Farmers protesting India’s new agricultural laws in 2020. Credit: Randeep Maddoke) It has been nearly a year since India’s BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government first promulgated a set of farm laws designed to encourage private sector investment in agriculture. In...
The flood of tributes for journalist Dawn Foster following her death at the age of 34 leave no doubt as to how valued she was by the British left. She was a committed socialist and a rare working class voice in the journalistic mainstream. As her friend, it feels...
Pedro Castillo being sworn in at the Peruvian Congress (Credit: Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) At around midday on 28 July, a man dressed in a suit and wide-brimmed white hat, traditional of his Andean region of Cajamarca, entered Peru’s congress to a shower of applause....
Imperial Federation map showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886 by Walter Crane Twenty years ago, when Tony Blair tried to restore something of the old militarism of empire, invading Afghanistan and Iraq with little understanding of what had once happened...
Image: Ben Kucinski, Flickr After the largest protests on the island since 1959, the Cuban government took what, for some, has been long-awaited steps to further liberalise the economy. The Cuban Communist Party has now announced that private enterprises with up to...
The author climbing outdoors, credit: Hannah Zia Just over ten years ago, my mother stepped foot in a climbing centre for the first time. The overwhelming friendliness of the counter staff towards my mother, dressed in her head to toe hijab with her two kids, hooked...
Photo credit: Peter Burka Understanding the cycles of social movements helps us to contextualise what has happened since the wave of protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer. Social movements ebb and flow like tides:...
Members of the Afghan National Police being trained by the US army in Ghazni province, May 2007 (Credit: Justin Holley) Located in Afghanistan’s remote south-eastern Paktika province along the border with Pakistan and the western edge of the Sulaiman mountains, the...
Promotional image for the 1936 People’s Olympiad Hitler’s 1936 Olympics were, in many ways, the first truly modern Games and set the tone for subsequent iterations: infrastructure as national pride, the inception of the torch relay and the first to be televised (by...
Can ridiculous music be sublime? As music and film critic Lesley Chow argues here, traditional music criticism tends to be taxonomic, ‘placing and summarising work rather than being overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of sounds’. In You’re History, Chow...
Photo credit: Arne Müseler / arne-mueseler.com / CC-BY-SA-3.0 When the Tokyo 2020 Olympic bid team was wooing voting members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), it tendered lofty promises designed to entice. On the first page of the bid’s introduction, the...
Image credit: lolostock So far this year, I have not exchanged sexual services for money. I tend to call myself a retired sex worker. The jargon du jour refers to me as having ‘exited’ the industry. Exit schemes, strategies and services are a current preoccupation for...