Pedro Costa's films belie both the cinematic exploitation of suffering and the documentary urge to record truth and fix recognition. Ana Balona de Oliveira sifts through the bones and ruins of Costa's Fontaínha trilogy, set in a disappearing Lisbon slum

Pedro Costa (born in Lisbon in 1959) recently concluded his film trilogy, begun in 1997 with Ossos (Bones) and continued in 2000 with No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room). The closing of this indelibly moving and harsh cinematic journey through Lisbon’s Fontaínhas slum district took place in 2004 with Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth), presented in the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, as well as among other film festivals and several museums worldwide. It was finally released in London with screenings at the Ciné Lumière (April 2008) and the ICA (June 2008), while the whole of Costa’s oeuvre will be presented in a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2009.

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

Regimes of ‘parcellized sovereignty’ and ‘fragmented peace’ led to an international humanitarian crisis that overran national borders and threatened the sovereignty of neighbouring states.

– Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia, London: Verso, 2006

In 'Lobster' 53 Robin Ramsay notes that the US 'military-industrial complex', in its perpetual need to generate enemies, "has just landed a big one: Africa".  While the Bush administration has created the long-lobbied for Unified Command for Africa, it's the NGOs, Hollywood liberals, Clinton functionaries and other sundry 'multilateralists' of the Save Darfur Coalition who are leading the charge.
This article comes from Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad08112007.html
Ongoing coverage of military moralism on Darfur can also be found at Spiked Online, most recently: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3723/

Destination Darfur

A New Cold War Over Oil

By VIJAY PRASHAD

The Counterpunch video interview with Peter Linebaugh is at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/ruspoli03142007.html

Press Release 13 August 2006 At around 8:30 p.m.

on Friday 11 August a candle fell over in the front room of a shack in the Kennedy Road settlement. Four people lived in the large shack. They were all able to get out except for Mr. Zithulele Dhlomo whose room was at the back of the shack. He was an old man, around 70 years old, and the way out was blocked by fire burning hot from the plastic sheeting in the roof. He was burnt to death. Last week there was a major conflagration in the Jadhu Place settlement. Before that it was Quarry Road and before that it was Lacey Road. The fires happen more or less every week. These fires are not acts of god. They are a direct consequence of the eThekwini Municipality’s infamous and unconstitutional 2001 decision to suspend the provision of electricity to shack settlement. The policy states that ‘In past (1990s) electrification was rolled out to all and sundry…electrification of the informal settlements has now been discontinued’.

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 extension of war, although only momentarily.  For a full, devastating account of how this works and WHY – i.e. the essential role of 'aid agencies' in the African new enclosures – see Silvia Federici's 'War, Globalization and Reproduction' subject: Africa | Cold War | History | New Enclosures | Postcolonial | State | War on Terror