Thursday, 20 February 2025 — The Tricontinental Katsukawa Shunshō (Japan), Japanese Women Reading and Writing, c. 1776. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. There are days when the dusk of events settles heavily on me, and I try to find a way to retreat into a quiet corner and Continue reading

Thursday, 13 February 2025 — The Tricontinental Chitra Ganesh (United States), Sultana’s Dream, 2018, a series of 27 linocuts published by Durham Press, © Chitra Ganesh. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach Continue reading

Donald Trump returned to the White House with a loud thump. His staff threw executive order upon executive order on his desk, which he signed with a flourish and then got on the phone to bark orders at the Danes and the Panamanians and the Colombians, demanding this, that, and the other thing, that thing,… Continue reading

For decades now, there has been a clear understanding that the models of development proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Washington Consensus – debt, austerity, structural adjustment – simply have not worked. The long history of adversity experienced by the former colonial countries remains intact. A glance at the numbers from the… Continue reading

Thursday, 16 January 2025 — The Tricontinental Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi (Pakistan), Two Wings to Fly, Not One, 2017. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Mark Rutte, the current secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), is not a poet. He, like other secretary generals of Continue reading

Very few humans have had the good fortune to descend into the depths of the world’s oceans. The deepest such place – 11 kilometres below sea level at its deepest point – is the Mariana Trench, which is located just north of the 607 islands of the Federated States of Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean… Continue reading

Pain shudders through the arteries of global society. Day after day passes by as the genocide against the Palestinian people continues and the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and Sudan escalate. More and more people slip into absolute poverty as arms companies’ profits soar. These realities have hardened society, allowing people to… Continue reading

Finally, before history ends, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment stated that there ‘are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of… Continue reading

On 31 May, the United States military endorsed a Statement of Principles for Indo-Pacific Defence Industrial Base Collaboration to strengthen military industry cooperation with its allies in the region. The principles outline commitments to initiatives such as the co-production of missile and rocket systems in Australia, the co-development of hypersonic missile interceptors with Japan, and… Continue reading

When Dante Alighieri and his guide reach the fifth circle of hell in Inferno’s Canto VII, they come across the River Styx, where people who could not contain their anger in life now wallow and fight each other on the surface of the turbulent, muddy water, and below them lie those who had been sullen… Continue reading

For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today,… Continue reading

In 1919, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’. Churchill, grappling at the time with the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq as Britain’s secretary of state for war and air, argued that such use of gas ‘would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious… Continue reading

Next year is the seventieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and attended by heads of government and state from twenty-nine African and Asian countries. Indonesia’s President Sukarno (1901–1970), who had led the freedom movement in Indonesia against Dutch colonialism, opened the conference with a speech entitled ‘Let a New… Continue reading

Reading legacy Western media – which dominates the world information order – is painful. During the genocidal war against Palestinians, for instance, these media outlets (such as CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Bild) have been unable to bring themselves to describe the Israeli military’s attacks on Palestinians. At most, and… Continue reading

On 1 October, US Representative Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement urging US President Joe Biden to ‘place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed for months, including… Continue reading