Abolkacim Ashabi once wrote, "If the people one day decide to live, fate must answer and the chains must break." Bouazizi’s martyrdom may have triggered a popular revival, many now believe, which will ensure that it is only a matter of time before Ashabi’s prophecy is fulfilled.
The events of a single day in three continents are a lesson in the interlocking crises that will define the decade.
An accumulating network of ignorance and prejudice is being mobilised in the United States against hyperbolised versions of the religion of Islam and its adherents. What are the core elements and ideological underpinnings of this powerful campaign? In a forensic essay first published in TomDispatc
Where are the sources of inspiration that can improve global and national prospects in 2011? openDemocracy writers across the world offer their thoughts. (The first contributions in this collection were published on 3 January 2011)
The Global Forum on Migration and Development is an example of global civil society activism, and was seen by many as the holy grail of a progressive approach to immigration. Is it really the way forward?
A report on the UK Border Agency's work, published today by the Home Affairs Select Committee, exposes poor decision-making and notes MPs' concern around the training of employees in the use of force. Clare Sambrook, co-ordinator of the campaign End Child Detention Now, welcomes the report, but sa
Paul Hirst explored one particular cause for the creeping authoritarianism of the liberal democratic state that he identified before 9/11: the worsening crisis caused by the attempt to govern by one community standard in a diversifying world.
Participants in the Revisiting Associative Democracy seminar organized last October by Andrea Westall and Stuart White in London’s Coin Street Community Centre were invited to read this usefully condensed account of Paul Hirst's normative political theory, published in 2002.
There exist in fact a range of useful definitions, some of which are deployed by governments already, that could serve a far greater number of vulnerable human beings. A more rounded application of human security would have identified the international system as a domain that needs to be rendered
Ranj Alaaldin explores the significance of Muqtada al-Sadr's return to Iraq for the nation's politics, and the US and Iranian stakes in the country.
We live in a highly organised climate of fear. If security organisations depend upon fear and paranoia to sustain their existence, Wikileaks suggests using the same tools to hold them to account.
