Read this commentary by David Sirota, taken from the Huffington Post, posted June 30, 2010: Laying Bare the Myth of 'The Left'

Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana have written a short retrospective on the U.S.-India nuclear deal. ...<< MORE >>

Elisabeth T. Eliassen writes about how cultural inattentiveness may affect political action.<< MORE >>

Harry Brill writes about what it will take to Reindustrialize America, now that the federal government has been complicit with the corporate world in deindustrializing our nation.<< MORE >>

Andrew Lichterman writes about "Deterrence, Torture and Power", the uses of language in talking about torture, national defense, and foreign policy in light of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration's commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world.<< MORE >>

An introductory essay for the "New Beginnings" eZine, a project of the Center for Global Peace and Democracy. Precis: Late actions of the Bush Administration and heightened NATO presence harken back to roots of Cold War.<< MORE >>

Welcome to NEW BEGINNINGS, the web journal of the Center for Global Peace and Democracy. Below we offer you the inaugural entry to what we hope will become a sort of “University Without Walls”, able to reach across the increasingly permeable boundaries of states and nations, offering ideas, intellectually engaged discussion, educational material, original research and publications.  We are a publication based in America, but we aim to have readers and a network of contributors from the entire globe.

Our central idea: Globalization from below.  This is the one meaning of “globalization” which is ignored or derided by those whose idea of globalization is one of selfish gain for a tiny elite minority rather than peace, democracy, and social and economic justice for the majority.  A peaceful world is only possible through global understanding based on democratic and just reorganization of the entire world.  World Citizenship may sound utopian but given the depth and extent of the crises that face the world—from the environmental crisis to mass poverty and hunger; the threat of nuclear war and the extermination of entire nations and perhaps of all of human life; the deepening world-wide economic crisis—the list goes on and on—nothing short of a broad and deep change in the relationship between individuals and nations will do—utopianism, if you will, born of a democratic movement from below. An essential building block in the new world citizenship is the renewal of the labor movement—nationally, internationally and globally. An independent, democratic, labor movement in China is especially important in this vision: such a labor movement can play a critical role in the creation of democracy in China and, indeed, a critical role in creating a new democratic movement for the rest of the world: “globalization from below”.

The alternative to the perspective outlined in this opening article, as shown in the new and intensifying nuclear arms race and the completely unaddressed threat of global warming is a species of what the sociologist, C. Wright Mills, correctly labeled “crackpot realism”—a philistine establishment politics—once again with Russia and the United States as principle actors and agitators—that can only bring death and destruction to the entire planet. 

In the essay that follows we examine the roots of the crisis that confronts the world and discuss the intellectual and political framework in which solutions may be found to that crisis.  In the spirit of our essay’s title, what we write here should be read as an exploration rather than as final answers to questions to which we hope others will also address themselves.