Sympathy

• Baghdad native and former architect Ghaith Abdul-Ahad traces his start as a journalist to the day Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in central Baghdad, on April 9 2003 – two weeks after US troops invaded the city.
• Framed as a watershed moment, Western media coverage at the time “heavily implied” the statue was taken down by “a large crowd of cheering Iraqis”.
• But expressions of gratitude for the American goal of “restoring democracy” were not unanimous.
• ‘Show the world American democracy.’

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Beyond ‘shock and awe’

• In the two decades since the brutal invasion, its architects have held onto near-total impunity.
• And in 2019, the UK government even sought to grant amnesty to troops who committed war crimes during their deployment.
• Countless memoirs from US and UK veterans published over the past two decades betray persisting delusions of heroism.

Sweeping and dynamic

• A Stranger in Your Own City is sweeping in scope.
• It doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre, but reads at once like a travelogue, geo-biography, memoir and political history.
• But this dynamic collection rarely meanders, nor does it lose the reader in its frequent shifts in focus.
• Instead, its structure foregrounds what the book does best: unsettling the enduring myths about the origins of Iraq’s never-ending crisis.

Sectarian tensions heightened by occupation

• Here, Abdul-Ahad challenges the widely held view that sectarian tensions were an entrenched and longstanding source of conflict in Iraq before 2003.
• We learn instead that sectarianism was, in fact, catalysed by the US occupation – namely in the formation of the post-Saddam government.
• Ultimately, these networks functioned as “personal fiefdoms” that distributed and privatised resources and services following sectarian quotas.
• And, as Abdul-Ahad argues, the rearranging of Iraqi society across sectarian lines – both socially and geographically – fuelled the civil wars to come.

An extension of America’s war

• Abdul-Ahad challenges the binary view of Iraqi societal tensions as split neatly between Sunni and Shia Muslims following the 2006 civil war.
• He examines a “wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography”.
• Despite this ever-changing political climate, Abdul-Ahad contends, “as for the Iraqis, friend and foe alike, this was still an extension of America’s war, even if it was now only Iraqis who were butchering Iraqis”.
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Disaster capitalism in Iraq

• Abdul-Ahad illustrates how the Gulf War and 13 years of crippling sanctions “brought [Iraq] to its knees”.
• Disaster capitalists exploit and even manufacture political and economic crises so they can introduce vastly transformative neoliberal policies amid the chaos.
• In this context, the invasion of Iraq was anything but a failure in the eyes of its architects.
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A productive tension

• As I write this review, I’m reminded the representational responsibilities of a book like this aren’t set in stone.
• Abdul-Ahad very deliberately resists buying into a reductive narrative about what caused the war – and rightly so.
• A productive tension emerges between Abdul-Ahad’s personal understanding of Iraqi society and politics and those of his interviewees, complicating the Western media’s monolithic rendering of Iraqis.
• But this pressure risks depoliticising their experiences – and relegating their historical and political contexts to the narrative margins.

‘Deeply human’, but still political

• But Abdul-Ahad mostly avoids this trap, without sacrificing either personal resonance or political subjectivity.
• While the protests failed to inspire substantial political change, the reverberations of a “larger more common identity” were felt.
• In the wake of the Tishreen Movement, Abdul-Ahad renders an image of ambivalent, angry steadfastness and hope.

• But it also disguises how much love is also work: a labour performed disproportionately by women.
• Review: They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life – Alva Gotby (Verso) Gotby’s book is a fascinating account of how this makes women subordinate carers (or apologist secondary co-workers) within nuclear families.
• She crusades to unmask the “naturalness of feminine care” – and to expose care inequalities and incite political awareness.
• Love can thus be used to extract an ongoing, infinite amount of labour – a work relationship that may stretch over a whole lifetime.

Class and ‘emotional elites’

• Alternative forms of attachment have been discredited, while children’s emotional needs have expanded – so, the care required from mothers has intensified.
• Now, argues Gotby, working-class children destined for the service economy also need to learn and deploy emotional skills.
• Emotional elites include bosses, managers, owners – people with resources and privilege who can displace their emotional difficulties onto others.
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Invisible work, female anger

• Gotby argues that the capitalist economy relies on invisible reproductive work to survive.
• But for women, it reflects weakness, flaws and excessive emotion:
  feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others.
• feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others.
• She champions women’s use of anger to ignite solidarity against male backlash and aggression.

