are the cornerstone of any authoritarianism that ultimately subjects all people to its dehumanizing logic.

      Schabas argues that this must be prevented while it is still possible.

      ↗ https://www.populismstudies.org/professor-schabas-us-germany-and-others-could-be-held-liable-as-accomplices-to-genocide-in-gaza/

    • “Don’t Woman Life Freedom Us, You Murderers!”

      “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War. A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic, 23. Juni 2025, https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

      It has already been six weeks: In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched an attack on Tehran in violation of international law. Iran struck back within hours, firing missiles at dozens of military installations in Israel. The Israeli government justified the war by claiming that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb – an unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating since 1992. Nine days later, the US officially entered the war on Israel’s side. According to the US-based human rights organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), nearly 1,000 people were killed and over 3,500 injured in the Israeli attacks. In Iran’s attacks on Israel, 29 Israelis were killed and 172 injured. After twelve days, the war was temporarily ended with a ceasefire initiated by the US.

      We share here a statement by the collective Roja, which was originally published in Farsi on June 16 and translated into English a week later by the decentralized network CrimethInc. It is now available in many other languages, too. Roja is an independent internationalist collective of Kurdish, Afghan (Hazara), and Iranian feminists, based in Paris, that was founded in 2022 in response to the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.

      The statement embeds the events of the war in the context of recent Iranian history, critically assesses the military interventions in the “War on Terror,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and insists that there is no such thing as a “just” war or justified bombing. With analytical clarity, Roja takes a stand against attempts at discursive appropriation from all sides. In the discussion about the so-called Twelve-Day War, supporters of the alleged “preemptive strike” who push the narrative of Israel’s self-defense and “regime change” in Iran are pitted against those who stylize the Islamic regime as an anti-imperialist resistance force to protect the Muslim peoples from Western superpowers. While monarchist groups justify civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage in the fight against the Islamic regime, the regime deliberately exploits the situation to repress political opponents and marginalized groups.

      Roja condemns Israel’s war and the US intervention just as strongly as it condemns the patriarchal-repressive regime of the Islamic Republic: “Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.” It recognizes that Israel’s war, which was supposedly directed only against Iranian nuclear facilities and regime officials, attacks the entire population of Iran and also and foremost the principles and actors of the women, life, freedom protests. In addition, it criticizes those who cannot differentiate between grassroots resistance movements and the actions of a state power, thereby rendering invisible decades of self-organization of the working class, to give one example.

      The collective does not relativize, but rather offers differentiated criticism of the governments of both countries: the Israeli government, which, according to renowned experts and human rights organizations, is currently committing genocide in Gaza and has been denying Palestinians self-determination for decades; and the Iranian government, which has been oppressing, persecuting, and executing opposition members, ethnic minorities, women, and many others for decades. Iran, Roja demands, must not be turned into a second Libya through external intervention, nor must it become the scene of renewed mass executions by the Islamic regime, as in the summer of 1988.

      By showing solidarity with grassroots resistance movements “from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon,” the collective rejects all attempts to legitimize state warfare and external regime change efforts. Only resistance movements from below can achieve long-term change through political means.

      ↗ „https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

    • An invisible university for Ukraine and the rest of the world

      Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War, ed. by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, Guillaume Lancereau, Ithaka/London (Cornell University Press) 2024.

      It is a global phenomenon: Universities around the world are under massive pressure—from defunding, subjugation to market logic, the elimination of entire departments, political interventions, and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of teaching, to the targeted physical destruction of university buildings, the killing of scientists, and “scholasticide” when the aim is to strike at an entire people. Since 2022, the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) has been offering online courses for Ukrainian students to help them work through their war experiences and the genocidal threat posed by Russian aggression, using innovative academic methods; almost 1,000 students have benefited from the courses so far. The collection “Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War,” published just under a year ago, features very moving personal contributions from students and professors at the highest level of reflection in the Ukrainian context, showing what one would wish for in any other context: a new, honest, unreserved way of generating knowledge at the university.

      “The need for uncommon institutional responses to the autocratic pressure on higher education has been a recurring topic of discussion since the late 2000s,” write Ostap Sereda und Balázs Trencsényi in the introduction; as early as that, the “Western” model of university education had already lost credibility in Eastern Europ. “The Invisible University was also a response to this crisis of academia, experimenting, under the pressure of an unprecedented situation of mass dislocation of students and scholars, to relink the educational, research, and civic components in unconventional and innovative ways.” The Invisible University does not see itself as a solitary entity, but rather as part of a cross-temporal and cross-spatial network, connected to other similar initiatives in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a history that is briefly and impressively traced in the introduction.

