Category: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Martin Kear, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

Hamas announced that it has accepted several parts of the peace plan put forth by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally end Israel’s war on Gaza.

Hamas has agreed to release the remaining Israeli captives it holds and is willing to hand over administration of Gaza to a technocratic committee proposed by the plan.

However, Hamas did not say it would disarm. Nor did it agree to withdraw from Palestinian politics fully. Instead, it said the future of the Gaza Strip and legitimate rights of the Palestinian people should be decided on the basis of a “collective national position” and relevant international laws and resolutions.

With ceasefire talks resuming in Egypt on Monday, Netanyahu said he expected the hostages to be quickly released and Trump said he believes Hamas is “ready for a lasting peace”.

However, there are many reasons for Hamas to be reticent about supporting a plan that is replete with ambiguity and robs Palestinians of agency to decide their own political fate.

A future governance plan sidelining Palestinians

So, why does Hamas seem reticent?

First, the plan envisages Israel’s continuing military occupation of Gaza until it can hand over responsibility to an “international stabilisation force” at some point in the future.

Then there is the plan’s proposed governance structure.

Under the plan, Gaza would be administered through a transitional period by “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”. This would be responsible for delivering basic services to millions of starving, traumatised, homeless and jobless Gazans.

Yet, this committee would also include international experts, which will dilute Palestinians’ voices and their ability to decide the fate of Gazans. Again, many details remain unknown, including who will sit on the committee, when it will be formed and how many members would be Palestinian.

A new international transitional body called the “Board of Peace” would also be formed, headed by Trump and purportedly including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Importantly, the plan does not specifically say the board would include any Palestinians.

The board would be responsible for the committee’s “oversight and supervision”. It would also oversee the reconstruction of Gaza until the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is currently dominated by the Fatah party, has undergone reforms and is able to take back control of Gaza.

Many questions remain unanswered here, too. These include:

• a timeline for new elections for the Palestinian Authority
• whether Gazans can take part in an election
• which political factions would be permitted to run candidates
• whether these candidates would be screened by the board, and
• who decides whether the PA has reformed sufficiently.

This leaves an open-ended political process exposed to differing interpretations that Hamas may fear will take power out of the hands of Palestinians.

After Hamas’ statement was released, a senior Hamas official outright rejected the idea of the “Board of Peace”, saying:

We will never accept anyone who is not Palestinian to control the Palestinians.

The plan also stipulates that Hamas “and other factions” (left unstated and open to interpretation) will not have a role in the future governance of Gaza. And it mandates that Gaza be demilitarised. But how this would be achieved and by whom, again, remains unknown.

What Palestinians say they want

These stipulations not only deprive the Palestinians of agency. They ignore the reality of Palestinian politics and the legitimacy that Palestinians attach to resisting Israeli occupation and the Netanyahu government’s stated goal of denying Palestinian statehood.

This highlights the greatest challenge for the “Board of Peace” – a reformed Palestinian Authority under the control of the Fatah party would struggle to gain legitimacy among Palestinians.

In a poll of 1,270 respondents in the Occupied Territories in May, Fatah garnered only 21% of popular support, compared with 32% for Hamas, and 12% for third parties.

When asked what the PA should be doing, most respondents nominated forming a unity government comprising all Palestinian factions to negotiate with Israel and the international community to rebuild Gaza.

When asked about plans to disarm Hamas, 77% of respondents in both the West Bank and Gaza opposed this action, with 65% of respondents opposed to expelling Hamas leaders from Gaza.

Tellingly, 80% of total respondents believed that if Hamas did disarm, Israel would not end the war and withdraw from Gaza.

The reality is some Palestinians still want Hamas to be a part of any future Palestinian government and remain capable of protecting Gazans from Israel’s military.

The disconnect between the plan’s aspirations and the political reality on the ground means it may have little chance of success, even if Hamas ultimately agrees to it.

It’s also unclear if Netanyahu truly supports the Palestinian Authority running a future Gaza, as the peace plan says. His remarks alongside Trump last week run counter to the plan:

Your plan is consistent with the five principles my government set for the end of the war and the day after Hamas. […] Gaza will have a peaceful civilian administration that is run neither by Hamas nor by the Palestinian Authority.

