State of Power: Recent Episodes
State of Power
Let us introduce you to some of the fascinating people we work with to help you make sense of the world’s most complex challenges. In this podcast we share our research, explore alternatives to the status quo and give a platform to scholars and activists who are at the forefront of the fight against the current neoliberal order. We believe there are alternatives to this world and hope you do too.
We live in an age of empire and resistance - a shifting geography of global power. The military, political and financial support of one country, the US, above all others has allowed a small country - Israel - to commit genocide in Gaza, to the horror of the vast majority of people worldwide. The US military, its corporations, its digital giants, its banks, and its culture continue to dominate globally.
Yet at the same time, US-led imperialism has never felt more fractured and resisted. The heavily-resourced US army has been forced out of Afghanistan and was recently expelled from Niger. Nations such as Nicaragua and South Africa are taking powerful former colonial countries to court. Other international institutions, long seen as vehicles for exporting or enforcing US-led neoliberalism, such as the World Trade Organisation have seemingly run out of steam. The US is also increasingly isolated globally: Brazil, China, India, Russia and other nations are directly challenging its hegemony, and the US' dysfunctional democracy is less and less cited as a model by other countries. There is a growing popular sense that the post-Cold War neoliberal globalised order is in crisis.
Is US hegemony really fading? Does any other nation, including China, pose any real challenge to US power, let alone offer a political or economic alternative? Has the heralded hope of a BRICS bloc collapsed amidst its contradictions? What would it take to build a more equitable and just new international political and economic order?
In this episode, to properly examine where geopolitical or geoeconomic power lies today – and how it is being exercised and how that might be changing, TNI's Nick Buxton speaks to Adam Tooze, and Walden Bello.
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade.
Walden Bello is a TNI associate and author of more that 20 books, a human rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist who has made a major contribution to the international case against corporate-driven globalization.
History in Action Part 1 delves into the founding of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and its origins with the Institute for Policy Studies. We look at the roots of TNI in opposition to the Vietnam War and other global liberation movements. We explore TNI's evolution and its sustained resistance against neoliberal ideologies, its tragedy with the assassination of Orlando Letelier, and its early work on debt, food and alternatives.
Narrator: Shaun Matsheza
Interviews conducted by: Denis Burke, Daria Gorshenina and Shaun Matsheza
Music: Aleksey Chistilin
Interviews with: Susan George, Cora and Peter Weiss, John Cavanagh, Achin Vanaik, Anthony Barnett, Susan Buck-Morss, Ariane van Buren, Manuel Pérez-Rocha
Archival audio with: John Berger, Isabel Letelier, Orlando Letelier, Eqbal Ahmad, Basker Vashee, Fred Halliday
Find out more about TNI at tni.org
Please consider making a contribution to support our vital work at tni.org/donate
With thanks to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
History in Action Part 2 dives into the 1990s, focusing on the impact of the Cold War's end, the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of the Alter-Globalization Movement, and the history of TNI's drugs and democracy programme. Key figures and activists explore significant shifts in global politics, the consolidation of U.S. imperial power, and the resistance of social movements: from the rise of progressive alternatives to the struggle against corporate power and neoliberal trade regimes.
Narrator: Shaun Matsheza
Interviews conducted by: Denis Burke, Daria Gorshenina and Shaun Matsheza
Music: Aleksey Chistilin
Interviews with: Susan George, Hilary Wainwright, Walden Bello, Martin Jelsma, Gonzalo Berrón, John Cavanagh, Achin Vanaik, Lyda Fernanda Forero, Manuel Pérez-Rocha, Jun Borras, Fiona Dove
Archival audio with: John Berger, Isabel Letelier, Orlando Letelier, Eqbal Ahmad, Basker Vashee, Fred Halliday
Find out more about TNI at tni.org
Please consider making a contribution to support our vital work at tni.org/donate
With thanks to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
History in Action Part 3 discusses the disastrous war on terror, the rise of China, and the convergence of social movements around the climate crisis, land, and essential public services.
Narrator: Shaun Matsheza
Interviews conducted by: Denis Burke, Daria Gorshenina and Shaun Matsheza
Music: Aleksey Chistilin
Interviews with: Arun Kundnani, Lyda Fernanda Forero, Jun Borras, Walden Bello, Dorothy Guerrero, Fiona Dove
Archival audio with: Howard Wachtel, Brid Brennan, Satoko Kishimoto, Fred Halliday
Find out more about TNI at tni.org
Please consider making a contribution to support our vital work at tni.org/donate
With thanks to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
History in Action Part 4 talks about the fallout of the financial crises, the rise of new forms of authoritarianism, the new movements that shook the world, and the work against transnational corporate impunity.
Narrator: Shaun Matsheza
Interviews conducted by: Denis Burke, Daria Gorshenina and Shaun Matsheza
Music: Aleksey Chistilin
Interviews with: Walden Bello, Sol Trumbo Vila , Niamh Ni Bhriain, Achin Vanaik, Dorothy Guerrero, Lucía Bárcena, Martin Jelsma
Archival audio with: Susan George, Howard Wachtel, Brid Brennan
Find out more about TNI at tni.org
Please consider making a contribution to support our vital work at tni.org/donate
With thanks to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
History in Action Part 5 guides us through the multifaceted impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, underscored by increasing corporate power and social injustices—from healthcare privatization and vaccine disparities to the militarization of borders. We talk about green colonialism and the people hijacking the transition to renewable energy for their own profits. We talk about Gaza. Insights from diverse activists and scholars emphasize the need for a collective, just transition and highlight the historical and ongoing struggles for social justice, for international solidarity and for systemic change.
Narrator: Shaun Matsheza
Interviews conducted by: Denis Burke, Daria Gorshenina and Shaun Matsheza
Music: Aleksey Chistilin
Interviews with: Arun Kundnani, Niamh Ni Bhriain, Katie Sandwell, Lucía Bárcena, Walden Bello, Sol Trumbo Vila , Achin Vanaik, Dorothy Guerrero, John Cavanagh, Achin Vanaik, Lyda Fernanda Forero, Manuel Pérez-Rocha, Fiona Dove
Archival audio with: Abir Kopty, Hamza Hamouchene, Susan George
Find out more about TNI at tni.org
Please consider making a contribution to support our vital work at tni.org/donate
With thanks to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
Nearly 75 years after the United Nations called for the abolition of coca leaf chewing, the world will have an opportunity to correct this grave historic error. The World Health Organization (WHO), at the Plurinational State of Bolivia’s request, and supported by Colombia, will conduct a ‘critical review’ of the coca leaf over the next year.
Based on its findings, the WHO may recommend changes in coca’s classification under the UN drug control treaties. The WHO recommendations would be submitted for approval by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), with voting likely in 2026. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Transnational Institute (TNI) will be monitoring the coca review process closely and examining key aspects of the debate. As part of this we are producing a series called “Coca Chronicles”.
The first issue of the Coca Chronicles discussed the current classification of the coca leaf in Schedule I of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (or its effective ban) and Bolivia’s initiation of the WHO critical review process.
The second issue highlighted three developments during the March 2024 CND session: (1) support for the coca review from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; (2) Bolivia’s call to protect the coca leaf as a genetic resource; and (3) an update on the WHO’s preparations for the review.
In this third issue, Anthropologist Wade Davis gives us a deep dive into the history and significance of the coca leaf in the Andean region.
Wade Davis is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, photographer, and writer. He is professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. He is a multiple award-winning author of more than 25 books, and has done extensive research into coca leaf, among many other ethnobotanic explorations.
The fossil fuel based energy system has shaped capitalism and our geopolitical order. On the 50th year of TNI's existence, the State of Power report unveils the corporate and financial actors that underpin this order, the dangers of an unjust energy transition, lessons for movements of resistance, and the possibilities for transformative change.
How can we build a Just energy transition in the age of corporate and imperial power?
In today’s episode, a special accompaniment to the 12th Annual State of Power Report on energy, Nick Buxton speaks to three interesting people who have unique perspectives on this question.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist, historian and professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. In 2012, his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil retold the history of energy in the Middle East, showing how oil weakened democracy, fuelled militarism and empire and created a dangerous myth of infinite growth.
Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and a member of the Climate and Community Project, a left-wing think tank. She works primarily on the politics of extraction, particularly in Latin America and the US. Her upcoming book is Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
Ozzi Warwick is the chief education and research officer of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago and the General Secretary of the national Joint Trade Union Movement. He is also a founding member of the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy South (TUED South), a new South-led trade union platform dedicated to a public approach to a just energy transition.
Nick Buxton is TNI’s Knowledge Hub Coordinator and founding editor of the State of Power report.
Even a global crisis can provide opportunities for fairer, freer and better ways of organising our world. But too often they can simply become moments to further entrench power, hegemony and undue influence. Unfortunately, as history has demonstrated, global policy making has often shifted in undesirable directions because those in power use crises to push their own interests.
Some commentators have made comparisons between the global impact of 911 on public policy, and the impact of the Covid 19 virus, because while the Covid pandemic may be over, just like 911, its impacts still reverberate. And they are likely going to stay with us for some time to come. Covid 19 had a fundamental impact on our economies, on global governance, and global policy making.
Through a series of interviews with experts in their respective fields, TNI Associate, Arun Kundnani, set out to explore all the different facets of the pandemic’s impacts, from the growing role of major Pharmaceutical corporations in global healthcare, to the the response of global governance bodies such as the WHO and the UN, to the part played by Big Tech Companies, the impact on the global debt and on migration and race politics. We had a chance to sit with him and explore his findings, and to see what alternatives are available for us when the next crisis comes rolling in, something which is all but inevitable.
Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are coming, Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. He’s also recently released a new book, is called What is Antiracism? and Why it means Anticapitalism.
Related playlist: https://audioboom.com/playlists/4634744-talking-security-with-arun-kundnani
Link to Arun Kundnani's work: https://www.kundnani.org/
Energy is currently produced and consumed based on sexist, racist and classist power relations that favour the pursuit of private profits at the expense of the common good.
Extractivist oligopolies and corporatised politics have imposed humiliating austerity measures, privatisations of public services, and excessive and growing socio-economic inequality, displacement and dispossession, and environmental destruction. These processes drive skyrocketing levels of energy poverty and a worsening ecological crisis. The most exploited and discriminated people are hit the hardest: from women in low-income households, women of colour and women with disabilities, to transwomen, single mothers and undocumented women.
