This dossier looks at how the contradictions of the struggle for land in Brazil led to creation of one of the largest peasant’s movements in the world: the MST. This text focuses on the movement’s tactics and forms of organisation and why it is the only peasant social movement in Brazil’s history that has managed to survive for over a decade in the face of the political, economic, and military power of Brazil’s large landowners.
This is the first bulletin from the art department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In this series, we will share our collective creative endeavours, news from our latest events, and how the art we are inspired by feeds the work of global social movements.
This dossier looks at the history and unfinished work of women’s liberation in the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Women’s lives vastly improved during the DDR’s forty years of existence in areas such as self-determination, reproductive rights, and access to affordable, quality childcare and healthcare. Women’s participation in the production process played a crucial role in achieving these rights, with the socialist workplace anchoring these transformations. Despite the less than favourable conditions following the dissolution of the DDR in 1990, this process continues in the present and offers valuable lessons for contemporary struggles.
The People’s Science Movement in Karnataka, India, is revolutionising education and cultivating scientific learning amongst children. Through neighbourhood schools and the Joy of Learning Festivals organised by the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (Indian Science Knowledge Association), the movement employs creative, inclusive, and hands-on learning in order to advance critical thinking and tackle deeply rooted divisions and hierarchies in Indian society. The People’s Science Movement is unique in that it operates in the spaces made available due to the failures of capitalism, differentiating it from other class-based organisations that, by definition, confront capital with full force.
Tectonic changes are taking place in the world, accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the rapidly escalating genocide in Palestine. These changes are shaped, on the one hand, by the Global North’s loss of economic power alongside its increasing militarisation and, on the other, by the Global South’s growing political demand for sovereignty and economic development. To understand these changes and the Global North’s bewilderment about the new mood in the Global South, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced dossier no. 72, The Churning of the Global Order, based on original research carried out with Global South Insights.