Vijay Prashad in conversation with Peter Mertens, General Secretary of the Workers Party of Belgium.

Following the interviews with Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute at Fudan University, and Martin Jacques, former senior fellow of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, Guancha.cn (观察者网) invited Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, to continue the discussion on the “civilizational state”.

Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality.

Democracy has a dream-like character. It sweeps into the world, carried forward by an immense desire by humans to overcome the barriers of indignity and social suffering.

On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property.

In 1996, the eight countries on the Arctic rim—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—formed the Arctic Council, a journey that began in 1989 when Finland approached the other countries to hold a discussion about the Arctic environment.

In May 2021, the executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and the UN high representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, wrote an article urging governments to cut excessive military spending in favour of increasing spending on social and economic development.

The United States government held the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in mid-December, prompted in large part by its fears about Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent.

The International Labour Organisation’s Global Wage Report 2022–23 tracks the horrendous collapse of real wages for billions of people around the planet.

South Africa is sitting on a tinderbox, says Irvin Jim, General Secretary of the country’s largest trade union NUMSA. The solution is to foster a spirit of solidarity which will have to come from people’s struggles and movements.

On 9 December, China’s President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to discuss deepening ties between the Gulf countries and China.

Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more […]

On 21 November 2022, Mali’s interim prime minister, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, issued a statement on social media announcing the government’s decision ‘to ban, with immediate effect, all activities carried out by [French] NGOs operating in Mali’.

The dust has settled at the resorts in Sharm el-Shaikh, Egypt, as delegates of countries and corporations leave the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The only advance made in the final agreement was for the creation of a ‘loss and damage fund’ for ‘vulnerable countries’.

In 1845, Karl Marx jotted down some notes for The German Ideology, a book that he wrote with his close friend Friedrich Engels. Engels found these notes in 1888, five years after Marx’s death, and published them under the title Theses on Feuerbach. The eleventh thesis is the most famous: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’.

In the last week of October, João Pedro Stedile, a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil and the global peasants’ organisation La Via Campesina, went to the Vatican to attend the International Meeting of Prayer for Peace, organised by the Community of Sant’Egídio.

At this year’s UN General Assembly, the African Union firmly rejected the coercive efforts of the U.S. and Western countries to use the continent as a pawn in their geopolitical agenda.

Chaos reigns in the United Kingdom, where the prime minister’s residence in London–10 Downing Street–prepares for the entry of Rishi Sunak, one of the richest men in the country.

At the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 2022, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus admitted that his country faces a serious crisis, which he said ‘can only be solved with the effective support of our partners’.

On 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré led a section of the Burkina Faso military to depose Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’état in January.