Vladimir Putin’s swearing-in as President last week was accompanied by protest rallies that were brutally broken up by police, and their organisers imprisoned. But as the Occupy Abay sit-in and organised ‘strolls’ through the centre of Moscow have shown, protesters are gaining confidence and adopt
The link between ‘karamah’ and ‘al hurriyah”, the call for dignified existence and the rejection of oppression has given birth to a further crucial concept – that of the social responsibility of public authority. This cannot be achieved by maintaining the economic polices of the old regimes.
Every ultra-rich person has the income of 100 poor people. But this is not Dickensian England or Depression-era America. It is the Italy of today. Halting the rise of the super-rich will be a crucial issue for the politics of the future.
Community organisatons, children's clubs, even doctors and health services, frequently lament that it is hard to get the people who most need help through their doors. The answer, a small charity in North-east England has found, is to get out on to the streets
Europe's crisis is being felt at multiple levels, from the future of the eurozone and divisions between member-states to the rise of populist forces. But is the crisis likely to lead to the European Union's disintegration? The precedent of the Soviet collapse offers some lessons, says Ivan Krastev
Can we imagine how real-time online direct democracy might improve the following: freedom of speech; the democratic process; the accountability of the government to the electorate; fairness and the rule of law?
In Tunisia the official Facebook page of the moderately Islamist Nahda party urged Franco-Tunisians to vote massively for Hollande to "dégage" Sarkozy.
If we want to develop effective co-operation within and among the member states of the EU, history should be kept at a distance. Living in the past is not feasible, and this is equally true for Euro-scepticism, the application of human rights as well as the fight against racism and extremism.
Nuclear waste is a problem - dangerous and long-lived, it needs geologically "secure" sites to be laid, one hopes, to rest. But in the UK, the government finds it more convenient to shoe-horn it in to geologically delicate areas under a carefully managed sham of local democracy. The national publi
45 years on, the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre is being used to address abuses of migrants’ rights in Europe. It is time to inject solidarity and accountability into the European migration regime, Jennifer Allsopp reports from Stockholm on Tribun
We need to build a civil society voice to rival the corporate lobbies, which are protecting their lucrative stake in the price speculation commodities market. We have the choice to make this the decade where world hunger ends.
