As western audiences increasingly switch off from generic reporting of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Imogen O'Rorke finds the news-unworthy testimonies at Tate Modern a much needed corrective

In this series of interviews with young migrants living in different European cities, Emilio Quadrelli tracks the elusive subject of 'political Islam' as well as the intensive police actions which together shape the boundaries of a 'refugee subjectivity'. Translation from the Italian by Stefano di Cicco

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

As database profiling of non/citizens grows increasingly pervasive and the dubious promise of 'techno-communism 2.0' haunts the blogosphere, real material differences will continue to sort the technologically ‘liberated’ from the dataslaves, declares Leutha Blissett

The notion of the 'failed state' is recurrently invoked to justify military and security interventions. Reviewing two books which take so-called failed states in Africa and South America as their object of enquiry, Angela Mitropoulos questions the founding premises of 'successful' national sovereignty

One thing the Spiked/Living Marxism faction usually does competently is denouncing spurious 'humanitarianism' (currently, it seems, being rebranded as 'human security') in geopolitics.  This text (re-posted from http://www.spiked-online.com) is a useful brief history of the century of Western interference in Somalia that created the 'failed state' pretext for perpetual re-interference.  It touches on the crucial question of 'aid' as economically destructive exten

For a government waging a War on Terror based on the clash between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ values, multiculturalism is losing its appeal, says Hari Kunzru. Shifting its emphasis from tolerance to the need to impose ‘shared values’, New Labour is enforcing nationalism with the carrot of ‘belonging’ and the stick of exclusion

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’