We need energy democracies and participatory politics in which a variety of ordinary women can influence tomorrow’s energy policies. Collective but diversified bottom-up power can ensure a new energy model is run by and services those who the current model exploits and discriminates against. But how do we get there? The growing call for the feminisation of politics – and energy politics for that matter – is about much more than merely increasing the representation of women in decision-making positions. We need to question the ways energy politics are shaped. We need to ask, energy for whom and energy for what?
An ecofeminist perspective on energy offers an important and underacknowledged framework for understanding what keeps us stuck in unsustainable energy cultures, as well as a paradigm for designing truly just energy systems.
In this episode of the State of power podcast, TNI researcher Lavinia Steinfort talks to Shannon Bell : professor of sociology, Cara Daggert : assistant professor in political science, and Christine Labaski, associate professor of women’s and gender studies in the field of Science Technology and society. They are all at virgina tech university in the United States, and are the co-authors of the brilliant article: Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough.They are also all members of the May apple energy transition collective.
image source: Beatrice Meo/ Climaccio! Flickr
Episode Notes:
Ecofeminism: fueling the journey to energy democracy
Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough
In 1973, a group of women from Mandal village in the Himalayas in India “hugged” trees to prevent them from being felled. When the loggers came, the women, led by Gaura Devi, surrounded the trees and chanted: “This forest is our mother’s home; we will protect it with all our might”. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the Chipko movement, which put a spotlight on ecofeminism. Consequently, when many people hear the term ecofeminism, it is the image of those women hugging the trees and fighting to save the forest that comes to mind. But what exactly is ecofeminism and how and why is it such a powerful vision that may actually save our planet?
Ecofeminism is a cross-cutting, multi-faceted, perspective that encompasses many issues, including food, climate and energy. It offers an alternative to the oppressive patriarchal capitalist system that has had devastating impacts on the planet and on human lives and livelihoods. Ecofeminist analysis explores the connections between women and nature in culture, economy, religion, politics, literature and iconography, and addresses the parallels between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women. It challenges the artificial division between the personal and the political, and the environmental or ecological. It seeks to show that “social justice, interspecies ethics, and environmental concerns” cannot be approached as separate issues. Moreover, a growing number of ecofeminists approach gender as a social construct, challenging the men-women binary and rejecting the idea that women are somehow closer to nature, as this is part of the patriarchal frame that subjects both “women” and “nature” to exploitation.
Our guest on today’s podcast is a well-known ecofeminist, who is very well placed to deepen our understanding of ecofeminism, especially as it relates to our food system, and our relation with the land and with the environment. Dr Vandana Shiva is the founder of the research foundation for science, technology and ecology. She is also the founder of Navdanya a grassroots movement which promotes biodiversity conservation, biodiversity, organic farming, the rights of farmers, and the process of seed saving. Amongst the many books she has written, she co-wrote a book called Ecofeminism, written together with Maria Mies.
She is here in conversation with Lavinia Steinfort, a political geographer and ecofeminist activist. Lavinia is a researcher at the Transnational Institute (TNI), where she is working on public alternatives such as (re)municipalisation of public services, a just transition towards energy democracy and transforming finance for the 99%.
Episode Notes
The seeds of Vandana Shiva
Borders uphold a global system of apartheid—and we should demand nothing less than their abolition. In this interview, activist and writer Harsha Walia lays out how borders and citizenship maintain colonial axes of power. From Fortress Europe outsourcing border control far into the African continent in exchange for aid, to Canada securing the availability of cheap farm workers through its selective immigration system, she demonstrates how capitalism and border regimes feed off of each other. Harsha Walia makes a compelling case for abolition: No banks, no bombs, no borders, no bosses. Or, in her own words: “Why would we fight for anything less than the freedom of all people?”
At the State of power podcast, we’re glad to once again host Harsha Walia, who is an activist and writer based in Canada. Her books include Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Here she is Conversation with Arun Kundnani, a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
How is it that drug companies can make huge profits from vaccines while people in the global south die from lack of access to medical care? How does the global regime of intellectual property rights enable this inequality? And what is the role of Bill Gates in defending this system?
In this interview, Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni argues that vaccine inequality is not a market but a policy failure. From the HIV crisis in the early 2000s to the recent pandemic, the public has repeatedly shouldered the risk for the development of live-saving medicines while private corporations have reaped obscene profits. How can we break Big Pharma's power and develop an alternative health system?
Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni is the co-leader of the policy group of the People's Vaccine Alliance. She is a senior health advisor with 40 years of experience in health policy and programming with international and national health and development agencies including multilateral agencies, NGOs and governments. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
An influential group of big technology corporations, commonly referred to as Big Tech has concentrated vast economic power with the collusion of states, which has resulted in expanded surveillance, spiraling disinformation and weakened workers' rights. TNI’s 11th flagship State of Power report exposes the actors, the strategies and the implications of this digital power grab, and shares ideas on how movements might bring technology back under popular control.
Our guest on the podcast is Cory Doctorow, a brilliant science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. His most recent book is Chokepoint Capitalism
(co-authored with Rebecca Giblin), a powerful expose of how tech monopolies have stifled creative labour markets and how movements might fight back.
This interview is part of the 11th State of power report, which focuses on Digital Power. Please be sure to check out all the other essays, as well as the infographics that give a good picture of digital power today.
You can also read an edited transcript of the interview.
What are the economic challenges facing the Global South post-pandemic? What role have global financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF played in worsening the economic situation for poorer countries? And what economic alternatives might exist?
In this interview, Jomo Kwame Sundaram shines a light on the effects that decades of liberalisation policy have had on countries in the global South, including deindustrialisation, food insecurity, and another looming debt crisis. He argues that the recent refusal to waive international property rights related to vaccines as well as sanctions on China have worsened the situation, with the odds increasingly stacked against poorer countries.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Visiting Senior Fellow at Khazanah Research Institute, Visiting Fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and has previously been the Assistant Director General and Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
Keywords:
Economic Justice, Trade, IMF, World Bank, Debt, Crisis
As the various tax avoidance scandals such as the Panama papers, Paradise papers and Pandora papers have shown, tax havens are some of the most important instruments for reproducing social inequalities. The wealthy use countries with favourable laws to store their wealth, safely and away from public scrutiny.
But tax havens are becoming an even bigger problem for social equity as the global economy becomes more and more digital. Big Data, generated by all of us all over the world through our interactions with technology, is the raw material for the digital economy, but is processed only in a few countries and by a handful of companies.
Just as financial capital can be transferred across borders, which in turn has generated tax havens, so too is data stored in places where companies can exercise control. Tax havens are becoming data havens to hide away the raw material of the digital economy from states and communities, building digital monopolies that make fair competition impossible, and impede the improvement of digital products for the social good.
Our guest on the podcast argues that it is no coincidence that financial power and digital power are gradually using the same places to hide.
Sofia Scassera is an economist, and associate researcher at TNI working on issues of digital society and the digital economy. In this conversation, we discuss why data is an important raw material? Why is it important for data to be seen as a public good and not hidden away by corporations. Exactly why are tax havens becoming data havens? What is to be done?
(Image: Evan Clayburg)
Episode Notes:
Banking on data: How the world’s tax havens became the data centres for the digital economy
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/banking-on-data
How Big Tech captured our public health system: Arun Kundnani in Conversation with Seda Gürseshttps://audioboom.com/posts/8086185-how-big-tech-captured-our-public-health-system-arun-kundnani-in-conversation-with-seda-gurses
The environmental and social effects of the industrial capitalist system have long been obvious to marginalised communities forced to live in the garbage dumps of production while their resources are pillaged for raw materials. However, today, the systemic effects are increasingly visible to all. It’s clear, to save humanity and complex life on our precious planet, we need a major course change.
If we’re to survive, we need to figure out how to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and how to adapt to the already changing climate while moving towards renewable energies, sustainable levels of energy use and other social transformations.
Billions will be spent on trying to adapt – finding new water sources, restructuring agriculture and changing the crops that are grown, building sea walls to keep the saltwater out, changing the shape and style of cities – and on trying to shift to green sources of energy by building the required infrastructure and investing in green jobs and technology. But whose interest will this adaptation and energy transition serve? And who will be expected to bear the heaviest costs of the climate crisis, and of the responses to it?
Since the 1990s the alter-globalisation and food sovereignty movements have advanced large-scale critiques of neoliberal capitalism. In the 21st century a wide variety of movements have adopted a shared language of system change, arguing that human rights abuses, political and social harms, and the climate crisis can be addressed only by a transformation of our entire social, cultural, political, and economic system. However, whatever transition happens must not come at the price of the destruction of lives and livelihoods. Justice has to be a key factor. The movements often use an intersectional lens, arguing that sexism and patriarchy, racism, and other forms of violence and systems of oppression are fundamental features of the capitalist system, and must be addressed. Increasingly, these different calls are beginning to come together under the banner of Just Transition.
But what do we mean by a Just Transition, and how do we orient ourselves and our social movements towards a such a Transition?
On this episode of the SOP podcast, Hamza Hamouchene unpacks a vision for a Just Transition, with a specific focus on North Africa. Hamza has done research on extractivism, energy democracy, food sovereignty and environmental and climate justice in the North African context. He is also the coordinator for North Africa at the Transnational Institute, where he has recently put together a dossier, a collection of essays from multiple authors, focusing on different dimensions of the energy transition in North Africa.
With this year’s UN conference of the parties, COP27 taking place in Egypt, there seems to be no better time to put a spotlight on the region.
Episode Notes:
Just Transition in North Africa
https://longreads.tni.org/just-transition-in-north-africa
From Crisis to Transformation: What is Just Transition?https://www.tni.org/en/publication/from-crisis-to-transformation
Extractivism and resistance in North Africa
https://www.tni.org/en/ExtractivismNorthAfrica
Nigeria has a terrible history with international oil companies like Shell, having a hard time getting compensation for environmental damage. Even with some legal wins, like when the Hague Court of Appeals found Shell Nigeria liable for damages from pipeline leaks in the villages of Oruma and Goi, the country is still a long way from achieving true justice. To add salt to the injury, the violators have themselves gone on to sue Nigeria, sometimes using domestic law, but in the greater number of cases, resorting to Investor State Dispute (ISDS) clauses in Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) that Nigeria is signed to.
As a result of these cases, where costs to citizens have run into billions of dollars, Nigeria has become critical of the current international arbitration system, and has since announced that it will revise all bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed between 1990 and 2001. They plan to re-negotiate 12 out of the 15 BITs that are currently in force.
