by MARIO OSORIO & PEDRO LABAYEN HERRERA

Ecuador is a nation that has weathered years of economic storms and political upheaval. Its struggles are perhaps best illustrated by its rapid descent from an “island of peace” in the 2010s to having the region’s second-highest homicide rate in 2025, behind only Haiti. Yet, for a time, Ecuador represented a successful social democratic project, prioritizing citizens’ welfare over foreign creditors. Today, like much of Latin America, it remains trapped in a geopolitical paradox, needing investment in education, science, and technology to escape the “middle-income trap.” Instead, a succession of myopic leaders has chosen the path of least resistance: maximizing short-term rents through the extraction of oil and minerals.

In a deeply misguided effort to facilitate this extraction, such leaders bind their countries to the obscure investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, either through neocolonial agreements known as bilateral investment treaties (BITs) or through clauses hidden in “free trade” agreements (FTAs). We are told these treaties promote “reciprocal protection.” In reality, they are profoundly asymmetrical, granting transnational corporations privileges that no domestic company or citizen enjoys. Under ISDS, foreign corporations can sue sovereign states, while states have no comparable right to do the same. The result is a clear pattern: both investment flows and the legal claims they generate move overwhelmingly toward the benefit of corporations at the expense of sovereignty.

These lawsuits do not happen in national courts, but in opaque international tribunals generally under the auspices of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an arm of the World Bank. The president of the United States always appoints the World Bank president, who also chairs ICSID’s Administrative Council, the governing body that appoints ICSID’s head. In this rigged casino, arbitrators (often corporate lawyers who cycle through a “revolving door,” acting as judges in one case and counsel in the next) decide the fate of public budgets. Corporations regularly invoke the bespoke construct of “indirect expropriation,” a legal fiction that rebrands legitimate public interest regulation — be it environmental protection or health laws — as a violation of a company’s expected future cash flow. Such lawsuits are not only extremely costly in legal fees and awards, they also produce “regulatory chill,” deterring governments from implementing necessary reforms, including climate measures.

CEPR for more

by CHRIS HEDGES

Gideon Levy believes Israel’s rampant militarism has infected the minds of its entire population. Without an impossible reversal, the Jewish state’s destructive warpath will rage on.

As the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran intensifies, the justifications for its outbreak grow increasingly murky, shifting between nuclear fears, regime change, and regional security concerns. In this interview, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy joins Chris Hedges to cut through the official narratives and examine the deeper ideological forces driving Israel’s long-standing push toward confrontation with Iran under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Levy argues that the war cannot be understood purely through strategy or geopolitics, but instead through a deeply embedded national mindset. “War is always the first option, not the last one in Israel,” he explains, pointing to a political culture that consistently defaults to military solutions while sidelining diplomacy. This helps explain why lessons from past conflicts—from Gaza to Lebanon—have failed to meaningfully alter Israeli policy, even when those campaigns produced questionable results.

At the same time, the human consequences have been dire. As the region destabilizes further, Levy emphasizes the sheer scale of displacement caused by Israeli military actions, noting that “six million human beings…were expelled, uprooted, displaced from their homes.” In other words, the war’s impact extends far beyond its stated objectives, raising urgent moral and strategic questions.

Levy goes on to discuss Israeli society itself. He delivers a scathing critique of the country’s media landscape, arguing that self-censorship have infected Israeli “open” society. Levy says the press voluntarily “made Israel totally ignorant about what’s going on on our behalf in Gaza,” insulating the public from the realities of its own military actions.

As the conflict with Iran threatens to spiral into a wider regional war, Levy remains deeply pessimistic. Without a fundamental shift away from militarism, he suggests, Israel risks entrenching itself in an endless cycle of violence—one whose consequences will ultimately extend far beyond the Middle East.

Chris Hedges for more

by SADAF SHABBIR

Suppression of critical voices through the instrumentalisation of religious fanaticism in university systems remains a powerful tool for maintaining the status quo, writes Sadaf Shabbir.

Throughout my four-year bachelor’s program, International Relations was taught predominantly through the lens of Realism or realpolitik, reinforcing hypermasculinity in both theory and pedagogy. Alternative theories were dismissed as inadequate, while religious ideologies were deeply embedded in classroom discussions. Criticism of radicalisation and extremism in Pakistan was often silenced, creating an environment where dissent was not just discouraged but dangerous. As a female student in a male-dominated space, expressing opinions that challenged theocratic narratives or questioned the weaponisation of religion against minorities and women often led to hostility, fear, and personal risk.

