“Russia is giving carte blanche to the far right”

A year ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war against Ukraine on the pretext of „denazification“. A year after the outbreak of war, IRGAC member Alexander Tushkin from Russia spoke to Sergey Movchan, left-wing activist and participant in the Marker project which tracks far-right violence in Ukraine, about Ukrainian nationalism, the far right and antifascists in the Ukrainian army, and how the war has affected their position in society.

IRGAC

Echoes of Jin, Jiyan, Azadi in Iran and Elsewhere

An interview with Nafis Fathollahzadeh and Ülker Sözen

Börries Nehe

Börries Nehe holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a specialization in Sociology. He is currently the academic coordinator of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism & Counter-Strategies

„Brazil is experiencing a fascist uprising“ Interview with Vladimir Safatle

On January 8, more than 4,000 supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro invaded, looted, and vandalized public buildings, in what the professor Vladimir Safatle claims to be a „fascist insurrection“ with the support and collaboration of the military police

Andrea Dip

Will Lula Get a Second Chance?

Brazil’s presidential election will decide whether the country continues down the path of reaction or joins the new Pink Tide

Sabrina Fernandes

Sabrina Fernandes is a Brazilian eco-socialist organizer and communicator with a sociology PhD from Carleton University, Canada. She is the person behind Marxist YouTube Channel, Tese Onze, and is coordinating the launch of Jacobin Brasil.

Art and Resistance: An Interview with Börries Nehe and Aurel Eschmann

How do we find images and develop counter-strategies that embolden others and create a narrative for global struggles today?

Börries Nehe

Political Crisis in El Salvador and the Millennial Authoritarianism of Nayib Bukele: Interview with Fuerza Solidaria por El Salvador

El Salvador is experiencing an accelerated authoritarian drift at the hands of its eccentric president Nayib Bukele, which has led to widespread demonstrations. Bukele´s image is that of a millennial president, spontaneous, young, and cool. Yet this style goes hand in hand with the persecution of social activists, the removal of the entire Supreme Court and the militarization of society. To learn more about the current situation and ongoing protests, we spoke with activists from Fuerza Solidaria por El Salvador.

Gustavo Robles

Gustavo Robles studied contemporary history and philosophy, an area in which he received his Ph.D. degree. He has been an Associated Professor at the Department of Education at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), a Postdoc-Researcher at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (UNLP-CONICET, Argentina), and an Invited Lecturer at different Argentinian Universities. He also carried out doctoral and postdoctoral research stays at different German universities, such as the University of Frankfurt, the University of Jena, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. His areas of research interests are Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary political thought, and social philosophy, and his current project is focused on the connections between subjectivization processes and affective dimensions in current authoritarian neoliberalism. Furthermore, he is an activist in different political and cultural collectives in Argentina and Germany related to issues such as human rights and immigrant working conditions.

Last publications:
"Crisis de la experiencia y (pos)fascismos. Lecturas desde la Teoría Crítica". Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica. N° 13. 312-339. 2021

"La teoría del reconocimiento de Axel Honneth. Análisis crítico". In Comou, Antonio (ed.). Perspectivas en Teoría Social Contemporánea. La Plata: EDULP. 2021

"El fin de algunas ilusiones. Subjetividad y democracia en tiempos de regresión autoritaria". Resistencias. Revista de Filosofía de la Historia. 2(1). 14-27- 2020

"Sobre la dimensión política del resentimiento" (2020). Castalia. Revista de Psicología. 34. 5-23

“Impossible Is Not So Easy”: An Interview with a Political Analyst from the Philippine Left

After more than five years of authoritarian rule, rent-seeking, and a kind of ‘gangster’ neoliberal economic policies, the strongman rule of Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte has begun to unravel as the Philippines gears up for the national elections in May 2022. Realignments of social and political forces are beginning to reconfigure the political landscape amidst the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. Progressive and traditional social forces are drawing their political lines as the mounting opposition against Duterte expands. This conversation with Joel Rocamora, a renowned author, political analyst, and progressive governance practitioner, seeks to examine the rise of Duterte’s authoritarian governance, the reconfiguration of the Philippine elite and other social classes, the political/ideological debates within the Philippine Left, and the political realignments towards the Philippine presidential elections in 2022.

Verna Dinah Q. Viajar

Verna Dinah Q. Viajar, a Philippine national, is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Philippines, School of Labor and Industrial Relations (UP SOLAIR).

The Struggles against Authoritarianism in Brazil: An Interview with Raimundo Bonfim of the National Campaign “Out Bolsonaro!”

Raimundo Bonfim, national coordinator of the Centre of People’s Movements (CMP), talks about the current political situation in Brazil and gives perspectives on the struggle against Bolsonaro and the challenges currently posed to the Brazilian left.

Hugo Fanton

Hugo Fanton is the State Coordinator of the Central de Movimentos Populares (Popular Movements Central) in São Paulo. CMP is an organization that was formed through a historic process of resistance by popular movements, especially the social struggles of the 1980s in Brazil for democracy, the defense of urban reform, and the right to the city.

Making business accountable: The voice of civil society on Telenor’s sale of its Myanmar business to blacklisted company

Even before the coup in Myanmar, the military was preparing to strengthen surveillance mechanism by pressuring telecommunication companies to enforce intercept spyware. Although it was not confirmed whether the Ministry of Transport and Communication under the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was involved to some extent in the implementation of these surveillance procedure, the budget amounted to nearly 3.4 million Euro were approved in 2019-2020 financial year for the purchase of spyware products and phone hacking technology. Since the coup, Myanmar military has been exerting control over the Internet service providers and telecommunication companies. The military’s order to intensify electronic surveillance systems lead to a recent speculation that Telenor, Norwegian multinational telecommunications would sell its business in Myanmar. Eventually, Telenor picked up a blacklisted company with bad track record for selling 100% of its share in Myanmar without giving any notice to its customers. This interview shares the voice of an activist who leads the movement for digital rights and the cancelling of Telenor’s sale to M1 group for the data security of 18 million users. The identity of the activist is kept under anonymity due to security concerns.

Nwet Kay Khine

Nwet Kay Khine, a former journalist and writer from Myanmar, is now affiliated to the Center for Social Development Studies under the Faculty of Political Science of Chulalongkorn University.

The Crisis of Brazilian Universities: higher education under Bolsonaro

The attack on science and knowledge production is known to be one of the main elements of the rise of the authoritarian right in the past decade. As one of the main global expressions of contemporary authoritarianism, Jair Bolsonaro is no exception to that. His government has been an important part of the context of difficulties for the higher education sector in Brazil, especially since research is highly dependent on public universities and funding agencies in the country. On top of that, the COVID pandemic in 2020 created difficulties for universities all around the world. If such a global crisis is expected to generate differentiated pressures across the Global North and South, the impact of authoritarian politics is surely prone to making the situation particularly delicate for universities.

Pedro Salgado

Pedro Salgado is an International Relations scholar, working on the intersection between the fields of Historical Sociology and Global Political Economy. He is currently a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, having previously worked at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Federal University of Bahia, and Universität Kassel. His doctoral research at the University of Sussex looked at the process of Brazilian state-formation from the colonial period to late 19th century. His research agenda is centred around the geopolitical mediations between the development and global expansion of capitalism, and political transformations in states and the states-system throughout the colonial period and beyond. It has grown to encompass three main topics: (a) the geopolitics of colonial slavery and early capitalist development; (b) the colonial foundations of sovereignty and modern democracies, emphasising its legacies in terms of control over populations and exploitation of nature; (c) the methodological (and meta-theoretical) implications of the dialogue between a historicist interpretation of Marxism and decolonial theory.