by ESKANDER SADEGHI-BOROUJERDI

The recent wave of protests in Iran have generated an extraordinary volume of commentary, much of it framed through familiar but misleading scripts. Some cast the unrest as an imminent revolutionary rupture; others as exclusively the product of foreign destabilization; still others as the delayed reckoning of a society finally pushed beyond endurance. Each captures part of the picture, but none adequately explains the dynamics of the present conjuncture. What is unfolding is better understood as the convergence of accumulated social exhaustion, acute distributive shock and a crisis of governance which the Islamic Republic no longer possesses the ideological, bureaucratic or fiscal resources to manage.

The protests have been sustained by a form of negative solidarity: a cross-cutting social coalition that stretches from elements of the rural poor and borderlands to the downwardly mobile middle classes and urban precariat of Tehran and other major cities. What unites them is not so much a shared project as repudiation of the Islamic Republic, and with it decades of failed efforts at structural reform and transformation. Beyond this refusal, however, the contours of a viable alternative remain indeterminate.

The immediate trigger for the protests was fiscal. Budgetary measures advanced under President Masoud Pezeshkian, particularly those affecting exchange rates and import licensing, sharpened pressures within an already distorted currency regime. The impact was felt most immediately among electronics vendors in Tehran’s bazaars, whose livelihoods depend on access to foreign currency and predictable pricing. The new rules soon translated into higher costs, disrupted supply chains and material losses. What transformed this sectoral grievance into a political rupture was the wider economic context. Years of inflation exceeding 40 per cent, with food inflation surpassing 70 per cent, infrastructural decay, water mismanagement, electricity shortages and toxic air pollution had already pushed large sections of Iran’s working and lower-middle classes into chronic insecurity. Since the Twelve-Day War in June the rial has depreciated by roughly 40 percent, and government employees’ wages have fallen by more than 20 per cent in real terms. Long-term socio-economic deterioration has converged with more immediate episodes of fiscal mismanagement. The budget did not create these conditions, but it crystallized a perception that the state protects rent seekers while offloading adjustment costs onto those least able to absorb them. The government’s pledges to provide food vouchers have done little to placate public fury. For decades, the Islamic Republic has pursued a form of authoritarian neoliberalism that has deregulated and precariatized labour while transferring state assets to parastatal organisations – from so-called revolutionary foundations and pension funds to subsidiaries of the Revolutionary Guards – coupled with the imposition of austerity from above. This provided a recipe for mass discontent and recurrent revolt.

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by DAVID SWANSON

This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”

Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were never asked, and the people had been violently taken over years earlier against the will of most of them, it’s true that straightforward conquest went out of fashion around the time of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which became law 98 years ago. But to state so simply the popular wisdom that the United States has supposedly not seized any land in 100 years, one has to pretend that military bases do not exist. Here’s a small sampling of the problems with believing that lie:

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye. Portions and the entirety of numerous islands were not given freely:

World Beyond War for more

by JAWED NAQVI

Mahatma Gandhi scribbled a short piece of advice in 1948 about ethical decision-making for those in public service.

“Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self will melt away.”

A young journalist put out a video clip last week that should have impressed Gandhiji. Some of the poorest men, women and children have been sleeping in the freezing Delhi winter, covered only with plastic sheets and gunny bags, outside AIIMS, India’s premier hospital. The people include very ill or old patients who have travelled for treatment from Bihar and Uttar.

It’s not that there is no night shelter outside the hospital, but it still leaves around 100 miserable people in the cold while they await their turn to see the doctor or be called for a procedure that could take days or even weeks to begin.

Reports from abroad are equally dismaying. India has never been humiliated like this. Donald Trump is misbehaving with everyone. Everyone is standing up to him, even Europe, but not India. All BRICS countries censured Trump for the military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president. Brazil is wary of the US because its president has been in prison at America’s behest. Yet it condemned Trump’s assault on neighbouring Venezuela.

South Africa and Russia expressed outrage, and China’s response was priceless. Expressing grave concern over the forcible abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, China said: “Release them at once, stop toppling the government of Venezuela, and resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.” And how did Vishwaguru, who plays host to the BRICS summit this year, respond?

“Recent developments in Venezuela are a matter of deep concern. We are closely monitoring the evolving situation,” the foreign ministry’s statement read. Not naming the US is understandable, given India’s desperate need to have a trade deal with Trump. But “recent developments”? Wasn’t the president of a sovereign country that once supplied oil to India just seized by the US military?