However, at the same time, Nigeria has already completed the first three steps of joining the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). This treaty is frequently used by fossil fuel companies to sue countries when they try to enact environmentally friendly policies. History shows that, though the Energy charter treaty makes many promises of burgeoning investment, the reality is that it doesn’t significantly improve investment prospects. Instead, the ECT’s Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions give foreign investors in the energy sector sweeping rights to directly sue states in international tribunals of three private lawyers, called arbitrators. Companies can be awarded dizzying sums in compensation for government actions that have allegedly damaged their investments.
When you consider that nearly all ISDS cases against Nigeria so far are already linked to the exploitation and selling of oil or gas, and couple this with the importance of the energy sector to Nigeria’s economy, it's easy to see the risk the country could face. If Nigeria joins the Energy Charter Treaty, the effort to critically assess its current investment treaties seems rather futile.
In many of the countries that are in the process of acceding to the ECT, hardly anyone seems to have even heard of the agreement, let alone have thoroughly examined its political, legal, and financial risks. And even with a supposed “modernization process”, which is supposed to deal with the problematic clauses in the treaty, it continues to threaten to bind yet more countries to corporate-friendly energy policies.
Why are African countries like Nigeria drawn to the ECT, when the treaty has such obvious grave implications for their ability to determine their own internal policies? What is the broader context that informs this seemingly contradictory behaviour? To understand what is happening with the Energy Charter Treaty in West Africa, and particularly in the region’s biggest country by population and economy, Nigeria, I spoke to Oberko Daniel. Daniel works as a tax and trade organizer for Public Services International, which is the Global Union Federation of Workers in Public Services. Currently based in Accra, Daniel also coordinates PSI’s project on digitalization in the region
Image: The retired Orlando Power station in Johannesburg, South Africa/ Wikimedia Commons.
Episode Notes:
ISDS in Nigeria
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/isds-in-nigeria
Busting myths around the Energy Charter Treaty:
https://www.tni.org/en/ect-mythbuster
Public Services International
https://publicservices.international/?lang=en
Lack of access to modern energy services remains a major constraint to economic development in many regions, and perhaps in Africa most of all. According to the Africa development Bank, only 40 percent of the continent’s people have regular access to electricity. African governments are trying to expand their capacity to provide energy to their citizens, and this has seen a proliferation of “mega energy deals”, where governments sign deals investors, usually foreign, who pledge to work with the government to build energy generation facilities, upgrade energy grids and other such cost-intensive developments.
However, this all happens in a context where we know what we have to do to solve the climate crisis. We must keep coal, oil and gas in the ground. What happens when African governments try to pass progressive policies to protect the environment, and to protect people from some of the harmful practices of these investors? The fossil fuel industry has a secret powerful weapon to keep countries locked in on fossil fuels: The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT).
The ECT is an International Investment Agreement (IIAs) that establishes a multilateral framework for cross-border cooperation in the energy industry. The treaty covers all aspects of commercial energy activities including trade, investments in and energy efficiency, and it is currently on a massive geographical expansion into Africa, Asia and Latin America.
History shows that, though the Energy charter treaty makes many promises of burgeoning investment, the reality is that it does not significantly improve investment prospects. Instead, the ECT’s Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions give foreign investors in the energy sector sweeping rights to directly sue states in international tribunals of three private lawyers, the arbitrators. Companies can be awarded dizzying sums in compensation for government actions that have allegedly damaged their investments, either directly through ‘expropriation’ or indirectly through regulations of virtually any kind.
In many of those countries in the process of acceding to the ECT, hardly anyone seems to have even heard of the agreement, let alone have thoroughly examined its political, legal, and financial risks. And even with a supposed “modernization process”, which is supposed to deal with the problematic clauses in the agreement, the treaty continues to threaten to bind yet more countries to corporate-friendly energy policies.
Here at the state of power podcast, we are concerned with power. How it can be generated in a fair and equitable manner, without endangering the planet or livelihoods. On this episode of the podcast, we take a specific look at East Africa, where five of the East African Community (EAC) countries have signed the non-legally binding International Energy Charter (IEC), which is a political declaration aimed at strengthening energy cooperation among signatory countries and international organizations, and does not impose any legal or financial obligation. The Governments of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda signed the IEC in 2015, while the Government of Rwanda in 2016, and the Government of Kenya and the East African Community as an intergovernmental institution signed the charter in 2017. As a consequence of this political declaration, the ECT Secretariat, whose survival depends on continuation of the treaty, continues to lobby these countries to take additional steps towards acceding to the Energy Charter treaty, which , because of its ISDS clauses, is not as innocuous as the International Energy Charter.
To get a better understanding of what exactly is going on, we speak to Olivia Costa, who is the executive director of Tanzania Trade and investment coalition, a grouping of thirteen Civil Society Organizations in the East African country. Joining her is Brenda Akankunda, who works with the Southern and Eastern Africa trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI), and is based in Uganda. Both organizations focus on Trade and Investment.
Image: The retired Orlando Power station in Johannesburg, South Africa/ Wikimedia Commons.
Episode Notes:
On the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT):
https://www.tni.org/en/energy-charter-dirty-secrets
Busting myths around the Energy Charter Treaty:
https://www.tni.org/en/ect-mythbuster
State of the World Conference link:
https://www.tni.org/en/webinar/state-of-the-world-2022
Get your tickets to the State of the World Conference:
https://ticketpass.org/event/ELAYKF/state-of-the-world
Why are US-China relations deteriorating? What are the impacts of growing anti-Asian racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) living in the US?Will the new Cold War with China replace the US War on Terror? In this interview, Tobita Chow argues that the rise of China as an economic power has become a clear threat to US hegemony. While the pandemic served as a catalyst for anti-Asian racism, it was not the root cause: Increasingly hostile foreign policy towards China leads to increasingly hostile domestic policy towards people perceived to be Asian. But AAPI communities are fighting back.
Tobita Chow is the founding Director of Justice Is Global, at the People's Action Institute, a network of state & local grassroots power-building organisations united in fighting for justice.
He is an organiser, a political educator, and a leading progressive strategist and critic regarding US–China relations and the rise of Sinophobia in the U.S.
Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
Why did the pandemic spiral out of control in India? Why did some states see many more people dying than others? The central government's authoritarian measures, badly planned lockdowns, structural inequality and many forms of discrimination drastically increased the death toll, argues Sulakshana Nandi in this interview. She discusses India's unequal vaccination rollout and the roles of the public and private healthcare sector in pandemic management. Finally, she explains what a better health system in India could look like.
Sulakshana Nandi is the co-chair of the Global Steering Council of the People's Health Movement in India. She is involved in research, capacity building, and advocacy on issues related to health equity and access, and public policy and programmes for health and nutrition, with a focus on gender and vulnerable and indigenous communities. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
During the pandemic, the World Health Organisation and governments took a back seat and power was centred on corporate interests. Health was viewed not as a right or a necessity, but as a product to be marketed and sold. Even in the midst of a global health emergency, companies treated the ill and the vulnerable as consumers and vaccines as commodities, setting prices and production rates that maximise profit. How has this happened and what, if any, are the alternatives?
Harris Gleckman is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Sustainability and Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting. He was previously Head of the New York Office of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He is here in conversation with Arun Kundnani, who is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
New generations of technologically advanced, hyper efficient industrial vessels, have gotten too good at fishing. This limited number of vessels has a massive impact on the ocean. Fish stocks have largely declined since the 1980s, but not all fishers contribute to the problem to the same extent, nor are all fishing livelihoods impacted to the same degree. The crisis of overfishing, fuelled in large part by a small number of industrial vessels, is threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities and small-scale fisheries around the world who depend on the ocean as a source of food and income.
Small-scale fishers around the world rely on traditional methods and practices, working in harmony with the environment to feed themselves and their communities. Around the world they are rallying around the idea of food sovereignty and the vision of a global food system with food producers and human rights at its center.
At the State of power podcast, we are concerned with the ways in which power functions, on land and on the sea. With the United Nations Oceans Conference coming up between 27 June and 1 July, we thought this would be as good a time as any to take a closer look at the oceans that make up more than 70% of our planet’s surface.
How are coastal communities dealing with the capitalist advance into the oceans, the so-called Blue economy? What are the challenges faced by small-scale fishers today? Who are the small-scale fishers today — from France to Indonesia? What social divisions exist within this category of "small-scale fisheries" , what roles do class, gender, and even race play -- and in this light, to what extent do "small-scale fishers" constitute a "political subject" that can fight for change?
Thibault Josse works at Association Pleine Mer, a collective of fisher people and fish eaters working together for local, equitable and sustainable fisheries, through the development and strengthening of Community Supported Fisheries. A fisheries engineer, he works with coastal communities in France and in the Global South for social and environmental justice.
Here he is in conversation with Mads Barbesgaard, who is a researcher with TNI working on struggles around the use and control of land and ocean resources in the midst of the energy transition. Mads is also an associate senior lecturer at the Department of Human Geography, at Lund University in Sweden.
Image source: Pleine Mer
This podcast has been developed in the course of the Deck-to-dish: Community-supported-fisheries advanced training project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union; the European Commission cannot be held responsible for the information presented.
Aside from occasionally popping up as a topic, for example in relation to plastics, oil-spills, or occasional references to melting glaciers, the oceans are often a "forgotten space" for many otherwise inspiring social movements. But the oceans have had a central and changing role across different moments.
The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilisation—warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
Here at the State of power podcast, we are concerned with the ways in which power functions, on land and on the sea. With the United Nations Oceans Conference coming up between 27 June and 1 July, we thought this would be as good a time as any to take a closer look at the oceans that make up more than 70% of our planet’s surface.
What is the relation between contemporary social, environmental, climate, economic crises and the oceans?
Also, who is benefitting from all of this exploitation of the oceans, and how? Who are the capitalists at sea and what are their strategies? What types of acts of resistance and struggle exist against these interests - historically and today?
Liam Campling and Alex Colas, are the authors of the book, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World
In their book, which deals with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth’s geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.
Here they are in conversation with Mads Barbesgaard, who is a researcher with TNI working on struggles around the use and control of land and ocean resources in the midst of the energy transition. Mads is also a senior lecturer at the Department of Human Geography, at Lund University in Sweden.
Image source: Ships in a Storm on a Rocky Coast by Jan Porcellis. Oil on canvas, 1614-1618, Hallwyl Museum/ Wikimedia
The privatisation of public services is a long-standing global trend. But in the wake of the pandemic and through the introduction of contact tracing apps, Big Tech has gone one step further: Large corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are now set to control the very infrastructure that underlies our public health system. In this eye-opening discussion, Arun Kundnani interviews Dr Seda Gürses about the dangers of a system in which we depend on profit-oriented companies for receiving basic health services. How did we get to this point, and how can we imagine a different future?
