22/05/2018 Ana Paula Pellegrino, Dandara Tinoco, Renata Giannini, and Robert Muggah Originally published on the Open Democracy               In mid-May 2008, a journalist, photographer and driver were kidnapped and tortured in Batan, a favela in Rio de Janeiro’s west zone. When…

27/04/2018 By Deirdre Collings and Robert Muggah Originally published on iPolitics In war-torn Syria, the contents of one’s phone mean the difference between life and death. “My phone is my lifeline,” Umm Hassan told us, one of the more than 150,000 Syrian citizens fleeing the destruction…

Most of the world’s critical infrastructure—nuclear plants, electrical transmission systems, water treatment plants, etc.—is managed by internet-connected hardware and software that makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks. 10/04/2018 By Robert Muggah and Nathan B. Thompson Originally published on the Council on Foreign Relations website   For almost twenty-four hours,…

Although democracy has spread from one country to more than 100 countries in the space of two centuries, it has also suffered setbacks along the way, and continues to face resistance to this day. Democracy, after all, is not inevitable, and yet it remains the…

In a country where jails are seen as ticking timebombs, a system of self-rule among inmates has proved a striking success 02/04/2018 by Jo Griffin Originally published on The Guardian Renato Da Silva Junior harbours ambitions of becoming a lawyer. There is just one obstacle:…

13/03/2018 Originally published on the World Economic Forum website Latin America’s largest city, São Paulo, was once among the region’s most violent. But the bustling metropolis of over 12 million Paulistanos has experienced a remarkable decline in homicide. The murder rate dropped from a high…

There is a widespread perception that violence in Rio de Janeiro is spinning out of control. During last month’s Carnival celebrations, disturbing clips of tourists getting assaulted and gunfire erupting between rival drug gangs were broadcast repeatedly on television. Then President Michel Temer signed an extraordinary…

February, 2018 The Globe and Mail   Anne-Marie Slaughter is an academic, foreign-policy analyst, author, former director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department and current president and CEO of New America. As statecraft proves less and less able to solve or even tackle…

  Febrero, 2018 World Economic Forum   En la reunión del Foro Económico Mundial en Davos la semana pasada, se abordaron al menos tres versiones diferentes sobre el futuro orden mundial. Una de ellos fue la difundida por un combativo Donald Trump, que pedía una retirada estadounidense a…

February, 2018 Project Syndicate   Since the end of World War II, Latin America has maintained a lukewarm stance toward the US-dominated liberal world order, and Brazil is no exception. But at the end of the day, Brazil has much more in common with the…

Venezuelans escaping economic crisis at home are also now pouring into Brazil. Though neighboring Colombia has born the brunt of this exodus, Brazil has seen 60,000 crossings from Venezuela and numbers are rising fast.

The question is whether our world leaders are capable of fully understanding what is happening in real time and can muster the collective action to set new rules of the road.

iPolitics Fevereiro, 2018 Three competing versions of the future world order clashed at the World Economic Forum’s gathering in Davos last week. There was the one pushed by a feisty Donald Trump calling for economic nationalism and his country’s retreat from the current order. Another was advanced by Chinese…

We are fixated to the forward march of democracies and the underlying principles on which they are based, yet we must learn to compromise and accommodate multiple value systems.

It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the global liberal order hangs precariously in the balance.