During a class discussion, a debate arose regarding the nature of the nation-state—specifically, whether it should be secular or theocratic. As Pakistan is a theocratic state, I expressed my opinion that the state should separate itself from religious affairs, considering how religion has historically been weaponised against gender and religious minority groups in the country. My opinion was met with disgust, and the atmosphere in the room turned hostile. With the class composed predominantly of male students (only 8% were female, who were seldom seen or heard in discussions), I was directly questioned about my religious beliefs. The question was loud enough to draw the attention of the entire class. This was not an ordinary situation; in Pakistan, such false portrayal can be life-threatening.

In 2021, Priyantha Kumara, a migrant, Sri Lankan factory manager working in Sialkot, a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan, was set ablaze by a mob after being accused of removing a poster with religious content from a wall. Most of the men responsible for his murder were staunch supporters of the notorious Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a militant group that exemplifies the growing infestation of religious parasites in the country. Such incidents cannot be viewed in isolation. Blasphemy in Pakistan operates as an institution, where each heinous act serves as a warning to the rest of society. This vicious cycle of fear politics continues with impunity, often tacitly endorsed by the state. What makes it even more repulsive is how it is now infiltrating higher education institutions in Pakistan.

Two crimes during my undergraduate years left me both petrified and resilient. The first was the lynching of Mashaal Khan, a student accused of blasphemy. The second was the killing of Hayat Baloch, who was a victim of military aggression. The uproar following these killings ignited a sense of unity and hope but also revealed how the suppression of critical voices through the instrumentalisation of religious fanaticism remains a powerful tool for maintaining the status quo.

Not only does a mob mentality exist among the masses, but law enforcement institutions are also complicit in such crimes. Dr. Shahnawaz Kunbhar, a doctor from Umerkot, was falsely accused of blasphemy and killed in a staged encounter by the police in September, 2024. This crime lays bare the fact that religious extremism in Pakistan is not only shielded by law enforcement but also operates structurally within such institutions.

John Mendue for more

by AMEL BOUBEKEUR

In France’s 2026 local elections, colonial-era racial anxieties were used to undermine political representation & frame wins as threats, writes Amel Boubekeur.

The 2026 municipal elections revealed something new in France. Candidates from immigrant backgrounds were no longer just symbols of republican inclusion. In a remarkable number of cities, they were winning.

Notably, Bally Bagayoko was elected as mayor in the commune of Saint-Denis – situated in the suburbs of Paris – in the first round. His supporters, celebrating at the town hall, chanted, “We are all the children of Gaza.” The following morning, a journalist asked Bagayoko on national TV whether Saint-Denis had elected a mayor or a Gaza proxy.

During the same programme, a fabricated quote about him calling the commune “the city of Black people” was also repeated. But Bagayoko had actually described it as “the city of kings and living people.”

A local electoral result had immediately been placed within a geopolitical context.

We’ve heard it all before

Indeed, the script was predictable. Muslim voters, we are told, have driven the Gaza genocide into local politics. Identity has replaced class. Communalism has entered the polling booth. Local democracy has been overshadowed by foreign conflict.

What this reading overlooks, of course, is the larger redeployment at play. Gaza did not simply enter municipal politics randomly. Over the past two years, a geopolitical conflict has increasingly acted as a local screening process that determines who can represent whom, on what terms, and at what cost.

For decades, the representation of France’s banlieues relied on delegation. Parties chose minority candidates, vetted them internally, and presented them as proof that the Republic could incorporate difference on its own terms. These areas could be governed because they were not expected to develop autonomous political voices. Their role was to be represented, not to redefine representation.

La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) disrupted that arrangement. Not because it stood outside electoral calculations, it did not, but because it created a channel through which working-class suburbs with large communities from immigrant backgrounds could express themselves and be heard, without relying solely on the old gatekeeping structures of traditional parties, municipal notables, and diversity brokers.

What unsettled the French political landscape in March was not only that candidates from immigrant backgrounds won, but also that they seemed less dependent on the traditional system of delegated representation.

New Arab for more

by TOM DANNENBAUM, REBECCA HAMILTON, ADIL AHMAD HAQUE, OONA A. HATHAWAY, & GABOR RANA

The United States and Israel initiated strikes on Iran over one month ago, on February 28, 2026. The attack was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter. The conduct of the war, and statements of U.S. officials, also raise serious concerns about violations of international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes. We have written the below statement together with over 100 U.S.-based international law experts, to detail our profound concerns about the war. The letter is signed by international law experts across the United States, including senior professors; leaders of prominent international law associations, non-governmental organizations, and legal clinics; former government legal advisors; and military law experts and former Judge Advocates General (JAGs).