The very least the fractured parties can do is to stop carping at each other publicly.

It’s perplexing at the very least, therefore, that the Indian opposition continues to be in disarray, despite there being every reason for it to take a lesson from Gandhi’s talisman and give a piece of its mind to the government for an abysmal show at home and abroad.

Dawn for more

‘The Philosopher in the Valley’ is the latest book from journalist and author Michael Steinberger, and it explores Palantir and its equally controversial and perplexing CEO, Alex Karp.

Steinberger had unprecedented access to the people behind what he describes as “the most interesting company in the world” that is making warfare “in vogue in tech circles.”

Today, Palantir’s surveillance and data software is used by intelligence agencies, militaries, and corporations, which leads it to be used in areas from finance to immigration and counterterrorism.

Watch the full discussion above to hear how Karp’s U-turn from the democrats towards MAGA is cause for concern not only for people in the US, but across the globe.

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by KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS, ALLISON PARSHALL, FONDA MWANGI, JEFFERY DELVICIO, & ALEX SUGIURA

A dive into how scientists are trying to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” What he was getting at, in part, is that though our senses might deceive us, the act of thinking was proof of our own existence.

But reflect on that sentence again: “I think, therefore I am.”

Who in that short declaration is I?

Scientists call that I, that subjective sense of self, consciousness.

And understanding what consciousness is, how it functions and where it lives in the brain has plagued researchers for generations. I spoke with SciAm’s associate editor Allison Parshall to learn more about the search for consciousness.

So you recently reported a feature in the February issue of Scientific American on consciousness. What kind of sparked your interest in the subject?

Allison Parshall: Well, I studied cognitive science in college, and consciousness is kind of the big question that looms over a lot of neuroscience, whether it’s, like, being addressed head-on or not.

There were these really famous split-brain studies many decades ago [with] people who were having seizures and they would try to address it by cutting, basically, the connections between the two brain hemispheres. And this would result in some really weird things where, like, there was information in your brain that you had but you weren’t conscious of because consciousness was, like, in one side of the brain and not able to access the other.

It’s inherently very interesting, right? It’s, like, the big question of, “How do I have a perspective? How is it that my brain is yielding me having a feeling of being me?” It’s, like, a very philosophical question, so as someone who is interested in cognitive science as a very interdisciplinary field the philosophy of it all was very interesting.

Pierre-Louis: One of the things that I thought was really interesting in your piece is: scientists don’t have a set definition of what consciousness is. But can you describe at kind of a high level what they’re trying to explore when they’re studying consciousness?

Parshall: The English word “consciousness” is a little bit of a mess, so we have to kind of forgive it for that, but it’s referring to a lot of things. I mean, first off, you can just think of it as whether you are conscious or not—like, are you awake or not? Are you—have you been knocked unconscious? Are you, like, blinking? Are you aware?

And then there’s also kind of what you are experiencing while you’re aware, so there’s this sense of subjective first-person perspective that is really kind of the source of a lot of the mystery here. It’s like, “Why is it that, as I’m sitting here, I am seeing through my eyes and having a holistic, unified experience of me as a person, and that is connected to every other state I’ve ever been in, and it’s all kind of this unified stream?”

Scientific American for more

by SOUMAYA GHANNOUSHI

We have entered the age of open thuggery, as the brutality Israel tested on Palestinians is now being normalised elsewhere

For months, many warned that Israel’s unrestrained assault on Gaza was not merely a crime against Palestinians, but a fatal blow to the very idea of international law. 

What was being tested was not only the scale of Israeli violence, but whether rules still applied at all; whether power would remain constrained by law, or whether law would give way to brute force. 

Those warnings were dismissed as exaggeration. They were not.

Few articulated the stakes more clearly than Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who cautioned that the choice before the world was “stark and unforgiving”: either defend the legal principles designed to prevent war, or watch the international system collapse under the weight of unchecked power politics. 

For billions of people in the Global South, Petro warned, international law is not an abstraction, but a shield. Remove it, and only predators remain.

He was right. Gaza was the opening act – not an aberration or a lapse, but the moment a long-gestating doctrine finally shed all restraint.

What has unfolded there is not only the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, but the killing of law itself – and with it, the value of human life. 

