Global Currents Archives | Contending Modernities

The Iran War and the Afterlife of Liberal Modernity: A Critical Tribute to Jürgen Habermas

Babak Rahimi
May 21, 2026May 21, 2026

Habermas’s liberal idealism may now linger as a kind of story most visible at the edge of disappearance, where loss and transmission drift together under the shadow of perpetual war.

First We Take Manhattan

S. Sayyid
April 10, 2026April 11, 2026

A political victory can show that Islamophobia is not inevitable or invincible. It can spark the recognition that Islamophobia connects the local and the global, the metropolitan and the periphery, the racial and the colonial.

Kharg, the Orphan Pearl: War, Extraction, and Spectral Histories

Babak Rahimi
March 26, 2026March 26, 2026

Kharg still holds histories waiting to be uncovered—spectral traces that have shaped the island through mourning and devotion, where land and sea were not merely resources but sites of sacred belonging.

Burning Human Rights Books, Part II: Genocide, Occupation, and Decolonization

Series: The Failure of Human Rights and International Law

Lena Salaymeh
March 19, 2026

What do human rights mean if a state can drop the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs and still claim that the resulting mass civilian deaths were unintentional?

Burning Human Rights Books, Part I: Modern International Law, War, and Colonialism

Lena Salaymeh
March 17, 2026March 19, 2026

Law does not exist in legal sources, but in the interpretation and application of legal sources.

No Catholic Brand of Christian Zionism, or Tolerance for Antisemitism

Jordan Denari Duffner and Julie Schumacher Cohen
March 12, 2026March 12, 2026

Catholics cannot repair their relationship with Jews at the expense of Palestinians, who have experienced Zionism as subjugation, dispossession, and discrimination.

Letter from Scholars of the Holocaust, Jewish History, and Antisemitism Against the Adoption of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism in New Jersey

Raz Segal
January 11, 2026January 11, 2026

Targeting Jews for the way they express themselves as Jews is very clearly not part of a struggle against antisemitism, but antisemitic itself.

The End of Antisemitism: How the Fight Against Hate Became a Weapon of Repression

Barry Trachtenberg
December 19, 2025December 19, 2025

By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.