Category Archives: Blog

Elena Maria Reichl: End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST

On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long […]

Stephen Campbell: On the dialectics of capitalist expansion: An interview with Christopher Krupa

In April 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press published A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador, by University of Toronto anthropologist Christopher Krupa. Tracing the expansion of capitalism in the largely rural, agrarian canton of Cayambe, Krupa’s book is an historically informed ethnography of Ecuador’s cut flower industry. In the interview below, […]

Mahmudul H. Sumon: What do we learn from hybrid governance in Bangladesh’s garments sector?

Global production networks, as we know today, have repeatedly failed to ensure the rights of workers and their health and safety. These failings have been exposed time and again whenever there has been a disaster. To address these failings, transnational activists have long been arguing for various types of multi-sectoral initiatives (MSIs) in global supply […]

Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State

At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended […]

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

Strategic Ambivalence or Disguised Conflict? China’s Reactions to Russia’s War on Ukraine and to Covid Why does China’s response so far to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “not add up”? On one hand, China has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has pushed its own state-controlled media to promote only pro-Russian propaganda, and […]

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating […]

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity […]

Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken […]

Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?

The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period in the interstitial area contested by three empires – Polish, Turkish and Russian – the Ukrainian nation was, indeed, formed through demographic processes that have left in […]

Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange along the lines of ‘it is NATO, but…’ versus ‘it is Russia, but…’. In a welcome development, discussants started following Tony Wood’s (2022) advice to ‘ascribe weights’ […]