| Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
type: channel
description: international, movement-driven institution focused on stimulating intellectual debate that serves people’s aspirations.
date: 2026-06-17T06:26:13Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: How to Present Your Research — From Notes to Slides
items: Hallucination Is a Property of Deployment, Not of Language Models
items: How to Use AI to Generate Scientific Figures and Diagrams for Your Research
items: Amílcar Cabral
items: East Asia’s Double Bind: Contradictions and Possibilities in the New Cold War
items: A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas
items: The Security Mirage: A Territory in Dispute
items: How to Analyse and Critique Research with AI
items: How to Summarise Papers and Books with AI
items: A Systematic Method for Controlling AI Writing Style

How to Present Your Research — From Notes to Slides
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-06-05T09:01:56Z
subject: How-To Guides
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: AI Is Transforming Research Presentations In the past, creating a research presentation often meant spending a great deal of time manually organizing content, adjusting layouts, and repeatedly revising PowerPoint slides. With the rapid development of large language models and generative AI, research presentations are entering a new stage. Today, research notes, paper summaries, and experimental […]
encoded: <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-146255 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text_H10-How-to-Present-Your-Research-From-Notes-to-Slides.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text_H10-How-to-Present-Your-Research-From-Notes-to-Slides.jpg 1000w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text_H10-How-to-Present-Your-Research-From-Notes-to-Slides-300x200.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text_H10-How-to-Present-Your-Research-From-Notes-to-Slides-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px"> AI Is Transforming Research Presentations In the past, creating a research presentation often meant spending a great deal of time manually organizing content, adjusting layouts, and repeatedly revising PowerPoint slides. With the rapid development of large language models and generative AI, research presentations are entering a new stage. Today, research notes, paper summaries, and experimental results can first be organized by AI and then further turned into slides, infographics, or web-based presentations. For progressive research institutions in the Global South, however, commercial tools pose two distinct problems: most are designed for business reporting rather than academic expression, technical content, or structured visualization; and licensing costs put many of them out of reach for institutions operating under resource constraints. Open-source projects offer an alternative on both fronts — better suited to research work, and accessible regardless of institutional budget. The following sections introduce several open-source presentation projects that work with large language models to help researchers generate presentations that are more polished and structurally clearer. HTML Presentation Generation Tools Generating a Deck End-to-End with an AI Skill One approa…

Hallucination Is a Property of Deployment, Not of Language Models
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-06-05T09:00:16Z
subject: Currents
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: Hallucination is not a defect. It is the predictable output of a training regime built to reward fluency over accuracy. The fix is not a better model. It is a different architecture. A researcher in Bamako, Niamey, or São Paulo opens Gemini and asks for a literature review on the Alliance of Sahel States — […]
encoded: Hallucination is not a defect. It is the predictable output of a training regime built to reward fluency over accuracy. The fix is not a better model. It is a different architecture. A researcher in Bamako, Niamey, or São Paulo opens Gemini and asks for a literature review on the Alliance of Sahel States — the 2023 confederation of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger that withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and broke decades of French military and monetary tutelage. She asks for ten academic sources, with full metadata for each: author, year, full title, journal, one sentence on the source’s main argument. The model returns ten, in matrix form. The first three entries read: Source 1. Kohnert, Dirk (2024). Navigating Rivalries: Prospects for Coexistence between ECOWAS and AES in West Africa. Elsevier BV / Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA). Cited by: 13. — The creation of the AES confederation undermines ECOWAS’s regional integration legitimacy while expanding the junta alliance’s military and economic partnership with global powers like Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Source 2. Sebego, M., Ouedraogo, I. M., & Folawewo, A. O. (2026). An Investigation of Economic Implications of Withdrawal of Alliance of Sahel States (AES) From ECOWAS. African Development Review (African Development Bank). Cited by: 1. — While the withdrawal marginally diminishes tax revenues due to trade shocks within the Sahel, trade diversion effects will likely boost exports for ECOWAS’s dominant economies (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria), prompting the AES to lean heavily on bilateral local initiatives. Source 3. Aniche, E. T. (2026). ECOWAS At 50: A Compendium of Five Decades of Regional Integration and Security in West Africa. Taylor & Francis (Strategic Review for Southern Africa). — ECOWAS’s mismanaged, punitive interventions and sanctions against military transitions inadvertently accelerated the formalisation of the AES, pushing the sub-region away from a bo…

