SUDAN ↴
Sudanese ‘resistance theater’ animates a future without war
WAGING NONVIOLENCE | Since the start of the war in Sudan, Sudanese theater director and artist Rabee Al-Hassan has brought theater to survivors of war and displacement across the country. He uses a kind of participatory theater that he calls “resistance theater,” which gives voice to many issues that remain taboo under oppressive laws and authorities in Sudan. Resistance theater confronts themes of human rights, social justice and equality, as well as despair, fear and post-war trauma. For Al-Hassan, theater also helps participants resist internalizing displacement as an identity, and instead “frees us from it in favor of our true identity.”
Conflict gold and ‘chequebook diplomacy’
CANADIAN DIMENSION | “You cannot negotiate with someone who is actually the aggressor himself,” Mohamed Bashir Abunommo, Sudan’s former minister of minerals, says. Gold has shaped the nearly three-year conflict in Sudan, from financing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army, to tangling the complex web of diplomatic alliances and betrayals in the region. In war and in peace, Sudan is yoked more tightly to the will of Gulf countries, its peripheries remaining in a chokehold of inequity and impossible choices.
(Image: Gold prospectors grind up rock debris before washing it to extract the gold it contains, North Sudan, Fourth Cataract Nile Region. Photo by Maciek67/iStock.)
The Betrayal of Darfur: Decades of broken promises paved the way for a resurgence in genocidal violence in Sudan.
THE PROGRESSIVE | Even prior to the city’s fall to the RSF, October had been a particularly deadly month for el-Fasher, with RSF forces targeting mosques and hospitals in deadly bombings since the beginning of this year. … Raised banks of sand or gravel built by the RSF, known as berms or earthen walls, hinder its residents from escaping attacks, creating what an August report from the Yale School of Public Health called “a literal kill box.” As long as the gunfire continues, Saeneen says, they are “waiting for their fate.”
(Image: A Sudanese child who fled el-Fasher city with family receives treatment at a camp in Tawila, Sudan, on November 2, 2025. Mohamed Abaker / AP Photo.)
RECENT ↴
Inside Afghanistan’s Compounding Crises
INKSTICK | As donors debate engagement and isolation, millions of Afghans confront hunger, homelessness, and a future with shrinking options. The past few months in Kandahar have been ruthless, Gul Mohammad Aryan tells me over a spotty internet connection. As director of the Sustainable Goals Organization for Afghanistan, he has been trying to support Afghan refugees who are now coming back from other countries in the region. More than 2.86 million people returned last year, the vast majority from Pakistan and Iran. “They have left everything in Pakistan, they have left everything in Iran,” Aryan says. “They just came with their clothes. They don’t have enough.”
(Image: WFP/Isheeta Sumra.)
Ecuador’s Social Transparency law deepens Noboa’s authoritarian rule
FAIRPLANET | The trial of Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza has pulled back the curtain on a sweeping state surveillance campaign in Ecuador, exposing undercover operations, and a wave of new laws critics say are dismantling civil society. As President Daniel Noboa pushes through neoliberal reforms under a permanent state of emergency, Indigenous and environmental defenders warn the country is sliding into authoritarian rule.
(Image: Amazonian Indigenous leaders from Pastaza in Ecuador’s Amazon convene a press conference to voice their demands to the government as part of the nationwide strike. mullu.tv )
Afghan refugees face deportation in Pakistan
INKSTICK | “This is not just a refugee issue, it is fundamentally a human rights issue that tests our collective conscience,” says Moniza Kakar, Karachi-based human rights lawyer and coordinator for Pakistan’s Joint Action Committee for Refugees. Following an extension to the deportation deadline last month, round-ups were restarted in September. Despite Pakistani authorities emphasizing voluntary return — what a Khyber official described as “honorable and dignified” — many Afghans who have lived in Pakistan for decades feel pressured and blindsided.
(Image: Mohammad Hassan Mukhtar Ahmad.)
COLOMBIA ↴
River politics and silent disappearances in Buenaventura, Colombia
FAIRPLANET | Long on the margins of South America’s shipping hubs, the industrial city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast is seeing massive changes. Port expansion is ushering in a new era of maritime trade. But justice for victims of armed conflict remains unresolved and their memory is slipping away.
(Image: Vladimir Oprisko / @captoprisko.)
Catatumbo crisis marginalises northeast Colombia communities
FAIRPLANET | With Trump doubling down on an old drug war playbook for Colombia, and Petro already folding to Trump’s executive order to deport Colombians, Catatumbo is now in a critical moment that threatens to deepen social divides.
(Image: UNHCR/Mónica Peñaranda)
An uncertain future for mine clearance in Colombia
THE PROGRESSIVE | New frontlines and funding cuts deepen risks for ex-combatants working in humanitarian mine clearance.
(Image: March 22, 2018. Algeciras, Huila. Photo Credit: Juan Arredondo for UNMAS.)
MAGAZINES ↴
Copper mining and green sacrifice in Putumayo
NACLA | This special issue of the NACLA Report critically examines the rise of green capitalism in the Americas in the lead-up to COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November. Guest edited by Sabrina Fernandes and Breno Bringel, this collection analyzes how the logics and instruments of green capitalism are shaping policy and territory, enabling new forms of dispossession, and deepening historical inequalities. Together, the voices and examples compiled in this issue expose the traps of a corporate-led transition that claims to be clean and just, but in practice reinforces systems of exploitation and domination. The Fall 2025 issue also highlights the movements, communities, and visions from below that challenge these false solutions and point the way toward just ecosocial transitions.
Making Montréal-Est
MAISONNEUVE | A sulfur processing plant. An oil refinery. A chemical warehouse. Corrals of shipping containers. A depot for petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil refining. Oil tank cars lined up along the street in a long row. The remnants of a factory, and the burnt carcass of a former recycling facility. The site of a soon-to-be-constructed airport fuel storage terminal along the northern bank of the Saint-Laurent River. These are the landscapes of Montréal-Est, a city on the eastern end of the Island of Montreal. The history of this small city is intertwined with heavy industry, as are the plans for its revitalization.
Catering to capitalism: How the informalization of labour is hurting workers
THIS MAGAZINE | For those whose livelihoods depend on the flexibility of catering work, there is also a price for this view into an often inaccessible world. While catering is the quintessential gig economy, temp-worker agencies and the informalization of labour in the sector pose new challenges for workers’ rights in a precarious industry—one that has long lacked many vital labour protections that are considered basic rights for other classifications of workers.
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