Across Latin America, the “pink tide,” which saw a range of left governments come to power over the last two decades, is in retreat. At the same time, new, left-wing electoral and social movements have emerged in many countries in Latin America as well as the United States. It is a critical time to reconsider what limitations and accomplishments left governments and movements across the region have had in recent years, and how they can build on these lessons in the pivotal years ahead. Join Dissent magazine and the New School for two days of discussion with scholars, activists, and journalists from across the Americas about the challenges and opportunities for left politics in the region today.
Attendance is free, but please register, and consider donating to support Dissent and help us put on more events like this in future. You can also RSVP on Facebook.
9 am: Welcome (Julia Ott, New School; Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent; Patrick Iber, University of Madison, Wisconsin)
This panel focuses on the achievements and limitations of left governments in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica. What kinds of political conditions did these social democratic governments face, and how did this determine their fate? How have social movements interacted with them, and how should they do so in the future?
What kinds of things were “populist” governments able to do that others were not? Drawing on the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, panelists discuss the Bolivarian option, and what this has meant for both governments and social movements.
1:15–2:30: Lunch
What sort of media should the left try to build? What challenges have Latin American journalists faced in reporting on left governments across the region? What other obstacles—including finance and security concerns—shape media coverage?
How should Cuba’s experiences with socialism inform the thinking of the left elsewhere? What should a “left” politics look like in Cuba?
What should democratic socialism look like in the 21st century? And what work does the left still need to do to build support for its goals?
What models are available for building a left economy? How do we account for the role of markets? How do finance ambitious programs and redistribute national and international resources more equitably? What political constraints do economic conditions impose on left projects? What opportunities?
1:15–2:30: Lunch
How do we build a post-extractive left? How will climate change alter the needs of populations in Latin America? How do the demands and rights of indigenous communities interact with left governments? How can we protect environmental activists?
What should solidarity look like in the 21st century? How can like-minded organizations and people support each other internationally? How should Latin American migration to the US affect the way we do solidarity work?
This conference is presented with the support of the Open Society Foundations. To attend, please register via Eventbrite. You can also RSVP on Facebook. If you have any questions, please email conference@dissentmagazine.org.
Kate Aronoff is a member of the Dissent editorial board and a contributing writer at the Intercept.
Celso Rocha de Barros is a sociologist, analyst for the Central Bank of Brazil, and a political columnist at the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. He holds a degree in political science from Unicamp and a doctorate in sociology from Oxford University.
Humberto Beck is a professor at El Colegio de México, and a co-founder and editor of Horizontal.
Carlos Bravo Regidor is associate professor and coordinator of the journalism program at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City.
Gerardo Caetano is a Uruguayan historian and political scientist. At the University of the Republic, he is a Professor and Academic Coordinator of the Political Observatory of the Institute of Political Science, and he is President of the UNESCO Center of Montevideo. He is the author of over 100 books.
Pamela Calla is Clinical Associate Professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University and director of the Observatory on Racism of the Universidad de la Cordillera in La Paz, Bolivia.
Vera Candiani is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, where here work focuses on the intersection of social, economic and environmental history with the history of technology, particularly in Colonial Latin America. She is the author of Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City.
Harold Cárdenas Lema is a Research Assistant at Columbia University, and the editor and co-founder of La Joven Cuba, a leftist alternative media outlet on Cuban politics.
Michelle Chase is an Assistant Professor at Pace University. She is an historian of modern Latin America, specializing in twentieth-century Cuba. She is the author of Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962.
Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. In 2018-19, he is a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.
Carlos Dada is the founder of the Salvadoran awarded news website El Faro. He spent most of the past year reporting from Honduras and Nicaragua. He is a NYPL Cullman Fellow and is currently working on a book about the assassination of archbishop Óscar Romero.
Alexandra Delano is Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at the New School. Her research focuses on diaspora policies, the transnational relationships between states and migrants, immigrant integration, and the politics of memory in relation to undocumented migration. She is the author of From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders.
Kate Doyle is a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the former president of TransAfrica Forum. He is a syndicated writer and author of Solidarity Divided, and “They’re Bankrupting Us”: And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He lives in Maryland.
