As this issue heads to print, U.S. legislators have been demonizing student-organized Gaza solidarity encampments, calling for protesters’ arrest while holding hearings that weaponize accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel. Too many university leaders have capitulated to this bad-faith, neo-McCarthyite pressure, ceding their ground to the Right or eagerly following its lead.
Our Spring 2024 issue opens with a timely commentary by PRA’s Habiba Farh on the state’s use of the “outside agitator” narrative to violently repress progressive movements.
In our first feature, Meena Jagannath and Nikki Thanos of the Movement Lawyers Lab consider what’s behind the global authoritarian surge—and what’s to be done about it. And as India wraps up national elections that could bring a third term to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Savera: United Against Supremacy reports on the violent, far-right Hindu supremacist movement behind Modi’s government.
In an online feature, Kayo Chang Black examines the role of disinformation in Taiwan's 2024 elections and what a split outcome reveals about the country’s ongoing struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
Ahead of his re-election, Russia’s Vladimir Putin declared 2024 “The Year of the Family.” In her commentary (published with a pseudonym), Irina Smolevskaya scrutinizes Putin’s appeal to “traditional family values” as a reversal of U.S. Cold War containment rhetoric. Russia, along with Egypt and Iran, is among the leaders of a global anti-gender movement that draws on this rhetoric to wield growing influence at the UN. As Zoë Schott writes, the movement’s mission has shifted from attacking gender-focused spaces to all global policymaking on gender and LGBTQ rights.
Ajay Singh Chaudhary argues in our excerpt of his book, The Exhausted of the Earth, that the “right-wing climate realism” of those who benefit from the extractive economic system that fuels global warming upholds “business-as-usual.”
Finally, we consider a few recent books in this issue. PRA’s Ethan Fauré discusses U.S. immigration politics and considers how two books—The Case for Open Borders and My Fourth Time We Drowned—challenge “border crisis” narratives. And PRA’s Annie Wilkinson speaks with the editors of Conspiracy/Theory, Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, about the reality-making power of conspiracism and its global spread.
Our cover features a paste-up collage of Palestine solidarity art in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In The Art of Activism, Fearless Collective artist Vicky Shahjehan speaks with PRA about the inspiration behind her public art.