Over more than two years, international law has been rendered meaningless, trampled alongside the bodies of children, doctors, journalists and patients bombed in their homes and hospitals. 

Human life has been reduced to an inconvenience, legality to an obstacle, morality to a nuisance.

Enabling atrocities

This was not done in secret, but in full view of the world. Germany armed it. Britain justified it. France equivocated. Others offered silence dressed up as “complexity”. The institutions meant to prevent such crimes stood aside or actively enabled them. 

The world persuaded itself that the collapse of law and the devaluation of human life could be contained; that Gaza could be treated as an exception without consequence. It could not.

The rules were expendable when Palestinians were crushed beneath them; they became sacred again when Greenland, or Europe itself, appeared exposed

There is something grotesque in watching Germany and Europe suddenly rediscover international law when US President Donald Trump speaks of of annexing Greenland. The same governments that spent months shredding legal norms, supplying weapons, and neutralising accountability while Gaza was pulverised, now speak gravely of sovereignty, order and the dangers of unrestrained power.

MEE for more

Interview with MONA ALI

The US dollar is used by governments and investors around the world for trade and as a safe asset. Jacobin asked economist Mona Ali if Donald Trump’s tariffs are destroying trust in the currency and what effect this instability will have on ordinary people.

More than half of global trade is conducted in dollars, and the United States is, by some measures, still the world’s largest economy as well as the world’s dominant political and military power. But since Donald Trump took office in January, he has attempted to use America’s position for political gain while undermining the pillars of the United States’ financial dominance, such as the rule of law.

Little of this behavior is new, economist Mona Ali explains in an interview with Jacobin. The global financial system is, at its core, a political system. However, Trump and his advisers are rocking this system more radically than any US president has done in a generation. In a wide-ranging discussion, Ali explains who benefits from the dollar’s dominance and whether the world’s reserve currency has any plausible challengers.

John-Baptiste Oduor

It is often said that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. What does this mean and how does it relate to the currency’s dominance?

Mona Ali

The dollar’s dominance is often attributed to its status as the key international reserve asset. This shorthand lends the impression that money is a commodity (a thing), when in fact for the most part money is credit (a social relation). While it is true that trillions of dollars are held as safe assets by investors and governments around the world, the bulk of these dollars in countries’ foreign reserves are credit contracts — predominantly US Treasuries.

While dollar dominance is often attributed to its reserve currency role, the dollar’s entrenchment in the financial system arises from its dominance in international credit creation. It is the unit of account undergirding the world’s deepest and most dispersed credit system, which includes, but is hardly limited to, Treasuries and bank loans. The power to create dollar-denominated credit isn’t restricted to the United States’ monetary authorities; foreign banks issue more dollar loans than US banks.

As the dollar system is a globe-spanning credit regime, its crises have correspondingly global consequences. When excess credit creation results in financial crisis, the United States’ central bank, the Federal Reserve, steps in to stabilize dollar markets. Yet it does so in ad hoc fashion. Crisis interventions reveal the inner workings of the international monetary hierarchy. While rich countries with access to the Fed’s backstop enjoy ease of access to dollar liquidity, low- and middle-income countries, which do not have easy access to the Fed’s dollar swap lines and other liquidity facilities must face discipline and punishment by international bond markets.

John-Baptiste Oduor

How is this position used to advance the United States’ interests?

Mona Ali

The dollar is perhaps the preeminent source of US hegemony. Like dark matter in the physical universe, dollar balance sheets are largely invisible to the public eye. They exist mainly in private hands. The dollar system skews extraterritorial: it spans the gamut from the centrality of US debt instruments in financial markets to the sensitivity of the global economy to movements in the dollar’s exchange rate, which systemically impacts global trade and financial conditions.

While Treasuries and the bulk of US bank loans have been backstopped by the Federal Reserve, large parts of the system aren’t governed by US monetary authorities and policymakers. The bulk of credit contracts in the global dollar system aren’t protected by the Fed. These shadowy parts of the dollar system exist offshore and off-balance sheet, in short-term funding instruments such as foreign exchange (FX) swaps. Derivative contracts in which one currency is exchanged against another, FX swaps are a predominant source of dollar borrowing even if they are not, technically speaking, credit instruments.

