Showing 1–30 of 44 results

  • Mobilizing for Health Justice: Global Health Watch 7

    Since its first edition in 2005, Global Health Watch (GHW) – the flagship publication of the People’s Health Movement (PHM) – has been critically reporting on the state of the world’s health. Published every three or four years, it comments on developments in global health while focusing on continuities with past popular struggles.

    As with previous editions, GHW7 comes to life with contributions from over one hundred activists around the world, sharing experiences and analysis on issues affecting people’s health in the contexts they live in and efforts to progress towards greater health justice. This process was energized by the fifth People’s Health Assembly (PHA5), the global gathering of PHM, that took place in Argentina in April 2024 under the motto “Making ‘Health for All’ our struggle for ‘Buen Vivir”.

    Political contributions from Latin America are manifest in the first GHW7 section, dedicated to “The global political and economic architecture”, where an up-to-date analysis of current health crises is followed by contributions that frame them in an eco-feminist perspective, showing how alternatives can be rooted in ancestral wisdoms and the practice of ‘Buen Vivir’. The second section addresses old and new challenges for public and global health systems through the critical lenses of gender justice and decoloniality. The third section, “Beyond Healthcare,” addresses key social and environmental determinants of health, while the “Watching” section critically apprises the state of global governance for health with a focus on several key institutions. The final section, “Resistance, struggles and alternatives,” highlights areas of transformative change by health activists in a global context of increasing repression. The book ends with a chapter on PHA5, highlighting how collective action is the most powerful medicine against ill health and health inequality at the human and planetary levels.

    Global Health Watch 7 will include the following chapters

    Chapters A2 and A3 have been translated from Spanish by Lila Esther Silgado Villadiego.

    Summaries of the chapters that are currently available can be viewed by scrolling down and clicking on the “Description” tab. You can also download the chapters highlighted below.

    Introduction: Mobilizing for Health Justice
    A1. From a Political Economy of Disease to a Political Economy for Wellbeing
    A2. Life at the Center: Ecofeminisms and Ecoterritorial Feminisms in the Struggle for Life
    A3. Ancestral and Popular Knowledge for Buen Vivir
    B1. Privatization and Financialization of Health Systems: Challenges and Public Alternatives
    B2. Artificial Intelligence, Digital Technologies, and Health
    B3. Building Equitable Health Systems: A Transformative Proposal from an Intersectional Gender Perspective
    B4. Abolition Medicine as a Tool for Health Justice
    B5. Decolonizing Global Health
    C1. War, Conflict and Displacement
    C2. People on the Move
    C3. Putting the Right to Health to Work
    C4. Tax Justice: A Pathway to Better Health
    C5. Commercial/Corporate Determination of Health
    D1. WHO’s Compromised Role in Global Health Leadership
    D2. Unpacking Our Pandemic Failures for Future Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response
    D3. Financing Pandemic Recovery, Prevention, Preparedness and Response
    E1. National Struggles for the Right to Health
    E2. Taking Extractives to Court
    E3. Fear and Hope in ‘Speaking Truth to Power’: Struggles for Health in Times of Repression and Shrinking Spaces
    E4. 5th People’s Health Assembly: Advancing in the Struggle for Liberation and Against Capitalism

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  • Una movilización por la justicia en salud: Observatorio global de salud 7

    Desde su primera edición en 2005, el Observatorio Global de la Salud (GHW) -la publicación insignia del Movimiento por la Salud de los Pueblos (MSP)- ha venido informando críticamente sobre el estado de la salud en el mundo. Publicada cada tres o cuatro años, comenta la evolución de la salud mundial al tiempo que se centra en la continuidad con las luchas populares del pasado.

    Al igual que en ediciones anteriores, el GHW7 cobra vida con las contribuciones de más de cien activistas de todo el mundo, que comparten experiencias y análisis sobre cuestiones que afectan a la salud de las personas en los contextos en los que viven y los esfuerzos por avanzar hacia una mayor justicia en salud. Este proceso fue dinamizado por la quinta Asamblea Mundial por la Salud de los Pueblos (ASP5), el encuentro mundial del MSP, que tuvo lugar en Argentina en abril de 2024 bajo el lema “Haciendo de la ‘Salud para Todos’ nuestra lucha por el ‘Buen Vivir’”.

    Las contribuciones políticas de América Latina se manifiestan en la primera sección del GHW7, dedicada a “La arquitectura política y económica global”, donde a un análisis actualizado de las crisis de la salud actuales le siguen contribuciones que las enmarcan en una perspectiva ecofeminista, mostrando cómo las alternativas pueden arraigarse en las sabidurías ancestrales y en la práctica del ‘Buen Vivir’. La segunda sección aborda viejos y nuevos retos para los sistemas de salud públicos y globales a través de las lentes críticas de la justicia de género y la decolonialidad. La tercera sección, “Más allá de la atención en salud”, aborda los principales determinantes sociales y ambientales de la salud, mientras que la sección “Vigilancia” analiza críticamente el estado de la gobernanza mundial de la salud centrándose en varias instituciones clave. La última sección, “Resistencia, luchas y alternativas”, destaca las áreas de cambio transformador de los y las activistas de la salud en un contexto mundial de creciente represión. El libro termina con un capítulo sobre la ASP5, en el que se destaca cómo la acción colectiva es la medicina más poderosa contra la mala salud y la desigualdad de la salud a nivel humano y planetario.

    Global Health Watch 7 incluye los siguientes capítulos:

    Los resúmenes de los capítulos actualmente disponibles, junto con el PDF descargable correspondiente, pueden consultarse desplazándose hacia abajo y haciendo clic en la pestaña “Descripción”.