This suggests that Netanyahu’s primary goal here is dismantling Hamas’ military capabilities and political rule, while also maintaining the political division that currently exists between Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

However, this would deny Palestinians the only faction many see as willing to resist Israel’s occupation and its intent of destroying any chance of Palestinians gaining statehood.

Additionally, the establishment of a new civil and military bureaucracy to help Gaza’s transition would take an indefinite period of time. It would also be subject to the political whims of capricious Western leaders.

This would leave the Israeli military occupying Gaza for the foreseeable future. This means there would be nothing to protect the millions of Gazans from further assaults from a military already accused of serious breaches of international humanitarian law.

Martin Kear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Hamas and Israel are on the verge of a ceasefire. What’s being left unsaid, though, could scupper the deal – https://theconversation.com/hamas-and-israel-are-on-the-verge-of-a-ceasefire-whats-being-left-unsaid-though-could-scupper-the-deal-266581

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

Perennial Nobel Prize contender Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland (1990) has been loosely adapted by Paul Thomas Anderson as a new film, One Battle After Another. The film is already considered an Oscar contender.

Vineland, at its core, is preoccupied with the fate of America in the age of mass media and creeping authoritarianism. Pynchon’s novel is largely set in 1984, the year president Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide – a time when the idealism and revolutionary impulses of the American left had withered.

That sense of defeat speaks directly to now. Anderson’s adaptation lands in a year defined by Donald Trump’s decisive 2024 election victory and a MAGA-driven backlash against diversity and inclusion, trans rights and climate action.

Anderson repurposes Pynchon for our present plight, plunging us into a familiar hellscape of immigration detention centres, white supremacist hideouts and so-called sanctuary cities. One of these cities is a central setting: engulfed in flames, thick with smoke and overrun by state-backed goons kitted out in combat gear – enforcers who seemingly answer to no one, itching to knock a semblance of sense into some “radical left” skulls.

Militarisation of American life

One review of the film points out how the escalation of immigration crackdowns and expansion of ICE under Trump’s second presidency “embodies the militarization of everyday American life” in a way that “feels, in a word, Pynchonian”.

The famously mysterious Pynchon’s last known paid job was a formative stint as a technical writer for Boeing. There, he was “a cog in the US war machine – closely involved in what was the most critical component of the military-industrial complex”, according to American Studies scholar Steven Weisenburger.

Over 100 pages of Pynchon’s Boeing prose survives, including detailed work on intercontinental ballistic missile systems. Tasked with translating the arcane dialect of rocket engineers into readable language for servicemen, Pynchon found himself writing at the very point when the Cuban Missile Crisis brought humanity to the brink of extinction.

This episode left him with a lifelong suspicion of the machinery of mass destruction and the technocratic rationalisations that sustain it.

Vineland: aftershocks of the 1960s

Vineland’s plot focuses on the fallout from the 1960s. It follows washed-up countercultural relic Zoyd Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in the film) and his teenage daughter Prairie (Chase Infiniti’s Willa), as they navigate the legacy of past betrayals and try to avoid the vice-like grip of state power.

While he changes the names of the characters, Anderson’s film overflows with images and emblems of state repression. In a striking early shot, we see a vast steel wall in the desert, floodlit against the starless night sky. Anderson’s film demonstrates how the shortcomings and failures of past resistance are often replayed, almost note for note, in the present.

Making extensive use of flashbacks and featuring a dizzying array of major and minor characters, Vineland explores the lingering aftershocks of the 1960s and the way they continue to inform personal lives and public culture.

The pot-smoking, welfare-cheque-cashing Zoyd Wheeler is our guide. When we first meet him, Zoyd is scraping by on the margins of Reagan’s America, reminiscing about the old days and trying his best to bring up his daughter.

