A few weeks before the World Cup kicked off, reports began to appear in the international press about violent riots in the cities of Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro - events at one and the same time bizarrely normal and something new.
A year of social turbulence preceded Brazil's hosting of football's World Cup, with the competition itself a symbolic target of many protests. What do Brazilians think now? Arthur Ituassu, in Rio, reflects.
Brazil is indeed stuck in the past. However, this temporal disjunction is less the outcome of being economically or institutionally backward, but more of an insistence on resorting to violence as a mean of managing political anxiety.
Protecting personal data is high on the EU agenda, and Snowden’s revelations undoubtedly triggered reactions and actions in Europe and across EU Member States, the significance of which should not be underestimated.
Participation has become a necessary basis for institutional authority in an era of declining social mobility and government retrenchment. It has become a tool for sustaining hierarchies as much as a tool for transcending them.
While media coverage of Brazil's urban protests continues to focus on Molotov cocktails and smashed windows, the fight against police violence, repression and institutional racism continues.
They have pursued GDP growth with little or no investment in human, social and natural capital. This does not bode well for the future of the world economy.
Human rights groups in the global South are dependent on international funds, but those monies are dwindling for NGOs in emerging economies such as Brazil. To survive, Brazilian public interest groups must lobby for an autonomous public funding mechanism as well as new laws to incentivize private
On 6th February, Rio's military police clashed with thousands of protestors calling for free movement in the city. What caused the fare-hike and why is the state so violently defending it?
