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Tag: Imperialism

Articles

Iran and Anti-Imperial Feminism. Ania Loomba in Conversation with Faranak Miraftab – 22 March 2026

On Wednesday, 11th March, 2026, along with 135 other nations, India co-sponsored a resolution of the United Nations Security Council which condemned Iran for attacking

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Articles

Empathising With Iran Must Recognise the Internal Struggle Against Religious Despotism, by Nissim Mannathukkaren – 20 March 2026

The progressive foreign response has often privileged geopolitics and anti-American imperialism at the cost of the struggle for democracy in Iran. The 13th century Persian

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Articles

The US & Israeli War with Iran: What Is a Needed Approach for a Principled Socialist Left?, by Frieda Afary – 18 March 2026

I.  What has happened since the United States and Israel launched the latest war on Iran? The United States and Israel started a new round

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Articles

Toxic Pacifism. Interview with Mira – 17 March 2026

Solidarity Collectives: Who are you, and how would you describe yourself? What role do you play in Solidarity Collectives? Mira: My name is Mira, and

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Book reviews

Partitions and the Making of Modern South Asia, by Gita Ramaswamy – 9 March 2026

South Asian states have obscured longstanding cross-border ties in order to consolidate national control. This history shows that dominant national identities crystallised only in the

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Articles

Iran After Khamenei. Interview with Asef Bayat – 3 March 2026

From Boston Review Alex Shams: You have written extensively on sociopolitical transformations in the Middle East in recent decades, including the Arab Spring revolutions that

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Statements

On the Ongoing War and the Urgency of Revolutionary Action, by Iran Labour Confederation – Abroad – 1 March 2026

The killing of Ali Khamenei, alongside a number of senior figures from the IRGC and the ruling apparatus, is an exceptional development in Iran’s current

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Articles

Why “Neutral” Anti-Imperialism Keeps Losing, by Siyâvash Shahabi – 1 March 2026

Let’s be blunt. Kidnapping, arresting, or killing a political figure of one country by another state is defined as illegal in international law, not because

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Articles

“A State that Massacres Its Own People Cannot Be a Force of Liberation for Others”. A Conversation with Collectif Roja and Leila Hossein Zadeh – 18 February 2026

In the following interview, Palestine solidarity activists from the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran

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Articles

Cuba’s Precarious Situation, by Samuel Farber – 7 February 2026

Cuba is in the midst of what is perhaps the most difficult situation it has faced since January 1959. The political situation continues to deteriorate

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Articles

Saudi Arabia’s Break With Interventionism, by Sultan Alamer – 6 February 2026

From New Lines Magazine In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist organizations (such

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Articles

Campists React to Iran Protests With Usual Dehumanization of Non-Western Struggles, by Brian Hioe – 19 January 2026

With the protests that have broken out in Iran, one has seen all-too-typical reactions from those often referred to as tankies or campists. With the

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Interviews Podcasts

Is Trump’s Venezuela Operation a ‘Gift to Putin’, and What Is the State of Russia’s ‘Shadow Fleet’? – 9 January 2026

At first glance, the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might look like an obvious disaster for Vladimir Putin. Russia has lost a key partner, and the prospect

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Articles

In a Time of Helicopters, by Ben Gidley – 7 January 2026

In September, Donald Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, and posted an image

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Articles

After Venezuela, What Now for Taiwan?, by Brian Hioe – 5 January 2026

The US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has led to warnings that the unprecedented action could allow for further actions by China directed at

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Articles

Venezuela and the Limits of the Chinese Empire, by Andrea Ferrario – 5 January 2026

Maduro’s kidnapping has exposed Beijing’s powerlessness. Billions invested in Latin America, but when Washington intervenes, China can only talk The U.S. military operation that led

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Articles

Monroe Doctrine Redux: New Americanism and the Echoes of Empire in China and Japan, by Craig A. Smith – 5 January 2026

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and

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Statements

From Caracas to Kyiv to Gaza: total rejection of imperialist aggression!, by Fightback (Australia/New Zealand) – 4 January 2026

Fightback unreservedly condemns the murderous attacks by United States forces on Caracas, Venezuela, which have resulted in 40 deaths and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro

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Videos Webinars

Anna Hájková on Eastern Europe and the Blind Spots of the Global Left – 4 January 2026