Frederico Freitas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. His research focuses on the intersection of the spatial and social implications of environmental policies, particularly in Brazil. He is the co-editor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
George García Quesada is a Professor of philosophy and the director of the Journal of Philosophy at the University of Costa Rica. He has a PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London, and his work centers on social theory, social history, political aesthetics, philosophy of history and of historiography. In his most recent book, he interprets the making of the Costa Rican “middle class” between 1890 and 1950 from a Marxist perspective.
Luis Godoy Rueda is a Master of Public Administration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, specialized in the intersection of technology and development. He has worked for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribean, Data-Pop Alliance, OPI and the Center for Mexican Studies at Columbia University. He is a member of Democracia Deliberada, a left-wing collective in Mexico, and part of the local chapter of MORENA in New York.
Miguel Gómez is the postgraduate coordinator and a faculty researcher of legal studies and international relations at the Universidad Americana in Managua, Nicaragua.
Lori Hanson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where her research focuses on the political economy of global health, activism and social movements, and extractivism, health and community resistance in Nicaragua.
Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. He is the author, most recently, of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. He is currently a scholar in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.
Patrick Iber is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2015) and a member of the Dissent editorial board.
Alejandra Matus is a journalist, Master of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School, and 2010 Harvard Nieman Fellow. She is the author, among other books, of The Black Book of Chilean Justice, whose censorship led her to live more than two years as a political asylee in the United States, and Doña Lucía, an unauthorized biography of the widow of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Her work has received awards in Chile and abroad. Currently, she writes for The Clinic magazine and it is an academic at the Journalism School of the Universidad Diego Portales.
Nara Milanich is a professor of Latin American history at Barnard College. Her scholarly interests include childhood, gender, reproduction, and law. Professor Milanich is a founding member of REHIAL, Red de Estudios de Historia de las Infancias en América Latina. She is the author of Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
Diosnara Ortega is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile and an academic at the Sociology School of the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez, Chile.
Pablo Ospina Peralta is a Professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, where he specializes in Ecuadorian politics.
Julia Ott is Associate Professor in the History of Capitalism and the co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School, as well as a member of the Dissent editorial board.
Gemita Oyarzo is a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. She holds a PhD in American Studies with a specialization in Social and Political Studies from the University of Santiago de Chile. Her current research seeks to investigate the transformations of political militancy in post-dictatorship Chile (1990-2016).
Andrés Pertierra is a historian specializing in Cuba and US-Cuban relations, and co-host of the AskHistorians Podcast. His writing has been published in Jacobin, The Nation, and elsewhere.
María Pilar García-Guadilla is Professor of Sociology and Political Sciences at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. She is co-author of Venezuela´s Polarized Politics:The Paradox of Direct Democracy Under Chávez (First Forum Press, 2017). She studies social movements and how the Bolivarian Project and state policy in Venezuela are shaping grassroots democracy, and vice versa (1999-2018).
Yasmín S. Portales Machado is a Cuban science fiction scholar, gay rights activist, and PhD candidate at Northwestern University.
Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of Political Science at Providence College. She is currently working on a book Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador under contract with Duke University Press.
Timothy Shenk is co-editor of Dissent and a National Fellow at New America.
Pablo Stefanoni is a journalist and historian. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Nueva Sociedad and the author of Los inconformistas del Centenario. Intelectuales, socialismo y nación en una Bolivia en crisis (1925-1939).
Maria Svart is the National Director of Democratic Socialists of America.
Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor in Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the core faculty member for the Latin America in a Globalizing World Initiative, and the former executive director of NACLA. She co-edited Real World Latin America: A Contemporary Economics and Social Policy Reader.
Ailynn Torres Santana obtained her PhD at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Ecuador. She studies political participation, local governance, and political culture in Cuba.
Alejandro Velasco is an Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is an historian of modern Latin America whose research and teaching interests are in the areas of social movements, urban culture and democratization. He is the author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela.
Jeffery Webber is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, and the author, most recently, of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. He writes regularly for Jacobin and Viewpoint.
Location:
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street, Room I-202, New York, NY 10011
Simultaenous Spanish–English interpretation will be provided.
Breakfast will be provided on a first-come, first-serve basis. Participants are encouraged to secure their own lunch.
A livestream is available through Dissent‘s Facebook page.
