Tag Archives | Tricontinental Newsletter

Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. ‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’. Béjar speaks […]

In October 2021, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) held a seminar on the pandemic and education systems.

The political and cultural divisions that widened during the Trump years continue to inflict a heavy toll on U.S. society, including over the government’s ability to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

For over a decade, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in and out of Egypt’s prisons, never free of the harassment of the military state apparatus.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

Each year in September, the heads of governments come to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City to inaugurate a new session of the General Assembly.

On 13 July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a landmark resolution on the prevalence of racism and for the creation of an independent mechanism made up of three experts to investigate the root cause of deeply embedded racism and intolerance.