Introduction Contraceptives are considered ‘the greatest life-saving, poverty ending, women-empowering innovation ever created’ (Gates 2019, 18). ‘Family planners’ – the global constellation of bi…
Social medicine, an approach that centres the social conditions of life as the cause of health and illness, can be thought of as an effort to ‘resocialize’ medicine.…
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage…
Kinshasa, its traffic and street vendors, receded as we drove past the international airport on the national road following the Congo River. “It’s been recently re-asphalted”, said the…
The identification of aflatoxin in the 1960s troubled plans for Senegalese peanuts. Blamed for the acute poisoning of English poultry fed with Brazilian peanut meal, this fungal metabolite…
By Salvador Contreras § Havaiko’s safe return to his family was a stroke of luck. In a village nestled in the Wixárika Sierra of Western Mexico, Havaiko and…
English is the dominant global language of the world, it is the language of power, and control. But it is not the only language, and different people have…
The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange…
Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary,…
After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the…
The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar…
Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko. I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-…
Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti. David Harvey prepared this text for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. We publish…
Nobody (as far as I know) has commented on how hard this year of lockdowns has been on university professors. That’s good: nobody should. Many millions of workers…
This oped was written by our research team from the University of Leicester and University of Guyana. The mental health of those who live and work in Guyana’s…
POW release to UN authorities was the first step in repatriation. Here, communists turn over UN troops at the POW receiving center at Panmunjon, on the border of…
Part 3 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Indispensable. Here was the so-called “indispensable nation,” the self-appointed saviour of the world, with generations of its leaders and thinkers…
In December 2019, a new respiratory virus outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. A new strain of coronavirus, designated COVID-2019, belongs to a large…
Annual Review of 2019: The State of the Empire at the End of a Decade This year marks the end of the second decade of the 21st-century, and…
Surely we have heard and seen enough by now that any lingering “optimism” about Trump governing as an anti-interventionist in foreign affairs has totally evaporated. What Trump promised…
A Bridge Too Far {click to enlarge} It resembled something from a post-apocalyptic setting in a movie: images of the blocked highway bridge linking Colombia to Venezuela, silent…
OCTOBER Where US–Canada relations were concerned, as well as Trump’s trade strategy, NAFTA was the leading event opening the month of October. The US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) On Monday,…
JULY June was a month so heavily saturated with key turning point events, that it seemed like the longest month of the year—but then July came. Already, on…
APRIL The Trade War Begins? April continued many of the same themes from March, beginning with the apparent start of a trade war between China and the US…