Democratiya: The World's Best Left-Wing Journal

Democratiya is "the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes in the English-speaking world," says Paul Berman, author of Power and the Idealists. The Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, says: "Democratiya is the only voice coming out of the left that is attempting to find responsible solutions for the twin scourges of our age: terrorism and dictatorship emanating from the failed and failing political systems of the Arab and Muslim world." Says the poet and translator George Szirtes: "At a time when the very idea of democracy is under attack it is invaluable to have an intelligent and passionate journal to defend and define it. Democratiya is such a journal."

Democratiya's founding editor is Alan Johnson, a professor in the Department of Social and Psychological Sciences at Edge Hill University in Britain and a co-author of the Euston Manifesto.

Democratiya's just-published Spring 2007 edition features, among other things: Ladan Boroumand: Reading Habermas in Tehran; Ali Hili: Homophobia and Human Rights in Iraq; Peter Tatchell: Their Multiculturalism and Ours; Richard Sandbrook: Globalisation and Egalitarianism; Bogusia Puchalska: The Economics of Democratisation; and Tony Blair: The 21st Century Challenge.

Another great journal of left-wing thought and opinion is Dissent, out of New York. In Dissent's just-released on-line edition, you can read Phil Clark on democracy and justice in the Congo, Johann Hari's review of six new books on Islam and the West, Joschka Fischer's address to the Iranian Center for Strategic Research in Tehran, and a lot more.

Irving Howe, the democratic socialist who founded Dissent in 1954, declared: "The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have."

True then, true now.