Join us Saturday night at Union Pool in Brooklyn for an after party with live music by La Mecánica Popular. Advance tickets via Eventbrite (sliding scale).
Across Latin America, the “pink tide,” which saw a range of left governments come to power over the last two decades, is in retreat. At the same time, new, left-wing electoral and social movements have emerged in many countries in Latin America as well as the United States. It is a critical time to reconsider what limitations and accomplishments left governments and movements across the region have had in recent years, and how they can build on these lessons in the pivotal years ahead. Join Dissent magazine and the New School for two days of discussion with scholars, activists, and journalists from across the Americas about the challenges and opportunities for left politics in the region today.
Attendance is free, but please register, and consider donating to support Dissent and help us put on more events like this in future. You can also RSVP on Facebook.
9 am: Welcome (Julia Ott, New School; Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent; Patrick Iber, University of Madison, Wisconsin)
This panel focuses on the achievements and limitations of left governments in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica. What kinds of political conditions did these social democratic governments face, and how did this determine their fate? How have social movements interacted with them, and how should they do so in the future?
What kinds of things were “populist” governments able to do that others were not? Drawing on the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, panelists discuss the Bolivarian option, and what this has meant for both governments and social movements.
1:15–2:30: Lunch
What sort of media should the left try to build? What challenges have Latin American journalists faced in reporting on left governments across the region? What other obstacles—including finance and security concerns—shape media coverage?
How should Cuba’s experiences with socialism inform the thinking of the left elsewhere? What should a “left” politics look like in Cuba?
What should democratic socialism look like in the 21st century? And what work does the left still need to do to build support for its goals?
What models are available for building a left economy? How do we account for the role of markets? How do finance ambitious programs and redistribute national and international resources more equitably? What political constraints do economic conditions impose on left projects? What opportunities?
1:15–2:30: Lunch
How do we build a post-extractive left? How will climate change alter the needs of populations in Latin America? How do the demands and rights of indigenous communities interact with left governments? How can we protect environmental activists?
What should solidarity look like in the 21st century? How can like-minded organizations and people support each other internationally? How should Latin American migration to the US affect the way we do solidarity work?
Location:
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street, Room I-202, New York, NY 10011
Simultaenous Spanish–English interpretation will be provided.
Breakfast will be provided on a first-come, first-serve basis. Participants are encouraged to secure their own lunch.
A livestream is available through Dissent’s Facebook page.
Join us Saturday night at Union Pool in Brooklyn for an after party with live music by La Mecánica Popular. Advance tickets via Eventbrite (sliding scale).
This conference is presented with the support of the Open Society Foundations. To attend, please register via Eventbrite. You can also RSVP on Facebook. If you have any questions, please email conference@dissentmagazine.org.
Kate Aronoff is a member of the Dissent editorial board and a contributing writer at the Intercept.
Celso Rocha de Barros is a sociologist, analyst for the Central Bank of Brazil, and a political columnist at the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. He holds a degree in political science from Unicamp and a doctorate in sociology from Oxford University.
Humberto Beck is a professor at El Colegio de México, and a co-founder and editor of Horizontal.
Carlos Bravo Regidor is associate professor and coordinator of the journalism program at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City.
Gerardo Caetano is a Uruguayan historian and political scientist. At the University of the Republic, he is a Professor and Academic Coordinator of the Political Observatory of the Institute of Political Science, and he is President of the UNESCO Center of Montevideo. He is the author of over 100 books.
Pamela Calla is Clinical Associate Professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University and director of the Observatory on Racism of the Universidad de la Cordillera in La Paz, Bolivia.
Vera Candiani is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, where here work focuses on the intersection of social, economic and environmental history with the history of technology, particularly in Colonial Latin America. She is the author of Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City.
Harold Cárdenas Lema is a Research Assistant at Columbia University, and the editor and co-founder of La Joven Cuba, a leftist alternative media outlet on Cuban politics.
Michelle Chase is an Assistant Professor at Pace University. She is an historian of modern Latin America, specializing in twentieth-century Cuba. She is the author of Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962.
Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. In 2018-19, he is a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.
Carlos Dada is the founder of the Salvadoran awarded news website El Faro. He spent most of the past year reporting from Honduras and Nicaragua. He is a NYPL Cullman Fellow and is currently working on a book about the assassination of archbishop Óscar Romero.
