Open Media

“The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Reading Arundhati Roy is how the peace movement arms itself. She turns our grief and rage into courage.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

In her major address to the 99th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on August 16, 2004—“Public Power in the Age of Empire,” broadcast nationally on C-Span Book TV, Democracy Now! and Alternative Radio—writer Arundhati Roy brilliantly examines the limits to democracy in the world today. Bringing the same care to her prose that she brought to her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, Roy discusses the need for social movements to contest the occupation of Iraq and the reduction of “democracy” to elections with no meaningful alternatives allowed. She explores the dangers of the “NGO-ization of resistance,” shows how governments that block nonviolent dissent in fact encourage terrorism and examines the role of the corporate media in marginalizing oppositional voices.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. Roy has also published four essay collections: An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, War Talk, Power Politics and The Cost of Living and is the subject of The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Interviews with Arundhati Roy, edited by David Barsamian. Roy received the 2002 Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation. Trained as an architect, Roy lives in New Delhi, India.