How to Use AI to Generate Scientific Figures and Diagrams for Your Research
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-06-05T09:00:10Z
subject: How-To Guides
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: Hallucination is not a defect. It is the predictable output of a training regime built to reward fluency over accuracy. The fix is not a better model. It is a different architecture.
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-145850 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text-How-to-Use-AI-to-Generate-Scientific-Figures-and-Diagrams-for-Your-Research.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text-How-to-Use-AI-to-Generate-Scientific-Figures-and-Diagrams-for-Your-Research.jpg 1000w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text-How-to-Use-AI-to-Generate-Scientific-Figures-and-Diagrams-for-Your-Research-300x200.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Text-How-to-Use-AI-to-Generate-Scientific-Figures-and-Diagrams-for-Your-Research-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px"> AI Is Redefining Scientific Visualization For a long time, creating scientific figures has been an exhausting and time-consuming process. Many researchers have experienced the same workflow: repeatedly adjusting arrows in PowerPoint just to finish a flowchart, endlessly tweaking fonts and colors in Illustrator to maintain consistency, or reorganizing entire layouts simply to make a figure more readable. The real difficulty has never been ‘not knowing how to design,’ but rather the fact that scientific figures demand accurate information, clear structure, consistent styling, and professional visual presentation at the same time — and existing tools require enormous manual effort to get every detail right. As a result, figure production has long been one of the most disproportionately costly steps in research communication: the time and energy it consumes often far exceed what the work itself should require. This is especially true for social science research in and on the Global South, where mapping commodity chains, capital flows, networks of power, or histories of struggle depends on visual communication that text alone cannot convey — yet access to professional design infrastructure…

Amílcar Cabral
type: item
creator: Amilcar
date: 2026-06-02T18:11:33Z
subject: Books
subject: Amílcar Cabral
description: This edition features 17 publishers from various countries in the Global South, as well as the Amílcar Cabral Foundation of Cape Verde and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. These texts highlight the importance of the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s legacy for anti-colonial struggles, particularly for the liberation movements in Africa during the 1970’s. This […]
encoded: This edition features 17 publishers from various countries in the Global South, as well as the Amílcar Cabral Foundation of Cape Verde and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. These texts highlight the importance of the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s legacy for anti-colonial struggles, particularly for the liberation movements in Africa during the 1970’s. This book includes an introduction by Desmond Fonseca that contextualizes Amílcar Cabral’s life and thought within the history of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and the leftist movement. In addition, the texts by Luiz Fonseca, president of the Amílcar Cabral Foundation in Cape Verde, and João Pedro Stedile, a member of the coordinating committee of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, highlight the importance and relevance of Amílcar Cabral’s thought and praxis for social struggles today. Download PDF <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-145279 aligncenter img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-662x1024.jpg" alt="" width="662" height="1024" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-662x1024.jpg 662w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-194x300.jpg 194w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-768x1187.jpg 768w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-994x1536.jpg 994w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover-1325x2048.jpg 1325w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-Cabral-book-cover.jpg 1790w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 662px) 100vw, 662px">

East Asia’s Double Bind: Contradictions and Possibilities in the New Cold War
type: item
creator: Stephanie Sandoval
date: 2026-06-02T08:00:13Z
subject: Dossier
subject: National sovereignty
subject: US hegemony
subject: militarism
subject: New Cold War
subject: multilateralism
subject: Hyper-Imperialism
subject: China encirclement
subject: Imperialism
subject: Cooperative security
subject: class struggle
subject: Imperialist war
subject: Global South
description: This is the seventh joint book by the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP) and brings together three articles by Amílcar Cabral, a revolutionary and leader of the liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, which have remained little known until now.
encoded: The images in this dossier, edited by Tricontinental’s art department, highlight the work of Kinjo Minoru, an Okinawan sculptor who honours the generations that have resisted war and occupation. For decades, Kinjo has carved the atrocities committed during and after the World Anti-Fascist War (widely known as the Second World War) era. Kinjo works in concrete, plaster, and metal – the same materials now being poured into Okinawa to build yet another US military base. In Okinawa – today a frontline in the New Cold War – Kinjo’s sculptures stand as memory and material refutation: a rough, heavy history that refuses to be smoothed over. 1 <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-145074 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ISC-300x100.jpeg" alt="" width="300" height="100" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ISC-300x100.jpeg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ISC-1024x342.jpeg 1024w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ISC-768x257.jpeg 768w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ISC.jpeg 1278w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-123601 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ncw-logo-300x260.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="260" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ncw-logo-300x260.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ncw-logo-768x666.jpg 768w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ncw-logo.jpg 785w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-145062 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IPA_EN-300x119.png" alt="" width="300" height="119" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/up…

