While anger mobilises opposition to coal seam gas projects, it is also joy, especially the joy of social connection, that helps to sustain involvement.
We wear the evidence of extreme inequality – clothing made by workers in Bangladesh for 35 cents an hour. But we know how to reduce inequality – we just have to do it.
Governments’ lack of response to rising inequality is not a problem of knowledge or public support. The problem is that those whose needs are being ignored must find a way to make themselves heard.
While government payments and programs go some way to reducing inequality, the transformation of the labour market and its institutions has cut workers’ share of the pie to historic lows.
This is the first article in a series, Reclaiming the Fair Go, to mark the awarding of the 2018 Sydney Peace Prize to Nobel laureate and economist Joseph Stiglitz.
For China, national amnesia has become a ‘state-sponsored sport’. Memories of events deemed sensitive by the state are not just forgotten, they are winnowed out and selectively deleted.
Reformists are calling for the emancipation of religion from a state that’s seen to exploit Islam for purposes of political power. This remains the most formidable challenge to Iran’s ruling clergy.
Not all false beliefs arise from malicious misinformation. Some legal precedents rest on the status of everyday ‘common knowledge’, since shown to be false, but embedded in our law nonetheless.
The financial oligarchies differ from other kidnappers by being silent about their power over institutions and policies – they don’t want to alert anyone to what they have done.
For Ukrainians, the legacy of the Euromaidan revolution is decidedly mixed, and for the protesters who waved European Union flags EU membership now looks like a distant dream.
The idea that societies equal nation-states, neat containers that can be closed off from outside threats, is powerful. The nationalist paradigm even has a hold over many critics of its politics.
The best defence against post-truth politics is not ‘the truth’. Democracy should resist the political tyranny of claims to some immutable truth as a basis for governing the lives of others.
The physical and political space of cities can be shaped from above or below, but few have had more revolutionary changes, first under the tsars, then the communists, than St Petersburg.
Fraternity is one of the three pillars of the French Republic, but social solidarity is fraying as citizens are criminalised for acting on their beliefs in the human rights of asylum seekers.
The protesters who took to the streets of Paris didn’t know what they wanted: they just knew what they were against. But they did make us think that maybe there is another, better world.
Camille Bedock, Université de Bordeaux; James K. Wong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Patricia Roberts-Miller, The University of Texas at Austin; Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School; Sor-hoon Tan, National University of Singapore, and Xavier Marquez, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Uncertainty is built into democracy, but we are seeing more talk of crisis and more attempts at redefinition. So where does this leave citizens who want to have a meaningful say in how they live?
Democracy takes many forms, some of them democracy in name only. Confusion and misappropriation complicate the public struggle for the democracy to come, but this challenge is always unending.
Professor of Comparative Political Science and Democracy Research at the Humboldt University Berlin; Associate of the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney; Director of Research Unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.