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Civil society organizations that participated in the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held this week in Busan, South Korea, regretted that the deal reached at the conference was not binding for all the donor countries, and the lack of a rights based approach, especially on gender, and of (…)

The first post in this two-post series featured highlights from a discussion between bloggers in Cuba, the United States (US), and Spain focusing on the use of new media in Cuba, where Internet access and technological tools are extremely scarce.
For this post, I interviewed City University of (…)

In the face of the world’s urgent economic and environmental problems, political leadership is failing. But from the ground up, new tools of understanding are emerging to fill the gap and point a way forward.
The world’s financial crisis is deepening, and protests are spreading across the (…)

Why is the armed might of the state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies) being applied to domestic policing of local communities and peaceful protests?
"How could this happen in America?", "Is this still my country?"
In the past few days, those and similarly poignant Twitter (…)

The spirit of 1968 flows through Arab Spring and Occupy movement - as its counter-current attempts to suppress uprising.
The turmoil in Arab countries that is called the Arab Spring is conventionally said to have been sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in a small village of (…)

One of the world’s richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.
The world’s second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate (…)

They’ve been ‘occupying’ Wall Street for almost a month, but people looking for information on what it’s all about are forced to go offshore for television journalism that will explain it to them. Mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest in the United States has been (…)

Introduction
With the dominant neoliberal model of the economy causing one crisis after another, the search for alternative development pathways has become an urgent necessity. By linking the macro and the micro economic levels, WIDE wants to facilitate and support processes which challenge (…)

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and (…)

LRAN Briefing Paper Series no. 2
On World Food Day, it is estimated that almost a billion people around the world are now suffering from hunger and malnutrition - a dramatic rise in number since the soaring food prices over the last three years. Of these, about half are estimated to live in (…)

The Libyan war is often portrayed through a “tribal” lens that fails to explain how the country’s tribes coexist with a sense of nationhood.
The Libyan war has not been a tribal conflict. Yet throughout the seven months of fighting, much external commentary predicted and expected that the war (…)

Arriving in Egypt the day before the September 9 protests that brought tens of thousands into the street, marches to the Ministry of Interior and the Supreme Court, and then the storming of the Israeli embassy, certainly threw me in at the deep end! But arriving in Cairo at almost any point (…)

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have defied many of its early critics, with tens of thousands of people still supporting those camped out at New York’s financial centre and the heart of US capitalism a month after the protests started.
It has since spread to over 70 cities across the (…)

The idea of taxing international financial transactions is gaining ground. The European Union is promoting it internationally and studying the possibility of imposing it throughout the bloc, or at least in the euro area.
But it is still not clear what the scope of the tax would be or what the (…)

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be (…)

The Open Society Media Program has commissioned background papers on a range of topics that are important for understanding the effects of new technology on media and journalism. The papers accompany a series of reports, "Mapping Digital Media," on the impact of digitization on democracy in 60 (…)

By the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers, Pambazuka Press, 160 pages, 16.95£
Many outside South Africa imagine that after Mandela was freed and the ANC won free elections all was well. But the last two decades have led to increased poverty and inequality. Although a few black South Africans have (…)

In 2008 hundreds of South African women donned their miniskirts and protested at the taxi rank where a young girl was brutally accosted by taxi drivers and hawkers for wearing a short denim skirt. The men who accosted her allegedly stuck their fingers into her vagina and called her a "slut." (…)

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay call for new strategy to stave off environmental catastrophe.
Environmental groups are trying to build a critical mass around issues like global warming to inspire public action and encourage legislators to get their heads out of the sand. The Sierra (…)

The Horn of Africa drought exposes the continuing gap between our ability to predict disaster and to take effective humanitarian action.
Earlier this week, the UN declared the drought in southern Somalia had become so bad that it could be officially declared a famine — the first time the word (…)