A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas
type: item
creator: Stephanie Sandoval
date: 2026-05-31T03:00:57Z
subject: Art Bulletin
subject: cuban revolution
subject: Mario Benedetti
subject: fidel castro
subject: Nuestra América
subject: José Martí
subject: poetry
subject: socialist art
subject: Human dignity
subject: Latin American boom
subject: Cold War
subject: Latin American literature
subject: revolutionary culture
subject: Casa de las Américas
subject: battle of ideas
subject: cultural resistance
subject: art
description: Caught between US military dependence and deep economic integration with China, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan face mounting contradictions as the New Cold War reshapes East Asia.
encoded: The Twenty-Seventh Art Bulletin (May 2026) <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-144984 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AB27_Header-1.jpg" alt="" width="950" height="550" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AB27_Header-1.jpg 950w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AB27_Header-1-300x174.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AB27_Header-1-768x445.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 950px) 100vw, 950px"> Listen to ‘Por Qué Cantamos / Canción Nueva’ (Why Do We Sing / New Song), from A Dos Voces (In Two Voices), a collaboration between Mario Benedetti and Daniel Viglietti that pairs Benedetti’s reading of ‘Por qué cantamos’ with Viglietti’s song ‘Canción Nueva’. In Latin America, the paths of people’s struggles and the development of their cultures have always been intertwined. From Spanish and Portuguese colonisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the independence struggles of the nineteenth century and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the peoples of Latin America have resisted successive forms of domination. José Martí, one of the leading figures in Cuba’s struggle for independence, gave this resistance one of its most powerful expressions in Nuestra América (Our America), his 1891 essay on the political and cultural unity of the continent. For Martí, Nuestra América named not only a geography – the vast territory stretching ‘from the Rio Grande to the Strait of Magellan’ – but a civilisational project rooted in the histories, cultures, and struggles of the continent’s peoples. This was the anti-imperialist force of Martí’s reflection: Latin America could only free itself by knowing itself, by recognising the Indigenous, African, peasant, and popular roots that colonialism and sections of the intelligentsia had treated with contempt. As Martí wrote in Nuestra América: ‘Solving a problem in full knowled…

The Security Mirage: A Territory in Dispute
type: item
creator: Stephanie Sandoval
date: 2026-05-28T08:00:44Z
subject: Nuestra América Newsletter
subject: crime
subject: human rights
subject: Nuestra América
subject: Security
subject: Bukele Model
subject: War on the Poor
description: While imperialist offensives weaponise culture to neutralise resistance, a radical truth remains: art, literature, and imagination are never separate from political struggle, but a necessary form of collective defiance in building a new society.
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-144545" class="size-full wp-image-144545 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sidney-Amaral-Brasil-Mae-Preta-ou-A-Furia-de-Iansa-2014.png" alt="" width="970" height="681" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sidney-Amaral-Brasil-Mae-Preta-ou-A-Furia-de-Iansa-2014.png 970w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sidney-Amaral-Brasil-Mae-Preta-ou-A-Furia-de-Iansa-2014-300x211.png 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sidney-Amaral-Brasil-Mae-Preta-ou-A-Furia-de-Iansa-2014-768x539.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 970px) 100vw, 970px"> Sidney Amaral (Brazil), Mãe Preta ou A Fúria de Iansã [Black Mother or the Fury of Iansa], 2014. Dear friends, Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. There is a long, silent, and profitable war being waged in Nuestra América: the war on the poor. Although uniforms, doctrines, or slogans change—ranging from ‘pacification’ to ‘iron fist’ (mano dura) or ‘zero tolerance’—whether under the shield of the ‘war on drugs’ or the ‘war on crime’, the war produced by the inequality of the prevailing economic order is fought to simultaneously criminalise poverty and terrorise the population. The ‘Angry Tide’ that has recently swept over the governments of Latin America has made combating the region’s perceived security crisis one of its central targets. In its strategy to discredit Latin American progressivism, the new right presents leftist forces as inefficient and incapable—even as accomplices—of criminality. Frequently, political debates use polls that reveal crime as one of the main concerns of the electorate in the region and even point out that, for this reason, the population has been favoring governments that promise a harsh and inclement iron fist against delinquency. It is not surprising, in this sense, …

