April 2009
Alan Fowler
This short booklet introduces new ideas about how civil society is taking charge in guiding development by taking key roles in society to respond to the most pressing issues the world faces such as poverty, injustice, conflict and environmental degradation.
April 2009
La Vía Campesina’s transnational campaign in protest against neoliberal land policies has helped to generate new meanings of global citizenship.
February 2009
News from the New Politics programme (last updated in February 2009).
December 2008
Thomas Hammarberg and Ben Hayes
If the human right to privacy is to survive a generation, never mind another 60 years, then European societies must have a serious discussion about surveillance techniques, their limits and how to control them, write Thomas Hammarberg and Ben Hayes.
As they prepare to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, European governments must do more than just congratulate themselves on the continued appeal of fundamental freedoms.
December 2008
Sérgio Sauer
Brazil has not experienced any sort of major agrarian reform since then, but dozens of rural movements have been organised and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants have acquired the right of access to land (especially through settlement projects) as a result of these social movements’ struggles. After so many years of fighting and popular mobilisation, what are these movements’ contributions to building rural democracy? This study seeks to understand this process by evaluating social movements’ alliances (both rural and urban alliances) and evaluating their relationships with political parties, especially with the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) and with the Brazilian Federal Government.
December 2008
Jonathan Fox, Carlos García Jiménez and Libby Haight
Has political regime change led to changes in state-society relations? This study begins to address this question by analysing rural movement efforts to exercise newly-won citizen rights. The specific focus is on rural civil society initiatives to use the “right to know” as a tool to bolster long-standing campaigns to build self-managed, community-based economic development institutions, to bolster peasant influence over the policy process, to defend human rights, and to respect indigenous rights.
December 2008
UNAC Rural Democratisation Research Team
To be a strong peasant movement in a place like Chokwe, Mozambique requires going beyond ambiguous compromises to develop collective political thinking and to develop the capacity to use political power in ways that ensure that governmental and non-governmental organisations that help the peasantry act in line with what peasants wish and need.
November 2008
Most public opinion surveys indicate that the Obamamania that swept Western Europe has also seized Russia. However Russians are more afraid of change, and there is nothing in the air to indicate that they see a necessity for sweeping reforms.
November 2008
Sadhvi Pragya Thakur’s arrest and the questioning of Hindutva extremists for the Malegaon blasts point to the need for action against majoritarian extremism.
WHEN this column (Frontline, October 6, 2006) raised doubts about the police account of the terrorist bombings, which killed more than 30, in Malegaon in northern Maharashtra, many readers questioned this writer’s motives and the validity of his argument that the attacks were in all probability executed by Hindutva fanatics.
Two years on, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has arrested Sadhvi Pragya Thakur.
November 2008
VENUE: CEDLA, Keizersgracht 397, Amsterdam
TIME: Monday 10 November, 15.30 – 17.00
Free entrance
The New Latin American Left - Utopia Reborn
Debate and book presentation organized bij TNI & CEDLA
Speakers:
Edgardo Lander, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas
Rosalba Icaza, Institute for Social Studies, The Hague
Daniel Chavez, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam
Discussant: Kees Biekart, Institute for Social Studies, The Hague
Chair: Barbara Hogenboom, CEDLA, Amsterdam
The resurgence of the left in Latin America has taken Social and political analysts by surprise since
