The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues.

It is clear that the Venezuelans who came to cast their vote on December 3 in a referendum on the Essequibo region saw this less as a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana and more as a conflict between ExxonMobil and the people of these two Latin American countries

Before he won Argentina’s presidential election on 19 November, Javier Milei circulated a video of himself in front of a series of white boards.

No war in recent years–not even the ‘shock and awe’ campaign used by the United States against Iraq in 2003–has been as ruthless in its use of force.

One of the curiosities of our time is that the far right is quite comfortable with the established institutions of liberal democracy.

More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli armed forces in Gaza since 7 October, nearly half of them children, according to the most recent report by spokesperson for the Gaza Ministry of Health Dr Ashraf Al-Qudra.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we continue to monitor the IMF’s impact on developing economies, including in our new dossier, How the International Monetary Fund Is Squeezing Pakistan (October 2023).

This week, from 14–18 October, the Dilemmas of Humanity conference brought together political leaders, activists, and organic intellectuals from around the world to discuss the central problems facing humanity today and strengthen proposals to address them.

In his 1963 book, ‘Africa Must Unite’, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent.

At its fifteenth summit in August 2023, the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) group adopted the Johannesburg II Declaration, which, amongst other issues, raised the question of reforming the United Nations, particularly its security council. To make the UN Security Council (UNSC) ‘more democratic, representative, effective, and efficient, and to increase the representation of developing countries’, BRICS urged the expansion of the council’s membership to include countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams.

Dilemmas of humanity abound. There is little need to look at statistical data to know that we are in a spiral of crises, from the environmental and climate crisis to the crises of poverty and hunger.

As Chile’s people, led by the Popular Unity government, took control over their economic and political lives and worked hard to improve their social and cultural worlds, they sent a flare into the sky announcing the great possibilities of socialism.

In 1958, the poet and trade union leader Abdoulaye Mamani of Zinder (Niger) won an election in his home region against Hamani Diori, one of the founders of the Nigerien Progressive Party.

BRICS countries represent 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of the world’s economy, and the group is now considering a possible expansion to more than 20 other countries.

Despite the limitations of the BRICS project, it is clear that the increase in South-South trade and the development of Southern institutions (for development financing, for instance) challenges the neo-colonial system even if it does not immediately transcend it.

The recent wave of coups in West Africa must be understood in the context of widespread discontent with the ruling elites and their collaboration with imperialism.

Neither the BRICS project nor China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are military threats; both are essentially South-South commercial developments (along the grain of the agenda of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation).

The coup in Niger follows coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. Each of these was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and U.S. troops and by economic crises inflicted on their countries.

From 28 July to 5 August 1973, eight million people, including 25,600 guests from 140 countries, participated in the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin (German Democratic Republic or DDR).