Looming over them is the absent figure of Frenesi Gates, Prairie’s mother and Zoyd’s former partner, whom they have not seen for years. (In the film, she is represented by the character Perfidia Beverley Hills, played by Teyana Taylor.) Once a member of a militant film-making collective (yes, you read that correctly), her camera trained on the frontlines of protest, Frenesi snitched on her comrades and crossed to the dark side.

Her defection is bound up with Brock Vond, a ruthless federal prosecutor, to whom she is disastrously and inexorably drawn. (Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, a detention centre commander, inhabits this role in the film.) Vond is no mere antagonist: seemingly omnipotent, he stands in for Vineland’s vision of state power. Amoral and obsessive, he is the embodiment of a system that brooks no deviation from predetermined norms.

His pursuit of Frenesi is more than a personal fixation; it is an allegory for how the state seduces, compromises and ultimately devours its subjects. This toxic dynamic animates the action of the novel. Pynchon’s point is not simply that the state corrupted Frenesi, but that the left’s own shortcomings and blind spots made such corruption possible in the first place.

In this sense, he is suggesting – correctly – that the seeds of the conservative ascendancy of the late 1970s and 80s were in fact sown in the failures of the radical movements that came before. It is an important, if bitter, pill to swallow – and we can identify comparisons with our own era.

MAGA’s rise has been abetted not only by right-wing mobilisation, but also by the left’s fragmentation: its internal conflicts weakening its ability to resist authoritarian drift in meaningful ways.

This, I think, is one of the reasons Vineland still matters today. Pynchon, to his credit, refuses readers the easy fiction of noble idealism set against the backdrop of a corrupt establishment. Instead, the novel collapses those binaries. Vineland reminds us radical energies can be turned against themselves – and that apparatuses of domination thrive on just such lapses.

In other words, the enduring power of the novel, which ends on a highly ambiguous note, has much to do with its unwillingness to let anyone – least of all those who once dreamed of revolution – off the hook.

Pynchon, conflict and coercion

Pynchon’s reputation rests, to a degree, on work that turns distrust and paranoia into a form of cultural critique. That distrust is already present in his exuberant, globetrotting first novel, V (1963). One of Pynchon’s instantly recognisable signatures – his compendious, darkly comedic writing style – was already present.

His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), was shorter and, on the face of it, more accessible. With its paranoid vision of secret postal networks and shadowy conspiracies, it resonated with readers shaken by the turbulence of their historical predicament.

Vietnam. The civil rights struggle. Wave after wave of political assassinations. These were at the forefront of public consciousness, deepening the nagging suspicion that hidden networks of power were shaping events in manners ordinary citizens could neither perceive nor determine.

Published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow – a postmodern epic about war, rockets and metaphysics – confirmed Pynchon’s standing as one of the century’s most ambitious novelists. A vast World War II narrative, it centred on the German V-2 rocket as a symbol of technological domination.

For some critics, Vineland seemed like an unsatisfactory retreat from the encyclopaedic scale of Gravity’s Rainbow – into a more straightforward engagement with postwar American society.

But, in fact, it was pivotal in Pynchon’s career. Vineland turns from the manufactured cataclysms of mid-century conflict to more insidious forms of coercion. Personal freedom is drastically curtailed and social existence is managed at every level imaginable. Philosopher Theodor Adorno would describe this as the totally “administered world”.

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Read more:
Join the Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern epic Gravity’s Rainbow at 50

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Numbed by slop

In Pynchon’s book, the radical upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s cast a long shadow, their energies sometimes tipping into outright political extremism. Yet by (the somewhat Orwellian) 1984, what remains is little more than a desiccated husk of ideological dissent.

It’s easily co-opted into the machinery of late capitalist society, numbed on a steady diet of televisual nothing piped into homes via a device known as the Tube. Meanwhile, an expansive security state relentlessly pursues anyone with the temerity to resist.

Today, instead of the Tube, we are bombarded with algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content, a continual flow of slop designed to pacify and distract us. At the same time, Trump’s return to office has brought renewed efforts to enforce censorship, restrict dissent and crack down on immigration: a 21st-century manifestation of the totalitarian reflex Pynchon outlined so presciently.

