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

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