Writing the day after Lula’s victory, Winnie Overbeek reflects on the three weeks of mobilisation that transformed Brazil’s runoff election. Youth-led street protests, the rapid…
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Written as Brazil entered the decisive second round of its presidential election, this article captures a country divided by fear, hope and conviction. Flávio Bolsonaro had led …
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The US’ policies and actions also weakened and eventually helped extinguish a popular democratic movement in Iran in the 1950s. This US strategy to expand its market and capital…
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Slowing economic growth, persistent poverty, high income and wealth disparities, large employment gaps and underemployment, and worsening environmental and ecological degradatio…
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On paper, removing one hawker is an administrative decision. In life, it affects many people. That is why eviction is often not a solution to a problem. It is a relocation of th…
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A demand for a transparent examination process should lead to a demand for equitable education, and to a larger question about a just society. Politics lies in moving from the r…
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Citizenship remains one of the most powerful legal institutions in the modern world. India's experience demonstrates that citizenship cannot be understood solely through legisla…
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Democracy has to become a habit. The politics of opposition must not merely say different things. It must learn to live differently. A politics of demands is necessary, but if e…
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None of this is an argument against the Forest Rights Act. Quite the opposite. It remains, perhaps, the most democratic forest legislation independent India has enacted. Without…
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The ecological crisis, instead of simply being a crisis of nature, is a crisis of the social relations through which nature, labour and life are organised. The task is not merel…
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Sawaal means question. Not a decorative name. To ask why, to look again at what is presented as settled, is part of democratic life. Elections and Parliament are indispensable t…
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Political dissent has never belonged to Parliament, party offices or newspaper editorials alone. It lives in slogans, songs, street theatre, cartoons, campus jokes, tea-stall ar…
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This city is made as much by its pavements, open grounds, bustees, settlements beside railway lines, temporary markets, tea stalls, rickshaws, handcarts and the livelihoods of o…
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In social movements, we need to distinguish between organisation and organising. An organisation may be a party, union, committee, NGO or federation. It has a name, an office, a…
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The Jantar Mantar movement dealt a powerful blow to the idea of the ruler’s domination as seamless and perpetual. Whether that political shock will contribute to the return of i…
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