Alexandra Delano is Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at the New School. Her research focuses on diaspora policies, the transnational relationships between states and migrants, immigrant integration, and the politics of memory in relation to undocumented migration. She is the author of From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders.
Kate Doyle is a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the former president of TransAfrica Forum. He is a syndicated writer and author of Solidarity Divided, and “They’re Bankrupting Us”: And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He lives in Maryland.
Frederico Freitas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. His research focuses on the intersection of the spatial and social implications of environmental policies, particularly in Brazil. He is the co-editor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
George García Quesada is a Professor of philosophy and the director of the Journal of Philosophy at the University of Costa Rica. He has a PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London, and his work centers on social theory, social history, political aesthetics, philosophy of history and of historiography. In his most recent book, he interprets the making of the Costa Rican “middle class” between 1890 and 1950 from a Marxist perspective.
Luis Godoy Rueda is a Master of Public Administration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, specialized in the intersection of technology and development. He has worked for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribean, Data-Pop Alliance, OPI and the Center for Mexican Studies at Columbia University. He is a member of Democracia Deliberada, a left-wing collective in Mexico, and part of the local chapter of MORENA in New York.
Miguel Gómez is the postgraduate coordinator and a faculty researcher of legal studies and international relations at the Universidad Americana in Managua, Nicaragua.
Lori Hanson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where her research focuses on the political economy of global health, activism and social movements, and extractivism, health and community resistance in Nicaragua.
Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. He is the author, most recently, of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. He is currently a scholar in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.
Patrick Iber is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2015) and a member of the Dissent editorial board.
Alejandra Matus is a journalist, Master of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School, and 2010 Harvard Nieman Fellow. She is the author, among other books, of The Black Book of Chilean Justice, whose censorship led her to live more than two years as a political asylee in the United States, and Doña Lucía, an unauthorized biography of the widow of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Her work has received awards in Chile and abroad. Currently, she writes for The Clinic magazine and it is an academic at the Journalism School of the Universidad Diego Portales.
Nara Milanich is a professor of Latin American history at Barnard College. Her scholarly interests include childhood, gender, reproduction, and law. Professor Milanich is a founding member of REHIAL, Red de Estudios de Historia de las Infancias en América Latina. She is the author of Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
Diosnara Ortega is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile and an academic at the Sociology School of the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez, Chile.
Pablo Ospina Peralta is a Professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, where he specializes in Ecuadorian politics.
Julia Ott is Associate Professor in the History of Capitalism and the co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School, as well as a member of the Dissent editorial board.
Gemita Oyarzo is a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. She holds a PhD in American Studies with a specialization in Social and Political Studies from the University of Santiago de Chile. Her current research seeks to investigate the transformations of political militancy in post-dictatorship Chile (1990-2016).
Andrés Pertierra is a historian specializing in Cuba and US-Cuban relations, and co-host of the AskHistorians Podcast. His writing has been published in Jacobin, The Nation, and elsewhere.
María Pilar García-Guadilla is Professor of Sociology and Political Sciences at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. She is co-author of Venezuela´s Polarized Politics:The Paradox of Direct Democracy Under Chávez (First Forum Press, 2017). She studies social movements and how the Bolivarian Project and state policy in Venezuela are shaping grassroots democracy, and vice versa (1999-2018).
Yasmín S. Portales Machado is a Cuban science fiction scholar, gay rights activist, and PhD candidate at Northwestern University.
Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of Political Science at Providence College. She is currently working on a book Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador under contract with Duke University Press.
Timothy Shenk is co-editor of Dissent and a National Fellow at New America.
Pablo Stefanoni is a journalist and historian. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Nueva Sociedad and the author of Los inconformistas del Centenario. Intelectuales, socialismo y nación en una Bolivia en crisis (1925-1939).
Maria Svart is the National Director of Democratic Socialists of America.
Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor in Program in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the core faculty member for the Latin America in a Globalizing World Initiative, and the former executive director of NACLA. She co-edited Real World Latin America: A Contemporary Economics and Social Policy Reader.
Ailynn Torres Santana is a PhD candidate at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Ecuador. She studies political participation, local governance, and political culture in Cuba.
