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Featuring: Derrick O’Keefe, author and social justice activist based in Vancouver.
Michael Ignatieff’s career as a politician and public intellectual raises a series of questions: What exactly is the state of liberalism today? Can imperial wars ever be justified? Were torture and the other murky practices of the 'war on terror' necessary as a lesser evil? What are the responsibilities of intellectuals today?
From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement in North America, the interconnected systems of neo-liberalism and Empire that intellectuals like Ignatieff have defended for decades are finally coming under sustained challenge.
About the book Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil?
-Tracing the course of his career over the last thirty years, from his involvement with the battles between Thatcher and the coal miners in the 1980s to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel's 2009 invasion of Gaza, O'Keefe proposes that Ignatieff and his political tradition have in fact stood in opposition to the extension of democracy and the pursuit of economic equality. Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? is a timely assessment of the Ignatieff phenomenon, and of what it tells us about the politics of the English-speaking West today.
More information: http://www.versobooks.com/books/494-michael-ignatieff
About the author
-Derrick O'Keefe is the co-chair of Vancouver's StopWar Coalition and the Canadian Peace Alliance, and serves as an editorial advisor with the publication rabble.ca. He is also the co-author of A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.