Dr Seda Gürses is an Associate Professor at TU Delft and an affiliate at KU Leuven. Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies, privacy engineering, as well as questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
Keywords
Health Securitization, Algorithms, Big Tech, Mobile Technology, Privacy
Many poor countries sign trade agreements with the desperate hope of attracting investment from their wealthy counterparts. However, these agreements, or treaties, tend to have some very problematic clauses, which often lead to trouble down the road. Investors have used these treaties to sue countries for any actions, such as changes in policy, that they perceive to be a threat to their projected profits. And they don’t sue in the national courts either, but in a special parallel system that seems to always favour the foreign investors. Countries have had to use billions in taxpayer money, to pay these investors, at the expense of their own development.
Our guest on this episode of the podcast, Luciana Ghiotto is a researcher at TNI on trade and Investment. Her Phd is in social sciences, and she has done a lot of research on these Free trade agreements. She is a researcher in CONICET-Argentina, and Professor of International Political Economy at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM). Ms Ghiotto is also a member of ATTAC Argentina and coordinator of the Assembly Argentina Better Without Free Trade Agreements.
Image source: B.S. Halpern (T. Hengl; D. Groll) / Wikimedia Commons
For a while now, the mantra “trade not aid” has dictated how the overdeveloped countries of the Global North engage with their less wealthy counterparts. The logic being that trade is more dignified than aid, and leads to longer lasting change.
However, to anyone who has been paying attention, the way global trade is set up may actually be one of the reasons these countries remain poor. The playing field is far from level, and there are multiple mechanisms that work in concert to ensure it remains that way. To try and understand how the global trade system works, and to find out what can be changed, we had a series of conversations with some experts. In all these conversations, we aimed to understand how the current global trade system came to be, how it works, and how we can make it more equitable, just, and fair.
In this episode, we wanted to understand exactly what the WTO is, where did it come from in the first place, and why does it have the influence it has?
Our guest, Alexandra Strickner, studied economics in Vienna and is co-founder of ATTAC Austria. Alexandra has decades of experience working in Civil Society around issues of globalization, EU trade policy and Economic alternatives.
Image source: B.S. Halpern (T. Hengl; D. Groll) / Wikimedia Commons
For a while now, the mantra “trade not aid” has dictated how the overdeveloped countries of the Global North engage with their less wealthy counterparts. The logic being that trade is more dignified than aid, and leads to longer lasting change.
However, to anyone who has been paying attention, the way global trade is set up may actually be one of the reasons these countries remain poor. The playing field is far from level, and there are multiple mechanisms that work in concert to ensure it remains that way. To try and understand how the global trade system works, and to find out what can be changed, we had a series of conversations with some experts. In all these conversations, we aimed to understand how the current global trade system came to be, how it works, and how we can make it more equitable, just, and fair.
In today’s episode, the first of the series, we speak to Grieve Chelwa, who is an economist, about how the global trade system particularly affects African countries. Grieve is the director of research at the Institute on race power and politics at the New school in New York City.
In upcoming episodes, we will delve deeper into the history of the World Trade Organization, we will look at how global trade as it is currently done contributes to climate change, we will explore how Global North countries can change the way they engage with their less wealthy counterparts, and we will zoom in on investor state dispute settlement, a particularly insidious mechanism that makes it difficult for countries to decouple themselves from an exploitative trade system that stifles their economic growth.
Image source: B.S. Halpern (T. Hengl; D. Groll) / Wikimedia Commons
On Monday, 1 February, Myanmar’s military ended the country's decade-long experiment with democracy by launching a coup against the most popular political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and its leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Now Myanmar’s people are on the streets, demanding the release of their leaders and the restoration of the 2020 election results. Many are also calling for the country’s 2008 constitution to be annulled and rewritten, as it explicitly acknowledges the military’s leading role in Myanmar’s politics. The military has responded with violence and used all means at its disposal to quash the protests, including the killing of protestors. But away from the news headlines what exactly is going on in Myanmar? How are we to understand the events that began when the military tanks rolled in front of the parliament on 1 February 2021? Myanmar’s political history is complex. There is no shortage of explainer videos, timelines and quick primers, but for those who have not been following the story closely over the years, it can be difficult to get a handle on what is going on. Here at the State of Power podcast we examine the ways coercive military power functions, how it mutates, how it is connected to other forms of power that shape the world around us. To help us understand events in Myanmar, we reached out to today’s guest on the program. Sai Sam Kham is an activist and scholar who left Myanmar in 2019 to begin his PHD studies in Land politics, food systems and climate change linked to Myanmar, at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague. Before he left his home country, Sai Sam was the executive director of Metta Development Foundation, an NGO that focuses on assisting communities that have been ravaged by years of internal conflict.
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Image Source: Ninjastrikers/Wikimedia
Music: Aztec Sun Band/ In the name of everyone.
On 24 February 2022, to considerable shock, Russia launched a large scale invasion of Ukraine. This was a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that has been ongoing, particularly since 2014.
In this podcast we want to find out what Ukrainians involved in its social movements are thinking about the conflict. Where do they think the war is going? What are their thoughts about the apparent rifts in the global left response? What should solidarity look like?
The State of Power podcast spoke to Denys Gorbach and Denis Pilash, who are both activists on the editorial board of the left Commons journal that explores and analyses Ukraine’s economy, politics, history and culture.
Image source: Markus Spiske/Unsplash License
Keywords:
Ukraine
Putin
Russia
Zelensky
Governments around the world have used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers. Populations have been divided on the basis of race and class into those deserving of protection and those perceived as risky and to be controlled.
Migrants, refugees, precarious workers, and racialized groups have faced vulnerability and repression. Many Western liberals, nevertheless, seem to wish for governments to be tougher in enforcing measures. In this fascinating discussion, Eda Seyhan lays out why an abolitionist analysis of official pandemic responses is essential and what an alternative approach would look like.
Eda Seyhan is an international human rights lawyer and researcher, focused on policing, national security and racial justice, and Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
When the word security is mentioned, images of men in uniform, perhaps carrying guns and in armoured cars, come to mind. How did we end up in a place where security is understood in the narrow terms of policing, and inevitably leads to racism? Why does this kind of security fail to make a large part of the population feel safer? And can we imagine a society where my security is not the opposite of your security?
In this thought-provoking conversation, Arun Kundnani speaks with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò about the destructive intersection of racial capitalism and global security, which constitute each other. They discuss how racial hierarchy is fundamentally a hierarchy in security, who benefits from keeping this hierarchy untouched, and how the concept of collaborative security can help us overcome this hierarchy.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a frequent writer on issues of climate justice, racism, and colonialism, you may also remember him as a guest from a previous episode on this podcast. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
Keywords:
Security, terrorism, militarism, racism, racial capitalism.
We are in a climate crisis. About this there seems to be broad consensus. But, there is more and more divergence around what must be done to stop it. As COP26 came around, we’ve seen more and more supposed solutions to the Climate crisis gaining attention.
But a closer look reveals that many of the ideas proffered as ways out of the climate emergency are merely duds, fancy ways to give the impression of progress while business continues as usual. Just as we cannot expect mosquitoes to cure malaria, we cannot expect the people that created the crisis to be the ones to solve it.
At TNI, we have been tackling the problem from multiple perspectives, drawing from decades of research and analysis, and leaning on the knowledge and experiences of movements across the world. We believe that the ideas that come from the ground up, from indigenous communities, from peasant farmers, fisher peoples, and workers across the world have the capacity to bring about a totally different way of being, a different humanity, with a different relationship to each other, and to the planet.
In today’s episode, we speak with colleagues and associates, to draw out what we think are the approaches that will pull us back from the edge of the cliff. From radical cutting edge analysis that exposes the problems with the global neoliberal system, to new ideas about how to think about public services, to alternative approaches to food policy, trade and energy. These are ideas that we believe can literally save the planet.
Be sure to check out our climate reading list for all the material mentioned in this episode.
Keywords: Climate, COP26, Just Transition
For the last two years, Lebanon has been witnessing an acute multi-dimensional crisis that has left more than half the population living below the poverty line. Many families are struggling to survive. Some say that the massive economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the August 2020 Beirut explosions and instability have all combined to create conditions even worse than they were during the 1975-1990 civil war.
In October 2019, Lebanon also saw a mass uprising, rejecting corruption and sectarian politics, and demanding change. However, the uprising short-lived for various reasons, including the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 that halted mobilisations and protests.
To add to all these huge difficulties and challenges, the Lebanese people find themselves in the midst of a thorny and complex geopolitical situation that has significant bearings on their internal politics. The actions of players such as Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, the Gulf monarchies, Western imperialist powers and Russia have had and continue to have considerable consequences on political developments, not just in Lebanon but in the entire Arab region.
To help us understand the situation in Lebanon, the Coordinator of TNI’s North Africa Program, Hamza Hamouchene, sat down to have a chat with Hicham Safieddine.
Hicham is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. He is a scholar of political economy and intellectual history (19th and 20th centuries) with a particular emphasis on the MENA region. He is currently researching financial (de)colonization on a global scale, the history of economic thought, as well as modern Arab and Islamic thought, with an emphasis on the age of anti-colonial national liberation in the mid-20th century.
In addition to his academic research and teaching, he is the co-founder of e-zines Al-Akhbar English and The Legal Agenda’s English Edition. His press writings have appeared in The Toronto Star, Al-Jazeera English, The Monthly Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Middle East Eye, among others.Image source: NicolasGaron/Wikimedia
Keywords:
Lebanon, Crisis, Economic Crisis, Debt, Middle East, Arab Uprisings
The Tonga people of Zimbabwe and Zambia, who call themselves the river people, speak of the pain of being separated from their relatives, who all of a sudden were made foreigners, stuck on the opposite side of a dam, in another country. All this, so that a massive dam, the largest man-made lake in Africa, could be built. The Kariba dam, which has one of the biggest hydropower stations in Africa, came at a great price.
Fast-forward just one generation later, in a case of history repeating itself, though this time under a post-independence government, another injustice of similar proportions appears imminent. The Zimbabwe government has struck a deal for another mega energy project. This time, a coal thermal power plant in Sengwa, Gokwe. The Sengwa coalfield, which extends into Binga, has an estimated 538 million tonnes of coal reserves, and if a power plant is constructed, it will vastly change the lives of another generation of Tonga people. And not for the better.
In Zimbabwe, power cuts are nothing to talk about, and it is quite obvious that there is need for an energy solution. However, our guest on the program makes the case that building a 3 billion dollar power plant, financed with a loan from China, is not the solution to Zimbabwe’s energy woes. Not only is it a tragedy for the Tonga people, but also for the environment, for public health, and for long term sustainability and the country’s adherence to its climate change commitments.
