The deadly attack on Holey bakery in July 2016 and a recent spate of crimes against minorities show that Bangladesh’s commitment to secularism and pluralism are at stake.
N'da Yao Messou is president of a cocoa farmers’ association in Niable, eastern Ivory Coast. Women’s right to development has a long way to go.
Reuters/Thierry Gouegnon
Between institutional collapse and false promises of utopia, people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others by thinking and acting as though power no longer existed.
Anarchism’s opposition to arbitrary power is often militant, but liberty is no simple thing.
Transmetropolitan Review
Liberty is a political matter bound up with institutionalised struggles for equality among individuals, groups, networks and organisations. This is where the cult of the free individual falls down.
Anarchists once took constitutionalism very seriously and might well do so again to develop radical decision-making practices.
Kim Davis/flickr
If anarchists reject private property and the state, they need to devise alternative, radical practices of power-sharing. Republican constitutionalism offers one way to think about this.
The Knitting Nannas Against Gas could be caught up in a push by the NSW government to criminalise legitimate protest.
AAP/Tony Markham
It isn’t just the ‘bad guys’ who are exposed to restrictive powers and tougher penalties. Anyone whose behaviour is regarded as a public safety risk is potentially in the frame.
It is for George Brandis to decide whether and how to audit Commonwealth laws for justifiable encroachments on common law rights.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The Australian Law Reform Commission has given George Brandis a report that does all that it reasonably could, while falling well short of what it was asked to do.
We are in danger of losing sight of what freedom is.
Supporters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions march in the streets of Johannesburg. Economic freedom has eluded the majority of South Africans.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
Economic transformation of unequal societies in a democratising context is difficult. This requires a creative mix of policy options underpinned by a commitment to social justice.
David Leyonhjelm is chairing the Senate inquiry into ‘Personal Choice and Community Impacts’.
AAP/Sam Mooy
We don’t know what will come out of the Senate inquiry into the ‘nanny state’, but we do have some idea about what Australia would look like based on libertarian principles.
The mobilisation of women has taken on many forms across the continent.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
David Leyonhjelm is a conviction politician whose positions are governed by principle, not populism. But he is exposing the disturbing moral thinness of the libertarian principles he espouses.
Remittance recipients whose priority is the socioeconomic improvements of their lives were found to be less engaged with democratic processes.
Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah
Remittances may hinder the development of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. A lot depends on whether recipients value rights and freedom much more than improving their standard of living.
George Brandis wants to protect the ‘right to be a bigot’ in the name of free speech. But the government may seek to remove such a right in relation to corporations.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
The federal government has indicated that it is considering repealing an exemption in the Competition and Consumer Act that provides for boycotts of companies on environmental grounds. The government is…
Free speech is a fundamental human right, but it cannot be absolute.
AAP/Howard Jones
The debate over the need for “rebalancing” of the Australian Human Rights Commission raises fascinating questions about the nature of human rights as a public ideal. Federal attorney-general George Brandis…