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?
Visit the archives.
Alexander O'Riordan -
In a March 26 press statement, the Executive Director of The Institute for Democracy in Africa (Idasa), Paul Graham, announced that the venerable South African democratisation and rights organisation would be closing. Idasa has been in existence for over twenty years, played an important role at the end of apartheid and is a major loss to civil society in South Africa.
However, it is also important internationally. Idasa is one of the widely recognised African democratisation and rights...
Dr. Salim Vally, director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, was recently invited by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Jerusalem office to visit Palestine and deliver a series of lectures, including a keynote address at Birzeit University in Ramallah. He was unfortunately detained by Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and Palestine. After a five hour ordeal, which included an interrogation and a strip...
Pepe Escobar -
Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship - or at least "biased agendas", in New Delhi's...
Giorgio Cafiero -
As Syria’s civil war enters its third year, the country's humanitarian crisis worsens each day and the Levant grows increasingly vulnerable to the conflict's spillover.
In mid-February, the United Nations reported a death toll “nearing 70,000.” Today, one in four Syrians is internally displaced or living abroad as a refugee. No dialogue between the Assad regime and rebels has begun, as the gulf between the two sides’ conditions for talks has proven too wide to...
Richard Pithouse -
In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...
When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake” it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100,000 copycat versions.
We've posted the "Harlem Shake Special Firefighter and Ambulance Edition" above.
However, in an article published by New Left Project, Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan, critique the "Harlem Shake". Beneath the...