00:00:00 Intro to the series 00:02:30 Intro to the webinar 00:03:31 Anna Hájková‘s research and public interventions 00:10:23 Blind spots 00:14:10 Epistemic frames 00:18:13 The

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Interviews

Beyond Melancholic Geopolitics. Interview with Sinistra per l’Ucraina – 30 December 2025

A laboratory for a Left of resistance and solidarity against status-quo pacifism. The collective Sinistra per l’Ucraina (“Left for Ukraine”) was formed in Italy in

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Articles

The Making of a Crisis: Unpacking Sudan’s Neglected War, by Husam Mahjoub – 15 October 2025

In one of its most important facets, Sudan’s war is a war against the revolution that began in December 2018 and endures in the daily

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Articles

How Fascist Is Putinism?, by Andreas Umland – 16 September 2025

Three Uses of the Concept of Generic Fascism for Understanding Russia’s War Against Ukraine For already two decades and initially unnoted among the wider public,

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Articles

Dispelling the Multipolar Myth, by Patrick Bond – 5 September 2025

Why BRICS is not a threat to imperialism, and an “anti-polar” alternative is needed If the Western liberal political empire has been shamed beyond repair

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Articles

Rethinking the Syrian Revolution, by Robert Francis – 2 September 2025

How the Left Misread Syria The Syrian Revolution began in the context of the Arab Spring. While there were many reasons for protest, people took

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Articles

The Reverse ‘Savages, Victims, Saviours’ Metaphor of Human Rights, by Shadi Mokhtari – 13 August 2025

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors

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Interviews

For an Ecommunist Alternative to Degrowth and ‘Luxury’ Communism. Interview with Esteban Mercatante – 21 July 2025

In his new book, Rojo fuego. Reflexiones comunistas frente a la crisis ecológica (Fiery red: Communist reflections on the ecological crisis), Argentine Marxist Esteban Mercatante

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Articles

Between Washington and Beijing, by Mebratu Kelecha – 4 June 2025

From Africa Is a Country The global economic balance of power is shifting, and Africa finds itself at a crossroads. The traditional dominance of the

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Articles

The History of Aggression in Asia That Moscow Wants to Erase, by Oleksandr Polianichev – 9 May 2025

Today, Tehran, Pyongyang and Beijing support the Kremlin’s war effort while it poses as anti-imperialist — but Iran, China, and Korea were once the prey

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Book reviews

China: A New Imperial Capitalist Power, by Chris Slee – 8 May 2025

China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial RivalryBy Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley SmithHaymarket Books, 2024 China in Global Capitalism

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Articles

Teaching Eastern Europe in the Age of Russia’s Imperial Invasions: A Conversation on Being Postcolonial When No One Takes Any Notice, by Oksana Dudko and Anna Hájková – 2 May 2025

This article first appeared in History Workshop Journal.

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Podcasts

Trump’s Imperialism – 5 April 2025

Trump was never a peace candidate. From his early Reform Party days to his “America First” doctrine, he wasn’t seeking an end to U.S. empire.

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Articles

Atlantic Bias, by Daniel Mang – 20 February 2025

By “Atlantic bias” I mean a set of assumptions about “race”, racism, colonialism and imperialism prevalent on the left globally but rooted in the history

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Articles

The Emerging Sub-Imperial Role of the United Arab Emirates in Africa, by Husam Mahjoub – 4 February 2025

The United Arab Emirates has become a sub-imperial power in Africa, investing in ports, airports and infrastructure projects to extract resources and increase its global

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Videos Webinars

Joe Grim Feinberg on Rethinking Colonialism and Imperialism – 12 January 2025

00:00:00 Introduction and background information00:03:40 Joe introduces himself and his work00:05:35 Nationalism and internationalism00:06:44 Imperialism and colonialism00:08:42 Recapitulation of the main points of Joe’s article00:21:44

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Articles

Resisting Local Authoritarianism and Multipolar Imperialisms in Georgia. A Deeper Look into the Protests – 11 December 2024

This article was prepared by a Georgian anti-authoritarian in exile in communication with local collectives in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, and Zugdidi. Georgians themselves refer to the

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Articles

Syria, Geopolitics and the Left, by Santiago Alba Rico – 9 December 2024

I am going to be very harsh: there is something morally nauseating about Western hypocrisy, which has always killed civilians or let them be killed

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Interviews

Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry. Interview with Ashley Smith about the rise of capitalist China, by Thomas Hummel – 23 November 2024

From Tempest Increasingly, understanding the inter-imperialist competition between the United States and China is becoming essential to understanding the dynamics of the modern capitalist system.

