The current crisis of the Bolivarian project is due to its failure to question the rentier petro-state model. Far from accepting that an alternative to capitalism necessarily had to be a departure from the destructive development model of unlimited growth, the government of President Chávez intensified it to extremes unknown in the country’s previous history.

The Transnational Institute proudly presents the first issue of Dynamo, a monthly and bilingual (English and Spanish) review of current debates and new ideas on international politics and economics. Dynamo is jointly published by TNI, la diaria (a Uruguayan newspaper run by a cooperative of journalists and media workers) and a collective of Latin American scholar-activists.

Researchers and activists from fifteen countries met in Amsterdam with the aim to jointly draft the research agenda of the New Politics Project, a decentralised think tank on counter-hegemonic politics. It will aim to boost the development of desirable, viable and achievable alternatives, transcending current oppressive and exploitative structures;  acknowledge the diversity of knowledge as a source of inspiration for the co-creation of alternatives; and promote fruitful collaboration and exchanges among researchers and activists from different regions of the world.

Economics often appears boring, but this narrow, mostly male dominated profession decides on matters intimately bound up with questions of power, democracy and vital matters of health, education, social welfare and the environment. Meaningful democracy requires the participation of ordinary people in economic debates, so that they can shape their own lives in solidarity with others.

In the era of globalisation, the steady removal of decision-making from democratic chambers by EU elites is serving as a blueprint for post-democratic governance around the world. Progressives must be ambitious and start putting forward ideas for a democratic world government as a viable alternative.

Building a real democracy in the face of corporate and financial power will require a rethinking of power and agency, unleashing the creative, experimental, knowledge-sharing and emancipatory approaches of social movements.

TNI's fifth annual State of Power 2016 report explores the intersect of power and democracy. Featuring prominent activists and academics, its essays feature the long battle between economic power and popular democracy, expose the different powers seeking to undermine democracy today, and tell the stories of radical popular democratic alternatives emerging worldwide.

Experiences and experiments in Spain, Brazil, Istanbul and other cities suggest that a transnational municipalism, based on concepts of an open source city (free online tools and active citizen participation), has the potential to regenerate democracy and build a geopolitics of the commons against neoliberalism.

In the wake of early 2010s upheavals such as the Arab Spring, Spain’s indignados, or the global Occupy movement, many commentators were quick to either invoke the presumed tech-savvy of ‘digital natives’ or the purported ‘cyber-utopianism’ of net freedom advocates who supported the protests. But what role have internet freedom activists – or ‘freedom technologists’ – played in ongoing struggles for progressive political change around the world and how can the pursuit of liberty be combined with the struggle for social justice?

India has strongly entrenched power hierarchies that have historical roots but have also been exacerbated by inequalities and injustices that have deepened with economic globalisation. However grassroots political movements are emerging in India that could signal a gradual shift to direct or radical democracy, coupled with making representative democracy more accountable and ecologically sustainable

Law 1448 has been promoted as a demonstration of ‘good will’ by Santos' government in Colombia. The law’s main objective is to provide recognition to the victims of the Colombian armed conflict. This stands in contrast to the policy of denial enacted by the previous government.

In Argentina, the accumulation of new lands for expanding mining and large-scale agribusiness requires displacement of current occupants. However, peasant resistance is shaping to achieve far-reaching structural change.

The demand for people-centred regional alternatives has been at the core of people’s struggles in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. This reader pulls together perspectives of social movement activists, describing the restrictive regional spaces within which they work and propose regional alternatives.

Why are those responsible for the EU crisis profiting from it? Why are the same policies that caused the crisis being used to resolve it? An infographic expose of the EU crisis, its causes and its social impacts.