Abolish it all?

• She argues that getting men to do more childcare without challenging “the conflicting needs and contradictions within capitalism” will have limited effect.
• She even claims true equality is impossible within existing gendered categories:
  Sexual difference already contains a construction of hierarchy, making “gender equality” a contradiction in terms.
• This means “following black, indigenous, trans, and intersex feminists” and embracing the openness and pleasure of queer sexual identity.

A convincing call to arms?

• Conceiving of emotional care work as “capital”, which can be learned, allows for change.
• For example, men can learn caring skills in teaching and nursing work – albeit with greater difficulty, later in their lives.
• The ebb and flow of emotional capital allows for emotional winners and losers to emerge, beyond Gotby’s conventional male-oppressor and female-oppressed binary.
• Gotby’s strong critical feminist Marxist position risks inflexibility – and a degree of highly gendered structural determinism.
• Women’s agency to avoid or resist exploitation – and men’s agency to become involved in care work – is underplayed throughout the book.

• Let’s take the example of Marc and his manager Kelly.
• Marc wants to share some updates about a project the team had been working on.
• “I’ll be with you in a minute”, she says while simultaneously checking her phone and ticking off items on a notepad.
• People seem to be all over the place and… Kelly cuts off Marc after the computer makes a notification sound.

Why is micromanaging problematic?

• Kelly and Marc’s interactions illustrate the underlying error of micromanaging.
• Although Kelly had good intentions – quickly solving an issue presented to her – the outcome was likely to be counterproductive.
• This is because it is more effective and motivating for most people to come up with their own solutions rather than being micromanaged.

What can you do about it?

Merely telling your manager that you don’t want to be micromanaged won’t help much. Here are some tips derived from our research that can support you to help shift your supervisor into more of an empowering attitude.

“I would love to get your viewpoint on XY”

“Let me know if you would like to hear my feedback on XY.”
“I would love to get your viewpoint on XY” “Let me know if you would like to hear my feedback on XY.”

• “What motivates me being able to use XY, do XY, work with XY”

  “It would really motivate me if I could use more of my strengths for the current project.

• What ideas do you have about how I could incorporate and leverage these skills?”


Thanks to these tips, you can put an end to micro-management situations. You can also help your manager to change their management methods to boost their team’s independence, and ultimately, motivation and performance.

• Histories of modern Ukrainian literature are often as much about writers’ lives as their works.
• Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina died on 1 July, from injuries she received during a Russian rocket strike on the city of Kramatorsk on 27 June.
• She joins a sombre procession of Ukrainian writers and poets whose lives were blighted or violently cut short by hostile states that oppressed their homeland.

An intellectual and advocate

• She might have stayed in the safety and comfort of a Western country, but she returned to Ukraine.
• A computer science graduate of the Lviv Polytechnic University, she embarked on a career in information technology.
• She might have continued to reap the benefits of being a member of Ukraine’s IT elite.
• And she advocated for Ukraine as a public intellectual.

Ethics, responsibility and temptation

• The November Syndrome dealt with the ethical person’s responsibility to combat suffering and injustice – even when the task seems hopeless and the temptation of retreat into a comfortable private life seems insurmountable.
• However much he yearns to cure himself of this state – “a madness, an illness, a gene mutation” – he cannot.
• He vicariously suffers with the protesters of the Arab Spring in Tunis and on Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Compassion, sympathy and the dangerous past

• The family in question consists of five women and one man, members of three generations, déclassé relics of the old Soviet military elite.
• As one would expect of a novel by the author of The November Syndrome, A Home for Dom is a compassionate book that invites sympathy for all its characters.
• About Jews, or the insurgency, or the KGB.” The real past, however, is a dangerous place where only the lucky survive.
• No less dangerous is the present, where living in Ukraine is to risk losing your life to Russian rocket fire, as you sit down to a meal with your Colombian guests.

A literary legacy

• Victoria Amelina’s literary legacy is not large: other than the two published novels, it comprises some writing for children, an unfinished novel in English, essays, and some lyrical poetry.
• The invasion inspired her to write the powerful polemical essay Cancel Culture vs.
• Execute Culture, which decries the West’s enchantment by Russian literature, whose complicity in Russian imperialism it routinely overlooks.