Tous les articles et traductions

The survivors of the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are still scrambling to deal with the damage. Here, however, pundits are still scrambling to explain the dramatic difference in impact. Haiti’s quake on January 12 came in at 7.0 on the Richter scale, leveled the capital city, and (…)

Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide more than 90% of the world’s opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, it’s not surprising that drug-trade news and war news intersect from time to time. More surprising is how seldom poppy growing and the drug trade are (…)

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India.
There is yet another significant shift in global power: from the (…)

As much as those who identify themselves as social progressives would like to believe otherwise, writes Dale McKinley, ‘the reality is that South Africa is a bastion of social conservatism’. One of the most glaring contradictions of South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘transition’, says McKinley, ‘is (…)

In the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali tells about his recent trip to Yemen, after Obama and other US politicians started hinting that this country might become a new frontline yet in the ’war on terror’.
Recounting the country’s history since World War II, and in particular the war and (…)

This week, California will host the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies. The conference follows hearings last week in the US House of Representatives and a report from the UK Committee on Science and Technology, as well as a recent report from the Government (…)

When most people think about the recent upheavals in Iran, they think of marches demanding democracy and challenging the June 12 presidential election. The face of those protests is the “Green Movement” — so called because its supporters wear green —that put millions of people into the streets (…)

UN-HABITAT launched its report State of the World Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide in the run up to the World Urban Forum 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast "mega-regions" which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be (…)

It might be the world’s largest free trade area, writes columnist Walden Bello, but Southeast Asia is still getting a raw trade deal from China. Read

African pastoralism has been dismissed as outdated and inefficient. But awareness of its social and environmental benefits is growing. Read more here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of (…)

As most countries miss deadline to demonstrate openness on petroleum, mining revenues, an international initiative that seeks to promote more openness about how countries profit from their oil, gas, and mining resources should not weaken its modest membership standards because governments are (…)

Whenever gender empowerment is a vibrant topic of discussion internationally, some of the countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America are invariably singled out for their success stories in politics, education, health care or civil liberties even as Africa is mostly left out of political (…)

What does it mean to be poor in 2010? In monetary terms, the number of people living below the official extreme-poverty threshold of $1.25 per day in developing nations has declined. In fact, according to the World Bank’s benchmarks, the extreme poverty rate worldwide has tumbled from about 50 (…)

A UNEP report forecasts rocketing sales of cell phones, gadgets, appliances in China, India, elsewhere. Proper e-waste collection, recycling is the key to recovering valuable materials, protecting health, building new green economy. Read more. Also here

The antiwar movement must go beyond challenging one war at a time. We need a deeper analysis of the structures that underlie militarism and war. Read more

How Allende’s Socialism - not "free-market" dictator Augusto Pinochet - Protected Chileans from Earthquake Fall-out. Read more

What if defeating the enemy was the justification for war, but not its real goal? What if its goal was a certain kind of power-brokerage? On Opendemocracy.net, Mary Kaldor attempts a redefinition of war in line with contemporary developments:
"Clausewitz defined war as an ‘an act of (…)

In their book Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media (New Press), activists and journalists Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark take us on a celebratory journey through the relatively recent (over the past eight years) surge of independent, progressive (…)

Corporate globalization in the ‘real’ world economy lay behind what appeared at first to be a strictly financial crisis. It was hooked on debt, a deadly vice which eventually crushes everything in its grip, to the point where no-one knows the value of anything. So it could be that, in August (…)