In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: ‘the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021’, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender.

As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people.

Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines.

The persecution of Julian Assange is a fundamental assault on journalism, press freedom, and freedom of expression.

Vijay Prashad recalls his early encounters with the struggle for national liberation, and the work of Archie Singham, an important intellectual in the latter part of that sequence of struggle.

At the U.S. State Department’s Summit for Democracy (9–10 December), U.S. President Joe Biden announced a range of initiatives to ‘bolster democracy and defend human rights globally’.

Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 and the rise of Soviet power reverberated across the world, from Latin America to Africa to Asia, and Middle East – that part of the world that lived under the ravages of colonialism and under-development.

United States President Joe Biden has suborned 111 countries to attend his Summit for Democracy on December 9–10, ending on Human Rights Day.

During the pandemic, socialist projects–such as those of LDF government in Kerala, the Cuban educational programmes, and the MST literacy campaign–are flourishing, while other governments cut their educational funding. ‘It’s always time to learn’, says the MST literacy programme, but this adage is not in use everywhere.

On 19 November 2021, a week before the first anniversary of the farmers’ revolt, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi surrendered.

The organisers of COP26 designated themes for many of the days during the conference, such as energy, finance, and transport. There was no day set aside for a discussion of agriculture; instead, it was bundled into ‘Nature Day’ on 6 November, during which the main topic was deforestation.

Nothing useful seemed to emerge from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at COP26 this week. The leaders of developed countries made tired speeches about their commitment to reversing the climate catastrophe.

The declaration of a state of emergency by Guillermo Lasso is more likely about quelling opposition than guaranteeing security for Ecuadorians.

It is perhaps fitting that United States President Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on the climate catastrophe with eighty-five cars in tow months after declaring ‘I’m a car guy’ (for details on the climate catastrophe, see our Red Alert no. 11, ‘Only One Earth’).

Since February 2021, the military forces of Ansar Allah have made a push to capture the central town of Marib, which is not only at the epicentre of Yemen’s modest oil refining project but is also one of the few parts of the country still controlled by President Hadi.

Is there a growing resistance to the unipolar imperial order? Is the U.S. an empire in decline? Will the future be a multipolar one? If so, what does that mean ans how should the left in the imperialist core respond?

The search for the new era in Chile has two important avenues: the writing of the new constitution, which is what the 155 members of the Constitutional Convention are doing, and the presidential election to be held on November 21, 2021.

On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ‘recognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights’.

Indian peasants and agricultural workers remain in the midst of a country-wide agitation sparked by the proposal of three farm bills that were then signed into law by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government in September 2020.

There is nothing more obscene than the existence of hunger, the terrible indignity of working hard but being without the means for sustenance.