      These initiatives, whether online or offline, have and always had a few things in common: a transnational, global perspective that combines global and regional perspectives and transcends national boundaries; a radically democratic approach that seeks dialogue rather than hierarchies; and a connection between the academic and the existential dimensions. The Russian war against Ukraine is the immediate catalyst for the Invisible University for Ukraine and the conditioner of its tensions, specifically: Although the IUFU works against Eurocentrism and uses postcolonial tools, it sees itself in a struggle that is, in addition to survival, about insisting on common “European” values. It must endure the fact that its civil engagement can conflict with the survival imperatives of war when it becomes critical of its own government. And it faces the (resolved) dilemma of how to deal with Russian colleagues as its main goal is to work toward a non-Russocentric understanding of the post-Soviet space and as it consistently boycots all Russian state institutions.

      The individual contributions show how the existential and the academic can be integrated and convey different, complementary lessons from the war. It is above all the dramatic changes in the concept of time brought about by the war – the altered temporalities – that have a profound effect on knowledge. The contributions spell out what this means in concrete terms: in the daily struggle for survival with the “sobering absurdity of death” (Denys Tereshchenko), where sacrifices are demanded and one makes them, or one doesn’t; in dealing with the media side of the war, the “digital witnessing” in the face of a volatile global public, and the ignorance of even well-intentioned reactions; but above all in readjusting the relationship between participation and observation in research and teaching. Only through honest dialogue can a future remain conceivable with new ideas – “my war is about creating spaces of dialogue” (Balázs Trencsényi). The feeling of “professional failure,” of “should have known” (Diána Vonnák), “wading through unmetabolized experience and a cacophony of guesswork, motivated speech, misinformation, and rudimentary analysis,” is made fruitful as a lesson in epistomology: “We could call it a fog of war in the epistemic sense, but if we flip this around, this fog is ever-present, the stuff of fieldwork, and navigating it is a predicament of any contemporary empirical research.”

      The anthology ends with an overview of all the courses that IUFU has taught since 2022 and the very moving and sometimes also funny short biographies of the contributors in the shadow of war. Tetiana Zemliakova, for example, who, apart from the IUFU, can only focus on the ontology of time: “She always knew she was living through the last days of historical humankind, but she could never guess these would be so stupid.”

      ↗ https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9781501782886.pdf

    • Fascism – normality, not exception

      Alberto Toscano: Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, New York (Verso) 2023.

      That Alberto Toscano has struck a nerve with his book, which was recently translated into German, was evident at the end of June at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The book launch, a conversation between Toscano and prominent guests (Bafta Sarbor, Lama el Khatib, and Quinn Slobodian), took place in the large auditorium, which was nearly sold out. Toscano does not offer a diagnosis of the present à la “this is fascism now”, and he strictly rejects any definition of the term based on a checklist of core characteristics. As a reader seeking orientation, this approach can be frustrating. But you are rewarded for reading on: above all with an invitation to think of fascism not as something spectacular, as a state of emergency, as the radical opposite of freedom and democracy, but as a potential and a process that thrives especially within liberal democracies and is experienced very differently by groups with different positionalities—along lines of race, gender, and sexuality.

      The book is divided into seven chapters, which build on and refer to each other, but can also be read individually depending on your interests. All chapters have in common that Toscano gives the authors who inspired him ample voice and often relates them to each other in surprising ways. I would like to briefly introduce two chapters that I consider particularly important: Chapter 2: “Racial Fascism” and Chapter 3: “Fascist Freedom.” In Chapter 2, drawing on anti-colonial thinkers and scholars/activists of the American Black Radical Tradition of the 1970s, Toscano turns the conventional historical classification of fascism on its head. Following Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. DuBois, and others, he argues that already the brutal colonial rule and the exploitation and violence-based as well as violence-generating capitalist divisions of the US Reconstruction period (1861-1877) should be understood as early forms of fascism. These, he argues, paved the way for and helped shape the regimes of the interwar period in Italy, Germany, Croatia, and elsewhere, which are now regarded as “historical fascism.” In a second step, Toscano takes up the insight that fascism did not end with “historical fascism” and its capitulation in the 1940s—at least not for those who were and are subjected to brutal disenfranchisement and violence even in democracies. He quotes, among others, from the prison writings of Angela Davies and George Jackson and states:

