The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
In exchange for oil, China builds infrastructure in Angola, a country devastated by three decades of war. This report shows Chinese workers building houses on an enormous project, Angola's biggest, which will eventually span 81 square kms.
Saliem Fakir -
Book: The Man Who Loved China
The fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Harper Collins
Reviewer: Saliem Fakir
In 1824, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote off China as 'the booby nation'. Emerson’s attitude marked the pervasive western prejudice doing its rounds on China: a poor backward country, suffering from squalor and poverty. Not much was known...
The international community seems unwilling to use the opportunity provided by the Beijing Olympic Games to demand greater respect for human rights from China. There are at least 15000 religious and political prisoners in Chinese jails and labour camps, while imprisonments, torture and deaths are on the rise. There are still said to be 130 people in prison since the Tiananmen Square protest 19 years ago.
Noam Chomsky reflects on the changing global power dynamic in 2008, arguing that there are three power systems in the world today - North America, Europe and North East Asia, with Asia showing the most economic dynamism of all. Concurrently, some of the most exciting democratic experiments are taking place in Bolivia. Japan and China and some oil producing countries have been sustaining the United State's economy for a long time, but its not clear how much longer they will continue to do...
Saliem Fakir -
The Free State students who made the racist video are perhaps breathing a sigh of relief that they’re no longer the centre of the world’s attention. It was too much for them too soon. The world was shocked then too.
At least they too know, no matter how revolting their little show, malicious prejudice conflicts with the idea of democracy and they are not alone in harbouring ghastly prejudices. They have something in common with all of us. Even a quiet prejudice seeds it’s...
Saliem Fakir -
There is no doubt that we live in an uncertain period. Since 9/11, the world has changed. Global governance is in flux and generally speaking, the outcome of our transforming world is still unknown.
The conventional source and centre of power is beginning to shift. This centre of power largely an alliance between the United States (US) and Europe, which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt aptly called Empire, is what we have come to accept as the de facto world in which we live, by which we...
