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John Hickman

John Hickman is Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College. He is the author, among other works, of Space is Power: The Seven Rules of Territory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016) and Explaining Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America’s Most Notorious Military Prison (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2013).

Israel/ Palestine
Can the UN be Reformed?  Turkish President Erdogan’s “A Fairer World is Possible.”  – A Review

Can the UN be Reformed? Turkish President Erdogan’s “A Fairer World is Possible.” – A Review

John Hickman

Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) – I avoid reading books written by politicians. They are all too often nothing more than exercises in annoying self-promotion disguised in improbably high-minded language. Yet circumstance tempted me beyond the powers of resistance to buy a copy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2021 book A Fairer […]

Iran
Discussions of Iran's Nuclear Enrichment ignore Israel's Atom Bomb Arsenal: What if Iran's Program is a Deterrent to War?

Discussions of Iran’s Nuclear Enrichment ignore Israel’s Atom Bomb Arsenal: What if Iran’s Program is a Deterrent to War?

John Hickman

Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) – According to the latest news coverage, Iran-U.S. negotiations to revive the 2015 JCPOA are in trouble. The main sticking points involve a guarantee demanded by Tehran that Washington will not abandon the deal at some future date as it did in 2018 under the previous administration and […]

European Union
The Int'l Community at Berlin II wants Oil and a Stop to Emigration from Libya; What Libya needs is Strong Institutions and Peace

The Int’l Community at Berlin II wants Oil and a Stop to Emigration from Libya; What Libya needs is Strong Institutions and Peace

John Hickman

Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) – A lazy international press corps is missing the big story on Libya. English language news coverage of the June 23rd Berlin II International Conference on Libya has been focused almost exclusively on the presence of foreign mercenaries while eliding information crucial to understanding the negotiations and the […]

Iran
What NPR's "All Things Considered" won't Tell you about the Iran Nuclear Issue (Like that Iran is Weak and has no Nukes while Israel is advanced and Does)

What NPR’s “All Things Considered” won’t Tell you about the Iran Nuclear Issue (Like that Iran is Weak and has no Nukes while Israel is advanced and Does)

John Hickman

Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) – What news audiences of National Public Radio (NPR)’s All Things Considered have and have not heard about the Iranian nuclear program since the election of Joe Biden offers a neat boundary delineation of the Hallin spheres of mainstream reporting on the topic. Daniel Hallin’s classic study of […]

Displaced and Refugees
"Lethal Disregard:" UN report on Deaths of Migrants in Mediterranean goes too Light on Libyan, Italian Navies

“Lethal Disregard:” UN report on Deaths of Migrants in Mediterranean goes too Light on Libyan, Italian Navies

John Hickman

Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) – The diplomatic language used in official human rights reports often fails to express the horrors that they reference. So it is with the May 2021 report issued by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet: “Lethal Disregard: Search and Rescue and the Protection of Migrants […]

Banking
Let Lebanon be Lebanon: Paris should Stop Threatening Beirut with EU Sanctions

Let Lebanon be Lebanon: Paris should Stop Threatening Beirut with EU Sanctions

John Hickman

John Hickman “Governing Lebanon is surely more daunting than governing France.”[1] That pearl of wisdom in an essay defending consociational democracy by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Brendan O’Leary has never been more accurate. A delicate balance of domestic interests with institutional vetoes at the best of times, Lebanese politics has been stalemated for months […]

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