Letter of over 100 international law experts on Iran war

We, the undersigned U.S.-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners write to express profound concern about serious violations of international law and alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel, and Iran in the present armed conflict in the Middle East.

Due to our connection to the United States, our focus here is on the conduct of the U.S. government, but we remain concerned about the risk of atrocities across the region including the continuing risks posed by the Iranian government to Iranians through violent crackdowns on dissent, and to civilians across the Middle East through Iran’s ongoing unlawful strikes on civilian infrastructure using explosive weapons in densely populated areas.

One month has passed since the United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran. The initiation of the campaign was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, and the conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.  

We collectively affirm the importance of equal application of international law to all, including countries that hold themselves out as global leaders. Recent statements from senior U.S. government officials describing the rules governing military engagement as “stupid” and prioritizing “lethality” over “legality” are profoundly alarming and dangerously short-sighted. These claims, particularly in combination with the observable conduct of U.S. forces, are harming the international legal order and the system of international law that we have devoted our lives to promoting. 

The war, which is costing U.S. taxpayers between $1-2 billion each day, is imposing significant harm to civilians in the region, has resulted in the loss of hundreds of civilian lives across the Middle East, and is causing serious environmental and economic harms.

We write to express our concern about 1) jus ad bellum, or the decision to go to war, 2) jus in bello, or the conduct of hostilities, 3) rhetoric and threats from senior U.S. officials and their allies, which portend further abuses, and 4) the decimation of civilian harm mitigation structures within the U.S. government as a part of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “gloves off” approach to warfare. 

1. Jus ad bellum concerns: The strikes launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026 clearly violated the United Nations Charter prohibition on the use of force. Force against another state is only permitted in self-defense against an actual or imminent armed attack or where authorized by the UN Security Council. The Security Council did not authorize the attack. Iran did not attack Israel or the United States. Despite the Trump administration’s varied and sometimes conflicting claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat that could ground a self-defense claim. Many international law experts have concluded that Israel and the United States’ actions violate the UN Charter, including the President and President-elect of the American Society of International Law, and the President of the American Branch of the International Law Association; UN Secretary-General António Guterres also condemned the attacks as undermining international peace and security.

2. Concerns about violations of international humanitarian law: The laws of armed conflict constrain the conduct of hostilities of all parties to the ongoing conflict. We are concerned that these fundamental rules may have been violated, including in the context of reported strikes on civilians and civilian objects such as political leaders who have no military role, oil and gas infrastructure, including South Pars, and water desalination plants. On March 19, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned strikes on energy infrastructure, noting their “disastrous” impacts for civilians. 

We are seriously concerned about strikes that have hit schools, health facilities, and homes. The Iranian Red Crescent reports that “67,414 civilian sites have been struck, of which 498 are schools and 236 health facilities.” A report by leading civil society organizations found that at least 1,443 Iranian civilians, including 217 children, were killed by U.S. and Israeli forces between February 28 and March 23. 

Just Security for more

by KELLIE B. GORMLY

Jermain Wesley Loguen opened his home to fugitives fleeing the South. He publicized this work openly, risking arrest or even re-enslavement

Twenty-six years after he escaped from slavery in Tennessee and fled north, the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen received a letter at his home in Syracuse, New York, from the woman who still considered herself his owner. He had run away from Sarah Logue’s plantation in 1834, taking a mare named Old Rock with him. Now, Logue was in desperate need of money—and she planned to get it from Loguen.

In her February 1860 letter, Logue wrote that she “had determined to sell you.” A potential buyer had already made an offer, but Logue believed she had a better idea: She wanted Loguen to send her $1,000 (nearly $40,000 today) as compensation for her losses. In return, she would release her claim on him. Because of Loguen’s escape and horse theft, Logue claimed, she’d been forced to sell two of his siblings, Abe and Ann, as well as 12 acres of land. She hoped to buy back the land with the money sent by Loguen.

If Loguen refused, Logue warned that she would arrange for his sale to a different enslaver. “You may rest assured that the time is not far distant when things will be changed with you,” Logue wrote, adding, “You had better comply with my request.”