In a revealing moment late in Pynchon’s novel, we overhear old-timers somewhere in the background

arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows.

The world Pynchon warned us about

Given the slow-motion catastrophe of contemporary life, these debates go a long way toward explaining the novel’s enduring relevance. Indeed, they could be lifted almost verbatim from today’s news headlines, where commentators continue to argue whether Trump represents a new sort of fascism or the culmination of an authoritarian tendency long embedded in the fabric of American political life.

One Battle After Another, approximately 20 years in the making, amplifies Pynchon’s concern with how power insinuates itself into every aspect of life. It presents us with a narrative about contemporary America that somehow feels both hyperbolic and, depressingly, only a small step removed from reality.

Unlike Pynchon, who had no problem referencing Reagan in Vineland, Anderson pointedly avoids naming Donald Trump.

Given the current political climate in America, it is probably a sensible choice. (One can only imagine the Truth Social tirade were Trump ever to sit through the film. If it happens, I’ll be online, waiting patiently, with a bag of popcorn and a few small beers.) Still, the event horizon of his second administration marks a gravitational pull too strong to ignore.

Welcome to the world Thomas Pynchon warned us about.

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, set in 1984, is translated for the Trump era in One Battle After Another – https://theconversation.com/thomas-pynchons-vineland-set-in-1984-is-translated-for-the-trump-era-in-one-battle-after-another-266063

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

On Taylor Swift’s highly-anticipated new album The Life of a Showgirl, track four, Father Figure, includes the late George Michael as one of the credited songwriters.

But Swift’s song is not a cover of Michael’s 1987 hit of the same name. Rather, it is an “interpolation”. What does this mean, and how is it different from a cover, or a song that uses sampling?

Cover, sample, remix and interpolation

The vocabulary of popular music can be slippery. Terms such as cover, sample, remix and interpolation all describe ways artists reuse existing material, but they are not interchangeable.

A cover is a new performance of an existing song. From jazz standards, to pub rock tribute bands, the cover reproduces a song recognisably intact, albeit with varying degrees of interpretation.

In his book A Philosophy of Cover Songs, philosopher P. D. Magnus argues a cover is best understood as a re-performance of the same song, albeit open to stylistic variation. Although, he also highlights how chronology and authorship problematise this definition.

For example, although Paul McCartney wrote The Beatles’ Let It Be, the first official released version of the song was sung by Aretha Franklin. Yet no one describes the Beatles as having “covered” Franklin.

A sample involves lifting a fragment of an original sound recording, such as a guitar riff, drum loop, or vocal hook, and inserting it into a new track. The sound itself is borrowed – not just the musical idea.

A remix manipulates the audio of an existing track, often altering tempo, instrumentation or structure, while remaining tethered to the original recording. This practice originated with DJs but has since become a standard part of studio production.

An interpolation sits somewhere between covering and sampling. As Magnus and industry sources note, it means re-performing part of a song, such as a melody, lyric, or riff, within a new composition. The material is recognisable, but newly recorded – not lifted from an existing recording.

In Swift’s case, Father Figure does not re-use George Michael’s recording, but it does quote from his song. That could be why Michael is credited as a writer.

Specifically, Swift interpolates Michael’s original track by echoing the lyrics of his chorus (“I’ll be your father figure”) and uses a melody that resembles – but doesn’t copy – the melody in the original track.

These are more subtle references than substantive quotation. So while the track pays tribute to the past, it still asserts itself as a definitive new work.

Creative practice and copyright

These distinctions matter because United States copyright law separates rights in the song composition (melody, harmony, lyrics) from rights in the sound recording (the particular performance captured on a recording).

To cover a song, an artist must license the underlying composition. This is usually straightforward through mechanical licensing schemes.

To sample a recording, however, permission is needed both from the songwriter and from whoever owns the master recording. This “double clearance” can be costly or impossible if rights-holders refuse.

Interpolation avoids this second hurdle. By re-recording the material, artists only require permission from the original songwriters, or their estates, who then receive royalties. This explains why interpolation has become such an attractive creative strategy. It’s also an example of how the law can shape artistic practice.