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Interviews Videos

Lachlan McNamee on Settler Colonialism – 19 November 2024

00:02:00 How did you get interested in the subject of “settler colonialism”? 00:05:50 Do you have an “Australian perspective”? 00:08:40 How would you summarise the

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Articles

Class analysis and Russian imperialism: A response to Ilya Matveev, by Dmitry Pozhidaev – 2 October 2024

In his interview, “Political imperialism, Putin’s Russia, and the need for a global left alternative,” Ilya Matveev suggests that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated

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Interviews

Political Imperialism, Putin’s Russia, and the Need for a Global Left Alternative. An Interview with Ilya Matveev – 28 September 2024

By Ilya Matveev & Federico Fuentes From Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal Over the past century, the term imperialism has been used to define

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Articles

El Pueblo: Understanding the history behind the contested presidential election in Venezuela, by Thomas Purcell – 1 August 2024

From King’s College London Amid growing unrest in Venezuela, as critics both domestic and international accuse incumbent president Nicolás Maduro of forging election results to

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Books Interviews Podcasts

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism. Interview with Sidney Xu Lu – 14 June 2024

Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “Malthusian expansionism” at the center of Japanese settler

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Articles

Re-Examining Lenin’s Writings on the National Question: An Early Marxist Critique From the Imperial Periphery, by Hanna Perekhoda – 1 June 2024

On the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death, this article revisits his pre-1917 writings on the right of nations to self-determination from the perspective of his

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Articles

Rogue Journalists Are Denouncing The Gaza Genocide Because They Want You To Deny The Next One, by Gerald Roche – 30 April 2024

As thousands of bodies are blown apart in Gaza and children starve to death in the city’s rubble-strewn streets, numerous groups are exploiting this suffering

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Articles

Coloniality or Imperiality (in Eastern Europe, for Example), by Joseph Grim Feinberg – 3 April 2024

At a conference in Prague this past spring (May 2023), a prominent theorist of colonialism and coloniality spoke to us via video chat from his

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Articles

Colonial – And Counter-colonial: The Israel/Gaza War through Multiple Critical Perspectives, by Oren Yiftachel – 1 April 2024

The current Israel–Hamas war is one horrific outcome of a century-long Zionist settler colonial project, which continues to violently shape the political geography of Israel/Palestine.

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Interviews

US Imperial Dominance, BRICS Sub-imperialism and Unequal Ecological Exchange. Interview with Patrick Bond – 23 December 2023

Patrick Bond is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, as well as a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social

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Articles

Putin’s Russia and Peripheral Imperialism, by Anatoly Kropivnitskyi – 20 December 2023

Why is Russian aggression in Ukraine imperialist? How is it possible to interpret it based on Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, and how do these interpretations

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Articles

Settler colonialism, by Lachlan McNamee – 5 October 2023

From Aeon, by Lachlan McNamee In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over

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Articles

The Liquid Imperialism That Engulfed Syria, by Yassin al-Haj Saleh – 7 September 2023

How regional and global powers, internal colonialism and Salafi-jihadist subterfuge converged to short-circuit the Syrian struggle against despotism From New Lines Magazine. Syria is a

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Articles

The Global South’s Views on Ukraine Are More Complex Than You May Think, by Michael Karadjis – 17 August 2023

From New Lines Magazine On July 19, South Africa announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be attending the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in

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Statements

Nothing About Us Without Us. An Open Letter From Russia’s ​Indigenous and Decolonial Activists – 3 April 2023

Russia’s invasion of sovereign Ukraine opened the eyes of many to the imperial nature of the Russian state. The expansion of the empire and strengthening

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Articles

Decolonial Thinking and the War in Ukraine, by Pierre Madelin – 27 February 2023

On 24 February, the Russian army invaded Ukraine as part of a large-scale military operation aimed at rapidly decapitating Ukrainian power and subjugating the country.

