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 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 |
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Views Tuesday, September 29, 2015 The Yemen Catastrophe: Beset by Contradictions of Will and Intellect Any attempt to provide a coherent account of the political strife afflicting Yemen is bound to fail. The country is crucible of contradictions that defy normal categories of rational analysis. If we look beyond the political fog that envelops the conflict the tragic circumstances of acute suffering... Read more |
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Views Sunday, July 26, 2015 Alliance Blackmail: Israel’s Opposition to the Iran Nuclear Agreement The Vienna Agreement [formally labeled by diplospeak as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)] reached by the P5 + 1 on July 14, 2015 has been aptly hailed as a political breakthrough, not only because it calms regional worries about Iran’s nuclear program, but more so because it has the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 14, 2015 The Geopolitical Right of Exception at the United Nations The notorious, yet influential, German jurist, Carl Schmitt famously insisted that ‘a right of exception’ was the core reality of national sovereignty. By this he meant that internal law could be put aside by ‘the sovereign,’ inhering as the crux of the relationship between state and society. In... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 29, 2015 What Too Many Americans Don't See When They Watch 'American Sniper' Note: 'American Sniper' was released on Christmas Day, 2014. It is a movie version of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, with 255 kills, 160 officially confirmed by the Department of Defense. The movie set in Iraq is directed... Read more |
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Views Saturday, January 17, 2015 Pope Francis, Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo There is some common ground, but not much. The killings in Paris last week were horrifying crimes that expose the vulnerability of democratic societies to lethal vigilante violence, whether facilitated from outside or as a spontaneous expression of homegrown psychopathic alienation. Beyond this... Read more |