      “Jackson and Davis are profoundly aware of the disanalogies between present forms of domination and historical fascism, but they both assert the epistemologically privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a carceral-judicial system that could fairly be described as a racial state of terror. In distinct ways, they can be seen to relay and recode that foundational gesture of anti-racist and Black radical anti-fascism crystallized in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. As the Martinican poet and politician tells it: ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the Gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’” (Toscano 2023, 32)

      Fascism and fascist processes are persistent and yet often invisible to those who have the privilege of not being directly exposed to the violence and the terror. In the chapter on “Fascist Freedom,” Toscano seeks to clarify the relationship between fascism and neoliberalism. I find this chapter particularly important because the terms fascism and neoliberalism are frustratingly unclear today, while being at the center of diagnoses of the present that see them as competing rather than consider them together. People ask: is this (still) neoliberalism or (already) fascism? For Toscano, this is the wrong question. He shows that the conventional idea that neoliberalism is fundamentally critical of the state, while fascism abolishes all forms of freedom in favor of state power, is neither theoretically nor historically accurate. He quotes from the writings of Mussolini, Reinhard Höhn, Ludwig von Mises, and others to prove that neoliberalism is indeed pro-state, but pro a very specific type of state, namely one that unleashes market forces and defends private property. Fascism, on the other hand, is indeed pro-freedom, but only for very specific freedoms enjoyed by privileged groups. In the Third Reich, too, the regime’s supporters and executors were granted considerable freedoms. According to Toscano, it is a mistake to overlook and dismiss the “spontaneities and enjoyments that fascism offers to its managers, militants or minions” (Toscano 2023, 61). Those who read on to the end are rewarded with tentative attempts at a definition in the short concluding chapter. Toscano identifies “four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism” (Toscano 2023, 156) that he wants to make his readers aware of. In a nutshell, these are: 1) that fascism existed before “historical fascism” and that it has survived it, 2) that fascism is by no means experienced in the same way by everyone, 3) that fascism can be understood as a mode of preventive counter-violence in response to epochal panics (such as the panic of the “Great Replacement”), and 4) that fascism not only demands submission from its supporters and perpetrators, but also offers them certain forms of freedom—such as the freedom to exercise violence and enjoy doing so.

      ↗ www.versobooks.com/products/2627-late-fascism

    • The Serbian government’s revenge on students and professors

      Adriana Zaharijević und Jana Krstić: How Did a Fight Against Corruption Become a Struggle Over Education? — Chronology of Pressure, Balkan Talks, 23. Mai 2025, https://balkantalks.org/chronicle-of-serbias-student-and-academic-uprising-2024-2025/

      Largely unnoticed in Western Europe, the conflict between the government and universities, students, and professors in Serbia continues to escalate. Since the end of last year, civil society in Serbia has been staging mass protests, mainly against widespread corruption and the collapse of constitutional institutions. (Snežana Stanković, here at Debatte, already outlined how the EU is involved in these events with its “lithium pact” and arms trade, in her pick on February 3.) The protests are mainly led by students. In December 2024, almost all public faculties in the country backed the students’ demands, fearing that the very existence of science and the education system itself was at stake. Teachers have organized and networked nationwide.

      Since March, the government has been cracking down relentlessly: the Ministry of Education, dubbed the “Ministry of Revenge,” is simply refusing to pay teachers and university professors most of their salaries. Peaceful protests are being hijacked by agents provocateurs to damage the reputation of the demonstrators, and the government is stirring up fears of violent clashes. University professors are now required to teach 35 hours per week, which makes research almost impossible. They often no longer know how they will make a living. Many are facing dismissal, and the accreditation system is in danger of collapsing. Since May 8, the government has been planning a new law on higher education that is expected to drastically restrict freedom of research and teaching.

      Our Serbian colleagues appeal to the international community not to ignore the repressive measures in Serbia, but to stand in solidarity with the students and professors and their demands for transparency, accountability, and academic independence.

      ↗ https://balkantalks.org/chronicle-of-serbias-student-and-academic-uprising-2024-2025/