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.

Inkani Books announces two new releases, launching in April and May, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, the first Zulu translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and The Revolutionary Thoughts of Kwame Nkrumah. We invite you to explore their pages and engage with their ideas. At Inkani Books, we remain committed to reviving histories of national liberation, one page at a time.

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.

Events in recent years, including Israel’s genocide in Gaza, signify a qualitative change in the US-dominated world order. Imperialism has begun its transformation to a new stage: Hyper-Imperialism. This is imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way, whilst also subject to the constraints that the declining empire has foisted on itself. The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni – whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds of the over US$ 2 trillion dollar military spending of the US-led Military Bloc.

Twenty-five years after the first ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and the Caribbean, the region – faced with the advance of right- and extreme right-wing – seems to be breathing new life into the latest wave of progressive governments. However, this ‘new wave’ faces a different reality than the earlier one. This dossier seeks to better understand the challenges, limits, and contradictions in the region today.

The inequality that capitalism inevitably produces has created a world in which the richest 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion people who make up 60% of the population on the planet. These twin trends have been going on for years, indeed for decades, woven together by the laws of capitalism in crisis. The task of explaining the crisis and understanding its fundamental laws is necessary to go beyond superficial manifestations and discover the essence of the entire process.

Dossier no. 68 presents an analysis of the 1973 coup against Chile and its effects on the Third World and non-aligned countries. It was the Allende government’s policies to nationalise copper that spurred the coup, but the policy to nationalise copper was part of a broader conversation in the Third World to create a New International Economic Order which would restructure the neocolonial international economic system along democratic lines and give weight to the ideas and peoples of the Third World. In that sense, the US-driven coup against Chile was precisely a coup against the Third World.

We stand together against the rise of a new McCarthyism that is targeting peace activists, critics of US foreign policy, and Chinese Americans. Despite increased intimidation, we remain steadfast in our mission to foster peace and international solidarity, countering the narrative of militarism, hostility, and fear.

Over the past century, there have been major shifts in the debates and theories concerning the question of development. In the post-war era, this evolution can be divided into four eras: the era of modernisation theory, the era of the New International Economic Order, the era of neoliberal globalisation, and the current transitional era following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. This dossier examines the historical and current thinking on development and offers an outline for a new socialist development theory.

It is remarkable how the media in a select few European and North American countries is able to set the record on matters around the world. In the second half of the twentieth century, post-colonial nations sought to address this severe imbalance, pushing for a New World Information and Communication Order. Though the US-led wave of neoliberal globalisation ultimately killed off these initiative , in recent years the dream of a new information order has been revived in the Global South.

This dossier offers a broad analysis of the living and working conditions of India’s large and diverse working class. The vast majority of workers in India are poorly paid and face terrible living conditions. Most of them are in the informal sector, where unionisation rates have been historically low. During the neoliberal era, corporations have demanded ‘labour market flexibility’, claiming that it would help attract foreign investment and generate economic growth. To overcome unions’ resistance against such ‘reforms’, which make jobs even more insecure, the government has moved to change laws. But workers have not surrendered to capital’s rising power.

As the old US-led ‘rules-based international order’ enters a state of great fragility, a new emerging project seeks to recover the spirit of the 1945 United Nations Charter. The struggle between these two systems is at the heart of growing international tensions and conflicts. This dossier, produced in collaboration with Cuba’s Centre for International Policy Research (CIPI), offers a provisional analysis of the realities and possibilities of regionalism to advance a more democratic world order.

Significant global changes have emerged in the years since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This can be seen in a new phase of imperialism and the particularities of eight contradictions, summarised in our latest text.

Hugo Chávez built the foundations of today’s Bolivarian Revolution, which radically transformed democracy and the material conditions of the people and made it possible to build independent states of free women and men. With advances and setbacks, the dreams of economic independence, political sovereignty, and social justice that Chávez embodied are more urgent than ever for Latin America and the Caribbean.

This dossier examines the history of Christianity and the rise of fundamentalism in Latin America, from looking at its emergence in the United States and how it has served as a tool of an imperialist project to its insertion in politics in the region today and its misogynist, anti-communist, and anti-democratic manifestations.

Catastrophes of one kind or another have rippled outward from Ukraine, including galloping inflation that is out of control. Areas of the world that are not directly party to the conflict are being hit hard by growing economic pressures, with political unrest an inevitable consequence. In this context, the Peace and Justice Project, a research institute headed by Jeremy Corbyn, joined up with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and two media partners, Globetrotter and the Morning Star, to produce a series of reflections on unfolding conflicts in relation to concepts of nonalignment and peace.

With the failure of capitalism to address the basic questions of our times, the obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy that stare us in the face, it has become more urgent than ever to recover traditions that are grounded in a scientific approach and have a sincere desire to confront the dilemmas of humanity. Unpacking the traditions of national liberation Marxism in ten theses, dossier no. 56 unearths the foundations of revolutionary praxis that would allow for more factual assessments of our times, a closer rendition of contemporary imperialism that can advance the construction of a socialist world.

We are witnessing a dangerous political, economic, and military escalation by the United States and its Western allies against Russia and China. The United States seeks to prevent a historical process that seems inevitable, the process of Eurasian integration, which threatens the primacy of the Euro-Atlantic elites. To secure global hegemony, the United States is committed to the pursuit of global nuclear primacy and is willing to use any means to ‘weaken’ both Russia and China – even at the risk of destroying the planet.

Under the leadership of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with 26 research institutes from around the world to draft A Plan to Save the Planet. This living, evolving document puts forward a vision for the present and the immediate future centred on twelve key themes: democracy and the world order, the environment, finance, health, housing, food, education, work, care, women, culture, and the digital world. Dossier no. 48 includes and elaborates on the Plan and lays out our orientation, principles, and horizon.