Jolien van Veen: Atmospheric Security in Rio de Janeiro
Image 1: Exú Tranca Rua (left) and Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas (right) depicted on the walls of the center. Photo by author. When I started fieldwork in…
Image 1: Exú Tranca Rua (left) and Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas (right) depicted on the walls of the center. Photo by author. When I started fieldwork in…
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…
Before, times like these have come before Times when we witnessed hurricanes that never stopped uprooting trees We thought that we had learned how to travel the road to…
A Postscript Note: I finished writing this piece prior to the Israeli-US attacks on Iranian cities and nuclear facilities, which killed over a thousand people. There is, therefore,…
This forum has shed light on vastly different but interrelated contexts of Palestine solidarity. The essays draw attention to the interplay of shifting solidarities with Palestine and the…
One question has been haunting me since the current wave of repression of pro-Palestinian speech began in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the genocidal campaign-disguised-as-reprisal…
Extrajudicial arrest, termination from employment, suspension of university enrollment, being declared persona non-grata (Karl 2025), police violence at demonstrations, harassment at airports, online …
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…
I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the…
Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S.…
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…
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 …
It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was…
I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic)…