I've been reading bits of last weekends papers on my tube journey this week, and have been inspired, outraged and generally provoked in some sort of manner so I thought I'd share some of the bits I've been reading.

This is a shameless plug for Tweets from Tahrir the book I've just edited.

"The poor" are all too frequently lumped together as an homogeneous voiceless group, whom the likes of NGOs, academics, celebrities and government officials speak on behalf of with little or no consultation or involvement of the people they seek to represent. A new book "No land! No house! No vote! Voices from Symphony Way" represents a radical shift from this in being an anthology written by poor pavement dwellers in South Africa. 

The edited version of this piece appears in the Oct-Dec 2010 edition of Race & Class.

One of the more controversial publishing events of the past year has been the appearance of Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid. Subtitled ‘Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa’, the book has rekindled the debate around economic development in the poorest countries of the global South. Moyo herself has been heralded as a prophet for the 21st century, being included in Time magazine’s top 100 influential people and even breaking into Oprah Winfrey’s top 20 power list. Yet is she right?

Dead Aid raises a number of critical issues which challenge the comfortable orthodoxy of overseas development assistance. The book follows in the footsteps of Teresa Hayter’s 1971 classic Aid as Imperialism, which exposed the use of aid as a political weapon wielded by donor countries in their own interests. US presidents had made no secret of this, as in Nixon’s much quoted admission: “Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves.”

Yet Hayter took the story a stage further by revealing the immanent ideological bias of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) at a time when those institutions were still promoted as being ‘above’ the politics of the Cold War. Hayter’s employer, the London-based Overseas Development Institute, refused to publish her research.

Moyo recognises the problems of aid dependency. Yet she is unable to situate the issue within the politics of neo-colonialism as understood by African writers such as Yash Tandon in his recent essay Ending Aid Dependence, or the African critics cited in Jonathan Glennie’s The Trouble With Aid. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Moyo’s policy prescriptions fall far short of what is needed to set the peoples of Africa on a development path free from Western domination and control. For this, Africa would need a radical politics and economics very different from that envisaged in Dead Aid.

One of our volunteers asked us the other day to recommend key books for someone wanting to learn more about Palestine. For anyone seeking a first guide, Ben White’s Israeli Apartheid (Pluto Press, 2009) gives a good overview and set of sources. Here’s a dozen of the works I’ve found most useful – from a variety of perspectives – plus a couple that I haven’t read yet but will be doing shortly. What have I left out? Do use the comments facility below to add to the list, and we will then be able to put up a more comprehensive compilation later.

General

Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (Random House, 1992 edition)

Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007)

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine (Pluto Press, forthcoming, 2010)

Edward Said, After the Last Sky (Vintage, 1993 edition), with photographs by Jean Mohr

Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile Books, 2008)

Greg Philo & Mike Berry, Bad News from Israel (Pluto Press, 2004)

Michael Palumbo, Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomsbury, 1992 edition)

Colin Shindler, The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream (IB Tauris, 2002 edition)

Historical

Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984)

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006)

Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)

Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Stanford University Press, 1999 edition)

Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-1929  (Blackwell, 1991 edition)

Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine, 1917-1948 (J Murray, 1999)

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009)

This just came my way today - a little video from Raj Patel appealing to the way most people feel the world should be governed - not by markets and prices, but actual values.