Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality. This year, 2023, will be the seventy-fifth year after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli troops illegally removed Palestinians from their homes and tried to erase Palestine from the map. Since then, Palestinians have resisted against all odds, despite Israel’s formidable backing by the most powerful countries in the world, led by the United States.

Habits of colonial thought mislead many to assume that democracy originated in Europe, either in ancient Greece or through the emergence of a tradition of rights. But this is partly the retrospective fantasy of colonial Europe. From anti-colonial revolt to trade union strikes, people’s often forgotten struggles to establish basic dignity against despicable hierarchies are as much the authors of democracy as those who preserved their aspirations in written texts still celebrated in our time.

On 8 January, right-wing supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro launched an attack on the country’s capital. Like the US Capitol attack (2021) and coup in Peru (2022), the events in Brazil are part of a violent trend that represents the hostility of the billionaire class to any rollback of neoliberal austerity. The elites prefer to bring ‘centrist’ political forces to power in the Global South who will maintain the obscenely unequal distribution of global wealth.

With members of the Arctic Council refusing to work with Russia since the start of the Ukraine War, the future of the Arctic and its indigenous inhabitants (who are most affected by climate change and mining interests) is at stake. Geopolitical tensions in the region began more than a decade ago when Arctic Council states began to jockey for control over the area, not to stem the dangers of climate change, but to exploit minerals, metals, and fossil fuels within the Arctic Circle.

For over five years, our institute’s work has been driven by the idea that it is possible to transform the world to meet the needs of humanity while living within nature’s limits. We have accompanied social and political movements, listened to their theories, observed their work, and built our own understanding of the world based on these attempts to change it. The worldview that we are developing does not merely understand the world as it is; it also takes hold of the dynamic that seeks to produce the world as it should be.