Alejandro Velasco is an Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is an historian of modern Latin America whose research and teaching interests are in the areas of social movements, urban culture and democratization. He is the author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela.
Jeffery Webber is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, and the author, most recently, of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. He writes regularly for Jacobin and Viewpoint.
Far from being white enclaves, today’s suburbs are rapidly diversifying—and reshaping the U.S. political map in the process. Above, a 2011 rally to mobilize low-income voters in Suffolk County (Long Island), New York. Courtesy of Long Island Wins.
Uruguay’s federation of mutual-aid cooperatives, FUCVAM, is home to some 90,000 people in housing new (left) and old (right). Photo by Jerónimo Díaz.
Chinese flags wave in front of Hantängri Mosque in the Nanmen neighborhood of Ürümchi (Timothy Grose)
A Project Beauty poster that was posted throughout the Uyghur neighborhoods of Ürümchi at the beginning of the People’s War on Terror. The posters were often accompanied by notices that rewards of up to 100,000 yuan would be given to those who reported unauthorized religious practice to the police. (Photo by Timothy Grose, translation by Darren Byler)
(Infographic by Darren Byler and Timothy Grose)
A map of “convenience police stations” in the center of the Uyghur district in Ürümchi (Darren Byler, with Google Earth)
Red lanterns hang from street lights on Tuanjie Lu (Timothy Grose)
Changes in the Heijiashan neighborhood between 2002 and 2016
Recent economic development in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Darren Byler)
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the black homeownership rate dropped to its lowest point since at least the 1980s, and the wealth gap between black and white Americans spiked. Above, Washington, D.C. resident DeAngelo McDonald and his children outside their home, which faced foreclosure in 2010. Photo by Tracy A. Woodward/Washington Post via Getty Images.
La France Insoumise supporter at the March for the Sixth Republic, March 2017 (Geoffrey Froment / Flickr)
In its ruling in Shelby County, which overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts court revived the equal dignity of states argument that arose out of the long-disgraced Dred Scott decision. Image of Dred Scott courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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Works Progress Administration poster by Harry Herzog, 1936, via Library of Congress
Dorothy Dinnerstein. Photo © Freda Leinwand. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Austin Frerick, who launched a bid for Iowa’s third congressional district on an antimonopoly platform, dropped out when party leaders made it clear that they preferred his better-funded opponents. Photo courtesy of Austin Frerick.
Early voting locations in the Indianapolis metro area in 2016, via IndyStar.
An Eritrean refugee in Khartoum. Photo by John Power.
Common migration routes from East Africa to Europe. Route information adapted from the International Organization for Migration, August 2015, by Colin Kinniburgh. Countries party to the Khartoum process are shaded in orange (note: not all shown on this map).
Khartoum as seen from the river Nile. Photo by John Power.
At the 1936 International Conference of Business Cycle Institutes, sponsored by the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Vienna. Ludwig von Mises is seated in the center with mustache and cigarette. Gottfried Haberler also pictured, at right. (Source)
The Democrats are in the throes of a remaking.
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Keith Vaughan, “Drawing of a seated male nude,” 1949. Courtesy the estate of Keith Vaughan / Creative Commons.
Sketch for a 1976 poster by the New York Wages for Housework Committee (MayDay Rooms / Creative Commons)
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat from Nebraska, ran for president on a fusion ticket with the Populist Party. This cartoonist from a Republican magazine thought the “Popocratic” ticket was too ideologically mismatched to win. Bryan did lose, but his campaign, the first of three he waged for the White House, transformed the Democrats into an anti-corporate, pro-labor party. Cartoon from Judge (1896) via Library of Congress
Political strategist Jessica Byrd. Courtesy of Three Points Strategies.
Stacey Abrams, Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia. Photo courtesy of David Kidd/Governing.
A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)
A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)
A drawing made for the author by a five-year-old girl in detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Courtesy of Nara Milanich)
Luxury condominium towers under construction in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2013 (Michael Tapp / Flickr)
Mayor Bill de Blasio inaugurates a new bus line in the Bronx, September 2017 (New York City Department of Transportation / Flickr)
Hydrocarbons from the Williams Central compressor, photographed with a FLIR thermal imaging camera and a normal digital camera, Brooklyn Township, Pennsylvania, 2014. © Nina Berman/Marcellus Shale Documentary Project 2014.
