Richard Falk
Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. An international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years, since 2002 Falk has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, June 23, 2020 The Politics of Kneeling: A Tribute to Colin Kaepernick I had long held the image of kneeling as primarily ritual behavior in placesof religious worship, a sign of reverence for the sacred and divine. More broadly, getting down on one’s knees is an expression of submission associated withformal meetings between those of unequal social rank—as when... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 25, 2020 Arms Control & Disarmament: A Failed Marriage The ongoing pandemic makes us obsessively aware of the precariousness of life, and if from the U.S., the mendacious incompetence of our political leadership. Yet, it also makes most of us as obsessively complacent when the threats seem remote and abstract. This complacency with respect to... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 26, 2019 Geopolitical Crimes: A Revolutionary Proposal [ Prefatory Note : The essay below is a modified version of the 2018 Annual Lecture of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) of Queen Mary’s University London, given on March 22 of that year. Its original title was “Geopolitical Crimes: A Preliminary Jurisprudential Proposal.” The text of... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 26, 2018 The U.S. Withdraws (Again) From the UN Human Rights Council Explicitly focusing on alleged anti-Israel bias the U.S. withdrew from further participation in the UN Human Rights Council until it reforms itself in accord with the liking of the Trump Administration. The only internationally credible basis for criticizing the HRC is its regrettable tendency to... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 16, 2017 The Flawed and Corrupted Genius of American Republicanism Trump as President makes us think as never before about viability of the American version of constitutional democracy, that is, the ‘republic’ that Ben Franklin promised the people at the time of Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. We often forget that Franklin replied to the question by... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 09, 2017 End of Nuclearism or the End of the World: Utopian Dreams, Dystopian Nightmares We are living amid contradictions whether we like it or not, driving expectations about the future toward opposite extremes. Increasingly plausible are fears that the ‘sixth extinction’ will encompass the human species, or at least, throw human society back to a technology of sticks and stones,... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 22, 2017 Trumped Up Diplomacy in the Middle East In his first overseas trip since moving into the White House, Donald Trump is leaving behind the frustrations, allegations, rumors, and an increasing sense of implosion that seems to be dooming his presidency during its second hundred days. At the same time, a mixture of curiosity and apprehension... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 05, 2017 The Welcome Condemnation of Israeli Settlement Expansion On December 23, 2016 the UN Security Council by a vote of 14-0 adopted Resolution 2334, notably with the United States abstaining, condemning Israeli settlement expansion. It was treated as big news in the West because the Obama presidency had finally in its last weeks in office refused to use its... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 26, 2016 Political Responsibility in the Nuclear Age Dear fellow citizens: By their purported test of a hydrogen bomb early in 2016, North Korea reminded the world that nuclear dangers are not an abstraction, but a continuing menace that the governments and peoples of the world ignore at their peril. Even if the test were not of a hydrogen bomb but... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 05, 2016 You Can’t Report Truthfully on Israel Without Facing Its Wrath Makarim Wibisono has announced his resignation as UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, the position I held for six years until June 2014. The Indonesian diplomat says that he could not fulfill his mandate because Israel has adamantly refused to give him... Read more |