During the weeks and months leading up to the London European Social Forum (ESF) there was much controversy as to whether a minority had managed to undermine the democratic nature of the forum itself. The history surrounding the ESF, the World Social Forum (WSF) and the World Economics Forum (WEF) needs to be understood to see clearly how serious a de-democratisation of the ESF could be.
The WEF has been running for over thirty years in different forms, but always acting as a think…
Trident Ploughshares report that one of their pledgers - a Swedish national - was detained and questioned for three hours about next year's G8 actions
The woman, who had a warrant for non-payment of a fine from a previous Faslane protest, flew into Scotland in early November. In order to to ensure that she didn't get picked up unexpectedly on future visits, she waited to the back of the queue at immigration at Prestwick airport and then told the officers that there was a warrant…
This useful summary and overview is part of a series of beginner's guides published by Oneworld. I'd like to see the others also - on Genetics, PalestineIsrael and particularly Postmodernism, a subject on which I shall always be a beginner.
Tormey presents a well-organised schematic look at the modern anti-capitalist movement in recent years. He believes that the last five years since WTO Seattle in 1999 calls for a redefinition of anti-capitalist movements - essentially the hopeful…
As the blurb to this sometimes excellent book goes, “by 2025 nearly two billion people will live in regions experiencing absolute water scarcity”.
Water, as some prescient reports from the UN and NGOs are starting to point out, will be the resource over which our future wars will break out. As the key to life, we've seen glimpses of a world in which water is seriously scarce, in African famines and Asian and American dust bowls; if the fight for oil is vicious, what might happen if…
The fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) opened in Cancun, Mexico on 10 September 2003. The talks collapsed five days later amidst clashes between countries from the developing South and the economic superpowers of the Northern hemisphere.
The main topic on the agenda was trade in agriculture, an issue which is vital to the survival of farmers and indigenous cultures throughout the south. When no agreement was reached on this topic the EU attempted to move…
“...The rebels search each other out. They walk toward one another. They find each other and together break other fences.” Part of the scene-setting statement from the latest volume to claim space on the shelf marked “new world order, resistance to”. Have we been here before? And yet... sometimes a book, a film, an action, grouping or artefact feels like a step shift, feels like it embodies a significant new dimension of thought or relevance.
With this 500 page “brick” of a book,…
Cheap, portable and readily available: every year more than half a million people are killed through the misuse of small arms such as handguns, assault rifles and grenades. Millions more are crippled. With poverty providing an ideal breeding ground for small arms proliferation, African countries are currently the worst hit by a global epidemic of armed violence which threatens the safety and well-being of people in developed and developing countries alike.
The human costs of small…
The South African “arms deal” has been described as “the betrayal of the struggle against apartheid” and as “the litmus test of South Africa's commitment to democracy and good governance”. The scandal has become the millstone around President Thabo Mbeki's presidency.
An opinion survey conducted last year by South Africa's leading pollster found that 62% of ANC voters want the arms deal cancelled, 19% want it cut and only 12% support it. On no other issue, including Aids, was the…
In December 2002, the Ethiopian government requested 1.4 million tons of food aid to avoid the possibility of another mass starvation throughout the country.
In January, Jesuit Relief Services (JRS) reported that Ethiopia is still waiting for that food, and over 11 million people are at risk of starvation. “Supplies have to arrive and not just be pledged,” says Stephen Power, country director for JRS.
In some regions, people are already on waiting lists to receive food.…
According to a 2002 United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) report, “By far the worst-affected region, sub-Saharan Africa is now home to 29.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Approximately 3.5 million new infections occurred there in 2002, while the epidemic claimed the lives of an estimated 2.4 million Africans in the past year. Ten million young people (aged 15-24) and almost 3 million children under 15 are living with HIV”.
In late October the seventh ministerial meeting about the Free Trade Area of the Americas took place in Quito, Ecuador. People from all over Latin America descended on the capital, with particularly strong represantation from women's groups, one of which commented “ access to social security, education, and economic resources is very limited, and it is not recognised that poverty affects women more than anyone else [...] we think that integrating into the international market would create a…
Ever find yourself losing your edge? Descending into woolly liberalism? Perhaps even thinking (No!) that those corporations might just, possibly, be reformable?
If there is any mental brake to that slippery slope, this book of cartoons is it. Polyp applies his cruelly sharp wit to globalisation, militarism, corporate power and hypocritical greenwash, exposing the intellectual and moral inconsistencies of so many official statements and positions that we have become so used to that…
Few writers can take two seemingly different subjects like river dams and the war on terrorism and turn them into a coherent, informed, impassioned indictment of the nation state, elitist greed and militarised globalisation. Arundhati Roy can, and does.
India is a country where 70% of the population has no electricity and where more than the total population of Canada might be displaced and made homeless from their villages and farms by dam building. I say might because as Roy states…
Some people still reduce Zapatismo to Marcos. Pure racism. An educated white man was surely manipulating those poor, illiterate Mayas. They cannot say what he is saying and even less conceive such a movement... Unabated racism.
But what about the crowds? A year ago, subcomandante Marcos and 25 Zapatista commanders travelled to Mexico City. For the first time, millions were able to see and hear them. Time and again the crowds did not allow the other Zapatistas to speak. Marcos! Marcos…
The fragile peace of the impoverished African country of Mozambique rests uneasily on caches of thousands of weapons left over from 16 years of civil war.
Albino Forquilha, coordinator of the Transforming Arms into Ploughshares project of the Christian Council of Churches, recently explained to Canadian peace and development activists how this project helps his country.
After the devastation of the civil war, Mozambique has a high level of unemployment and of violent crime. Ex…
