Protesters gather in solidarity in London, October 2022. Photo credit: Alisdare Hickson On 16 September 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini died as a result of severe head injuries sustained when she was arrested by the so called ‘morality police’, gashte ershad, for...
Red Pepper
Playing dirty
Politicians at the Lusail stadium, Qatar (CC BY 2.0) The men’s Fifa World Cup finals in Qatar are well underway. This is the first time the biggest stage in world football has played out in the Middle East and it ushers in a new age in the geopolitics of both sport...
Mourning radicalism
A young bell hooks. Photo credit: The Ethics Centre The sudden death of bell hooks on 15 December 2021 created ripples that will be felt for a long time. As a young black working-class woman, bell hooks’s words were initiation into a political trajectory that...
Review: Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan
Karachi, Pakistan from above. Credit (CC BY-SA 3.0) In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs the microhistories of Afghans in Pakistan with a focus on two cities: Karachi and Peshawar. The book empathetically provides an inside-out understanding of how shifting...
How the Knights of Labor fought nativism
Delegates to the 1886 convention of the Knights of Labor Nativist Moments The year is 1880. The United States is just out of a long slump caused by a financial crisis, the Panic of ’73. Much of the rest of the world is still in it. Unemployment is high. Migration is...
A demand for dialogue: The movement to save Virunga National Park
Mount Mikeno & Mount Karisimbi located within Virunga National Park (Credit: Johannes Zielcke) Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya: What are the key dangers currently facing the Virunga National Park and the local communities? Pascal Mirindi: The Democratic Republic of...
Review: Doreen Massey: Selected Political Writings
Selected Political Writing cover art In 2013, Doreen Massey, Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin published the ‘Kilburn Manifesto’ in their journal, Soundings. It was a rallying call for a socially democratic alternative to neoliberalism. Hall died in the following year;...
Review: Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Michal Burawoy’s Public Sociology cover art It is unusual to read a book written by someone who was your close neighbour when growing up. Michael Burawoy was our ‘next door but one’ neighbour in a lower middle-class street in south Manchester. Later, doing maths at...
Sutton Community Farm and the politics of community agriculture
Photo provided by Sutton Community Farm The UK farming sector is in the middle of an existential crisis. As a consequence of leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the Conservative government has had to draft a new agricultural support scheme to either match or...
Christmas gift subscriptions – on sale now!
Not sure what to get that special lefty in your life this festive season? Want to support independent media? Look no further! The Red Pepper Christmas gift bundle includes… our latest issue, ‘Deluge and Drought’ an annual subscription for 2023 (four more issues!) the...
Power in unions
Emergency Workplace Organising Committee graphic (Credit: EWOC) At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of US workers were confronted with more dangerous conditions at work. They were called essential but in many cases were treated as expendable....
After Holden, how many more kids will Britain send to war?
For Irish unity march, London 1979. Photo credit: Gillfoto David Holden didn’t intend to kill Aidan McAnespie, but he did fantasise about doing it. While fondling a general-purpose machine gun, aiming it at McAnespie and pulling the trigger, Holden fantasised about...