With trades averaging $5 trillion per day, the foreign exchange swaps market — in which one currency is exchanged for another by means of a derivative contract — is by far the largest market in dollars globally. Lightly regulated, large in transactional amounts, and informal in governance — which occurs by way of a voluntary global FX code — the market in FX swaps is at times prone to a “liquidity mirage” (i.e., true liquidity may be overstated). These instruments are the “known unknowns” of the dollar system. The potential vulnerabilities in this gargantuan market remain obfuscated. American exceptionalism is usually understood in purely financial terms, yet it also derives from the fact that US corporations capture the lion’s share of profits across a host of far-flung supply chains.

It should be clear that the markets that comprise the dollar system aren’t just prone to volatility; they are dysfunctional. Rather than raising capital for factories or infrastructure, dollar funding markets are largely in the business of refinancing debt contracts. (Three out of every four transactions in financial markets involve refinancing of some sort.) Given their anarchic tendencies, some central banking experts have called the dollar-centered international financial regime a nonsystem.

Jacobin for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

A colleague, an editor at a widely read outlet that centered Gaza throughout the two-year genocide, recently voiced his frustration that Gaza is no longer a main focus in the news.

He hardly needed to say it. It is evident that Gaza has already been pushed to the margins of coverage—not only by mainstream Western media, long known for its structural bias in Israel’s favor, but also by outlets often described, accurately or not, as ‘pro-Palestine.’

At first glance, this retreat may appear routine. Gaza during the height of the genocide demanded constant attention; Gaza after the genocide, less so.

But this assumption collapses under scrutiny, because the genocide in Gaza has not ended.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the so-called ceasefire was declared in October 2025, despite repeated claims that large-scale massacres had ceased. These are not isolated incidents or “violations”; they are the continuation of the same lethal policies of the last two years.

Beyond the daily death toll lies devastation on an almost incomprehensible scale. More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, with entire neighborhoods erased, infrastructure pulverized, and civilian life rendered nearly impossible.

To grasp the depth of Gaza’s crisis, one must confront a brutal reality: well over one million people remain displaced, living in tents and makeshift shelters that collapse under winter storms, floodwaters, or strong winds. Infants have frozen to death. Families are swept from one temporary refuge to another, trapped in a cycle of exposure and fear.

Beneath Gaza’s ruins lie thousands of bodies still buried under rubble, unreachable due to Israel’s destruction of heavy machinery, roads, and emergency services. Thousands more are believed to be buried in mass graves awaiting excavation and dignified burial.

Meanwhile, hundreds of bodies remain scattered in areas east of the so-called Yellow Line, a boundary claimed to separate military zones from Palestinian “safe areas.” Israel never respected this line. It was a fiction from the start, used to manufacture the appearance of restraint while violence continued everywhere.

From Israel’s perspective, the war has never truly stopped. Only Palestinians are expected to honor the ceasefire—compelled by fear that any response, however minimal, will be seized upon as justification for renewed mass killing, fully endorsed by the US administration and its Western allies.

People’s World for more

by TRAVIS ALEXANDER

As struggles over the human body escalate, we should return to the work of cinema’s greatest anatomist: David Cronenberg

What does government govern? What, in other words, is government the government of? The answer – at least in the West – has shifted over time. In the age of religion, kings and queens ruled over souls, preparing them for the divine beyond. After the Enlightenment, the soul gave way to the mind as the focus of governance. By the late 18th century, the target had shifted again. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), the philosopher Michel Foucault observed that, as the 19th century approached, government was turning its gaze to the body itself. Biological life was no longer incidental to politics: life and death, sickness and health became objects of management, control and regulation. Foucault called this new regime ‘biopolitics’ or ‘biopower’.

Across the centuries since, the government of bodies has grown only more visible – and more contested. So much of our politics now revolves around managing them. We see it in battles over trans participation in sports and access to abortion, the furore over Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implants, and the push to regulate red dye in food. Even an issue as seemingly distant as school funding is, at bottom, a struggle over the body; that makes sense, since research shows how profoundly the environment impacts brain development and neuroplasticity from childhood all the way through early adulthood. When we talk about school budgets, we’re talking about the kinds of brains (and bodies) we want to produce. When we worry about AI in classrooms, we’re worrying that students may never form the pathways of critical thought and focus they need.

The reigning biopolitical disputes hinge on deceptively simple questions: what is the body for? What should we do with it? Are there levels of biology where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind? If a human body changes (or is changed) beyond a certain point, does it stop being an altered human body and become, instead, something else?

