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Facebook is not a game. It is a means of communication that transcends borders, but does not supplant national or international legality concerning civil liberties and rights of association and expression. Choosing such means to spread one’s message, is and will be useful and effective, if the (...)

Namibia, Namaqualand and the Namib Desert are all named after the first people who lived in that area, the Nama. Where are the Nama today? The reality is that they have largely become forgotten bit players in a complex world.
The indigenous people of various nations, descended from (...)

Creating a new kind of economy is crucial if we want to tackle climate change and avoid the mounting social problems associated with the rise of economic inequality. The Great Transition provides the first comprehensive blueprint for building an economy based on stability, sustainability and (...)

In the days following the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians have begun to outline the characteristics of their ideal country. The “New Egypt” will be clean, it will lack discrimination, it will be corruption-free. The initiative is the beginning of a push for specific demands that (...)

If there was ever a better time to read ‘Egypt: The Moment of Change’, a book edited by Rabab El Mahdi and Philip Marfleet which was launched in front of a packed audience at SOAS in 2009, then it is now. Made up of chapters by eight Egyptian and British academics, it catalogues the explosive (...)

Swami Aseemanand’s confessions on the involvement of Hindutva outfits in terror attacks leave investigating agencies red-faced. Whatever the final verdict on the reported confessions made recently by Swami Aseemanand, leader of Abhinav Bharat, a Hindutva extremist organisation, the fact is (...)

Many Indian laws do not reflect modern and enlightened concepts of justice and require major revision. The judiciary needs to reconsider laws, which conflict with fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. The legislatures should fashion enlightened statutes for the 21st century. India (...)

If the revolutions of 2011 succeed, they will force the creation of a very different regional and world system.
I remember the images well, even though I was too young to understand their political significance. But they were visceral, those photos in the New York Times from Tehran in the (...)

The idea of democratisation planted in Egyptian minds is beyond containment, yet Mubarak continues to resist.
The realist terminology of the ’domino effect’ does not capture the agency that Arabs are today assuming to unseat Arab hegemons, from Cairo to Sana’a.
This agency is unshackling (...)

A chilling story of justice denied…
Binayak Sen graduated from one of India’s elite institutions, the Christian Medical College, Vellore, and chose to practice medicine amongst the tribals of Chattisgarh. Years of dedicated work led him to believe that sustainable health care cannot be (...)

The jholawala is the latest lobbyist in town. He or she has top policymakers on speed-dial, is now feted by the media and sought out by companies eager to promote ‘India Inclusive’. It’s a remarkable, even heady, transformation. For long derided as irrelevant trouble-making activists largely (...)

The problem: Washington’s foreign-policy planners seem to be out of ideas, literally brain-dead, just as the world is visibly in flux. In their reactions, even in their rhetoric, there is remarkably little new under the sun, though from Tunisia to India, China to Brazil, our world is changing (...)

Few South Africans realise the power of Co-operatives in the global economy. Canada, Norway, Italy, India, China and Brazil each have a significant amount of their GDP generated by Co-operative organisations. One in four citizens in the USA and Germany are members of Co-ops. Even though our (...)

Old political-economy problems always nibble at the feet of new aspirant runners. These problems are systemic and get carried from one era to another despite the changing face of political players.
In the last 15 years, South Africa rode the economic wave on the basis of a commodity boom, (...)

On 24 December 2010, Dr Binayak Sen — a man who has now become a cause célèbre across the country — was sentenced to life imprisonment by a sessions court in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, for “conspiracy to commit sedition”. Sen had worked for 30 years with the tribal poor in the state both as a (...)

Two recent judicial interventions on the exercise of freedom of expression have given rise to some uneasiness. Judge Navita Kumari Bagha, Metropolitan Magistrate of the Patiala Courts, New Delhi, delivered on November 27 a 12-page order that sought to reverse years of free-speech jurisprudence (...)

Last fortnight we discussed the clandestine endgame afoot at Cancun to change the framework of the climate change negotiations to suit big and powerful polluters.
Since then Cancun has concluded and a deal, in the form of a spate of agreements, has been gavelled into existence by the chair. (...)

This report speaks to the heart of what local government is about: supporting a better life for people and helping to build resilient communities, now and over the longer term. This report presents the findings of a project commissioned Local Government Improvement and Development and the (...)

Against the background of governments’ consolidation strategies, European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) researcher Vera Glassner provides an overview of recent developments in terms of pay, employment and reforms of the pay system in the public sector. Cuts and freezes of public sector wages (...)

There are currently about 200 million people living outside their countries of birth. Worldwide the rate of migration grew at six percent a year during the 1990s, a rate faster than population growth as a whole. Better opportunities for employment are among the main reasons people choose to (...)