The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
How did the financial crash in Iceland inspire the Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements? Why did the Arab Spring in North Africa end with Islamists running Egypt? How did the peaceful movement against a dictatorship in Syria degenerate into an all out civil war?
World famous Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, best known for his research on the information society, communication and globalization, talks about the emergence and characteristics of new social movements around...
John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt.
A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...
On Syria, Robert Fisk says, “We’d like to see a democracy, wouldn’t we? But although the word ‘democracy’ has a bad taste and a ring in it for many Arab Muslims, for good reason. We’d like to see some kind of freedom and dignity, which is what Syrians originally asked for before the massive peaceful protests on the streets—they weren’t completely peaceful, but they were pretty peaceful—turned into armed militia, government forces battles....
Mandisi Majavu -
As Noam Chomsky once wrote, the vocation of “historical engineering” is as old as history. White liberalism has developed this vocation into a science, and one of the tools that liberals deploy when carrying out “historical engineering” is ethnic solipsism. This is why today the French revolution is globally recognised as an important historical event, whereas the Haitian revolution is not foregrounded in the study of the development of the 18th century social...
Chris Hedges -
LONDON—A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the...
Saliem Fakir -
Living with an electricity monopoly armed with a mandate to provide basic services can be a double-edged sword. If well run and efficient it can be a boon for consumers and the public in general. If poorly and inefficiently run, the aftershocks will hurt your pocket and eat at the tax base for a long time to come.
When a utility company holds a monopoly over power plants, the transmission of electricity and large parts of the distribution network, as South Africa's Eskom does, it pretty...
