IV524 - September 2018

Warsan Shire, a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London, in her debut book, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) observed, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Three years back, the photographs of Aylan Kurdi created shock-waves around the world. The macabre images of a three year old Syrian boy lying face down on a Turkish beach drew global attention towards the severe problems of refugees and migration.

In Tunisia, major mobilizations led by feminist organizations have taken place in recent weeks to demand full equality in the law, particularly with regard to the Tunisian Personal Status Code (CSP). The CSP consists of a series of legal provisions governing marital relations between men and women and inheritance issues. The Swiss journal SolidaritéS spoke to Ahlem Belhadj, feminist activist and member of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women).

Filmmaker Ken Loach on populism, the gig economy, and the importance of transnational solidarity in his movies and beyond.

In 2009, twenty years after the negotiated end to a brutal civil war, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), former guerrillas turned left political party, finally won the presidency of El Salvador, defeating ARENA, the far rightists who had made the country a showcase of neoliberal “reforms”.

The regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is threatening to carry out a massive assault on the province of Idlib, including a potential chemical weapons attack, in a bid to crush one of the last strongholds of opposition. Such an assault would have a potentially devastating impact on civilians, many of them refugees from the civil war and the last seven years of Assad’s attempt to crush a democratic uprising.

As spokesperson for the Die Linke party in the Bundestag (with Dietmar Bartsch), Sahra Wagenknecht comes from the anti-capitalist left of the party and has long been its most popular representative. With her husband Oskar Lafontaine – both with high media profiles – she has been involved for some time an informal group called “Team Sahra”, which you can join on the internet and which argues for the creation of a new political movement in the image of France Insoumise (FI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. They have announced that this movement will be launched in September 2018, not in competition with Die Linke, but to put pressure on the other parties in the sense of a more social policy.

An absolutely riveting case was before the United Nation’s court, the International Court of Justice at The Hague, last week. How could a court case 50 years after the events, in what is usually the dry legalistic argumentation of the most arcane kind about international law, be “riveting” by any stretch of the imagination, let alone “absolutely riveting”?

The outcome of the Swedish parliamentary election on 9 September confirms a general European trend: rising rightwing populism and a weakening Social Democracy. The traditional picture of Sweden as the home of a progressive social democratic welfare state has been fading away for several decades now.

In the space of less than a month, the Chilean feminist mobilization has installed and stimulated an intense public debate about the role and potential of feminism today in the refounding of a left for the 21st Century. This is undoubtedly a major experience of systemic projection and ideological irruption in the field of anti-capitalist politics.

I reached out for my copy of Willem Van Schendel’s A History of Bangladesh on Wednesday last week, almost two weeks after the beginning of the student-led protests against unauthorised vehicles and unlicensed drivers on the roads of Dhaka and other parts of Bangladesh. As I tried to make sense of what brought the anger of these seemingly apolitical teenagers to a boiling point, I was also left confused by why the protests were not making substantial news internationally, especially in South Asia outside Bangladesh.