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Zimbabwe is currently the subject of sanctions designed to pressure Robert Mugabe and his colleagues to cease human rights abuses and remove other barriers to democratization in the country. Yet despite some recent positive developments — such as the appointment of independent commissions on (...)

Even if India and Pakistan appear willing to allow more interaction across the Line of Control (LOC) that separates the parts of Kashmir they administer, any Kashmir-based dialogue will fail if they do not put its inhabitants first.
“Steps Towards Peace: Putting Kashmiris First”, the latest (...)

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic (...)

The Safai Karmchari Andolan, a grass roots movement by conservancy workers is working towards banishing the inhuman practice, with admirable success. This practice of ‘manual scavenging’ is the worst surviving symbol of caste untouchability in India. It drives people into this degrading daily (...)

A lifetime of death and loss is driving thousands of young Kashmiris to drug abuse. Across Kashmir, tens of thousands of young men and women who have failed to cope with the cumulative effects of trauma in their daily lives are escaping to drug abuse and alcoholism. Parvaiz Bukhari reports on a (...)

On his first day in office, President Barack Obama promised that he would close the Bush-era prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” and “no later than one year from the date of this order.” By now, it’s painfully obvious that the rejoicing, like the president’s can-do optimism, was (...)

Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local (...)

Helen Thomas, a veteran reporter, asked the question at a White House press conference on al-Qaeda and terrorism. US administration officials stonewalled. “In these times” asked several contributors with various profiles, including Noam Chomsky and Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak, to provide some (...)

Over the past three decades, in the shadow of hostile nationalisms fuelled by radical Islamic and Hindu politics, military crises, a runaway arms race, nuclear weapons and war, an amazing set of civil society initiatives has been taking root in India and Pakistan. A citizens’ diplomacy movement (...)

Nonviolent rights activits in Gujarat are being branded maoists and jailed, reports Parvaiz Bukhari. Dangs is the smallest and perhaps the most scenic Adivasi district of Gujarat. As you soak in the beauty and breathe the fresh air, Ashish Pawar, a young Adivasi activist acting as a guide, (...)

In Nigeria, patterns of “religious” massacre are many decades old, but it is wrong to see this as simple “sectarianism”. A poor society facing modernisation at the hands of corrupt elites is vulnerable to the use of violence as a means of asserting economic and political power and the mobilisation (...)

There is a lot of news about nuclearism these days. But to cut through the verbiage of treaties and agreements and summits, and move people from fear to action, we need to focus on three concepts. The United States is the biggest problem when it comes to nuclear weapons. We need a new treaty to (...)

The ambitious desire to close Guantánamo hailed the coming of a new era, a feeling implicitly recognised by the Nobel peace prize that President Obama received. Unfortunately, what we witnessed was a false dawn. The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of (...)

The first decade of the 21st century has been dominated by wars that have killed or injured close to half a million people, wars that arose after determined paramilitaries used parcel-knives to exploit the weaknesses of the world’s most advanced state. That incident might in principle have been (...)

The Stockholm Programme, the latest in a series of EU agreements on security policy, was endorsed in December 2009. Based on the "principle of availability", the Programme plans to enable the cross-border collection, processing and sharing of data on a massive scale. Supposedly promoting (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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).

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

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 violence (...)