    Todos los capítulos, excepto A2 y A3, han sido traducidos del inglés por Lila Esther Silgado Villadiego

    Introducción: Una Movilización por la Justicia en Salud
    A1. De la Economía Política de la Enfermedad a la Economía Política del Bienestar
    A2. La Vida en el Centro: Ecofeminsmos y Feminismos Ecoterritoriales en la Disputa por la Vida

    A3. Saberes Ancestrales y Populares para el Buen Vivir
    B1. Privatización y Financierización de los Sistemas de Salud: Retos y Alternativas Públicas

    B2. Inteligencia Artificial, Tecnologías Digitales y Salud
    B3. Construyendo Sistemas de Salud Equitativos: Una Propuesta Transformadora Desde una Perspectiva Interseccional de Género
    B4. La Medicina de la Abolición como Herramienta para la Justicia en Salud
    B5. Descolonización de la Salud Mundial
    C1. Guerra, Conflicto y Desplazamiento
    C2. Personas en Movimiento
    C3. Poniendo el Derecho a la Salud ¡A Trabajar!
    C4. Justicia fiscal: El camino Hacia una Mejor Salud
    C5. Determinación comercial/empresarial de la salud
    D1. El papel de la Organización Mundial de la Salud en el liderazgo de la salud mundial, bajo amenaza
    D2. Desembalaje de Nuestros Fracasos Pandémicos para la Prevención y Preparación ante futuras pandemias
    D3. Financiación de la Recuperación, Prevención, Preparación y Respuesta ante una Pandemia
    E1. Luchas Nacionales por el Derecho a la Salud
    E2. Llevando a las Empresas Extractivas a los Tribunales
    E3. Miedo y esperanza en “Decir la verdad al poder”: Luchas por la salud en tiempos de represión y reducción de espacios
    E4. 5ª Asamblea Mundial por la Salud de los Pueblos: Avanzando en la lucha por la liberación y contra el capitalismo

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  • Welfare for a Humane Future: Moving Beyond the Welfare State of Racial Capitalism
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    Welfare for a Humane Future: Moving Beyond the Welfare State of Racial Capitalism

    Welfare for a Humane Future by David Matthews and Howard Waitzkin critiques the capitalist welfare state, emphasizing its role in sustaining racial capitalism’s exploitative structures. The authors argue that welfare under capitalism reinforces racial and class divisions, as seen in historical policies like the New Deal, which excluded Black workers. They envision a post-capitalist welfare system rooted in communal values—love, solidarity, and participatory democracy—drawing inspiration from global examples like Rojava’s democratic confederalism, Venezuela’s communes, and Cooperation Jackson’s solidarity economy. Key components include cooperative housing, community-controlled healthcare, and universal basic income, all managed through local assemblies. The book highlights mutual aid and grassroots organizing as pathways to transformative change, urging readers to build alternative institutions within capitalist societies. By prioritizing collective well-being over profit, the authors advocate for a welfare system that empowers communities and fosters equity.

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  • Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism

    As the world grapples with the legacy of crimes of enslavement, colonialism, genocide and mass killings, imprisonment and murder of children, attempts at eliminating cultures and history of Indigenous peoples, looting and other crimes against humanity, the performance of public atonement has become increasingly prevalent. Apologies from state actors and institutions are issued in solemn ceremonies, often acknowledging the collective guilt for historical atrocities. Despite the solemnity of these events, there is a growing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of these apologies, particularly when they are not accompanied by tangible reparations, healing, reconciliation or systemic change. This scepticism is rooted in a perception that these acts of contrition are sometimes less about making amends to the aggrieved and more about assuaging the guilt of the aggressors and maintaining the status quo, providing the illusion of progress without the substance.
    In this compelling work, Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism, the authors unveil the complex interplay between public apologies, social justice and popular mobilisations. The chapters are devoted primarily to the experiences of Latin America, particularly of Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil. But there is also a chapter on the struggles for Palestine — so relevant in the face of the current genocidal invasion by the Zionist State of Israel into Gaza, the world’s largest and most densely populated concentration camp.

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  • Book cover
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    Post Capitalist Philanthropy

    “Post capitalist philanthropy is a paradox in terms. A paradox is the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species.” This is how long-time activists, political strategists, and accidental philanthropy advisors Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy start their treatise on Post Capitalist Philanthropy. This book is a result of decades of practice and research, including a hundred plus interviews with leading activists, philanthropists, philosophers, social scientists, cosmologists and wisdom keepers.

    The authors take us on a journey from the history of wealth accumulation to the current logic of late-stage capitalism to the lived possibilities of other ways of knowing, sensing and being that can usher in life-centric models. This “ontological shift”, as they call it, is at the heart of the text – creating new-ancient-emerging realities is not simply about how we redistribute wealth or “fight power”, but rather, how we perceive and embody our actions in relationship to a dynamic, animistic world and cosmos.

    This book is made available by Daraja Press on behalf of the Transition Resource Circle.

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  • Singing to Liberation: Songs of Freedom and Nights of Resistance on Indian Campuses

    Singing to Liberation: Songs of Freedom and Nights of Resistance on Indian Campuses

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    Singing to Liberation: Songs of Freedom and Nights of Resistance on Indian Campuses

    Student activism and cultural activism go hand in hand on Indian campuses. Over the last few years, especially after 2014, student movements in the country against social injustice have increased in numbers and tenacity. Cultural modes of expressing dissent have played a key role within this new wave of student movements that have gripped the nation. This book takes the reader through a journey into the ways cultural activists analyse cultural modes of protest, especially in the context of student movements in the Global South. The book delves into the political and ideological contours set by organisations such as the Indian Progressive Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), and by figures such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib, Hemanga Biswas and Safdar Hashmi. The book locates them within the contemporary wave of cultural protests, analyses their continued relevance and argues for a revival of theoretical and practical engagement with the early progenitors of the progressive cultural movement in India.

