On 7 May, Chileans went to the polls to choose a Constitutional Council that will produce a new constitution to replace the one bequeathed by the Pinochet dictatorship – and handed control to a far-right party that never wanted a constitution-making process in the first place.
Mexico’s development banks have violated their own socio-environmental standards while granting loans for the construction of the Mayan Train (TM), the flagship project of the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
At this year’s
G7 Hiroshima Summit in Japan, world leaders will have a chance to “uphold the international order based on the rule of law and extend outreach to the Global South.” Education, as a binding force that unites us all in our global efforts to protect human rights and ensure sustainable development, should be front and centre on the G7 Agenda.
Renuka Kumari is a 45-year-old Christian woman from the Dalit community in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh. She faces numerous challenges every day and hopes for a day when her struggles will end and she can lead a comfortable life.
In October 2021,
Alia Azizi left her office in Herat province after receiving a phone call from a Taliban official and never returned home. She remains missing.
When the Taliban captured power back in 1996, one of its first political acts was to hang the ousted Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah in Ariana Square Kabul.
Fast forward to 15 August 2021, when the Taliban, in its second coming, assumed power ousting the US-supported government of Ashraf Ghani, a former official of the World Bank, armed with a doctorate in anthropology from one of the most prestigious Ivy League educational institutions: Columbia University.
The arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan on alleged corruption charges has led to the deterioration of law and order with attacks on army offices for the first time since the country came into being in 1947.
Events in Sudan have been a constant topic of conversation in Cairo's coffee houses since
the violence erupted there four weeks ago. The images of almost 30 Egyptian soldiers briefly detained in Sudan by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militias and the death of an Egyptian diplomat in Khartoum caused a stir in Egypt.
The world’s news media -- both under authoritarian regimes and democratic governments-- continue to come under relentless attacks and political harassment.
In the deep rural village of Jekezi in South Africa's Eastern Cape, most young and able-bodied people have fled the area, leaving behind people with disabilities, the elderly, and children.
In the heart of The Gambia, an intrepid young woman called Fatou Juka Darbor is blazing a trail for women fuelled by her fiery passion for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
Parliamentarians from more than 30 countries agreed to send a strong message to the G7 Hiroshima Summit in Japan later this year, focusing on human security and support of vulnerable communities, including women, girls, youth, aging people, migrants, and indigenous people, among others.
A civilian student named Saber was caught in the crossfire in Khartoum. He had two choices: either flee and lose everything; or die. But within a moment his option to choose was violently denied: he died.
The Ukraine crisis, which in addition to bringing devastation to the people of that country has had severe impacts on a global scale—even giving rise to the specter of nuclear weapons use—has entered its second year. Against this backdrop and amid urgent calls for its resolution, the G7 Summit of leading industrial nations will be held in Hiroshima, Japan, from May 19 to 21.
The World changes, though prejudices and misconceptions remain. In 1996, political scientist Samuel Huntington published
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he predicted that people’s cultural and religious identities would become the primary source of conflict in a
Post–Cold War World. Huntington’s allegations have been contradicted by a number of critics, among them American Palestinian professor Edward Said, who lamented their extreme cultural determinism, which omitted the dynamic interdependency and interaction of cultures. Said’s own
Orientalism depicted a generalised “Western view” of Arab cultures as “static and undeveloped”, while European culture was considered to be “developed, rational, flexible, and superior.” Literature and movies have depicted Arabs as exotic men riding camels and horses through the desert, and their women as dangerously seductive objects of male desire. Eventually, the exotic men turned in to being terrorists, and/or depraved oil-rich magnates, while Muslim women were presented as veiled, enigmatic, and oppressed.
This week, the United Nations will host two days (May 8-9) of preliminary talks to plan a larger conference on tuberculosis (TB) in September. These preliminary talks will be held in New York City, the epicenter of the last significant surge of TB cases in the United States (U.S.) thirty years ago.
Pakistan, one of two polio-endemic countries in the world, has started staging theatrical dramas to promote immunisation in an attempt to encourage parents who refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated.
In 2022, Charles III became king not just of the United Kingdom, but of 14 other states, and Head of the Commonwealth. He now heads a monarchy that is starting to face questions about its role in British imperial atrocities, such as slavery, and, as he has said, concerning which it is time to "acknowledge the wrongs that have shaped our past."
Where will you be in 2040? For Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the answer is: in the Kuksaroy Presidential Palace. That’s the chief consequence of the referendum held in the Central Asian country on 30 April.
With dissent tightly controlled in conditions of closed civic space, there was no prospect of genuine debate, a campaign against, or a no vote.
The world is in permanent crisis mode. In addition to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, the war in Ukraine and other violent conflicts, a worldwide cost of living crisis and an intensified debt crisis in more and more countries of the global South are affecting large parts of humanity.
On the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Saber Nasr, a young Egyptian man of 20, developed a fever.