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Articles

Economics vs. Culture: Ishchenko & His Critics, by Adrian Ivakhiv – 6 February 2023

Volodymyr Ishchenko has carved out a unique niche as one of the western Left’s go-to voices on all things Ukrainian. His list of articles and

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Articles

Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism, by Kavita Krishnan – 20 December 2022

Multipolarity is the compass orienting the Left’s understanding of international relations. All streams of the Left in India and globally have for long advocated for

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Articles

Reinventing Internationalism (2/4), by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval – 18 March 2022

The bankruptcy of a one-sided ‘anti-imperialism’ Some on the left still have trouble counting to two. Having two enemies and not just one, fighting on

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Articles

Fuck leftist westplaining, by Zosia Brom – 4 March 2022

Earlier this week, the Polish parliamentary progressive left party, Razem, issued a statement in which they announce that they are cutting ties with two European

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Articles

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey, by Derek Hall – 28 February 2022

David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on  “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces

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Articles

Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Origins of Campism, by Dan La Botz – 31 January 2022

I began this paper as a contribution to discussions in the Internationalism from Below Group, whose members’ criticisms helped to improve it. I finished it

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Articles

Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism, by Axel T. Paul and Matthias Leanza – 17 April 2021

Axel T. Paul is Professor of Sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Matthias Leanza is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at

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Articles

Were the Muslim Arab Conquerors of the Seventh-Century Middle East Colonialists?, by Robert Hoyland – 17 April 2021

Robert Hoyland is Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University, NY, USA. This article first appeared in Comparativ

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Articles

Ottomans in Syria: “Turkish Colonialism”, or Something Else?, by James A. Reilly – 17 April 2021

James A. Reilly is Professor Emeritus of modern Middle East history at the University of Toronto (Canada). This article first appeared in Comparativ Vol. 30

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Articles

A Colonial Empire Without Colonies: Russia’s State Colonialism in Comparative Perspective, by Michael Khodarkovsky – 17 April 2021

Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago (USA). He specializes in the history of Russia’s imperial expansion into the Eurasian borderlands. This

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Articles

Imperialism and Colonialism in the Qing Context, by Matthew W. Mosca – 17 April 2021

Matthew W. Mosca is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington (USA). His teaching and research interests center on Chinese and Inner Asian

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Articles

Looking for Empires: Japanese Colonialism and the Comparative Gaze, by Kate McDonald – 17 April 2021

Kate McDonald is Associate Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA). Her research explores the social, cultural, and technological history of mobility in

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Book reviews

Review of Andrew B. Liu’s ‘Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India’, by Jairus Banaji -30 March 2021

Andrew B. Liu is an associate professor in the Department of History at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA). His research interests include modern China, South and

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Articles

The Red-Brown “Zombie Plague”: How Fascist Ideas Are Becoming Popular on the Left – Part 1, by Daphne Lawless – May 2018

Introduction: Conspiracy theories and “pod people” When I wrote “Against Conservative Leftism” just over two years ago, I considered it disturbing that socialists would rally

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Articles

The Red-Brown “Zombie Plague” – Part 2, by Daphne Lawless – May 2018

How did we get here? For an infection to spread, you need both a germ (a virus, a bacterium, a spore or similar) and a

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Articles

The Red-Brown “Zombie Plague” – Part 3, by Daphne Lawless – May 2018

Germ 1: Political confusion and despair I now wish to return to the question of the agent of the Red-Brown zombie plague, that is: what

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Articles

The ‘Anti-Imperialism’ of Idiots, by Leila Al Shami – 14 April 2018

Once more the western ‘anti-war’ movement has awoken to mobilise around Syria. This is the third time since 2011. The first was when Obama contemplated

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Articles

The Specificity of Imperialism, by Salar Mohandesi – 1 February 2018

From Viewpoint Magazine “Imperialism,” David Harvey announced at a roundtable last year, should be seen as a “sort of metaphor, rather than anything real.” This

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Articles

Thomas Sankara and the Revolutionary Birth of Burkina Faso, by Mamadou Diallo – 1 February 2018

In 1983, 23 years after its independence and the succession of several neo-colonial regimes, the Upper Volta was one of the most materially destitute countries

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Articles

Russian Imperialism, by Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski – 27 November 2014

Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture, says that perhaps the most important idea for Russians “from the fall of Byzantium until today is the

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  • Year Three of the War [in Sudan] in One Word: Drones, by Kiri Rupiah – 18 April 2026
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