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  • Anticapitalist Economy in Rojava: The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggles

    Anticapitalist Economy in Rojava: The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggles

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    Anticapitalist Economy in Rojava: The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggles

    This book looks at the anti-capitalist economy and the organization of social relations in the context of the revolution and autonomy of Rojava (Kurdistan-Syria). It questions both the limitations and the historical problems of the phenomenon of revolution, and the conflicts and contradictions that emerge in this process. It also draws from the conflicts and contradictions the author has consistently felt as a “political subject” who wants to change the world, especially through her experience in the Kurdish struggle and the Kurdish Movement. For this reason, every question she raises and attempts to answer in this book—about the Kurds, Rojava, and the world in general, involves what she says is her own subjectivity.
    The idea and dreams of revolution have existed since humans created systems of domination. Indeed, revolution, meaning the liberation from systems of domination, has undoubtedly been one of the most discussed subjects in history. There have been moments when the possibility of revolution has been clearer, and there have also been certain agreements on what it is and how to get there, but it has never been something completely definable. This continues to be true today. This book does not intend to define this great phenomenon, rather it looks at the revolutionary practices that create emancipating realities and embraces revolution as an undefined, contradictory and dynamic process. Although the rulers have traditionally written history, the history of social struggles has been and is still being created by many revolutionary and transformational processes. The future is being shaped based on desired revolutions and the struggles that, in turn, transform their actors, the people. Therefore, the desire and quest of the Kurdish people for liberation from the colonial rule of the nation-states of the Middle East—the subject of this book—has always been directly linked to the phenomenon of revolution.

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  • Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa

    Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa

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    Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa

    Members of the Organic Intellectuals Network are active organizers in the struggle to achieve social justice. They have experienced the contradictions of the NGO discourse and, just like others before them, have found themselves in the struggle versus survival dilemma. To get a clear picture of our contemporary struggles and the despair of NGOs operating in the proletarian movement, comrades decided to reflect, study, and analyze Prof. Issa Shivji’s book Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa. For the authors, these analyses and reflections are based on personal experiences in their day-to-day organizing. In summarizing the authors’ observations regarding the impacts of NGOs in organizing, this book calls into question the fundamental question, ‘why do NGOs exist?’ To answer this question, the authors provide a historical chronology of the resistance in Kenya, Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa, relating those to the subjective factors in existence at every period. Through this, a scientific relationship can be drawn between social movements and NGOs in our current epoch. From their experiences with NGOs, the authors, representing grassroots social movements, highlight the dangers associated with donor funding. Often, donor funding ends abruptly after making people dependent on them, creating severe strain on grassroots organizations. The more one engages with NGOs, the softer one becomes to critique NGOs, particularly in highlighting their relationship to imperialism. Further, NGOs usually help in driving reforms. However, they play no part in revolutionary work. As a result, they merely preserve the present order and help exacerbate the frustrations arising from massive inequality in our society. In the long run, NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and independence of grassroots social movements. This publication also includes two previously published essays by Prof Issa G Shivji, Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa, &, Reflections on NGOs in Tanzania: What We Are, What We Are Not and What We Ought To Be.

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  • Dark PR cover image

    Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment

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    Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment

    If you’re interested in how powerful forces of marketing & manipulation make the positive change we badly need MUCH harder, read @grantennis.bsky.social’ great bookDark PR.” – Brent Toderian, Bluesky

    “Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now.

    In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives and reclaim control of our lives.

    Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment referenced in the UK House of Lords.

    “I’m really interested in a piece of work that’s written by a guy named Grant Ennis, and I would advise you to have a look at his book on subsidy. So actually the Government provide an awful lot of subsidy to unhealthy food producers. Actually we could reduce the subsidy that is provided for that food and use the money in a different way to do different things. He is the expert in that”
    Alice Wiseman, Director of Public Health for Gateshead, England

    Link: https://lnkd.in/e6AnKssm Minute 11:34:24

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  • The revolutionary ecological legacy of Herbert Marcuse - 2nd Edition

    The revolutionary ecological legacy of Herbert Marcuse – 2nd Edition

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    The revolutionary ecological legacy of Herbert Marcuse – 2nd Edition

    Description (2188 / 2500)
    The author appeals to the energies of those engaged in a wide range of contemporary social justice struggles such as ecosocialism, antiracism, the women’s movement, LGBTQ rights, and antiwar forces. As the dialectical counterpart of Marcuse’s Great Refusal, the book, which culminates with the ‘EarthCommonWealth Project’ is keyed to what we are struggling for, not just what we are struggling against. The author argues that regressive political forces must be countered today, and this is best accomplished through radical collaboration around an agenda recognizing the basic economic and political needs of diverse subaltern communities. System negation must become a new general interest. The author discusses core ethical insights from African philosophical sources, indigenous American philosophy, and radical feminist philosophy. Humanity’s first teachings on ethics are to be found in ancient African proverbs. These subsequently served also as a critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. Long-suppressed indigenous American sources supply a philosophical and political critique of Euro-centric economic and cultural values. They also offer an understanding of humanity’s place in nature and the leadership of women and attest to modes of cooperative and egalitarian forms of community. Feminist anthropology furnishes an historical context for understanding the origins of patriarchy and how to move beyond dominator power to new forms of partnership power.