How to Analyse and Critique Research with AI
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-05-22T09:01:14Z
subject: How-To Guides
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: Addressing security without mirages is fundamental for the healthy development of a society. The popular camp cannot ignore this challenge.
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-144435 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/08-How-to-Analyze-and-Critique-Research-with-AI_1000667.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/08-How-to-Analyze-and-Critique-Research-with-AI_1000667.jpg 1000w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/08-How-to-Analyze-and-Critique-Research-with-AI_1000667-300x200.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/08-How-to-Analyze-and-Critique-Research-with-AI_1000667-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px"> AI can now rapidly generate large volumes of ‘paper analyses,’ but much of this content is merely fluent text with an academic tone. They look like critical studies, yet they lack clear sources of evidence, analytical pathways, and verifiable bases for judgement. Genuine critical evaluation is not impromptu commentary or emotional negation, but a structured process. It requires the researcher to clarify the analytical objectives, fix the evaluation criteria, and ensure that every judgement can be traced back to the source text. The focus of this article is not on making AI ‘better at critiquing,’ but on how to establish a set of critical analysis methods that are traceable, verifiable, and reusable over the long term. Why AI Tends to Produce ‘Pseudo-Critique’ AI’s biggest problem is not that it cannot analyse, but that it is all too easy for it to ‘look like it is analysing.’ Without structural constraints, the model will automatically complete the logic, amplify vague cues, and generate a large number of standardised judgements such as ‘the research has limitations,’ and ‘the argument is insufficiently developed.’ But the real question is: do these conclusions actually come from the source text? Can they be located in specific paragraphs, evidence, or argumentative structures? If t…

How to Summarise Papers and Books with AI
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-05-22T09:00:40Z
subject: How-To Guides
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: AI can generate a text that ‘looks like a summary’ in seconds, but the real problem is not whether the model can write, but that many outputs are not suitable for research, teaching, or long-term knowledge management. They are often linguistically fluent and structurally complete, yet lack faithful preservation of the original text’s logic, context, […]
encoded: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-144419 img-responsive" src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/07-How-to-Summarize-Papers-and-Books-with-AI_1000667.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/07-How-to-Summarize-Papers-and-Books-with-AI_1000667.jpg 1000w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/07-How-to-Summarize-Papers-and-Books-with-AI_1000667-300x200.jpg 300w, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/07-How-to-Summarize-Papers-and-Books-with-AI_1000667-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px"> AI can generate a text that ‘looks like a summary’ in seconds, but the real problem is not whether the model can write, but that many outputs are not suitable for research, teaching, or long-term knowledge management. They are often linguistically fluent and structurally complete, yet lack faithful preservation of the original text’s logic, context, and evidential provenance. A truly usable literature summary does not merely compress content into something shorter, but preserves the original argumentative structure and conceptual relations as far as possible, and makes key conclusions traceable back to the source for verification. This article therefore focuses not on writing ‘longer’ prompts, but on how to build a repeatable, checkable, and maintainable process for AI-assisted summarisation — specifically of long-form academic texts such as journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and lecture or interview transcripts. The same scaffolding does not transfer cleanly to news, marketing copy, or short-form web content; those genres call for different prompts. Why Many AI Summaries ‘Look Right but Are Actually Unusable’ The problem with many AI summaries lies not in obvious errors, but in ‘vague accuracy.’ The model will automatically complete the logic, smooth out arguments, and rewrite statem…

A Systematic Method for Controlling AI Writing Style
type: item
creator: Bandung Circuit
date: 2026-05-22T09:00:12Z
subject: Currents
subject: Bandung Circuits
description: Style is not a preference. It is a specification. Without one, the machine writes in a single voice. Every large language model (LLM) produces prose with the same tells. The contrast rhetoric (‘X isn’t just Y, it’s Z’), the deluge of dashes, the rule of three, the smooth pivot to a generic profundity — once […]
encoded: Style is not a preference. It is a specification. Without one, the machine writes in a single voice. Every large language model (LLM) produces prose with the same tells. The contrast rhetoric (‘X isn’t just Y, it’s Z’), the deluge of dashes, the rule of three, the smooth pivot to a generic profundity — once a reader knows the pattern, it is unmistakable. Last year, Forbes’ ‘Seven Tells of AI Writing’ catalogued them; the Field Guide to AI Slop arrived at the same diagnosis from a different angle. And the prose is now everywhere. A report by Graphite found that since November 2024, AI-generated articles on the internet have outnumbered human-written ones. A single, machine-uniform voice has become the majority voice of the written web. The cost of that uniformity is not visible in any single sentence. It becomes visible when the default register is applied to writing whose distinctness was the analytical content. Consider a passage from Tricontinental dossier no. 69, How the International Monetary Fund is Squeezing Pakistan (2022): Pakistan’s balance of payments problems have long been managed by the country’s main ‘export’ — its geostrategic value to Washington. When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it needed Pakistan’s support, and so it removed its economic sanctions against the country and provided it with economic, security, and military aid. In the same period, owing to Pakistan’s strategic importance in the ‘War on Terror’, the Paris Club rescheduled $12.5 billion out of the total of $13.5 billion of the debt that Pakistan owed to it. Ask a large language model to produce a paragraph on the same material — Pakistan, the IMF, US strategic interest after 2001 — and the output, however fluent, will be of a different kind. A representative run, produced by ChatGPT in May 2026, returned: Following the 2001 United States-led invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became a central strategic ally in the so-called “War on Terror,” a shift that significantly re…