Melania Chiponda is a Zimbabwean feminist activist and researcher. She is a land defender, and has been at the forefront of battles against extractivism in Zimbabwe and in the Southern African region in general. In her work with Just Associates Southern Africa (JASS), she has been involved in feminist movement building and feminist popular education around the extractives sector. She speaks about her work in Binga, in particular about the resistance to the proposed power plant.
Image source: Stodtmeister /Wikimedia
Keywords:
power, energy, resistance, global campaign, transnational corporations, China, coal, renewable, just transition.
Twenty years on, America has chaotically pulled out of the war in Afghanistan with nothing much to show for it, and the war on terror appears to have achieved very little, except to cause more terror and to bring America’s violence to more parts of the world.
In this fascinating conversation, Arun Kundnani interviews Deepa Kumar, who traces the longer historical roots of the War on Terror and how it racialised and targeted Arab and Muslim communities well before 9/11.
Deepa Kumar is the author of the recently published book, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: Twenty Years after 9/11. Arun Kundnani is a TNI associate and author of the The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror.
Keywords:
terror, War, George Bush, 9/11,
About a decade ago, Tunisia was the birthplace of the so-called Arab spring, when Tunisians toppled the decades long dictator Ben Ali, heralding momentous changes across North Africa and beyond. To some extent, the Tunisian experience seems to be an exception in the region, because the country did not descend into the chaos and violence that have affected its neighboring countries since.
However, many argue that the popular aspirations of the Tunisian people have been subverted and their demands for dignity, national sovereignty, and social justice have been sidelined by the same disastrous economic policies that led the people to rise up and revolt in the first place.
Fast-forward to 25 July 2021. After a day of protests across the country, Tunisia’s president Kais Saied announced that he was invoking article 80 of the 2014 constitution, which allows him to instate a state of emergency, following an imminent threat. He sacked the prime minister, closed the parliament for 30 days, and revoked the immunity of members of parliament and declared himself prosecutor general- all this while being backed by the military.
The reactions were swift, especially from western media and pundits. There were headlines about the collapse of democracy in Tunisia, amid assertions that the coup is channeling the country towards dictatorship and turmoil. Saied has been described as a Trump-like populist, and of being inspired by the Egyptian scenario where Sisi orchestrated a coup after popular mobilisations in 2013, which pushed Egypt into a much worse form of dictatorship. We even saw the re-emergence of some orientalist and racist stereotypes about the region of the like, “maybe Tunisians are not yet fit for democracy after all.” Yet many in Tunisia were celebrating these developments, seeing them as corrective measures to the revolution and the burgeoning democracy.
Is this a coup or not, and if so, is it a military reactionary coup, or is it a progressive coup to correct the revolutionary process? Is this a useful question to ask? What are the dangers and opportunities emerging from such developments, and what would a progressive agenda look like in this context?
Our guest, Heythem Guesmi, is a Tunisian researcher and activist based in Tunis. His focus of work is around agrarian questions and land struggles. He currently works with the North African Food Sovereignty Network. He also hosts a podcast on Tunisian affairs, called The Arrogant Monkey.
Heythem is in conversation with Hamza Hamouchene, the coordinator of our North Africa program at TNI. This conversation is part of a series looking at the Arab Uprisings, a decade afterwards.
Listen:
What makes a Revolution? The Arab Uprisings a Decade on: In Conversation with Jamie Allinson
Image source: M.Rais/Wikimedia
Keywords:
Arab Spring, Tunisia revolution, Mohamed Bouazizi
About a decade ago, parts of the Arab world experienced great upheaval. The events that took place, and which continue to unfold to the present day, are not easily explained. In fact, to this day, and in light of subsequent uprisings, there is an ongoing attempt to fully understand what it is exactly that happened during what has been called the Arab Spring. Can these events be called revolutions? What is a revolution, and how does one determine whether it is successful or not?
To tackle these questions and more, TNI’s state of power Podcast presents Jamie Allinson, who is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University, an activist and trade unionist, and author of the upcoming book: The age of counter revolution: states and revolutions in the Middle East. Jamie is in conversation with Anthropologist, internet researcher, anti-racist campaigner, Miriyam Aouragh.
This conversation is part of a series looking at the Arab Uprisings, a decade afterwards.
Watch the webinar: The Arab Spring lives on: Uprisings in times of pandemic
Watch the webinar: The Arab uprisings a decade on: Egypt and Tunisia
Listen to the podcast: Algeria's popular movement - the Hirak: A Conversation with Brahim Rouabah
Keywords
Arab Spring, revolution, North Africa, MENA Region, Counter revolution
Image Source: AlMahra/Wikimedia
The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated the already existing deep structural problems of corporate and increasingly globalized food systems. A radical, human rights-based and agroecological transformation of food systems is more urgent than ever.
As the United Nations gears itself to hold the 2021 version of the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), activists and analysts are sounding the alarm that this year’s event is not building on the legacy of past World Food Summits, which resulted in the creation of innovative, inclusive and participatory global food governance mechanisms anchored in human rights, such as the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (the CFS).
This year’s Food Systems Summit follows a strong multi-stakeholder approach, which puts on equal footing governments, corporations, other private sector actors, philanthropies, scientists, and NGOs.
Critics argue that, while the FSS organizers aim to create an illusion of inclusiveness, it remains unclear who is in control of taking decisions and by what procedures those decisions are made. Our guest on the podcast, Paula Gioia, is a peasant farmer, a beekeeper based in Germany. She works on a community farm, and is part of the European Coordination of La Via Campesina.
La Via Campesina is an international movement bringing together millions of peasants, small and medium size farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. Built on a strong sense of unity, and solidarity between these groups, it defends peasant agriculture and strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture that destroys social relations and nature.
La Via Campesina believes that this year’s summit is opening up UN processes to the private sector. It is privileging the corporate elites, and the process behind it has been opaque, exclusive and has ignored the autonomy of People’s Movements.
Paula explains what kind of 'food regime' or 'food system' is needed today, right now, and how we can bring it about. What are the main obstacles today to making fully real and accessible for everyone a genuine and meaningful 'human right to food'?
Website of the People's Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit
:https://www.foodsystems4people.org/
International Peasants Movement: https://viacampesina.org/en/
Image source: Shade Cacao Plantation, Ixcacao Mayan Chocolate/Mvfarrell
Keywords:
food summit, World food summit, Food Aid Organisation FAO, Peasants, Farmers
If you listen to the news and read the papers, it would be easy to be convinced that the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon future energy system is “already underway”. Advocates say that renewable energy is already cost-competitive - with costs of generation falling below that of fossil fuels. According to them, the transition is all but "inevitable". Yes, we may still be using fossil fuels, but only as a temporary measure as we all move to cleaner energy. We are probably past peak use of coal, and with the daily improvements to our capacity for wind and solar energy, clear skies are just a matter of time . Here at the State of Power podcast, we are very concerned with the state of power, because hardly anything has a greater impact on the future of our planet, than the ways in which we generate and consume energy. Our guest on the program believes that some of the optimism with regards to renewable sources of energy is ill-placed, and that we have to face the reality that we have a lot more to do before we can even begin to talk about a transition. The following conversation is centred around an upcoming paper that Sean has written together with John Treat. In the paper called The Energy Transition Myth, the authors look at the numbers, and use them to challenge many of the claims that we are well on the way towards an energy transition.
Image: Kenueone/Wikimedia
Read more:
Energy democracy and public ownership
Eskom Transformed: Achieving a Just Energy Transition for South Africa
Keywords:
Energy, Energy Democracy, Public ownership, Renewables, Parastatals
From a human rights perspective, the global vaccine distribution problem would for example aim to get the COVID vaccine to communities and peoples in the Global South quickly, safely, at low or no cost without political-, class- or gender-discrimination. It would lead toward a solution that combines a WTO waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-related products and processes, maybe a General Assembly declaration that health is a global public good, a multilateral global humanitarian relief fund underwritten by rich country governments, and an international distribution system directed by the World Health Assembly.
But that is not the vision that has prevailed.
Instead, what we have is COVAX, a multistakeholder group that represents the vision and goals of a World Economic Forum (WEF) or a Gates Foundation perspective. Their aim is to get the COVID vaccine to communities and peoples in the Global South without disrupting the global pharmaceutical market, with a mechanism that circumvents long standing multilateral humanitarian relief systems while steering the vaccines to preferred allies in the Global South. Today on the podcast, we’re taking a closer look at COVAX, the program touted as the solution to the global vaccine distribution problem. Our guest on the podcast argues that COVAX is actually a mechanism through which corporate interests have hijacked UN processes and used them to safeguard their profits, with little regard to the attendant social costs. Harris Gleckman is a sociologist who has spent much of his career at the United Nations and has a detailed understanding of corporate global governance across multiple issues. His work at the UN and his ongoing research at the university of Boston in Massachusetts and also with the Brussels based Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability gives him deep insight into how the UN might be restructured to better handle bigger crises in the health, environment and social areas.
Read Harris Gleckman's report here.
For more about the corporate capture of global governance and what we can do about it, see this resource.
Image source: USAID in Africa/wikimedia commons
Keywords:
Vaccine, Vaccination, Covax, COVID-19, Multistakeholderism, Corporate Capture, Corporate Power
The unprecedented movement to #defundthepolice has brought a critical debate about the role of a powerful coercive state agency into the mainstream of political discussion. It has raised the question about how the police functions everywhere and whose interests they serve. But the police are not the only coercive arm of the state. What about the military, homeland security, prisons, the intelligence agencies? Isn’t it time to put those agencies also under the spotlight and examine whose interests they serve? For ten years, TNI has published a yearly State of Power report to examine who has power in the world today, how they use their power, and how those committed to social and environmental justice should respond. Most of our editions have focused on corporate power, responding to the trend of ever more concentrated corporate power and the way it has shaped economic policy and had massive social and cultural impacts. Yet alongside the rise of corporations, the last few decades have also seen a significant strengthening of coercive state forces, especially in the wake of 9/11. Military spending has doubled, world prison numbers have increased 24%, and border agencies have grown exponentially. State security forces not only escaped the post 2008 austerity crunch that afflicted nearly every other state agency, they often boomed without restraint. The rise of surveillance and data technologies has provided many of these agencies with capacities to monitor and control populations that were inconceivable in the last century. How are we to understand the history, trajectory, current state and likely future of coercive state power? How does it differ in countries in the Global North and South? How does geopolitics and the rise of Big Tech shape coercive state power? What alternatives exist that can return power to the people? To help us tackle these questions and more, we invited two prominent thinkers with deep and interesting perspectives on these issues. Achille Mbembe is a groundbreaking philosopher, who has profoundly woken people to the deadly costs of racial capitalism over four decades of work, and Olufemi Taiwo a thinker and prolific writer whose theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition and anti-colonial thought. Both our guests are very public philosophers, and have written extensively on the intersections of racial capitalism, climate justice and colonialism.
