All over the world, pro-choice activists held a day of action on September 28 to promote women’s right to reproductive health. They’re facing a difficult global climate. Every year 47,000 women die from unsafe abortions — most of them in the 66 countries that ban the...
As a mother of two little girls, aged 4 and 6, the photograph of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, the waves lapping the face of his lifeless body, shook me. But the tears came much later — not as I saw more and more images of migrant and refugee suffering in the news, but when...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and OtherWords. Except for maybe the Affordable Care Act, nothing gets Republican politicians fired up like Iran. In the first GOP debate alone, Scott Walker promised that he’d tear up the Iran nuclear...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. When government forces launched their attack on the village of Bauw in South Sudan’s Unity state in early summer, Nyaduri and several other women fled into the bush. Their hiding place...
As the death toll continues to climb in Nepal following its 7.8-magnitude earthquake, women on the ground are fearlessly leading rescue efforts in the face of the devastation. “We are counting deaths,” said Renu Adhikari. The government figure has already topped...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. The literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky once attributed Tolstoy’s success as a novelist to the “energy of delusion.” The Russian writer was committed to constant trials and experimentation. He had a seemingly endless capacity to put...
Two summers ago, a Somali mother publicly recounted a harrowing experience of sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of African Union troops in Mogadishu. Somali troops, she said, had violently kidnapped her, ostensibly to investigate whether she had ties to the...
Resistance and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in Chiapas, Mexico and transnational Kurdistan, where the respective Zapatista and Kurdish resistance movements create new gender relations as a primary part of their struggle and process for building a better...
The Nigerian authorities recently postponed elections that had been scheduled for February, ostensibly to give them more time to fight Boko Haram, the militant Islamic extremist group with ties to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The delay heightens the already intense...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. The expanding U.S.-led war on the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, has largely fallen off the radar of U.S. social movements. Many (but not all) who were active in anti-war organizing...