    The book envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most bestial and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence. It is searching for a new system of ecological production, egalitarian distribution, shared ownership, and democratized governance, having its foundation in the ethics of partnership productivity with an ecosocialist and humanist commitment to living our lives on the planet consistent with the most honorable and aesthetic forms of human social and political fulfillment.

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  • Cover: Homestead, Homeland, Home

    Homestead, Homeland, Home

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    Homestead, Homeland, Home

    This is a collection of observations and meditations by Professor Emeritus (York University, Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events, issues, people and ideas culled from recent history and the world, from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries, it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home, no place, that is to say, which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are, therefore, harsh, particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation, in his view, has, in recent history, made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared, certainly not the author’s native land, Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher’s searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode, resounding with intermittent fury, to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.

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  • Mudarse Màs Allá de la Agricultura Capitalista

    Mudarse Màs Allá de la Agricultura Capitalista

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    Mudarse Màs Allá de la Agricultura Capitalista

    Los agentes patógenos surgen una y otra vez de un sistema agroalimentario global arraigado en la desigualdad, la explotación laboral y el extractivismo sin límites por el que se despoja a las comunidades de sus recursos naturales y sociales. Un sistema económico propenso a la crisis que prioriza la producción para obtener beneficios por encima de la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas y la preservación ecológica se organiza en torno a una intensa producción monocultural que, por el camino, permite la aparición de las enfermedades más mortíferas.

    La Investigación sobre la Pandemia para el Pueblo (PReP) se centra en cómo la agricultura podría ser reimaginada por el tipo de intervención a nivel de la comunidad que podría detener la aparición del coronavirus y otros patógenos en primer lugar. Abordamos cómo la ciencia convencional apoya los mismos sistemas políticos y económicos que ayudaron a producir la aparición del coronavirus y otros patógenos en primer lugar.

    Introducimos la agroecología, un ecologismo de los campesinos, los pobres y los indígenas, que existe desde hace mucho tiempo, y que trata la agricultura como una parte de la ecología de la que la humanidad cultiva sus alimentos. La agroecología -una ciencia, un movimiento y práctica- combina la ciencia ecológica, los conocimientos indígenas y campesinos y los movimientos sociales por la soberanía alimentaria y territorial para lograr sistemas alimentarios ambientalmente justos.

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  • Domains of politics 
and modes of rule
: Political structures of the 
neocolonial state in Africa

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    Domains of politics 
and modes of rule
: Political structures of the 
neocolonial state in Africa


    “A concise, dense and illuminating dissection of the workings of the post-independence African state that also charts a path towards imagining and working for a true politics of liberation.”Ndongo Samba Sylla, Senior Researcher, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.


    This is a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people.  It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population.  In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination.  Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens.  In the domains of uncivil society and ‘traditional’ society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people.  In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle.

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  • Hand on the Sun cover

    Hand On The Sun: A passionate and powerful novel of race and class

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    Hand On The Sun: A passionate and powerful novel of race and class

    This was Tariq Mehmood’s first novel, published by Penguin Books in 1983, charting the experience of the second generation migrants to the UK. Set in the declining textile industry of the North of England, it is a raw story of pain and anger at the relentlessness of British racism, from the street to the state – a story of an unquenchable desire for justice, and reclaiming human dignity. A dignity that is wrapped around new questions of Identity, a crossroad between religion, language, history and resistance. It is a little big story, that talks to the extremities of social, political and literary issues today? Can stories of a generation be appropriated? How important is religion in identity? If all you have is a story to tell, who should you tell it? Are the issues of today, just the issues of today or can we learn something from the past? In these stories, friendship is not defined by religion or colour, but by humanity. And racism is much more than skin deep. It is an exhilarating read that bears witness to the urgent 80’s battles against state and popular racism. As important now as then. In this new edition, Mehmood provides a Foreword that describes how the novel came to be written and the lives of real people on whom the characters were created. In the Afterword, Mehmood revisits some of the characters who are now 40-years older, and reflects on how the book would have been written today where the conditions of mass mobilizations no longer exist in neoliberal Britain.

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  • Politics of Turbulent Waters
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    Politics of Turbulent Waters: Reflections on Ecological, Environmental and Climate Crises in Africa

    For the past 10 years, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) has been on the front line of the struggle for environmental justice, climate justice and food sovereignty in Africa and the globe. It has been a decade of non-stop probing of the exploitation of resources, peoples and nations, which has given rise to numerous environmental and climate injustices. HOMEF has had a decade of witnessing and standing against the injustice, the powers and structures (industries and policies) suffocating the rights of the people to a healthy environment and standing with the neglected to take charge of their once self-managed food and agricultural systems. The struggle has necessitated the reawakening of communities’ consciousness to the injustices that besiege them and to their ‘people power’ – power to be utilized in seeking the desired change.mPolitics of Turbulent Waters is a compendium of selected articles in the 36 issues of the Eco-instigator published from 2013 to 2022. The Eco-instigator is yet another tool used by HOMEF to pull together thoughts and reports of activities that advance environmental justice and food sovereignty. Issue by issue, these thoughts and reports flow from within HOMEF and other environmental/climate justice and food sovereignty advocates from across Africa and the globe.They form this rich assemblage (Politics of turbulent waters) to commemorate HOMEF’s 10th anniversary. The title of the book is one of Nnimmo Bassey’s (the director of HOMEF) numerous articles that have graced some pages of the different issues of the Eco-instigator. The article cum title encapsulates the messages that the book intends to convey to you, the reader. It crystallizes the dire condition of Africa and its waters and the power imbalance together with the spatial disposition that plunged the continent into the calamitous environmental situation it faces. It speaks of the politics of economic development and market fundamentalism that avows to maintain the status quo in terms of destructive exploitation of Africa’s marine and other natural resources.