One well-known example of an interpolation is Ariana Grande’s 7 Rings (2019), which re-sings the melody of Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers My Favourite Things (1959). Because the melody was newly performed, the composers are credited as songwriters, but no use was made of the original recording.

Beyoncé’s track Energy, from her 2022 album Renaissance, re-uses elements of Milkshake, written by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, and performed by Kelis. Again, the original writers are credited, but no part of the original recording is used.

Shifts in authorship and creatvitiy

Prior to the 1930s – back in a time when sheet music drove profits as much, or more, than recordings – different and subsequent performances were not seen in terms of an “original” versus a “copy”. This binary only emerged later with the culture of recorded cover versions.

By the early 1960s, covers and cover bands became a primary means of disseminating popular hits to youth audiences, reflecting both changing social practices and the dominance of recorded music.

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Read more:
Why do we ‘like a version’ so much? The history of cover songs, from Elvis to TikTok

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Today, the term “cover” often carries connotations of derivativeness. Scholars such as Roy Shuker note covers are frequently equated with a lack of originality, even when the performer substantially reinvents the source material.

An illustrative example is Pat Boone’s 1956 cover of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti (1955). Boone’s version was seen as a sanitised rendition aimed at accessing a broader, predominantly white audience.

Historically, covers were more about marketability and accessibility than artistic reinterpretation. And this commercial dynamic underscores why they have often been perceived as derivative.

Interpolations enjoy higher cultural capital. Artists who interpolate go beyond reproducing, to create a new work that operates in dialogue with the past.

This distinction is especially salient for an artist of Swift’s stature – a songwriter celebrated for creative agency and influencing large-scale trends in popular music.

Timothy McKenry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Taylor Swift’s Father Figure isn’t a cover, but an ‘interpolation’. What that means – and why it matters – https://theconversation.com/taylor-swifts-father-figure-isnt-a-cover-but-an-interpolation-what-that-means-and-why-it-matters-265583

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton

On the surface, I am ideally suited to write about the terrorist atrocity on the Heaton Park synagogue. The attack, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, left two Mancunian Jews dead, several seriously injured and a local (and national) Jewish community traumatised.

Over a 40-year career, I have researched and written about antisemitism in the UK, from the readmission of the Jews to Britain in the mid 17th century through to today. I have also published widely on British Jewish history over the same period. Lastly, I am a Mancunian Jew born and brought up in the city, later working in the Manchester Jewish Museum.

There are, however, limits to my ability to understand what happened. I am an insider because of my roots: my parents bought their first house on the same street as Heaton Park synagogue in the 1950s. But I am also an outsider, having grown up in the south side of the city in one of its leafier suburbs, and spent over half my life some 260 miles away in Southampton.

What follows is an attempt to put the events of October 2 into the historical context of Manchester Jewry and antisemitism in the city. In my view, the horror does not fit into a wider pattern of responses to Jews in Manchester, or the wider British Jewish community.

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Read more:
Manchester synagogue attack: why so many people in Britain’s Jewish community felt a sense of inevitability that this day would come

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The historian of Manchester Jewry, Bill Williams, insisted that “in no sense can the Jewish community be regarded as ‘alien’ to Manchester. It was not a late addition to an established pattern of urban life, but an integral part of the pattern itself”.

Although Manchester has Roman roots – Mancuniam – it is essentially a modern city. Indeed, it has a justified claim to be regarded as the first modern, industrial city in the world. It has been and remains a city made by migration. The first Jews, pedlars and then shopkeepers, settled in the town in the late 18th century, mainly of German Jewish origin.

Manchester grew slowly in the first half of the 19th century, with Jews coming also from eastern Europe and north Africa. This diversity of origin was reflected in the synagogues and communal organisations. By the 1870s, the community had grown to around 4,000, half of whom were from eastern Europe. It was a trend that would intensify in the period of mass immigration until 1914, when it reached around 25,000.

Even before that influx of Jews with Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Ukrainian origin, Manchester Jewry was by far the largest provincial Jewish community in the UK, a status that is increasingly true today.