In this wide ranging conversation, they help us to understand modern day coercive state power, tracing its roots in colonialism and examining the way it has shaped our contemporary security institutions.
Read the transcript
Read all the essays from State of Power 2021
Keywords:
Coercive Power, security, borders, arms trade, state violence, Police, Policing, national security
Despite the political and institutional changes that occurred with Africa's decolonisation process in the second half of the 20th century, many colonial constructs remain to this very day. One of the most obvious and egregious symbols of these continuities is no doubt the CFA franc. The acronym of this currency created in 1945 by the French provisional government originally stood for franc of the French colonies in Africa. It still circulates in eight countries in West Africa and six countries in Central Africa, and its imperial founding principles haven’t really changed.
For a deeper understanding of the CFA Franc, we spoke to Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese development economist who lives in Dakar, and works with the Rosa Luxembourg foundation. Ndongo recently published a book, written together with Fanny Pigeaud, titled: Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story. Through an exploration of the genesis of the currency and an examination of how the economic system works, the book outlines how colonialism persists in many African countries.
Keywords:
Finance, Currency, colonialism, independence, decolonial, France
The present reeks of the past. The world we live in is not the result of some natural law. It was created by people, like you and I, humans who walked, breathed, ate and drank. The contemporary world is a result of people making decisions, decisions that would give them more power, access to more wealth, and grant them the influence to safeguard their wealth and power. If they could make it, you and I can unmake it.
This is the third and final episode of our three part series, in which we look at how Europe and its offshoots came to be dominant globally. In the first episode we looked at Racism and how it was used to justify European imperialism. In the second, we took a closer look at how colonialism unfolded. In this final episode, Shaun Matsheza continues his conversation with Roger van Zwanenberg, the founder of pluto books, an independent publisher of radical, left‐wing non‐fiction books. Roger has written a new global history, called Wealth and Power, which he is sharing in a series of blogs. Roger’s work traces the roller coaster story of the past 500 years or so of human history, focusing on how Europe and its offshoots amassed great wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the world.
In this episode, we explore how wealth and power manifest in the contemporary world. How does power play out today?
Julius Malema Oxford Union Address
Harlot's Ghost
Keywords:
decolonial, colonialism, history, United Nations, African Union, World Bank, IMF
17 April is the “International Day of Peasant Struggles”. One may be inclined to think that such a day has very little significance for places like Europe and other parts of the developed world, but one would be mistaken. Struggles over farmland are a very real reality in Europe, although the nature of these struggles differ across the continent, with main differences being between Eastern and Western Europe.
There are threats of land grabbing by large transnational companies and investors. Farmland is converted to other uses (infrastructure, energy projects, urban sprawl for example.). More generally, market forces make it very difficult to make a living as a small, independent operator who wants to produce food locally rather than for the world market in an ecological way.
In this episode, we get to hear inspiring stories from those who are farming in order to support life sustaining economies in line with principles of agroecology, food sovereignty, and community supported agriculture. Our host for this episode, Sylvia Kay, speaks to our guests, Attila Szocs, Jolke de Moel and Samson Hart. They also talk about the role of spirituality, feminism, and the legacy of communism in European land and farming.
Image source: FranHogan/Wikimedia
Roots of Resilience Policy Report
Since February 2019 (2 years ago), the people of Algeria have waged an inspiring and historic revolt. Millions took to the streets united in their rejection of the ruling system, demanding radical democratic change. They chanted ‘They must all go!’ and ‘The country is ours and we’ll do what we wish’ – two slogans that have become emblematic of this new Algerian revolution. The popular movement or Hirak (movement in Arabic) succeeded in overthrowing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in early April 2019 after six weeks of protests. The weekly protests continued every Friday since and only in March 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic forcing a lockdown, did this mass movement see a temporary halt of around 10 months. But the Hirak has come back and it resumed its weekly protests against the military dictatorship.
To talk about all of this and give some analysis about the motivations, objectives, challenges and the horizons of the uprising in Algeria, our guest Brahim Rouabah agreed to chat to us.
This is the second episode of our three part series in which we look at how Europe came to be the dominant global power. In the first episode we looked at Racism and how it was used to justify European imperialism. As the world seeks a decolonial future, it is good to remind ourselves of what colonialism really was, and in this episode we take a closer look at how colonialism actually unfolded.
Shaun Matsheza continues his conversation with Roger van Zwanenberg, who is the founder of Pluto books, an independent publisher of radical, left‐wing non‐fiction books. He’s written a new global history, called Wealth and Power, which he is sharing in a series of blogs. Roger’s work traces the roller coaster story of the past 500 years or so of human history, focusing on how Europe and its offshoots amassed great wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the world.
Image source Walter Crane: Wikimedia
Featured podcast: Erlendy Cuero Bravo: A vision for community
Societies the world over are under extreme stress and we are only beginning to guess the long term social and economic effects of the Covid19 pandemic. However, it is already clear that there is a gendered dimension to Covid’s direct and indirect socioeconomic impacts.
Here at the State of power Podcast, we’re interested in how patriarchal power operates, how it mutates, and how it shapes the world around us. The theme for International women’s day on March 8 2021 is “Choose to challenge”, and our guest on the podcast today works with an organization that has chosen to stand up in support of women’s rights in Indonesia, and to challenge the oppression of women’s voices.
Arie Kurniawaty works with the feminist organization Solidaritas Perempuan, in Indonesia. Solidaritas Perempuan works with peasant women, fisherwomen, women migrant workers, and any other marginalized groups of women in Indonesia. Arie tells of some of the ways women in Indonesia's fisher communities have been adapting to a world that is far from the norm they were used to.
Photo credit: Thibault Josse
Resources: * TNI Webinar on Feminist Realities: Transforming democracy in times of crisis * Webinar with Nancy Fraser : The Left Reflects on the Global Pandemic * TNI Longread on Gender and Fisheries in Indonesia * TNI report on Marine Spatial Planning * Solidaritas Perempuan website
Here at the State of power podcast we are interested in how power functions, how it mutates, and how it shapes the world around us. We believe that, if we are to understand the present, we need to put it in its proper historical context and try to understand the historical processes that have led us here. Our guest on the podcast today, Roger van Zwanenberg is the founder of Pluto books, an independent publisher of radical, left‐wing non‐fiction books. He’s written a new global history, called Wealth and Power, which he is also sharing in a series of blogs. Roger’s book traces the roller coaster story of the past 500 years or so of human history, focusing on how Europe and its offshoots amassed great wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the world.
Meant for popular reading, the book focuses on how we have created today’s world, which we all take for granted. Roger insists that the world we live in is unique in world history. He ponders the question of How Europe, a small and rather insignificant part of the world in 1500, became so powerful and dominant across the globe by 1900, and he brings out the mechanisms that were used to establish European dominance.
In this episode, the first of three, we discuss the beginnings of racism, and how it has shaped the world today.
Image source Walter Crane: Wikimedia
You can find the Exalt Podcast here.
Here at the State of Power Podcast we are concerned with how power functions, how it mutates, and how it reproduces itself, and our guest on this episode deals explicitly with this.
Nyasha Mboti is an Associate Professor at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein South Africa, and is the founder of a new field of study that he terms ‘Apartheid Studies’. He is soon to publish the first of four volumes outlining the scope of the new field. He graciously agreed when we asked him to sit with us and to explain what exactly Apartheid Studies is.
Nyasha's Book will be available on major online book stores at the end of February. To get in contact with him, you can subscribe to the Apartheid Studies YouTube channel, and visit the website www.apartheidstudies.com. You can also follow the Instagram account "Apartheid Studies" and the ApartheidStudi1 account on Twitter
Music credit: Pax Afro/Zimbabwe
Image source: Annette Kurylo (Wikimedia)
Chihiro Geuzenbroek and Anna Bissila are both climate activists, and the co-organizers for the expo: People-Powered Movements versus Shell. An exhibition that explores the fight for justice that has been fought from Indonesia to Nigeria, from Curaçao to South Africa, and from Alaska to Groningen. Through installations, audio-stories, photography and relics of activisms, the exhibition invites the public to learn from the people who have shown resistance and made calls for decolonial climate justice.
Link to exhibition: https://www.ndsm.nl/en/event/people-powered-movement-vs-shell-exhibition/
image Credit: People-Powered Movements versus Shell
In this episode, Hamza Hamouchene discusses his report titled: Extractivism and Resistance in North Africa, which documents several cases of natural resource extraction which take the form of brutal "accumulation by dispossession," degrading environments and ecosystems through the privatisation and commodification of land and water. The report shows that these extractive activities have also been met with new waves of resistance and the entrance of new social actors onto the scene, demanding that wealth generated in resource projects be shared equitably in society.
Are these new actors mainly motivated by environmental concerns, or are they fundamentally anti-systemic, seeking to undermine the basis of the capitalist extractive economy? Are these passing episodes of resistance, or do they represent a new development in the historical trajectory of class struggle in North Africa?
If we’re going to stop the climate catastrophe that is unfolding, we will need a radical overhaul of how many things work. Our financial system has played a big role in leading us to the brink of collapse, and must be completely overhauled if we are to stand a chance. What does a fair and responsible financial system look like? How can we shift power to democratically accountable public enterprises that will move us more rapidly towards a fossil free world? Further, in the wake of the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, how can changing finance and how it works help us to power a Just Transition?
In this episode of the State of Power podcast, we speak to Oscar Reyes, who is an associate fellow on the Climate policy program of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. He’s written a book called “Change Finance, Not the Climate”, which looks at how we can change the financial system to address the climate emergency.
The far right is on the rise. The rhetoric of anger and resentment is emanating from personalities like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte and Viktor Orban and is captivating and mobilizing large numbers of people. In an increasing number of countries, the extreme right has already captured the government or is on the threshold of power.
While this swift turn of events has shocked or surprised many in the North, the extreme right’s seizure of power is not an uncommon event in the South. In Counterrevolution, Walden Bello deconstructs the challenge from the far right by deploying what he calls the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution and harnesses the methods of comparative history and comparative sociology.
