16 January 2020 — Tri-Continental Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On Wednesday, 15 January, China and the United States agreed to suspend their full-scale trade war. From February 2018, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods that entered the US market, and then China retaliated. This tit-for-tat game… Continue reading

10 January 2020 — Tri-Continental Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In October of last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its flagship World Economic Outlook. In that report, the IMF said that the global growth rate would stumble at 3% in 2019. A month ago, the IMF’s main… Continue reading

2 January 2020 — Tri-Continental Gao Liang, The People Who Got Land, June 1948. How Many Millions Did You Make for the Pennies You Gave to the Coolies: The First Newsletter (2020). Continue reading

26 December 2019 — Tri-Continental Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Millions of people are on the streets, from India to Chile. Democracy is both their promise and it is what has betrayed them. They aspire to the democratic spirit but find that democratic institutions – saturated by money… Continue reading

21 November 2019 — Tri-Continental Visualizing Palestine, Gaza Diet, 2018. Continue reading

In 2017, Issa Shivji delivered the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Issa, who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) for decades, reflected on the idea of revolutionary intellectuals. He remembered a lecture given by Ali Mazrui fifty years previously, where Mazrui defined an intellectual as someone… Continue reading

At the edge of hope lies the gunfire from what Frantz Fanon called ‘the old granite block upon which the nation rests’. At the moment of protest, when the gunfire starts, clarity arrives. One should not be naïve about the character of the elite, whose smiles camouflage the instructions given through clenched teeth to the… Continue reading

Quito’s streets tremble between aspiration and repression; the smell of tear gas and the shouts for freedom reverberating in equal measure from one part of the city to another. President Lenín Moreno’s State of Emergency (October 3) and Curfew (October 12) give the men with guns more authority, but – despite hundreds of injured protestors and… Continue reading

There is a geography to human suffering; one that subordinates the well-being of the majority of the world’s people to the interests of a small handful of billionaires. In this world, the powerful not only control social wealth; they also control the public policy discussion — and what counts as intellectually correct. In this world,… Continue reading