The climate crisis is changing the way nations think about food, energy, resources, war and peace. Melting ice caps are opening up new trade routes fought over by the world's great powers, conflicts are waged over food and mineral resources, shifting climates are fuelling migration – and Donald Trump says it's all just a scam.

Join Arthur Snell as he discusses his new book Elemental: the new geography of climate change and how we survive it. Spanning conflict in the Sahel, Russia's war in Ukraine, the US coveting Greenland, NEOM in Saudi Arabia, and China's energy push, Snell explores how the climate crisis is now in every part of our politics. But while there is much to concern us here, there's hope too. The world faces various futures, and it can adapt and respond to the realities of a changing climate.

Buy Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive it

In researching my book Seeking Sexual Freedom, I was struck by the contrast between the expansive ways our ancestors understood gender, sexuality and intimacy, and the growing restrictions being shaped today by religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and political power.

I think of these restrictions – often described as a “backlash” – as an interruption.

Across the continent, we have centuries of knowledge that speak to fluidity in our gods and goddesses, and to a multiplicity of family structures and ways of being. The current moment – marked by rising homophobia and the rollback of progressive rights across Africa and beyond – sits uneasily against that longer history.

At a moment of intensifying backlash against rights and bodily autonomy globally, movements are being forced to adapt fast – often with little space to reflect on what is actually working.

Much of the media that covers activism still flattens that work into individual stories or neat 'wins', even as organisers themselves push back on those framings.

This Q&A is part of openDemocracy’s effort to do something different: to treat movements not just as subjects of coverage, but as sources of knowledge – and to surface the practical thinking behind how organisers are navigating risk, building power and learning across contexts in real time.

In July 2024, a 17-year-old stabbed 13 people, killing three girls, in a dance studio in Southport, in the north-west of England. Fueled by misinformation about the incident in the aftermath, rioters clashed with police and attacked a local mosque. Anti-immigration protests and riots spread across the UK in the days that followed.

On Monday, the UK government released the first phase of its inquiry report examining the event. While the report says that the “perpetrator’s responsibility is absolute” – he pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment – it considers a range of other factors and failings that surrounded the event and its aftermath. That includes the role of the internet and tech platforms, including, in particular, X and Amazon.

Social media and online content

• This piece was originally published by Agencia Publica, and has been translated and edited by openDemocracy

As night fell on Rio de Janeiro on 13 March 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart, known as Jango, addressed a crowd gathered at Brazil’s Central Station to announce measures that would change the course of the country’s history.

It is now clear that the war against Iran is going badly for Donald Trump. Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) may be determined to carry on, but Trump is the war leader in deep trouble.

So radical is this unexpected outcome that the United States may even be facing its Suez moment, like the one that saw France and the UK lose status in 1956, hastening decolonisation in the 1960s. If so, the effects of the Iran conflict could last for decades, well beyond the immediate conflict, and have impacts that change the current world order – with unpredictable consequences.

Consider the past month and a half. Iran’s theocratic leadership had been crippled by assassinations within days of the start of the assault, but leaders were quickly replaced, and the much-anticipated popular uprising simply did not happen.

“The best-case scenario is that the state captures me,” says Ángel Flores, the regional coordinator of the Indigenous Movement for the Articulation of the Struggles of the Ancestral Peoples (MILPA), one of the most vocal organisations against state mega-projects in El Salvador.

It would not be the first time MILPA’s members had been detained under El Salvador’s state of emergency, which has suspended constitutional rights and allowed police to arrest people without a judicial warrant. President Nayib Bukele’s government initially introduced the measure in 2022 after a spike in gang-related homicides. At the time, it was supposed to last 30 days, but last month entered its fourth year, having been extended dozens of times.

In this article, some of the hundreds of journalists and defenders of human and land rights have told us how their lives have changed since the state of emergency was introduced. Some remain in El Salvador, defiant in their resistance despite fearing for their and their families’ lives amid state-led persecution. Others have been forced to flee the country, fearing detention, being disappeared, or even death.

Who won the 2025 African Cup of Nations depends on who you ask. On the pitch, Senegal. On paper, Morocco – the football tournament’s host. But beyond the disputed result, AFCON has revealed a story of how a host country managed its image – and who it pushed out of sight to do so.

Late last year, Morocco forcibly displaced hundreds of Black migrants as it prepared to welcome more than 600,000 tourists for AFCON. While such operations are not uncommon in the country, the Moroccan Human Rights Association (AMDH) told openDemocracy that there was a significant spike ahead of the tournament.