As part of that pattern, the Heaton Park synagogue was founded in 1935 and moved to its present location in 1967. Its history reflects the growing suburbanisation of Manchester Jewry away from the original settlement areas of Cheetham Hill and Strangeways.

Today, Manchester is one of the few Jewish communities in the UK that is growing, totalling around 28,000 in the 2021 census, a 12% increase from that a decade earlier. Much of that growth is made up of the very orthodox, or Haredi, communities, some of whom came from Hungary as refugees in 1956.

Manchester Jewry has maintained an extraordinarily strong local identity, but is notable in its diversity. This is evident in its different forms of religious practice, geographical origins (including 7,000 who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the more recent migrants from Israel), socioeconomic profile and politics.

Antisemitism in Manchester

The city has always prided itself on its cosmopolitanism and tolerance, though has not always lived up to the ideal of the latter. There were occasional attacks, in print and in person, on the early Jewish pedlars to the town.

In the late 19th century the Manchester City News described eastern European Jews as an “invading force, foreign in race, speech, dress, ideas and religion”. Another local journal called them “just as desirable as rats”. In contrast, the Manchester Guardian (which became The Guardian) supported the right of asylum for refugees, and praised the respectable middle-class Jews for the contribution they had made to the economy and culture of the city.

During the first world war, Jewish soldiers fought back against slurs that they were avoiding military service. There was an even more militant response from Jews and non-Jews during the 1930s to attempts by the British Union of Fascists to stir up antisemitism in Manchester and other areas of Jewish concentration in Britain.

Until the horror of the Heaton Park synagogue attack, perhaps the most difficult moment for Manchester’s Jews came in 1947 when there were antisemitic riots in Manchester and nearby Eccles following rightwing extremist Zionist terrorism against British soldiers in Palestine. Most of the violence was against Jewish property and not person; it was still shocking to a community still reeling from the impact of the Holocaust.

One thing uniting such articulation of antisemitism is the official response to them. The magistrate who described the 1947 riots as “both un-British and unpatriotic” was very similar to the sentiment from all British religious and political leaders in 2025.

Manchester has recovered from and shown genuine solidarity after acts of terrorism before: the IRA bomb in 1996 and the Islamist terrorist bombing of Manchester Arena in 2017. It is already clear this pride of place and mutual support is present in Manchester today. As one local resident stated: “These people are sent to divide us, but they won’t.”

The attacks of 2017 and 2025 were terrorist acts of individuals, utterly untypical of and denounced by the local Muslim communities. They were hard, if not impossible, to predict. These outrages have and will leave huge scars on those directly impacted, but they run totally against the grain of a place that takes genuine pride in its diversity, including the rich Jewish history which is integral to Manchester.

Tony Kushner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Synagogue attack: the Manchester I know – by antisemitism researcher and Mancunian Jew – https://theconversation.com/synagogue-attack-the-manchester-i-know-by-antisemitism-researcher-and-mancunian-jew-266712

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Joseph J. Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Global Studies, Appalachian State University

The lights went out in Cuba again.

For the fifth time in a year, all of Cuba plunged into darkness on Sept. 10, 2025. Even critical emergency services like hospitals suffered during the nearly 24-hour power outage.

That’s because Cuba’s power grid is old and hard to maintain, and the country cannot afford to import all the oil it needs to keep the lights on.

As a scholar of Cuban society and politics, I believe that the ongoing blackouts point to larger economic problems facing the country. While much of that is due to the continuing effects of the U.S. embargo, which since 1960 has obstructed American trade and tourism with the Caribbean island, Cuba’s leaders also deserve a share of the blame for their economic mismanagement.

Indeed, while other nominally communist countries, such as Vietnam and China, have facilitated the development of a private sphere in their economies in the past several decades, officials in Havana have in practice restricted such growth so as not to threaten state enterprises.

The result has been a less vibrant, less productive network of private enterprises unable to provide the economic growth that Cuba so desperately needs. All the while, Cuba’s communist government faces an existential threat as it struggles to maintain power in the face of popular discontent.

