As the date of the AV referendum is confirmed, Anthony Barnett looks back to a speech he made, urging the Durham Union to vote for change.
If the Big Society is in the middle of everything, where are state, the people and England? David Martin asks in this Friday Essay whether Britain can claim to have a centre any longer.
Edward Said should have been alive on February 12, 2011
The democratic wave sweeping the Arab world, and shared by Iran, opens a new agenda for the civic activists who helped make it possible, says Ramin Jahanbegloo.
openDemocracy's UK Section, OurKingdom, has published a 350 page Reader on the Winter of Protests that swept into British politics in November last year. They began as a student opposition to the tripling of fees for university education but immediately escalated, because of a much wider protest a
The complete Oxford Debate on Higher Education, all six articles as featured on openDemocracy.net OurKingdom.
The Reader on the Winter Protests in Britain is now up! Freed download or scan its 350 pages
It is the deeper process of social transformation which should spread from one country to the other and not just some hollowed out ‘pro-democracy movement’.
Maybe the US won’t change its course until the Arab world changes. It is amazing how instantly possibilities present themselves when the people, en masse, demand their own interests and rules of the game.
The uprisings sweeping across the Middle East portend a political transformation as significant as those of 1989. The economic stagnation of the region, the failures of corrupt and repressive autocratic regimes, conjoined with a disenchanted youthful population wired together as never before, have
In thinking through the issues we were struck by how often failures happen at the level of the national state nowadays and remedies, responses, the making of solutions… all tend to happen at more local levels, from cities and villages to translocal networks and neighbourhoods.
