Month: March 2019

Riot police stand guard as a large fire burns inside the Moria refugee camp on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, September 19, 2016.Michael Schwarz/Press Association. All rights reserved.Nothing but burnt rubble remains in a large part of Moria on the island of Lesbos. The infamous EU hotspot – aka detention centre – that so…

Professor Loren McClenachan of Colby College was visiting the British Admiralty Library in Portsmouth, England, when she unearthed a series of magnificent antique nautical charts. Depicting the waters around the Florida Keys, the charts were made by British cartographers and dated from just before the American Revolution. They were the works of the world’s best…

Team Syntegrity participants in Barcelona in June, 2017.The Team Syntegrity (TS) sessions held in Barcelona on 19-22 June provided a space and a method of hope in which a variety of social powers unfolded through association and combination. The objective was to think collectively about how civil society may be able to confront the main…

In a time when fake news has become “a game of Whack-a-Mole,” popping up on a variety of media platforms while duping audiences of all political affiliations, teaching young people to discern the difference between what is or isn’t reliable information has become an unusually difficult, and urgent, challenge. Fortunately, a new study published in the journal Science and Education has brought…

An open-air photography exhibition in the centre of Moscow, November 2017 (4 months before the 2018 Russian presidential election). The exhibition depicts idealised scenes of traditional peasant life in (northern) Russian villages. Photo by Natalia Mamonova, all rights reserved. The recent presidential elections returned Vladimir Putin to power for the fourth time. In the elections,…

By now, you’ve likely heard about James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote a ridiculously long memo (3,300 words, to be exact) about why, in his opinion, women are biologically ill-suited to work in the tech industry. Despite claiming to “value diversity and inclusion,” Damore wrote that women weren’t succeeding as much as their high-ranking…

Photo courtesy of Nueva Sociedad. This article is being published as part of the partnership between Nueva Sociedad and democraciaAbierta. You can read the original article here. The regional elections of October 15 were a true catastrophe for the opposition in Venezuela. Few times in history has an electoral event had such overwhelming consequences: practically, the…

Before I became a journalist, I worked as a teacher, and one year I had a third grader who was sometimes reluctant to participate in class. One afternoon, instead of writing down three math problems that were on the board, he was busy rolling a clump of boogers (as children sometimes do) across the top…

The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.   Legal mobilization for abortion rights, or the use of law and courts by feminist actors in their pursuit of abortion legalization, is a recent development in Latin America.  Its development is part of the turn towards…

Central Americans reading information they have been given about the asylum process while the queue up for a shower in the migrant hostel in Palenque. Paul Miranda. Some rights reserved. Mexico is not doing “nothing” to curb northward migration, as U.S. President Donald Trump claims. In this Q&A, Crisis Group's Latin America & Caribbean Program…