Susan Richards is a non-executive director and founder of openDemocracy. She has produced a number of feature films and written a prize-winning book, Epics of Everyday Life, about the lives of ordinary Russians in the transition from communism. Her next book which covers the period 1992-2008, will be published by I.B.Tauris later this year.

Recent articles

The sacking of the French-born foreign minister has opened a new phase in Georgia’s troubled post-rose-revolution history. In Tbilisi, Susan Richards assesses the challenge facing a defiant Salome Zurabishvili.

Military occupation, armed resistance, pervasive insecurity, the hunger for religious certainty, a compliant media and oil. The parallels between Russia’s war in Chechnya and America’s in Iraq are uncomfortably close. Will either ‘imperial’ power heed the warning they present?

A new world is also a new way of seeing. The World Social Forum, warmed by the electoral success of Brazil's new president and infused by the energies of its global citizenry, offered openDemocracy confirmation that shifts of power and perspective go together. For Susan Richards, it all came together at Porto Alegre. 

To the outside world, the bomb blast that hit the Mombasa Paradise Hotel on 28 November was the latest strike in al-Qaida’s “war” on Western targets. The local perspective is different. For the indigenous population of the Kenyan coastal region of Msumarini and the neighbouring villages of the Kilifi district, the bomb was just the latest calamity in the region’s downward spiral into poverty and banditry. Before the bombing, a recent Kenyan poll voted the Kilifi district as the third most likely in the country to erupt in violence.

The disastrous climax to the Chechen assault on a Moscow theatre inevitably recalls the tragedy of Manhattan. The phlegmatic reaction of ordinary Russians reveals not just a different emotional register, but a nationalist trigger-instinct that carries great dangers. Will this at least unite America and Russia? The managing editor of openDemocracy calls her Moscow friends, listens, argues – and warns.