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Roy clarifies the political and human stakes of "regime change" and reaffirms the imporance of activism and protest.

“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 and on Democracy Now! and Alternative Radio, writer Arundhati Roy brilliantly examines the limits to democracy in the world today. Bringing the same care to her pose 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.

From Public Power in the Age of Empire:

When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we understand “public power”? When freedom means occupation, when democracy means neoliberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words like “empowerment” and “peacekeeping” make your blood run cold—why, then, “public power” could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I’ll just have to define “public power” as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way. In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from “the people.” This distinction has to do with the fact that India’s freedom struggle, though magnificent, was by no means revolutionary. The Indian elite stepped easily and elegantly into the shoes of the British imperialists. A deeply impoverished, essentially feudal society became a modern, independent nation state. Even today, fifty-seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.

Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public. However, as you make your way up India’s complex social ladder, the distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state. It sees like the state, thinks like the state, speaks like the state.

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn’t the Communists, it’s al-Qaeda. If it isn’t Cuba, it’s Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world—with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs—is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government’s Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink. To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the government from the people. It is this confusion that fuels anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: “Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms,” et cetera. This enhances the sense of isolation among people in the United States and makes the embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a cuddle in the wolf’s bed.

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. Roy was trained as an architect. She lives in New Delhi, India.