In this wide ranging interview, Walden Bello outlines the key ideas behind his book, **Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right
https://www.tni.org/en/event/counterrevolutionary-movements**
A great global panel of activists, social movement leaders and thinkers discuss how to make this pandemic a turning point towards system change that we need not just to deliver social justice but increasingly to defend our very survival. The very insightful conversation examined what can we learn from previous major global mobilisations, how can we build cross-sectoral and intersectional movements and what strategies and tactics we need to confront entrenched corporate power and authoritarian governments?
Panellists:
- Thenjiwe McHarris, Movement for Black Lives (USA)
* Hakima Abbas, Assocation for Women's Rights in Development (Senegal)
* Rafeef Ziadah, Palestinian performance poet/Professor at SOAS
* Josua Mata, Secretary General, SENTRO trade union, Philippines
* Vrinda Grover, Human rights lawyer, India
Moderator: Hilary Wainwright, author of A New Politics from the Left (2018)
This webinar was organised by Transnational Institute with Focus on the Global South and co-sponsored by Alternative Information Development Centre.
COVID-19 has become another touchstone for today’s deeply entrenched politics of militarised borders and anti-migrant racism.
This webinar explored the trajectory and globalization of border militarization and anti-migrant racism across the world, the history, ideologies and actors that have shaped it, the pillars and policies that underpin the border industrial complex, the resistance of migrants, refugees and activists, and the shifting dynamics within this pandemic.
Panellists:
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Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013)
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Jille Belisario, Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe (TMP-E)
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Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders (2020), Storming the Wall (2019) and TNI's report More than A Wall (2019)
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Kavita Krishnan, All India Progressive Women's Association (AIPWA). TBC
This webinar was hosted by TNI and co-sponsored by Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC), Focus on the Global South, Asia-Europe People's Forum (AEPF), Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe (TMP-E), and Statewatch.
Prior to the pandemic, popular opposition to the power of Big Tech was growing. Yet, in the COVID-19 moment, Big Tech has emerged stronger than ever. Dependence on digital platforms has delivered record profits for the likes of Amazon (and Zoom on which this webinar relies), while states are rolling out new apps with corporate partners in the name of a health emergency with almost no consideration of privacy or human rights. A new digital economy opportunism is deepening faultlines of inequality, while systems of surveillance are being normalised that will invariably be deployed along class and race lines.
This webinar explores who owns our data and why it matters, the relevance of data extraction for countries in the Global South, and the impact of COVID-19. What strategies, structures and institutions are needed at national and international levels to confront Big Tech and reclaim our data commons? What opportunities are available in this time of a pandemic to advance digital justice?
Panellists
• Anita Gurumurthy, Founding member and director of IT for Change, India
• Ben Tarnoff, Tech worker, writer, and founding editor of Logic magazine, US.
• Caroline Nevejan, Chief Science Officer for City of Amsterdam
• Nanjira Sambuli, Researcher and advocacy strategist, Kenya
• Vahini Naidu, Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, South Africa
Ten years ago, the Arab uprisings were celebrated as world changing events. The emancipatory experience was so contagious that people were inspired all over the world. Occupiers from London to Wall Street and the Indignados were proud to “Walk like an Egyptian”.
The revolutionary process that has swept North Africa and West Asia, driven by demands for bread, freedom, dignity and social justice, has seen ups and downs, gains and setbacks, which materialized in a liberal democratic transition in Tunisia and bloody counter-revolutions and imperialist interventions in other countries. This led some pundits to pronounce a death sentence on the so-called “Arab Spring”.
A decade on, this protracted revolutionary process is well into the second wave of revolt, triggered by the same features of governance and political economy that shaped the first wave. This time, it started from Sudan in December 2018 and spread to Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon. 2019 saw massive popular movements erupting onto the political stage, demanding radical change and achieving some historical gains.
However, these movements find themselves pitted against entrenched authoritarian and counter-revolutionary forces that do everything to crush and bury them, including in times of COVID19. However, these have not said their last word yet and there are already signs that protests will resume after the pandemic subsides.
Panelists:
Muzan Alneel – Sudanese engineer, political activist and blogger. Brahim Rouabah - Co-founder of Algerian Solidarity Campaign. PhD candidate in Political Science at CUNY. Rima Majed - an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB) Zahra Ali (Iraq): is a sociologist and feminist based at Rutgers University and author of "Women and Gender in Iraq".
The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments to release an unprecedented number of people from prison and curb new admissions to prevent deadly outbreaks in prisons and other detention centres. The pandemic has exposed the societal costs of mass incarceration, while the quick actions taken by governments casts doubt on the necessity of imprisonment for those released. This webinar looks at the drivers of mass incarceration worldwide, sharing analysis on the impact of COVID-19, the negative impacts of imprisonment exposed by the pandemic, and the challenges and opportunities it provides for sustainable reform. It focuses particularly on the role of punitive drug policies in driving up prison numbers.
Activists and researchers from different regions will discuss and share strategies by civil society to reverse this long-standing trend of mass incarceration as a response to crime. Panellists
• Olivia Rope, Director of Policy and International Advocacy, Penal Reform International
• Isabel Pereira, Coordinator of the Drug Policy area at Dejusticia, and member of Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law (CEDD).
• Sabrina Mahtani from Advocaid Sierra Leone
• Maidina Rahmawati, Institute of Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR), Indonesia
• Andrea James, Founder and Exec Director, and Justine Moore, Director of Training, National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, USA
This webinar is co-sponsored by IDPC (International Drug Policy Consortium), WOLA (Washington office on Latin America) and Penal Reform International.
An inspiring global panel of feminist thinkers and activists discuss how we can collectively reorganise, shift power and pivot towards building transformative feminist realities that can get us out of the worsening health, climate and capitalist crises.
This webinar explores feminist analyses of the crisis and the way the pandemic intersects with patriarchy, corporate power and a global division of labour that is both gendered and racialised. What can we learn from the feminist practices and measures that are already being deployed to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?
Panellists:
-Tithi Bhattacharya: Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University
-Laura Roth, Lecturer of legal and political philosophy at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona and member of Minim Municipalist Observatory
-Awino Okech, Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
-Khara Jabola-Carolus of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women
Support for public services and limits on private profit is at an all-time high in the wake of the pandemic. How do we ensure this prioritisation of public needs and goods becomes permanent? What are the best models of democratic and participatory public services?
This webinar shares some of the most visionary ideas and campaigns emerging across the world at local, state and national levels advancing a new vision of a public future. The speakers tackle the question: How can we build a broad alliance between social movements and trade unions to ensure there is ‘no going back’.
Panellists: * Rosa Pavanelli, General Secretary of the global union federation Public Services International (PSI)
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Philip Alston, outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
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Aderonke Ige, Our Water, Our Rights Campaign in Lagos / Environmental Rights Action /Friends of The Earth Nigeria
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Sulakshana Nandi, Co-chair, People's Health Movement Global (PHM Global)
As governments take action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and prevent economic collapse, big law firms are watching the virus too. Yet, their concern is not to save lives or the economy. Instead, the lawyers are urging big business to challenge the social and economic emergency measures that governments around the world have taken to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. 2600 investment protection agreements worldwide have opened the door for transnational companies to sue States for billions of dollars In a parallel corporate justice system called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). A new report, Cashing in on the Pandemic, takes a close look at how lawyers are preparing to sue states over COVID-19 measures.
Guests:
Pia Eberhadt (researcher with Corporate Europe Observatory)
Cecilia Olivet (researcher with TNI)
Image: Anastasya Eliseeva
How do we ensure that the economic response to COVID-19 also addresses existing crises, most of all the unfolding climate crisis? How do we build a truly Global Green New Deal that delivers transformation and justice especially in the Global South? This webinar features leading international activists and thinkers, bringing fresh new perspectives on how to embed just transition into our response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Panellists:
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Richard Kozul-Wright, Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, author of Transforming Economies: Making Industrial Policy Work for Growth, Jobs and Development
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Karin Nansen, chair of Friends of the Earth International, founding member of REDES – Friends of the Earth Uruguay
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Sandra van NIekerk, One Million Climate Jobs Campaign, South Africa
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Asad Rehman, Executive Director, War on Want. Co-organiser of Global Green New Deal Campaign.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed like never before the perils of governments handing over our right to health and life to corporations. The privatisation of our health has made millions of people vulnerable to infectious diseases and undermined the integrated public systems needed to coordinate an effective response. This webinar brings healthcare experts together with activists at the forefront of struggles for equitable universal public healthcare from across the globe. Panelists speak about the changes that will be needed in terms of access to medicines, the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare systems, and the global governance of health.
Organised by TNI and co-sponsored by AIDC, Focus on the Global South, Corporate Accountability International, People's Health Movement (PHM), Public Services International, Global Justice Now (GJN), RedLAM-Red Latinoamericana Acceso a Medicamentos, ABIA-Brazilian AIDS Interdisciplinary Association, and GTPI/Rebrip - Working Group on Intellectual Property.
Panellists:
• Susan George, President of the Transnational Institute and author of 'Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are Seizing Power' (2015).
• Kajal Bhardwaj, health and human rights lawyer, India
• Mark Heywood, Co-founder of Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa
• Baba Aye, Health Office, Public Services International (PSI)
• David Legge, People’s Health Movement representative
What are the likely global impacts of the economic fallout from the Coronavirus pandemic? What would a peoples' agenda look like? How might we be better prepared than in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis to put forward progressive solutions that address the immediate crisis as well as existing crises of poverty, inequality and environmental destruction?
Panellists: - Professor Jayati Ghosh, award-winning economist Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
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Quinn Slobodian, associate professor of history, Wellesley College. Author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018).
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Walden Bello, author of Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (2019) and Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (2013)
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Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Senior Research Fellow of Trade Collective, a thinktank in South Africa that works on international trade, globalisation, regional integration and feminist economics
A conversation between Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and agrarian justice activists from Myanmar, Palestine, Indonesia and Europe.
This episode explores how globalised industrial food systems set the scene for the emergence of COVID-19 and the structural connections between industrial agriculture, pathogens and precarious working conditions. It also explores the different realities people face right now, and how these impact ongoing struggles for more just food systems and societies.
Panelists: - Rob Wallace author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and co-author of Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm.
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Moayyad of Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), member organization of La Via Campesina in Palestine.
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Arie Kurniawaty of Indonesian feminist organization Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) which works with women in grassroots communities across the urban-rural spectrum.
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Sai Sam Kham of Metta Foundation in Myanmar.
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Paula Gioia, peasant farmer in Germany and member of the Coordination Committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina.
With Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017) as well as experts on public health systems and activists on the frontlines responding to the crisis in the Global South.
