In 1957, Mao Zedong oversaw the publication of Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, a three-volume collection of articles compiled by the Communist Party of China for the political education of the peasantry. The following year, selections from these volumes were republished in abridged and regional editions. One such edition included a report from the Anyang… Continue reading

A decade ago, I was a fly on the wall during a trade negotiation between the United States and a small country in Southeast Asia. What interested me was not the substance of the negotiation, the deliberations around an issue of minor concern to world affairs but of great concern to this one country, but… Continue reading

The number in the graph above, based on data from the International Monetary Fund, is not an exaggeration. Despite the growing technological and industrial capacity of countries in the Global South, countries and corporations in the Global North continue to own intellectual property patents on key products, locking the South into indefinite patent payment regimes.… Continue reading

Every morning, I open the newspapers (now on apps rather than print) and read about atrocities taking place across the world. There is an inflation of pain, from the genocide in Gaza to the war in Sudan and the unreported chaotic violence in and around Myanmar. These conflicts seem interminable and might even confuse the… Continue reading

Thursday, 5 June 2025 — The Tricontinental Rebecca Lee Kunz (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), Coyote Skin – Dusty Paws, 2022. Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Reading documents from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) makes me morose. Everything looks terrible. This is largely due to the social processes set in Continue reading

I have written this newsletter before. In fact, I could write this newsletter every year when a new Global Report on Food Crises is published. The report rests on four points: Continue reading

In the last days of March, I was in China’s new city of Xiong’an, less than a two-hour drive from Beijing. The city is being built to relieve congestion in the capital, but it will also be home to women and men who are eager to develop China’s new quality productive forces and will be… Continue reading

Eighty years ago, on 11 April 1945, units of General George S. Patton’s 4th Armoured Division of the US armed forces drove toward the city of Weimar, Germany, where the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. Patton’s troops eventually took control of the camp, but soldiers’ statements, which were collected later by historians, suggest that the… Continue reading

In 1962, Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa (1931–1993), mostly known as Flora Nwapa, sent a book manuscript to the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). Four years earlier, Achebe, at the tender age of twenty-eight, had published his landmark novel Things Fall Apart with Heinemann. The novel arrived in Heinemann’s London office as the decolonisation movement began… Continue reading

On an evening in September 2024, Argentina’s President Javier Milei stood before a large crowd in Parque Lezama in Buenos Aires. He wore his signature dark leather jacket and barked out his speech, the crowd devouring every word. ‘Here you have the trolls’, he said, ‘corrupt journalists, shady characters. These are the trolls’. Then, he… Continue reading

Thursday, 20 March 2025 — The Tricontinental Alejandra Laprea (Venezuela), El acuerpamiento de las mujeres es nuestra estrategia de defensa (Women’s Embodied Solidarity Is Our Defence Strategy), 2022. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In 1945, when the United Nations Charter was drafted, its authors and those who first Continue reading

March is the month of International Working Women’s Day, a day deeply rooted in the socialist movement. Most of the world now only calls 8 March ‘International Women’s Day’, excluding the word ‘working’ from its title. But work is a fundamental part of women’s daily lives. According to UN Women’s annual report Progress on the… Continue reading

As far as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is concerned, each person in the Global North is worth nine people in the Global South. We get that calculation from IMF data on voting power in the organisation relative to the population of the Global North and Global South states. Each country, based on its ‘relative… Continue reading

Thursday, 27 February 2025 — The Tricontinental Cao Fei (China), My Future Is Not a Dream 05, 2006. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In his first month back in the White House, US President Donald Trump indicated his interest in annexing Greenland and brokering a peace deal for Continue reading