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  • (Bengali edition) হিন্দুত্ববাদ ও ইহুদী জাতীয়তাবাদ : একটি ক্রমবর্ধমান সম্পর্ক)
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    (Bengali edition) হিন্দুত্ববাদ ও ইহুদী জাতীয়তাবাদ : একটি ক্রমবর্ধমান সম্পর্ক)

    This is a Bengali translation of Hindutva and its relationship with Zionism, by Amrit Wilson: ISBN 978-1-990263-76-7. Written in December 2022, this text is based on a lecture given earlier at the invitation of the Institute of Palestine Studies. Since then, the relationship between Israel and India has deepened further and atrocities have skyrocketed in both countries. On 5 April 2023, Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers inside. At the same time, Israel is facing internal turmoil in a battle between a diverse group, including those who think the current settler colony is a democratic nation and want things to remain as they are, and those who stand even further to the right. Significantly, the BJP, India’s ruling party, supports the latter. This book is about Hindutva, the ideology which drives the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli apartheid state. In this era of rising fascism, these two remarkably similar ideologies are crucially important in cementing the economic and military alliance between two of the world’s most repressive right-wing states – while helping to legitimize them in cultural arenas. Israel is, of course, a settler colonial state, but it is also, like India, a fascist state, not only because of ‘the extremist parties that [are] part of the government’ but also because of ‘their enablers – Netanyahu and his chauvinistic Likud party which long strove for a Jewish state dominating both sides of the Jordan River.’ In the words of Marwan Bishara, Netanyahu is ‘the godfather of modern Israeli fascism.’ This essay focuses primarily on Hindutva, discussing Zionism mainly to highlight its similarities, links and increasing alliances with Hindutva.

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  • White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences
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    White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences

    Given the growing interest in understanding the meaning, manifestations, analyses and implications of racism in North/South relations, White Saviorism in International Development seeks to remedy the shortcomings of the development studies literature on the prevalence of White Saviorism in Western development initiatives in the Global South. The volume comprises theoretical chapters, testimonies, stories and lived experiences from 19 contributors from across the Global South. With sensitivity and intelligence, these practitioners and academics create a tapestry that unveils the implicit and explicit forms of White Saviorism in international development.

    USD $ 5.00 USD $ 22.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 22.00
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  • Aufbruch in Jackson [German edition of Jackson Rising: Black self-management and solidarity economy]

    Translated from English by Michael Halfbrodt & Michael Schiffmann, with a foreword by Mason Herson-Hord

     

    How black activists are building liberation practically from below: Departure in Jackson documents the history of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the USA Present.

    Since the 1970s, black liberation movements in majority-black Mississippi have taken change into their own hands. The Deep South should become the center of their independence – “Free the Land!” In the 2010s, the election of Chokwe Lumumba as mayor in the capital Jackson took an important step towards implementing the vision of assembly democracy, solidarity economy and an end to racial inequality. Lumumba dies unexpectedly in 2014, but his son Antar and the Cooperation Jackson continue to move forward.

    We learn about the pitfalls of radical local politics and struggles for housing and land, democratic economic models and ecology, internationalist solidarity and the parallels to the Rojava Revolution and the Zapatistas, about encouraging experiences in which different concerns go hand in hand.

    USD $ 24.00
  • MATHARE: An Urban Bastion of Anti-Oppression Struggle in Kenya.

    MATHARE: An Urban Bastion of Anti-Oppression Struggle in Kenya.

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    MATHARE: An Urban Bastion of Anti-Oppression Struggle in Kenya.

    History is written by the victors of any war. But what happens when the victors forget to write down their history or omit the cog of the struggle? This is the untold story of Mathare Slum that has never been told to the world: of the role it played in anti-colonial struggle and the planning ground for the Mau Mau struggle which culminated with the fall of the British Colonial Empire in Kenya in the midnight of December 12th 1963. Mathare has also played a critical role in anti-oppression struggle against the four regimes that we’ve had since independence and continues to do so up to date. This history has not been documented and has only been done piecemeal. This has overtime eroded the rich history of Mathare and led to a distorted history of once a planning ground and a bulwark of Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA). The current generation are not cognizant with the critical role Mathare played in the independence of our country. Presently, Mathare is majorly known for all the negative reasons and its proximity to Mathari Mental Hospital has contorted its image to the outside world. My story tries to re-tell the history of Mathare from an informed insider perspective by threading the struggles from the colonial era to the present day and the role it has played in agitating for social justice. My story brings to view the past history of this informal settlement in the heart of Nairobi, the present struggle and the promising future through community organizing.

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  • Insurrectionary Uprisings

    Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization

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    Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization

    The volume includes two sections exploring nonviolence in the long Black freedom struggle within the US. From Ella Baker to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, from Vincent Harding and Grace Lee Boggs to Colin Kaepernick, the two sections on the Black liberation movement highlight the theory of nonviolence in direct and indirect ways and foreground the relevance of these historic texts for the present moment of political uprisings on both the left and the right. Black strategies for survival and power are analyzed in terms of the ongoing US economic and epidemiological crises as well as the global climate crisis and ecological collapse. A section on revolutionary nonviolence in Africa presents a previously unpublished piece on the role of armed struggle by Franz Fanon, as well as essays by Amilcar Cabral, Barbara Deming, Graca Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge This section clearly contextualizes the continent’s anti-colonial struggles with the practical thinking about military and unarmed tactics which those movements faced over the course of a half-century.
    The section on nonviolence and feminist struggle highlight the work of Grace Paley, Audre Lorde, and Arundhati Roy, along with a little-read piece by Johnnie Tilmon, a leader of the 1960s welfare rights movement. The section on resistance against empire tilts toward Latin American scholars/activists with essays by Maria Lugones, Anibla Quijano and Berta Caceres. This section includes pieces that draw from current debates about the role of state power in building towards radical change and the push to build holistic perspectives on what liberation means for all peoples. The final section on social change in the 21st Century reflects on specific aspects of organizing that are facing campaigns and movements of today and tomorrow. Our goal is to provide challenges and insights for building effectively against all forms of oppression! Though primarily compiling key texts not often seen or contextualized together, the book also provides new strategic commentaries from key leaders including Ela Gandhi, Ruby Sales, ecofeminist Ynestra King, Africa World Press’ Kassahun Checole, and Palestinian Quaker Joyce Ajlouney, Hakim Williams, and Mireille Fanon Mèndes-France.