Images from Italy of the army unloading coffins, exhausted doctors and fearful citizens in ever more countries shocked the world and pushed even recalcitrant politicians into action.
But the real health disaster could still be ahead of us as the pandemic spreads in countries in the Global South, impoverished by decades of policies of neoliberal austerity, with weak public health systems and people already in highly precarious conditions. It will not be enough to respond at only a community or national level. How can social movements mobilise an internationalist response?
This episode examines authoritarian and repressive state responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, featuring the UN Special Rapporteur on Protecting Human Rights and other global experts and activists. In response to an unprecedented global health emergency, many states are rolling out measures from deploying armies and drones to control public space, to expanding digital control through facial recognition technology and tracker apps. What if these measures become permanent once the pandemic has subsided? What if health is repurposed as a national security issue? How do we ensure that COVID-19 doesn’t become the new 9/11 – a new milestone in authoritarian states of control?
This episode explores the political dimension of state responses, particularly the securitisation of COVID-19 through the expansion of powers for military, police, and security forces. Panellists explore how we can prevent these practices from being normalised and how to use our collective experiences of solidarity to construct a more just, democratic, and rights-centered world.
Panellists- Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism, University of Minnesota
Arun Kundnani, New York University, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain
María Paz Canales, Derechos Digitales (Digital Rights campaign), Chile Anuradha Chenoy, School of International Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, and author of 'Militarisation and Women in South Asia'
This episode is an extract from the first in our series of webinars focused on Covid-19, which featured a presentation by Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017), as well as contributions from experts on public health systems and activists on the frontlines responding to the crisis in the Global South. Images from Italy of the army unloading coffins, exhausted doctors and fearful citizens in ever more countries shocked the world and pushed even recalcitrant politicians into action.
But the real health disaster could still be ahead of us as the pandemic spreads in countries in the Global South, impoverished by decades of policies of neoliberal austerity, with weak public health systems and people already in highly precarious conditions. It will not be enough to respond at only a community or national level. How can social movements mobilise an internationalist response? Panellists: - Sonia Shah, award-winning investigative science journalist and author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017).
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Luis Ortiz Hernandez, public health professor in UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico. Expert on social and economic health inequities.
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Benny Kuruvilla, Head of India Office, Focus on the Global South, working closely with Forum For Trade Justice.
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Mazibuko Jara, Deputy Director, Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, helping to coordinate a national platform of civic organisations in South Africa to confront COVID-19.
This webinar, organised by Transnational Institute and co-sponsored by Alternative Information and Development Centre, South Africa and Focus on the Global South/Asia, is available in full:
www.tni.org/webinars
This episode is an extract from the third edition in our weekly webinar series, which featured a dialogue between Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and agrarian justice activists from Myanmar, Palestine, Indonesia and Europe. The webinar explored how globalised industrial food systems set the scene for the emergence of COVID-19, and examined the structural connections between industrial agriculture, pathogens and precarious working conditions. It also brought out the different realities people face in light of the pandemic, and how these impact ongoing struggles for more just food systems and societies.
Panellists: * Rob Wallace author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and co-author of Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm. * Moayyad Bsharat of Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), member organization of La Via Campesina in Palestine. * Arie Kurniawaty of Indonesian feminist organization Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) which works with women in grassroots communities across the urban-rural spectrum. * Sai Sam Kham of Metta Foundation in Myanmar. * Paula Gioia, peasant farmer in Germany and member of the Coordination Committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina.
Watch the full webinar:
www.tni.org/webinars
Photo: Peasant working in the field / Credit: Dinkum/Wikimedia Commons.
Two decades ago, and without significant public debate, an obscure international investment agreement entered into force. The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) gives foreign investors in the energy sector sweeping powers to sue states for millions of dollars over government actions that have supposedly ‘damaged’ their investments.
In recent years, the ECT has become increasingly controversial – because of its potential to obstruct the transition from climate-wrecking fossil fuels towards renewable energy. It also has the capacity to lock-in failed energy privatisations, and undermines the provision of energy at affordable prices. But despite the growing controversy, countries in the global south, particularly in Africa, are in the process of joining this outdated and damaging treaty.
Guests:
- Faith Lumonya, Programme Officer, Trade and Investment Programme, SEATINI Uganda
- Pia Eberhardt, researcher with Corporate Europe Observatory
- Cecilia Olivet, Coordinator, Trade and Investment programme, TNI.
You can find out more on www.energy-charter-dirty-secrets.org/
Image source: Gretar Ívarsson: Wikimedia "The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Plant in Þingvellir, Iceland"
This is episode two of a series on Border Wars: placing the ‘migration crisis” in perspective.
In episode one, we looked at some of the reasons for the building of militarized borders, and examined the systemic causes of migration, showing how people are displaced as a result of corporate crimes, conflict, poverty, climate change. We showed that migration cannot be divorced from the legacy of colonialism and the impact today of corporate capitalism and imperialism.
This episode takes a closer look at the military and security companies that have benefited from the refugee crisis. These companies provide, among other things, the equipment for border guards, the surveillance technology to monitor frontiers, and the IT infrastructure to track population movements. We will also look at how these companies grow their influence, and how they are implicated in a global restructuring of labour that has led to injustice, suffering, and death.
The third and last episode will explore ways in which communities are reaching out and building bridges instead of walls.
Guests:
Nick Buxton, TNI
Brid Brennan, TNI
Harsha Walia, Author: Undoing Border Imperialism
Todd Miller, Journalist, Author: More than a Wall
Maren Mantovani, StopTheWall, Palestinian Land Defence Coalition.
Photo credit: Rianne Van Doevern/Flickr/(CC BY-ND 2.0)
This is episode one of a series on Border Wars: Placing the ‘migration crisis” in perspective.
It explores the rise of border walls particularly in the last three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and analyses some of the systemic reasons behind what has been termed the “migrant crisis”. Follow-up episodes will focus on the corporate interests that stand to gain the most from existing migration policies, and explore ways in which communities are reaching out and building bridges instead of walls.
Guests:
- Harsha Walia: Canada Antiracist activist, author Undoing Border Imperialism
- Nick Buxton , TNI
- Todd Miller, Journalist Tucson Arizona: More than a wall.
- Brid Brennan, TNI, Transmigrant Platform
- “Mara”
Photo credit: Flickr/syriafreedom
Walden Bello is a TNI associate, a human rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist who has made a major contribution to the international case against corporate-driven globalization. He is currently a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, as well as an adjunct professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton. In our latest podcast he shares his thoughts about China and its role in the global financial system.
The discussion is guided by Walden’s latest book: Paper Dragons, China and the Next Financial crisis. Have a listen to this wide ranging discussion about the contradictions in China’s financial system, the ongoing trade war with the United States of America, and China’s impact on the global economy.
Instead of stemming the flow of narcotics, the global “war on drugs” has only managed to cause untold suffering to millions of people across the world. The voice of communities involved in illicit cultivation have long been excluded from national and international policymaking platforms.
What alternative approaches are there to current regime? Is it possible to put human rights first?
Guests:
Martin Jelsma: Director Drugs & Democracy programme, TNI.
Nang Yon: Myanmar Opium Farmers Forum.
Photo: Farmer harvesting opium in southern Shan State / Credit: Tom Kramer
There is a crisis in Venezuela. The country teeters on the brink of total economic and social collapse. There is civil unrest, hospitals and supermarkets are empty, and there is a very real possibility of an invasion led by the United States of America. The Bolivarian revolution, which is the political process initiated by the late president Hugo Chavez, has not borne its promised fruits.
What happened in Venezuela, and what is in store for the country and its people? What lessons are there for the left?
Guests:
Professor Edgardo Lander, TNI Fellow
Dr. Daniel Chavez, TNI Fellow
Rachel Rumai Diaz, Venezuelan poet
Photo credit: Flickr/David Hernández (aka davidhdz)/ (CC BY-SA 2.0)
This episode of the State of Power podcast examines the case of the resistance against the TAP pipeline in Salento, Italy. Expected to bring 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year from Azerbaijan, the pipeline has been hailed as an impressive feat of engineering that will help solve Europe’s energy needs. However, there is no overstating how much the local populations along the pipeline detest this development.
We use the resistance against TAP to explore a process we call “pacification”, which is part of how capitalist elites, states and transnational corporations deal with protest and resistance against their activities. In October 2018 TNI convened a conference on pacification over three days in this affected region in Italy. Delegates, who included local activists, scholars, and even the mayor of the nearest town, Melendugno heard how despite massive local resistance, construction work on the pipeline began in March 2017, and currently still continues.
Guests:
- Mark Neocleous: Professor of the Critique of Political Economy, Brunel University, UK.
- Dr. María del Carmen Verdú: Lawyer, campaigner with Correpi: Coordinator Against Police and Institutional Repression), Argentina
- No TAP activists, Salento, Italy.
When Transnational Corporations violate the rights of people and communities, it can be almost impossible to hold them to account. That’s why TNI is a long term supporter of the process towards a United Nations Treaty on Transnational Corporations with regard to Human Rights.
This episode of the State of Power podcast outlines some of the violations against people and the environment, perpetrated by Transnational Corporations in South Africa: Cases such as the massacre of protesting miners at the Marikana mine in August 2012, and ongoing attempts to evict rural communities in Pondoland from their land to facilitate titanium mining serve to underline the need for a binding international legal mechanism.
The episode shows some of the efforts by local activists to hold perpetrators accountable, and briefly outlines the history of The Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity. Guests:
- Joseph Mathunjwa, President of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU)
- Siyabonga Ndovela, Amadiba Crisis Committee
- Brid Brennan, Transnational Institute, Global Campaign.
Photo: ACC marching, Commemoration 21 march 2017 Credit: Amadiba Crisis Committee
In 2008, as financial markets fell into chaos, the world got an acute reminder of the limitations of the current neoliberal financial system.
We need a systemic reversal, to ensure that public resources serve people and planet, and enhance collective and individual well-being. For this to become reality, we must pursue radical but doable proposals and practices, showing how progressive (local) authorities, social movements, workers and unions, among other engaged actors, can provide democratic and diverse ownership of finances and wealth for the future we want.
Photo credit: kudumbashree.org/ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The financial crisis of 2008 revealed the limitations of our current neoliberal financial order. As banks and other financial institutions lost their grip on financial markets across the world, it was the world’s governments that stepped in and saved the system on the backs of their taxpayers.
If they have the capacity to create public money to save the banks, why don’t democratically elected governments use that same power to create money and involve people in order to solve problems of such as debt, poverty and the climate crisis?
Photo credit: Carsten Ussat [CC BY-SA 4.0]