Credit: By Guillaume Paumier (Own work) CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The year 2017 will go down as a particularly tough one for ordinary citizens, particularly in the global South. A sharp rise in government restrictions on fundamental freedoms across regions as well as in levels of inequality played a big part in that negative review.
According to a recent Oxfam report, 1% of the world’s richest now own 82% of the world’s wealth, with a dollar billionaire having been created every two days in 2017. People are actively fighting back against a system that seems to favour the super-rich at the expense of everyone else. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, an online tool that tracks threats to civil society in every country, there were at least 42 reports of activism leading to positive developments for civic space in 2017.