The external factors of the crisis

Since 2020, Cuba’s gross domestic product has shrunk by almost 11%, with economists forecasting a further decline of 1%-2% in 2025.

There are a number of reasons for this decline.

Tourism, Cuba’s lifeblood, has not rebounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Venezuela, which subsidized Cuba for a decade in the 2000s, particularly with oil exports, no longer has the capacity to do so. Further, persistent energy shortages in Cuba have led to steep declines in agricultural and industrial production.

From a broader perspective, the U.S. embargo also continues to harm the Cuban economy. For more than 60 years, Cubans have been unable to sell their products to the United States – and Americans have been unable to travel to or do business with Cuba outside of very limited categories.

Estimates vary as to what extent the embargo damages the Cuban economy, but it seems certain that the “blockade,” as Cubans call it, deprives the nation of at least hundreds of millions, if not billions, of U.S. dollars in trade every year, most particularly in agriculture and tourism.

Steps toward domestic reform

While external factors have taken a toll, the persistent economic difficulties facing Cubans are also self-inflicted by the government.

Cuba’s leaders have pursued a slow, narrow and sometimes arbitrary path toward economic privatization – especially when contrasted with other officially communist countries in Asia.

Following Fidel Castro’s departure from public life in 2008, Cuba’s subsequent leader, and Fidel’s brother, Raul Castro, announced a series of gradual steps intended to encourage private enterprise that had long been curtailed by the government.

Under Raul, the state allowed Cubans to own, buy and sell their homes; they could also create their own businesses, and even employ others to whom they were not related – practices prohibited under Fidel Castro.

The government also allowed more foreigners to invest in Cuba, principally in tourist infrastructure, provided they confined themselves to minority stakes.

Cubans were also permitted for the first time in decades to own their own land, grow food and sell it at markets, setting their own prices within limits. Collective farms, the bane of Soviet agriculture that had once inspired Fidel’s revolutionary visions, were no longer the norm.

By 2017, about 13% of the workforce held licenses to start businesses, while the private sector employed about one-third of all workers.

In the years immediately following these reforms, Cuba posted some gains in industrial and food production and GDP. Indeed, during the mid-2000s, Cuba posted impressive growth rates, sometimes in excess of 10%.

Domestic progress stalled

Unfortunately for Cubans, the upward trend did not continue.

And that is in no small measure due to Cuba’s prosperity in the 2000s being built on Venezuelan subsidies, not by Cuban entrepreneurs.

Venezuela’s late president, and longtime Castro admirer, Hugo Chavez, began to subsidize Fidel Castro’s government shortly after taking power in 1999.

A petrostate, Venezuela provided much-needed oil to Cuba on favorable terms, while also paying the Cuban nation for doctors to work in Venezuela’s hospitals and clinics, providing Cuba with the hard currency it needed to pay for imports.

Researchers estimate that the Venezuelan government subsidized the Cuban economy by as much as US$9 billion per year until 2016.

Venezuelan oil allowed Cuba to paper over a starker reality: Despite reforms, Cuba’s entrepreneurs remained hamstrung by a cumbersome and often corrupt state policy.

Thanks to ever-changing regulations, the majority of private businesses have remained small and dedicated to personal services, such as restaurants, hairdressing, seamstressing and repairs.

On a larger scale, Cuba’s state bureaucrats see competition with government-owned businesses, especially in tourism, as a threat to their power and privileges. Taxes also remain inequitably high for private firms.

Meanwhile, the larger private businesses that are now occasionally permitted are almost always, according to a number of my Cuban-based sources, connected to friends or family members of the political elite, not average Cubans.

There have been successes, to be sure. The private sector now accounts for more retail sales by volume than state enterprises.

But the percentage of the workforce employed by the private sector remains about what it was in 2019, while private enterprise accounts for only about 15% of Cuba’s GDP.

The unsustainable present

Confronting multiple crises, Cuba’s leaders continue to blame the U.S. embargo and policy from Washington that has become only more bellicose under President Donald Trump. No doubt drawing optimism from having weathered severe crises before, the Cuban government seems committed to a state of defiance.

