“I don’t know how to explain it”, Caro told me in an interview, “but you develop a sense [Gespür] for when you can keep standing in front of…
Image 1: Gated community ‘Vila Ingles’ in São Paolo. Photo by Cornelius Kibelka In urban Brazil, portarias–entry halls and porters lodges–and their staff absorb the circulation of people…
Image 1: Photo of an election poster for former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza. The poster burnt down and destroyed in relation to the uprisings in Maputo 2010. Photo…
Image 1: Akwesasne territory. Source: Mohawk Council of Akwesasne Born on US soil to citizen parents, I applied for my first passport at age 12, when my grandma…
Image 1: Military police officer patrolling in Mangueira, Brazil. Photo by Tomas Salem Palm Springs, mid-September 2025. The American flag flies at half-staff across the city in honour…
Presidente da República, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, durante encontro com o Curupira, mascote da COP30. Parque da Cidade – Belém (PA) Foto: Ricardo Stuckert / PR This…
Introduction Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in an earlier post on this blog (Hann 2022), I emphasized the geopolitical and economic interests of the west, especially…
Aziz put down the newspaper and sighed. “This is bad, the situation is bad”. Sitting in his small tea shop, he had just finished his routine practice of…
Amidst the media frenzy in recent years regarding inflation, it is worth asking when, and for whom, is inflation actually a problem? As economists are quick to point…
When the daily Miami-Santiago de Cuba flight landed in Cuba in May 2024, a passenger at the back of the plane shouted in Spanish: !Ya llegaron los dolares!…
A few months before the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented globally I travelled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil for a stint of ethnographic fieldwork about the complex…
The election of Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding anarcho-libertarian, to the Presidency of Argentina promises to cement Argentina’s status as a prime experimental site for inflation-tackling policies…
In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000…
After a period of relatively low inflation in many economies in the Global North, inflation has once again become a major world concern. The COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted…
While explaining the origins of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony to an interviewer, the labour historian Michael Denning (2023) suggested taking a Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is…
The silence around the salience of race in development and humanitarianism (see White 2002, Kothari 2006) has lately been interrupted by an increased attention to white saviourism, especially…
By hosting the UN’s global Climate Change conference COP29 in Baku (11-22 November 2024), Azerbaijan presents itself as a climate-responsible oil state and new political ally and donor…
Critical scholars recognize humanitarianism as a racializing project rooted in colonial and imperial relations, in which classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘loc…
The German governing coalition explicitly considers refugee integration to be a humanitarian project based on an obligation to care for others because of their shared humanity. Notably, however,…
The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by…
Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern …
From Andheri to Goregaon—it’s five kilometers. Half an hour by Ambassador in the north Mumbai traffic. Windows down—through them, the usual fumes: chai, wood smoke, diesel exhaust. Plus,…
At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely…
Communism continues to thrive both as a ubiquitous presence and a powerful electoral force in the south Indian state of Kerala. Established in 1940, the Communist Party of…