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Randall Amster
Randall Amster, JD, PhD, is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. His books include Peace Ecology (Routledge, 2015), Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012), Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB, 2008); and the co-edited volume Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2013).
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 09, 2017 Surrealistic Homeland Blues You don’t need a weatherman to tell you that we’re in the midst of volatile conditions as we arrive at the fiftieth day of the Trump presidency—which feels more like fifty years in regular human time. With each passing day, the news cycle takes us "through the looking glass" with a perverse array... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, March 01, 2017 And the Oscar Goes to… We learned a few important things following the President’s speech to Congress. First, we now know that he is able to read from a teleprompter, after all, and stick close to a script for an extended period. Second, someone in the Administration got the message that it might be a good idea to give a... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 24, 2017 Contrived Chaos and States of Confusion There has been a lot of analysis suggesting that the executive-level politics we’re seeing play out right now are about incompetence or irrationality. The psychology of the President himself has been called into question, with bizarre public performances and blatant falsities being propagated,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 16, 2017 Weaving the Threads of Resistance Good morning America, and welcome to those proverbial "interesting times." We have a so-called President seemingly coming unhinged in public, a dystopian aura infusing politics at every level, a resurgence of hatred made safe by irresponsible rhetoric, and a cultural fascination with misdirection... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 07, 2017 So Now What? Good Question Since the election last November, I’ve been searching for the right words to convey my concerns. It’s not primarily about who won and who lost, although clearly the outcome does have serious implications not only in terms of policies and principles, but also for the cultural messages it sends about... Read more |
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Views Saturday, January 07, 2017 Faux Real: What's in Your Worldview? We had to know this was coming. It was always here, but now it can be seen more clearly through the unvarnished lens of protofascism. Retrenchment and revanchism arrive with a new pitchman, selling rollbacks disguised as opportunities and promising to reclaim that which has been lost after decades... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, December 14, 2016 President-Reject: Don’t Say His Name This has to be a bad dream, right? Perhaps it’s the fault of shadowy hackers who juiced voting machines, spewed fake news everywhere, and/or exposed the Democrats for being—well, Democrats. Maybe it was just old-school electoral skullduggery designed to suppress the vote in strategic locales. Or... Read more |
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Views Saturday, December 10, 2016 Beyond the Post-Truth Society There’s been a lot of virtual ink spent recently on the various implications of presidential politics in the hypermedia age. It’s not a secret that the system is dysfunctional, and that having more outlets doesn’t mean greater veracity in the public discourse. Yet things have escalated beyond all... Read more |
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Views Friday, November 25, 2016 Black Friday and White Noise Here we go again, right on the heels of gorging ourselves in preparation for the frenetic commercialism of the holiday season. The relentless pursuit of consumer “goods” (which are almost universally bad for people and the planet) obscures the deeper possibilities of giving and sharing that exist... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 10, 2016 Trumping Disbelief The results of the election provide ample reason to try and avoid the reality of President Trump, and wanting to push this debilitating campaign cycle into the dustbin would be an understandable reaction. It could make us feel better than having to confront the inevitability of the titanic changes... Read more |