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  • Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth

    Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth

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    Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth

    Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.

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  • Nigeria and the Challenge of Federalism

    Nigeria and the Challenge of Federalism

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    Nigeria and the Challenge of Federalism

    The book identifies three key moments in Nigeria’s experience with federalism and makes the argument that a complex and socially-diverse country like Nigeria can only be successfully governed by a truly federal arrangement, and not the present unitary contraption that has only delivered poverty, social unrest and the powerful centrifugal forces that are now threatening the very existence of the country itself. The time has come, write Ike Okonta, to convene a conference with sovereign powers to design a federal constitution for the country. The current process of amending the 1999 Constitution by the National Assembly will not suffice. The document is so hopelessly flawed that only its discarding and a fresh effort at constitution-making will suffice.

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  • Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe: Outsourcing EU border controls to Africa

    Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe: Outsourcing EU border controls to Africa

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    Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe: Outsourcing EU border controls to Africa

    Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe is a detailed journalistic account of how the EU is attempting to limit mobility within the African continent as a matter of the EU’s domestic policy agenda, hence the title hinting at the many agreements (with Turkey, Libya, Sudan) aimed at blocking migrants from approaching the European continent. The new “Berlin Wall” not only encircles Europe, but also generates a proliferation of militarised borders in Africa. …To summarise, the authors argue, Europe desires protected borders and open markets. The novelty is the amount of material that this book contains about African desires and strategies, both as a continent and as single states. This, in particular, makes the work a collection of extremely valuable directions of research. In fact, Africa, if one were to simplify the continent’s intentions, is depicted as aspiring to the exact opposite of Europe, namely open borders (with the African Union aspiring to free movement within the continent) and protected markets (protected from Western corporate predatory strategies). Moreover, contrary to the narrative of aid according to which the West “helps develop” Africa, the figures quoted by the authors suggest the opposite: while Sub-Saharan Africa receives $134 billion a year in development funding, $192 billions flow out of Africa, with $46 billion in profit for major corporations and another $35 billion vanishing in tax havens (218). https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2022/02/double-book by Oana Pârvan.

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  • JACKSON EN REVUELTA

    [Spanish edition of Jackson Rising]

    Mississipi; el estado más pobre de los EEUU, el que tiene el porcen- taje más alto de población Negra y con una historia dramática de terror racial y de resistencia Negra. Este es el contexto de la resistencia presentada en este recopilatorio de escritos.

    Sin desanimarse por la incertidumbre, el miedo y la an- siedad causadas por el constante deterioro del orden ne- oliberal, la respuesta de las activistas Negras de Jackson ha sido organizarse. Inspiradas por la rica historia de lucha y resistencia en Mississipi y comprometidas con la Estra- tegia Jackson-Kush, construyen instituciones arreladas en el poder comunitario, que combinan política y desarrollo económico y que satisfacen necesidades reales de la gente para crear un model social alternativo.

    Las experiencias y análisis recogidas reflejan el poder creativo que se genera cuando la lucha política se basa en una visión del mundo liberada de las contradicciones y li- mitaciones inherentes al liberalismo. Esta es, en definitiva, una historia sobre un porceso decolonial y socialista, orga- nizado y dirigido por personas Negras.

    Suggested Price: USD $ 10.00
  • Partisan Universalism: Essays in Honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu

    Partisan Universalism: Essays in Honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu

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    Partisan Universalism: Essays in Honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu

    The collection of essays in Partisan Universalism celebrates the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu, a scholar, teacher and friend, marking his extraordinary contribution to the philosophy, politics and praxis of liberation. As Ato Sekyi-Otu has argued in his recent book, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (Routlege 2019), universalism is an ‘inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration’. Universalism must and can only be partisan.
    “Responding to the invitation ‘to re-member severed but shareable things’, these lovers of truth, freedom, and dignity celebrate the searing intellect, generosity, wit, and compassion of the person and the scholar Ato Sekyi-Otu. … this is a precious contribution. Not to be missed!” —Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement and co-editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. /
    “Critically engaging Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of partisan universalism, this timely volume of essays speaks directly to the onto-metaphysical issues that will give Africana thought the new foundations that will enable it to move beyond the linguistic turn, brush aside the ashes of Afro-pessimism. … A must read for all concerned with the future of Africana theory and praxis.” —Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason/
    “Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. The texts compiled in this volume celebrate and engage with the work of Sekyi-Otu … They bear eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice.” — Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa.

