EDITOR’S LETTER
AMY HALL for the New Internationalist Co-operative newint.org
Cover: An agricultural landscape in Kazakhstan, from a collection of images from the USGeological Survey. The fields follow the contours of the land – long and narrow in mountain valleys, and large and rectangular over the plains. USGS/UNSPLASH
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In his first speech to Britain and the Commonwealth as the new monarch, King Charles III thanked his mother for her devotion to the ‘family of nations’.
But what makes a family? One of the key things that unites the 53 countries that make up the Commonwealth of Nations is that nearly all of them had their land colonized by Britain.
I thought of the lyrics to ‘Birthright’, the Sarathy Korwar track I have been listening to on repeat while putting together this magazine:
Mi casa es su casa, says the man who stole your land. When Queen Elizabeth II took the throne, more than a quarter of the world’s population was under British imperial rule. She heard the news of her father’s death while she was in Kenya in 1952. Shortly afterwards her government violently quashed the Mau Mau uprising in the country. Decolonization movements across the world were met with similar violence from the British security forces, who often also tried to cover up the evidence.
Resistance to colonialism is as old as the process itself, and people around the world continue to agitate and organize for loosening its grip.
As we delve into the issue of land rights in this edition, we also launch a new series called ‘Decolonize how?’. Over the next year we will explore what people living with the legacies and current realities of colonialism are doing to challenge power.
Elsewhere, Busani Bafana reports on the Zimbabwean government’s crackdown on press freedom, and Severia Bel explores how asylumseekers in Lithuania are caught in a political crossfire.
THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE:
Hana Shams Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada and the former co-ordinator of the advocacy body, the International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission. Riley Yesno is an Anishinaabe scholar and public intellectual. She lives and works in Toronto, where she spends her time writing and completing her PhD in political science. Severia Bel is a Londonbased freelance writer from Lithuania who writes about activism, Eastern Europe, photography and gender inequality. Gabriel Tejada is a Peru-based documentary photographer, who usually works with subjects related to humans, their customs and the space in which they develop, using this to reflect on questions of territory and identity.
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NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2022
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