Smithsonian Mag for more

by MADLEN NIKOLOVA

Bulgarians will go to the polls for the eighth time in five years later this month, after a massive wave of protests brought down Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s right-wing coalition at the end of last year. Demonstrations broke out in November in response to the proposed 2026 budget, which sought to hike social security contributions and taxes, increase salaries for the police, defence agencies and judiciary while leaving rank-and-file administrative workers, teachers and hospital staff with pay rises hardly covering inflation. The budget was also the first to be denominated in euros, Bulgaria having been approved to join the Eurozone last year, which inflamed popular anxiety about inflation. The protests peaked on 10 December, when more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, with tens of thousands more turning out across almost all regional cities. The next day Zhelyazkov – having been in power for less than a year – announced his resignation on live television, minutes before a scheduled parliamentary vote of confidence.

The protests were lazily described as another ‘Gen Z revolt’ by the liberal media, while some on the left dismissed them as orchestrated by the opposition coalition, the centrist PP-DB. Yet they unleashed political energies that far transcended the nominal organizers: the PP-DB’s approval ratings are around 15 per cent; an estimated 71 per cent supported the protests. Surveys revealed, moreover, that they were not confined to angry youth. Many participants were middle-aged, animated by concerns for a dignified old age for their parents, affordable healthcare, education for their children, and profoundly distrustful about how the higher taxes – raised from wages already strained by inflation – would be spent given widespread corruption.

NLR for more

by SHOBHITA THAKUR

As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of disciplined distance; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing.

As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of discipline d distance ; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing. But some time ago, I watched a video of Sonam Wangchuk speaking after his release from detention, and that distance quietly collapsed.

What I saw was not an activist, not a figure of resistance, but a human being carrying the visible weight of care. His face was drawn, marked by fatigue; there was a faint, almost fragile smile, the kind that seems less an expression of ease and more an act of endurance. I could see a thousand quiet wounds etched across his face. And yet, there was dignity, an unbroken composure that did not harden into hate, nor dissolve into despair. He spoke gently, almost tenderly, as though the very thing he was fighting for, his mountains, his home, still required softness to be protected. What stayed with me was not what he said, but how he remained: unbitter, without rage, still capable of care and love. It is difficult to understand how someone can move through such strain and not be altered into something unrecognizable to love. And perhaps that is where the unease begins, not in his suffering, but in ours. In how easily we receive such moments, process them, and move on, as though they belong to the ordinary rhythm of things.

As though this quiet erosion of the human spirit, this demand that love must endure struggle to justify itself, is somehow normal. His suffering did not turn into hatred; it remained, stubbornly, a form of love. And in that persistence, something about the rest of us, our ease with forgetting, our fluency in indifference, the quiet coldness of the human heart feels far more unsettling. Why is it that those who love hardest, feel deepest, think most clearly and remember, like elephants, with a quiet and unrelenting fidelity are the ones the world turns against? They are the ones who are made to suffer, to be broken, to be silenced, jailed, even erased.

As though memory itself were a threat, and love, when it refuses to fade, becomes something the world must discipline, its hunger to possess, to command; because a world that can inflict and endure violence often cannot bear the persistence of memory, nor the clarity of those who refuse to forget. Orhan Pamuk is someone who has a deep love affair with his city, Istanbul; his words carry the power of visuals. He has captured memories and emotions of himself and of his city and his people in ways no historian ever could, not just recording the past but inhabiting it. There is something quietly disconcerting about a novelist needing protection. Pamuk was not inciting violence; he was naming it, speaking about histories his country preferred to leave unspoken.

The Statesman for more

Russia Today (RT) correspondents Steve Sweeney and Ali Reda Sbaity were attacked while reporting on southern Lebanon. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.

Youtube

Israel rocket strike on British Journalist Steve Sweeney

This is the moment our member and dear comrade Steve Sweeney was almost killed by the Israeli Zionists, acting hand in glove with US and British Imperialism.

Steve has been reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His news pierces the imperialist-Zionist Propaganda. Here he was making an on-the-ground report in Lebanon.

There can be no doubt that this was 100% premeditated and targeted at Steve, in line with the Israeli policy of murdering journalists to kill the evidence of their atrocities.

It is almost certain that our “Labour” prime minister @Keir_Starmer, and “Labour” foreign secretary @YvetteCooperMP and Armed forces minister @JohnHealey_MP, and other cabinet level “Labour” ministers were aware of and green-lit the assassination attempt.

Make no mistake, comrades. We are at war. And the Labour Party is the enemy running the imperialist murder machine. They walk among us. Anyone who supports Labour is the enemy of the British workers.

Youtube