Displacements often “intensify” when the world’s eyes are on Morocco for international sports tournaments, diplomatic summits, or big cultural festivals, according to AMDH president Souad Brahma.

As the dust settles on last week’s Hungarian election, which saw Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party wiped out in a landslide win by centre-right candidate Péter Magyar, some onlookers are left puzzled.

What changed? Hungarians, including many Fidesz voters, have long known of the Orbán regime’s corruption and anti-democratic measures, which were backed by both Donald Trump in the US and Vladimir Putin in Russia. Was Magyar just in the right place at the right time, or is there something deeper at play? And what can progressive forces around the world learn from him?

We know that it was not primarily – or not only – propaganda that kept millions wedded to Fidesz for so long. This is clear from a recent interview given to an independent media outlet (Partizán) in which a Fidesz politician explains that she had been scandalised by the enrichment of Orbán’s close circle and the cases of abuse within child protection services that had come to light – she just did not believe these were intrinsic to the workings of Fidesz. So if Fidesz politicians and voters alike were often aware of these issues, what kept them supporting the party for so long?

It’s 2017 in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest, and the World Congress of Families has landed in town.

Organised by US anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ personality Brian Brown, the annual gathering of Christian nationalist campaigners, political figures, think tanks and academics pulled off its biggest coup yet: welcoming Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to the stage as a keynote speaker.

Orbán used his speech to describe Europe’s future as “under attack”, with the region “losing out in the population competition between great civilisations”. He claimed that the EU wanted to solve the problems posed by an ageing population and low birth rates with immigration.

Within hours of Donald Trump accepting a two-week ceasefire in Iran, walking back on his dire threat that “a whole civilisation will die”, Binyamin Netanyahu did his best to wreck any prospect of peace.

Israel launched an intense bombardment of Beirut and other Lebanese towns and cities, with 100 attacks in the first ten minutes. More than 300 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) also carried out a series of strikes across Gaza, including a precisely targeted armed drone attack on the car of Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah, the 262nd journalist to be killed by Israel since October 2023.

The UK is seeking to grant ministers wide-ranging new powers to rewrite significant portions of the Online Safety Act through amendments tucked into two unrelated bills, a move that experts warn could bypass normal parliamentary scrutiny.

The proposed changes would allow ministers to amend the act by adding as much as a third to the regulatory regime using so-called Henry VIII clauses, limiting Parliament to a simple yes-or-no vote on an unforeseeable number of new rules, rather than full debate or amendment.

The change would allow the central government to limit detailed parliamentary scrutiny and amend the act more quickly. “It’s basically [introducing] a third of the Online Safety Act,” and gives ministers power to add as many unforeseen new rules as they want, said Essex University law professor Lorna Woods, legal adviser to the Online Safety Act Network.

At a time when activists and campaigners are being asked to prove impact in ever more measurable ways, we wanted to ask a different question: what actually counts as a ‘win’? And what does it take to keep going when everything feels stacked against you?

As part of a new series on rights movements and what makes change possible, we spoke to Harsh Mander, a long-time human rights activist in India whose work spans areas from the right to food and shelter to his Caravan of Love campaign against hate violence and lynching.

Mander famously resigned from his position as a senior civil servant in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots, choosing instead to dedicate his life to justice work on behalf of marginalised communities. Since then, he has led landmark Supreme Court interventions on the right to food, homelessness and social protection. For many, he remains a deeply respected moral voice.

Rose* was in her forties when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s. A period that was already anxiety-ridden and scary was made even worse when, she alleges, her consultant flirted with and sexually abused her.

“On the one hand, he was saving lives,” Rose told me when we first spoke in 2022. “On the other hand, he was ruining lives.”

Rose and I met when my then-colleague Sascha Lavin and I were investigating sexual abuse in healthcare. We found that patients had sexually harassed and assaulted thousands of healthcare staff, that more than 4,100 complaints of sexual abuse made to the police took place in NHS settings, and that the NHS had spent millions on compensation for victims and survivors of sexual harassment, assault and even rape.

Business is booming at Anacta Strategies, a lobbying firm that advised Labour in the 2024 election and has shown significant growth in its first full year of operations, newly filed company accounts reveal.

Anacta — which has close ties to Keir Starmer and describes itself as "the leading Labour-specialist advisory firm” — counts among its clients Pearson Engineering, an Israeli-owned defence firm which won a government contract worth £10m, its largest ever, with the Ministry of Defence last year.

It has also lobbied the government on behalf of Airbnb, Visa and Sky, according to the statutory lobbying register, but does not publish a full list of its clients and is not signed up to the industry’s voluntary code of conduct.