Why should we return to the now 100-year-old genocide of the Ottoman Armenian population? The study and acknowledgement of this genocide, and what it symbolises, is critical to the practice of an emancipatory politics today.
In 2013, openDemocracy published Pradeep Baisakh’s interview with Arvind Kejriwal, charting his transition from Gandhian social activist to politician. One year on, Baisakh writes an open letter to the leader of the Aam Admi party, urging him to once again take up Gandhian principles.
The particular way in which we commemorate the First World War has an umbilical link to the present.
If the twentieth century was, in the language of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the “age of extremes”, then the twenty-first century may well be the age of democracy. And yet a profound sense of disconnect has emerged.
Neoliberal logics are increasingly being applied to the ways in which we talk about ‘creativity’. The new dogma of ‘creativity’, far from ushering in an age of horizontalised power structures, masks powerful processes of elite capture and capitalist development.
The social centre of Can Vies in Barcelona, occupied by squatters since 1997, achieved global recognition when plans for demolition were met by forceful protest. The attention on rioting has masked the hard work of reconstruction by the people of Sants, in a site of urban struggle against austerit
This statutory nature of the Sharia begins to emerge, paradoxically, in the colonial British courts. It is this legacy that led to a reimagining of the role of Sharia, that now plagues the modern Muslim nation state.
Whilst there are many apparent similarities between the rhetoric of ‘Localism’ in England and that of ‘Community Empowerment’ in Scotland, a closer look reveals striking contrasts in the ways that these policies have been developed and what they mean in practice.