There’s no shortage of modern artists and thinkers wrestling with these questions. The choreographer Meg Stuart pushes bodies to extremes of movement; the multimedia artist ORLAN and the transgender artist Cassils use performance to test the boundaries of flesh and identity; another performance artist, Stelarc, stages the body as machine, grafted with prosthetics. Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures imagine hybrid anatomies, while the films of Julia Ducournau – director of the body horror Titane (2021) – and Claire Denis probe bodily desire and transformation. In scholarship, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the future of the human species, Kate Crawford critiques the bodily costs of AI, and Paul B Preciado theorises on gender transition and pharmacopolitics.

And yet, few voices have been as persistent – or as transformative – as David Cronenberg’s. Since the 1970s, he has been cinema’s great anatomist, staging dramas of growth, decay and mutation. Over the decades, his vision has shifted: from a romantic belief that altered bodies deserve celebration, to a more careful insistence that people should be free to alter themselves only if they choose. The arc feels natural, but it is also urgent right now. At a moment when the fight over bodies threads through disputes on everything from vaccines to elder care, Cronenberg offers a framework we need: a way to affirm bodily autonomy without stoking the panic that casts every transformed body as a threat. His cinema points toward a politics of protection – one that secures the vulnerable while refusing to weaponise their difference, and that shows how the defence of bodies can be a form of solidarity rather than a spark for fear.

Aeon for more

by WILLIAM I. ROBINSON

Beyond the seizure of Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources, the January 3 invasion is inscribed within the epochal crisis of global capitalism.

Historians will likely look back at the January 3, 2026 attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of its president, and the takeover of the country as marking the definitive crack up of the post-WWII international order as the world descends into transnational conflagration. The U.S.-Caribbean venture is inscribed within the broader logic of the epochal crisis of global capitalism that also encompasses the United States’ threat to take over Greenland, ICE assassinations in U.S. cities, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the wars in Ukraine and Sudan, the bombing of Nigeria, mass displacement and the seizure of mineral deposits in the Congo, and other headlines that are reverberating around the world.

In times of epochal crisis, we can only make sense of events by framing them within their world-historic context. The United States’ position as the hegemonic anchor of world capitalism has been in decline for some time as the world fragments into competing political and geoeconomic centers. Yet all countries are integrated into a single globalized system of production, finance, and services—and no one state, however powerful, can control the process of global accumulation. In earlier epochs, the breakdown of hegemonic order during periods of capitalist crisis was marked by political instability, intense class and social struggles, wars, and ruptures in the established international system.

We have entered anew a period of worldwide upheaval. Key turning points include Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the West’s radical political, military, and economic response to it, as well as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza beginning in 2023 and the West’s complicity in it. Major crises of world capitalism have historically involved the breakdown of state legitimacy, widespread social conflict, political upheaval, and war. But the current crisis is like no other, given the social and biospheric limits to further expansion and the destructive power of the global arsenal. An epochal crisis signals the irreversible decline of capitalism’s capacity to reproduce itself through time and space. The different dimensions of this crisis—economic, social, political, and ecological—are coming together in an explosive mix that is generating conflict in every direction.

The Gaza genocide has set a precedent for the impunity with which ruling classes can unleash death and destruction in complete disregard for any legal order.

Structurally, global capitalism faces a crisis of overaccumulation, chronic stagnation, and a secular decline in the rate of profit that generates intense pressure for expansion. The capitalist system is by its nature expansionary, and cycles of crisis have always involved waves of violent expansion. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated more wealth than it can spend, much less reinvest. In its desperate search for outlets for these surpluses and new spaces for transnational accumulation, it has launched a new round of predatory expansion around the world involving the seizure of markets and resources—especially energy and mineral resources—through war, displacement, and repression. The U.S. state in its Trumpist form and beyond it, what I will call Global Trumpism, has become the out-of-control instrument of this expansionary wave.

Transnational capital is penetrating ever deeper into the Latin American countryside, where land and resources must be tapped to fuel this expansion. Autonomous peasant and Indigenous communities stand as barriers and must be dispossessed. The so-called “War on Drugs” has nothing to do with combatting drugs, yet provides a pretext for the application of state and paramilitary violence to access this wealth and contain resistance to the plunder. The Gaza genocide has set a precedent for the impunity with which ruling classes can unleash death and destruction in complete disregard for any legal order.

NACLA for more