Robert Malley – författare

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike?In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that U.S. officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers. Charting Algeria's political evolution from the turn of the century to the present, Robert Malley explores the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the current crisis. His analysis helps makes sense of the civil war that is tearing Algeria apart. Using contemporary Algerian politics as a case study of the intellectual movement labeled 'Third Worldism', Malley's thoughtful analysis also elucidates the broader transformations affecting countries of the Third World that once embraced ideologies of state-centered radical change. Malley focuses on the interplay between politics, economics, and ideology to explain the rise, essential components, and precipitous decline of Third Worldism - a movement that attracted scholars and activists in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. He relates the disillusionment with Third Worldism to the growing appeal in the Third World of economic liberalism, versions of political pluralism, and ideological movements that threaten the very existence of the central state.At a time when the public increasingly is associating countries of the less developed world with Islamism, tribalism, and ethnic warfare, "The Call from Algeria" challenges our assumptions and offers a new perspective.