Afghanistan: beyond ethnicity
The international community has addressed Afghanistan through an ethnic prism. As anxiety grows about the future after international forces leave in 2014, a trajectory needs to be established towards a...
View ArticleWhat chance for Ukraine's ‘united opposition’?
As the Ukrainian government steadies itself following the violent surge of protest in Kyiv, the opposition must now present a united face if it wants to achieve anything. Realistic? Annabelle Chapman...
View ArticleMisogyny in the Greek parliament and media: a problem no-one wants to deal with
Chauvinism and corruption work in tandem to stifle public life in Greece. The disparaging and dismissive treatment of female politicians points to a wider malaise. For all the international coverage...
View ArticlePreventing abuse in the UK: a matter of education
A new campaign by the UK Government’s Home Office, This Is Abuse, is a critical step to preventing violence against women and girls, but the Department for Education’s failure to support it is...
View ArticleSmashing egoism: against flashpoint action
For many anarchists, real liberation manifests itself through flashpoint: sudden, unannounced acts of violence. These people see themselves at war with the world, and are often derisive towards broader...
View ArticleStarving the roots of women’s human rights groups
A paradigm shift in funding from human rights toward 'investments' and 'business solutions' is threatening women’s rights organizing and the rights-based approach to development. We need greater...
View ArticleBradford’s Community University: co-producing knowledge for a change
This is a year-long experiment in knowledge exchange and co-production, aimed at exploring what emerges when academics and community participants try to learn from each other. Universities are not...
View ArticleInspired by the public
Experimenting with public participation at the Kröller-Müller Museum, 2010-2014.Whose exhibition? was the question I asked myself when writing my Master’s thesis. Posing this question led me to a...
View ArticleAlternative horizons - understanding Occupy's politics
Occupy is to be assessed, firstly, in terms of the alternative public space that it creates and the mutual recognition between individuals that (in however fragile a fashion) it brings into existence....
View ArticleIn defense of Otpor
When they claim that Otpor was an American operation to unseat Milosevic, they do not bother to explain why all these other organizations were fighting Milosevic, some for years before Otpor joined the...
View ArticleIndia’s questionable choices of icons
It was only in 1990 that one of twentieth century India’s finest minds, principal author of its constitution and campaigner against caste oppression, B.R. Ambedkar, was conferred this honour, 34 years...
View ArticleIs slavery invincible?
The right not to be enslaved is one of the two absolute human rights that cannot be violated on any ground whatsoever. However, 65 years after its denunciation, slavery continues to resist the corpus...
View ArticleThe student protests this week mark the handover to a new generation
After a wave of occupations - and a crack down from police and university administrations - the British student movement is back.Occupy SussexReports of the death of the student movement have been...
View ArticleNelson Mandela: see the movement he personified as well as the man
Nelson Mandela was a great man, but it is the movement he was part of which changed the world.There’s not much that anyone can add to the massive outpouring of grief and admiration for Nelson Mandela....
View ArticleThe problem of patriotism and the left
The Guardian editor being asked if he loves his country highlights how much of a problem the British left has with patriotism. With Scottish and EU questions being posed, this problem is coming to a...
View ArticlePolice, protest and the fragility of capital
The de-facto criminalisation of lawful protest by the British police only serves to highlight the fragility of the market order in its post-08 slump.When the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report was...
View ArticleBritain’s Gypsy moral paranoia
If only the politicians and journalists would try to understand a bit more not only the lives of Roma migrants, but also the poverty conditions and structural inequalities in which so many different...
View ArticleThe Nine
Nine ordinary Ukrainians – ‘The Nine’– are currently sitting in jail in Kyiv. They were part of a peaceful protest near the Presidential Administration building; they paid for this with their health...
View ArticleBliss Was It in that Dawn to be Next Door
In which our author underestimates the good vibrations in British Film Week in Morocco, enjoys a good steel band, and rejoices in the grit of a woman called Rabha. In Part Two he returns to the vexed...
View ArticleThe government is refusing to honour its own commitments on giving powers to...
The British government's failure to keep its word on the issue demonstrates once again that it is determined to keep as much power in its own hands as possible. Parliamentary sovereignty remains a...
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