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September-October 2011

A special This panel: The legacy of Canada’s 10-year Afghan mission

This Magazine Staff

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history. […] More »

Postcard from Sudan: Rebirth of a nation

Heather StilwellWebsite

In many ways, this tiny classroom was just like any other: rows of young students looking up at their teacher, the day’s lesson displayed on the dusty chalkboard overhead. But this day was not about grammar or arithmetic. It was about the long fight for freedom. In South Sudan, it is rarely about anything else. […] More »
May-June 2011

This45: Judith Parker on U.S. war-resister defence lawyer Alyssa Manning

Judith Parker with Kelli Korducki

Not every punk-rock high school dropout grows up to become a refugee lawyer, but Toronto-based attorney Alyssa Manning isn’t exactly ordinary. Barely into her 30s, Manning has made a professional niche for herself by working with U.S. war-resister files, defending such high-profile clients as Jeremy Hinzman, James Corey Glass, and The Deserter’s Tale co-author Joshua […] More »
May-June 2011

This45: Linda McQuaig on the United Nations Emergency Peace Service

Linda McQuaig with Katie Addleman

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the Canadian government commissioned the departments of Foreign Affairs and National Defence to investigate the feasibility of a United Nations rapid-response service. The research was co-directed by Peter Langille, an academic and defence analyst known as a critic of NATO’s military doctrine, a key figure in the development […] More »

What I think about when I think about Remembrance Day

Graham F. Scott

Today is Remembrance Day. I have to be honest: I’ve had mixed feelings about the occasion for as long as I can remember, even as a kid. Does it, in some ways, glorify and sentimentalize war? I think so. Do we need to do it anyway? I think that too. But I think the contemporary […] More »

Dear George W. Bush: Kanye West is the least of your worries

simon wallace

Dear George Bush, I’ve been following the press coverage of your forthcoming book, Decision Points, with considerable interest. Just the other day you sat down with Matt Lauer of NBC to pre-tape an interview and, I must say, some of the pre-released quotations are real gems. One, however, stands out: recalling Kanye West’s remarks at […] More »
September-October 2010

Postcard from Damascus: Two artists, still drawing in the margins

Siena AnstisWebsite

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water. Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished […] More »

5 important things to know about the Afghan endgame

simon wallace

Irving Howe (the New York socialist) once wrote “Blessed New York Times! What would radical journalism in America do without it?” The newspaper was, to be sure, a tool of the bourgeois but a tool that reported the news with unequalled comprehensiveness. Read it and, ideology aside, you became the possessor of a full range […] More »

U.S., U.K. move to stem "conflict minerals" in Congo, while Canada undermines reform

jesse mintz

As I type this, I am complicit in the funding of rape and war.  You probably are too–sitting on your laptop, listening to your mp3 player, texting on your smartphone–even if you don’t know it. But that could all change with the passing of Barack Obama’s sweeping financial reform legislation by Congress in July. While […] More »

Why Omar Khadr's case is a constitutional crisis for us all

jesse mintz

It’s time for a little refresher course in Canadian civil society: Canada’s formal political dependence on Britain came to an end in 1982 with Pierre Trudeau’s Canada Act.  The Act led to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution–you know, that old document that outlines the vibrant democratic system of government we so proudly employ in […] More »

John Duncan in the Globe and Mail on Afghan surge hype

Graham F. Scott

John Duncan, who wrote about the Canadian military’s Afghan misadventures for the March-April issue of This, contributed an op-ed to Wednesday’s Globe and Mail on the much-touted Afghan surge. Ominously titled “The insurgents will be back,” Duncan’s editorial argues that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan will simply sidestep any such troop movement, wait it out, and […] More »