If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.

The grand schemes of liberation, however indistinct and amorphous, can quickly be compromised, consumed by petty disputes and local hatreds.

Violence is used to suppress a people in a most blatantly crude way. We can historicize and contextualize it. We can analyze the Algerian situation, its history and so forth, and question whether that is anything like the situation we face today. But, this is only one way to understand why violence becomes so important.

Many of the democratization projects are a real threat to real democracy.

Counter-violence against the colonial regime is liberatory because it is an act, and by acting, the absolute power of colonialism, internalized by the colonized, is shaken.

The colonial regime makes sure, often with the help of surrogates, that radical leaders and those honest principled intellectuals and activists who refuse to compromise their principles of independence are eliminated, so that the postcolonial regime (and especially its resources) remains accessible. The result has been a disaster for the (post)colonial world.

Fifty years is the long time to think about a thinker's relevance or to think of the relevance of their work to a contemporary period.