Egypt – Peter Geoghegan

Review: Why It’s All Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

By peterPosted on 30th January 2012Posted in Books, Politics, Society and Culture, Sunday Business PostTagged Egypt, Jameson, Occupy, Paul Mason, Why It's All Kicking Off Everywhere1 Comment

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,’ Fredric Jameson, a leading theorist of post-modernism, wrote in 2003. Not anymore it isn’t. If the culmination of Francis Fukuyama’s Whiggish ‘End of History’ was the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 – scuttling liberal democracy’s […]

Mubarak is Gone but Young Women Still Struggle in Egypt

By peterPosted on 29th January 2012Posted in Politics, Sunday Business PostTagged Egypt, Female Youth Unemployment, Tahrir Square

Thanks to a grant from the Simon Cumbers Fund, I spent time in Egypt before Christmas researching female youth unemployment after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. On the eve of the 1st anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests, my piece on the issue of jobless young women appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post. Sara Ahmed, […]

Sean O'Casey in Tahrir Square

By peterPosted on 16th January 2012Posted in Irish Times, PoliticsTagged Egypt, Occupy, Sean O'Casey, Tahrir

In 1936, Robert Merton published a seminal paper entitled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” in the American Sociological Review . Seemingly minor events, the then 26-year-old argued, can have profound, unanticipated implications. The “law of unintended consequences” was born. Mohammed Bouazizi was the same age as Merton when he provided the digital age’s most […]