Composite of drilling rig image from Rome, Pennsylvania and hundreds of images taken by a Hop Bottom, Pennsylvania resident of the volume of truck traffic passing in front of a neighbor’s home over four days of the operation of a nearby shale gas well pad. © Nina Berman/Marcellus Shale Documentary Project 2015.
The nightmare situations preppers imagine are already happening—to people whose wealth and status don’t protect them. Above, Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico, October 2017 (Agustín Montañez / National Guard)
From the music video for “Unforgettable,” by French Montana, featuring Swae Lee (FrenchMontanaVEVO / Youtube)
Wizkid performing at Royal Albert Hall, London, September 2017 (Michael Tubi / Alamy Live News)
The cover of L’antinorm, published by the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR), February 1973. The subtitle reads “Workers of the world, stroke yourselves!”
Jair Bolsonaro, at a debate about violence against women in Brazil’s chamber of deputies, September 2016. Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil.
Jair Bolsonaro, at a debate about violence against women in Brazil’s chamber of deputies, September 2016. Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil.
The front page of the Canard, February 28, 2018. Courtesy of Le Canard enchaîné.
Selling drugs in the shadow of an abandoned factory, North Philadelphia. Photo by George Karandinos.
Bundle of $10 bags of heroin. Photo by Fernando Montero Castrillo.
A state employee reads the newspaper at the reception of the Defense Committee of the Revolution (CDR). March 2016, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.
A street vendor selling tropical fruits in front of a Benetton shop in Old Havana. May 2017, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.
On a dilapidated Havana street, an elderly man searches through the garbage. February 2018, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.
Students rally in support of the lecturers’ strike, February 23 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)
Part of a much larger painted banner in Bristol, February 28 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)
At the University of Bristol, February 28 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)
MORENA supporters at a rally in Itzapalapa, Mexico City, April 2015 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)
Audience members waiting for the program to begin at a MORENA rally, March 2016 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)
MORENA supporter leafletting against energy reforms, 2013 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)
AMLO mural in Mexico City, 2007 (Randal Sheppard / Flickr)
Andrés Manuel López Obrador on the campaign trail during his previous presidential run, May 2012 (Arturo Alfaro Galán)
Courtesy of Robert Greene
Entrance to Alcatraz in 2008 (Babak Fakhamzadeh / Flickr)
Letter from the Indians of All Tribes to the National Council on Indian Opportunity, January 1970 (National Parks Service)
Sign on Alcatraz during occupation, 1969–60 (National Parks Service)
Proclamation of the reclaiming of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes, November 1969 (National Parks Service)
Members of the People’s Guard on motorcycles, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.
Armed group of the Menshevik People’s Guard, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.
Eleven-year-old Liza Greenberg, daughter of David and Suzanne Nossel. Photo by Todd Gitlin.
Protest against neoliberalism in Colombia, 2013
At a protest against the alleged Pizzagate conspiracy, Washington, D.C., March 25, 2017 (Blink O’fanaye / Flickr)
[W]hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. . . right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. Actually almost opposite to each other. —Dilar Dirik, “Rojava vs. the World,” February 2015
The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights.
Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal.
Turkey: For much of its modern history, Turkey has pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards its minority peoples; this policy is particularly stringent in the case of the Kurds—until recently referred to as the “mountain Turks”—who make up 20 percent of the total population. The policy has included forced population transfers; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals, and names; and extreme repression of any attempt at resistance. Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999.
Syria: Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of the population and live mostly in the northeastern part of Syria. In 1962, after Syria was declared an Arab republic, a large number of Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and declared aliens, which made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or any public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs. The PYD was founded in 2003 and immediately banned; its members were jailed and murdered, and a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was met with severe military violence by the regime. When the uprising against Bashar al Assad began as part of the Arab Spring, Kurds participated, but after 2012, when they captured Kobani from the Syrian army, they withdrew most of their energy from the war against Assad in order to set up a liberated area. For this reason, some other parts of the Syrian resistance consider them Assad’s allies. The Kurds in turn cite examples of discrimination against them within the opposition.
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