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  • Agroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias

    Agroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias

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    Agroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias

    La COVID-19 ha expuesto la naturaleza racializada de los sistemas alimentarios, pero también potencialmente otorga oportunidades para construir de nuevo. Maywa Montenegro explora una serie de defectos, desde las cadenas de suministro fracturadas hasta las infecciones no controladas entre los trabajadores de alimentos esenciales y comunidades negras, marrones e indígenas victimizadas por el virus a lo largo de viejos surcos de opresión racial. Ella rastrea los orígenes probables de la COVID-19 hasta los sitios de desborde forjados por la expansión agroindustrial en regiones boscosas donde los patógenos brotan libremente e infectan a los humanos. La agricultura animal de tipo industrial impulsa estos cambios ecológicos que incuban futuros brotes. Las pandemias tienen sus raíces en la separación violenta de las comunidades de sus territorios, semillas, conocimientos y riqueza. El racismo permite ese robo como elemento fundamental para la expansión capitalista.

    Para hacer frente a las pandemias y las injusticias alimentarias, Montenegro invoca una agroecoecología abolicionista. Ninguna alternativa anticapitalista puede ignorar el racismo que es fundamental para el sistema alimentario industrial transnacional. Académicos como Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore y Mariame Kaba han argumentado que, aunque la abolición se ve con frecuencia como una estrategia de oposición, para erradicar, por ejemplo, prisiones y policía: la abolición es igualmente propositiva. Una agroecología abolicionista abre múltiples posibilidades que responden a las exigencias de un planeta pandémico: no existe una “normalidad” a la que podamos regresar con seguridad.

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  • Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa

    This African Edition of Extracting Profit is available only in East Africa at www.zandgraphics.com
    The original version was published by Haymarket Books and can be ordered here

    A piercing historical explanation for poverty and inequality in African societies today, and social impact of resource-driven growth.

    A piercing historical explanation of poverty and inequality in African societies today and the social impact of resource-driven growth, Extracting Profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. Rising global prices in oil and minerals have produced a scramble for Africa’s natural resources, led by investment from U.S., European and Chinese companies, and joined by emerging economies from around the globe. African economies have reached new heights, even outpacing rates of growth seen in much of the rest of the world. Examined through the lens of case studies of the oil fields of the Niger River Delta, the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline and the East African infrastructure boom, this period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs, but has instead fueled the extraction of natural resources, profits accruing to global capital, and an increasingly wealthy African ruling class.

    Extracting Profit argues that the roots of today’s social and economic conditions lie in the historical legacies of colonialism and the imposition of so-called “reforms” by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The chokehold of debt and austerity of the late twentieth century paved the way for severe assaults on African working classes through neoliberal privatization and deregulation. And while the scramble for Africa’s resources has heightened the pace of ecological devastation, examples from Somalia and the West African Ebola outbreak reveal a frightening surge of militarization on the part of China and the U.S.

    Yet this “new scramble” has not gone unchallenged. With accounts of platinum workers’ struggles in South Africa, Nigerian labor organizing and pro-democracy upheavals in Uganda and Burkina Faso, Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond.

    And in an updated Preface, the author analyses the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic and escalating climate emergency, as both the crises and resistance to extraction accelerate across the continent.


    Reviews
    • “Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit – Imperialism, Neoliberalism and The New Scramble for Africa is at once historical and contemporary. It unpacks ongoing resource crimes by analytically exposing its historical roots and pointing to ways by which the oppressed can cut off the bonds that lock in their subjugation.” —Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation

      “Lee Wengraf provides an important reminder that Africa’s position within the world economy is heavily determined by its unequal insertion into the global capitalist system and ongoing manifestations of imperialism.” –James Chamberlain, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute

      “Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit provides a breathtakingly detailed account and analysis of some of the major socioeconomic ills that have been plaguing Africa for centuries. Amongst the host of issues she tackles, arguably the most consequential are mass poverty in African societies, their indefensible economic inequalities and the steady plundering of the continent’s resources, starting from the slave-trade era up till the present-day.” –Remi Adekoya, Review of African Political Economy

      “Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond.” Developing Economics

      “Evidently, this book is well-researched and it contributes to the expansion of the frontiers of Marxist scholarship on Africa’s development dilemma within the global capitalist order. This book lends credence to the pioneering works of such notable radical scholars as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, and Samir Amin among several others. It should be read by students and teachers of political economy, development studies, Marxism and philosophy.” Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

      Extracting Profit provides a great arch of scutiny from the earliest carve-up of the African continent, through colonialism, war, imperialism, to the recent neoliberal takeover. The book demonstrates the continued importance of Marxist analysis on the continent, asserting the centrality of class analysis and a project of revolutionary change. Wengraf provides us with a major contribution, that highlights contemporary developments and the role of China on the African continent that has perplexed and baffled scholars. An indispensable volume.” —Leo Zeilig, author of Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution

      “The history of resource frontiers everywhere is always one of lethal violence, militarism, empire amidst the forcing house of capital accumulation. Lee Wengraf in Extracting Profit powerfully reveals the contours of  Africa’s 21st century version of this history.  The scramble for resources, markets, and investments  have congealed into a frightening militarization across the continent, creating and fueling the conditions for further political instability. Wengraf documents how expanded American, but also Chinese, presence  coupled with the War on Terror,  point to both the enduring rivalry among global superpowers across the continent and a perfect storm of resource exploitation. Wengraf offers up a magisterial synopsis of the challenges confronting contemporary Africa.” —Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

      “One of the most well-known stylized facts of Africa’s recent growth experience is that it has been inequality-inducing in ways that previous growth spurts were not. Lee Wengraf, in her new book Extracting Profit , expertly utilises the machinery of Marxian class analysis in making sense of this stylized fact. Along the way we learn much about Africa’s historical relationship with imperialism and its contemporary manifestations. This book should be required reading for all those who care about Africa and its future.” —Grieve Chelwa, Contributing Editor, Africa Is A Country

