Global News and Analysis

Source: Waging Nonviolence

This text is adapted from “The Paradox of Repression and Nonviolent Movements,” edited by Lester R. Kurtz and Lee A. Smithey for Syracuse University Press.

Suffering under the brutal dictatorship of the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, a group of women rose up courageously as “mothers of the nation” to challenge his elite rule and build grassroots democratic change in their communities. Women of Zimbabwe Arise, or WOZA, mobilized a campaign of “tough love,” using the traditional role and moral authority of mother to scold the repressive and corrupt leaders of the country and call for a new kind of society where equality and social justice prevail. This joining of love, power and justice echoes the vision and experience of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who declared, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” read more

Source: Alternet

Last week, on July 26, the United States House of Representatives passed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which will then go on to the U.S. Senate and finally to the U.S. president. It is worthwhile to note that 139 Democrats, including the entire Democratic Party leadership, voted for this bill. This Act provides the U.S. government with $717 billion for a year’s military spending. This is $100 billion more than was spent last year (which is itself more than half of the annual Chinese military budget). No country spends money on its military like the United States. It’s not long now before the annual U.S. military budget will cross the $1 trillion mark. read more

Source: Mongabay

The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has issued a long-awaited ruling in favor of those affected by the transnational oil company Chevron, which operated through its subsidiary Texaco in Ecuador between 1964 and 1990. The court rejected the protection action that the company filed in 2013.

In the 151-page ruling, the court denied Chevron’s claim of violation of constitutional rights. Chevron will now have to pay $9.5 billion for the repair and remediation of social and environmental damage that – according to audits and expert reports – were a result of oil company operations in the Amazonian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana. read more

Source: The Nation

A new proposal would do little to alleviate the suffering on Europe’s borders.

Faced with a surge in migration across the Mediterranean Sea, European Union officials apparently think the best way to manage migration is simply to keep migrants from reaching the shore. The EU Commission is currently weighing a plan to reform the union’s border policies by finding more elaborate ways to warehouse, filter, and ultimately push away its unwanted human cargo.

While the plan would do little to stem the social forces that drive people onto smuggling routes from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it would aim to create a number of so-called “controlled centres,” hosted by countries that volunteer to serve as disembarkation points. Processing about 500 people at a time, teams of border agents would screen arrivals for “humanitarian” qualifications, to vet their backgrounds for eligibility for humanitarian protection as refugees, or to brand them mere “economic migrants,” to be forcibly returned. Participating frontline states would gain the EU’s infrastructural support and reimbursement of about 6,000 euros per migrant. But human-rights advocates warn that, like previous policies aimed at “deterrence,” the proposal would simply make the journey more miserable for migrants fleeing crisis in the Global South. read more

We live in a perilous time of rising great power tensions, the ascendency of right-wing autocracies, uncertainties, and renewed nuclear and high-tech arms races. This is compounded by the reality that there are no longer any givens in US foreign and military policies or to the future of liberal democracy in the US.