      “In recent years countries in the African continent have experienced an economic boom—but not all have benefited equally. Extracting Profit is a brilliant and timely analysis that explodes the myth of “Africa Rising,” showing how neoliberal reforms have made the rich richer, while leaving tens of millions of poor and working class people behind. Lee Wengraf tells this story within the context of an imperial rivalry between the United States and China, two global superpowers that have expanded their economic and military presence across the continent. Extracting Profit is incisive, powerful, and necessary: If you read one book about the modern scramble for Africa, and what it means for all of us, make it this one.” —Anand Gopal, author, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes

      “Thorough and thoughtful, Wengraf’s book has a radical depth that underscores its significance. It’s definitely a must-read for anyone who cherishes an advanced knowledge on the exploitation of Africa as well as the politics that undermines Africa’s class freedom.” —Kunle Wizeman Ajayi, Convener, Youths Against Austerity and General Secretary of the United Action for Democracy, Nigeria

      “Extracting Profit is a very important book for understanding why the immense majority of the African population remain pauperised, despite impressive growth rates of mineral-rich countries on the continent. It continues the project of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. And in several ways, it also goes beyond it, capturing the changing dynamics of global capitalism 45 years after Rodney’s magnus opus.

      In this book, Lee Wengraf debunks the myth of “Africa Rising” and the supposed expansion of an entrepreneurial middle-class, revealing “reforms” imposed by international financial institutions as mechanisms for fostering imperialism in an era of sharpening contradictions of the global capitalist economy. The adverse social, economic, political and environmental impact of these are elaborated on as a systemic whole, through the book’s examination of the sinews of capital’s expansion in the region: the extractive industries.

      But, Wengraf does not stop at interrogating the underdevelopment of Africa. Her book identifies a major reason for the failures of national liberation projects: while the working masses were mobilised to fight against colonial domination, the leadership of these movements lay in the hands of aspiring capitalists, and intellectuals. The urgency of the need for a strategy for workers’ power internationally, she stresses correctly, cannot be overemphasized.

      Reading Extracting Profit would be exceedingly beneficial for any change-seeking activist in the labour movement within and beyond Africa.” —Baba Aye, editor, Socialist Worker (Nigeria)

  • Politics, Democratization and Academia in Uganda

    Politics, Democratization and Academia in Uganda: The Case of Makerere University

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    Politics, Democratization and Academia in Uganda: The Case of Makerere University

    As the oldest (and arguably best-known) university in Uganda and the wider eastern and central Africa region, Makerere University looms large in the history of higher education on the continent. Alma mater to presidents, public intellectuals and pundits of all disciplines, Makerere has attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention, both in respect of its prominence and achievements, and well as with regard to its failures and foibles. The proposed book focuses on a particularly understudied aspect of the place of higher education in the African context, i.e. the relationship between a public university of unique historical importance and the contestations over democratization that have taken place both within campus and outside of it. It is built around the late-1980s struggle by the Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) for improved living conditions against the backdrop of the early programs of structural adjustment and economic reform that the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government adopted soon after taking power in 1986. Although seemingly introverted in focus, in many respects the MUASA action represented the earliest forms of political struggle against a regime of governance that promised a great deal, but disappointingly delivered considerably less.

    The focus on MUASA provides a critical entry-point to a wider debate about the place of organized democratic action by academics in a post-conflict context where the traditional institutions of political and civil society, i.e. political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have either been severely compromised or discredited, or where they are too weak and inorganic to provide any form of significant counter-juxtaposition to the government in power. By organizing the first strike by academic staff in the sixty-seven (67) year history of the university, for a time MUASA became the focal-point for democratic organizing against a regime that was yet to fully expose its nefarious and anti-democratic colours. The book examines the broader issues concerning the relationship between organized academic action and democratization; the place of the Media in reviewing these struggles; the position of students as a critical component of academe; “big P” and “small p” politics affecting female academics, and finally, the paradoxical role of the School of Law in both aiding and inhibiting the struggle against dictatorship in a country which has enjoyed

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  • The imperative of Utu / Ubuntu in Africana scholarship

    The imperative of Utu / Ubuntu in Africana scholarship

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    The imperative of Utu / Ubuntu in Africana scholarship

    Written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, this publication celebrates the birth of Black studies as a liberated academic zone. Professor Mũgo reflects upon the significance of Africana studies, specifically within the context of America’s predominantly White universities, revisiting the hers/his/torical context that birthed Black studies as a field of knowledge. She reflects on the ownership of knowledge, its production, dissemination and custodianship while proposing utu/ubuntu as imperatives in defining transformative education. The hypothesis and heart of the argument is that knowledge and scholarship can either be colonizing, alienating and enslaving; or, alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanizing and liberating, creating new human beings with the agency to transform life and the world, for the better. he dismisses the false myth of dominating, colonizing and imperialist cultures that claim to have a monopoly of knowledge and whose purpose is to justify the dehumanization of the conquered, the attempted erasure of their knowledges, heritages and ultimately, entire cultures.

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  • We Rise for Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Southern Africa

    We Rise for Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Southern Africa

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    We Rise for Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Southern Africa

    In recent years southern Africa has aroused the interest of domestic and foreign investors targeting several sectors. Agrarian and extractive capital has been penetrating the countryside, causing land conflicts, displacement of local peasant communities and in worse cases, deaths. Rural people in general have not, been passive—alone or in alliance with non-governmental organizations and activists, they have organized raised their voices. Resistance movements to capital are taking place throughout the region, even when faced with repression. The book provides critical assessments of the dynamics of agrarian and extractive capital in southern Africa: with contributions from DRC, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, Mauritius and Madagascar.

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