But the evidence this time around suggests Havana’s leaders should be less sanguine.

Despite increasing costs, Cubans enjoy widespread access to [the internet] and they know just how bad and how inequitable things are.

For all the government’s rhetoric and commitment to a decades-old revolution, Cubans see a much-vaunted medical system that is failing, unable to provide drugs, procedures — or even electricity. They know that crime is on the rise, while inflation reduces the value of the Cuban peso relative to the dollar every week

Cubans see and hear of their well-connected countrymen, with links to state enterprises, flaunting their wealth. Cubans may also know that their military holds as much as US$18 billion abroad — about 16% of Cuba’s GDP in 2024.

What they certainly know and experience is the reality of being forced to live without power, with no possibility of improvement in sight.

Limited choices going forward

Historically, Cuba has been pulled from crises by foreign patrons willing to subsidize its revolution.

But Russia’s strategic position, China’s global priorities and Venezuela’s hardships all make that unlikely right now. And with the U.S. now pursuing a policy of maximum pressure against noncompliant governments in Latin America, Havana can rest assured that it will see little breathing room from its powerful neighbor and long-time antagonist.

That leaves the Cuban government with only a few options.

It could choose to continue trying to restrict its citizens’ access to the internet. Unfortunately for the state, the internet is the lifeblood of the private sector.

Cuba’s leaders could also choose to rely on the loyalty of its security forces and their ability to intimidate and abuse their fellow Cubans. That has worked in the past, but given Havana’s scarce resources and its limited capacity to reward its henchmen, it is not clear that the government can afford to adopt this approach indefinitely.

Of course, Cuba’s leaders could take steps toward further reform the private sector and eliminate the waste and corruption that have increasingly defined the Cuban state.

Such a course would require the government to permit all Cubans, not just a well-connected few, to compete with state enterprises. It would also mean allowing for a greater degree of foreign investment, which has remained stunted due to government policy.

If the past offers any guide, however, Havana will instead continue to rely on its formidable security apparatus to repress is citizens, while privatizing in ways that do not threaten the power and privileges of the elite.

Joseph J. Gonzalez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Cuba’s leaders see their options dim amid blackouts and a shrinking economy – https://theconversation.com/cubas-leaders-see-their-options-dim-amid-blackouts-and-a-shrinking-economy-266203

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Andonea Jon Dickson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh

Under President Donald Trump, the United States is expanding its efforts to detain and deport non-citizens at an alarming rate. In recent months, the Trump administration made deals with a number of third states to receive deported non-citizens.

In Australia, the Labor government has similarly established new powers to deport non-citizens to third states. The government signed a secretive deal with Nauru in September, guaranteeing the small Micronesian island A$2.5 billion over the next three decades to accommodate the first cohort of deportees.

In both countries, migrants can now be banished to states to which they have no prior connection.

Last year in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour party promised that the previous Conservative government’s plan to deport people to Rwanda was “dead and buried”. Yet, Labour removed close to 35,000 people in 2024, an increase of 25% over the previous year.

Starmer has also proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for people with rejected asylum claims.

Meanwhile, the far-right Reform Party has put forward a “mass deportation” plan involving the use of military bases to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people, if it wins power in the next general election.

Similar policies may soon come to Europe, too. In May, the European Commission published a proposal that would allow EU member states to deport people seeking asylum to third countries where they have no previous connection.

The deportation of populations deemed problematic is not a new practice. For centuries, states have used forms of deportation to forcibly remove people, as Australia’s own history as a British penal colony illustrates.

Today, deportations are a staple of migration governance around the world. However, the recent expansion of detention and deportations reflects an accelerated criminalisation and punishment of non-citizens, tied to a rising authoritarianism across purportedly liberal Western countries.

Criminalising movement

The expansion and outsourcing of deportation is underpinned by long histories of criminalising migration.

Over the past three decades, legal obstacles and securitised borders have increasingly forced those fleeing war, persecution and insecurity to rely on unauthorised routes to seek refuge.

Governments have simultaneously reframed the act of seeking asylum from a human right to a criminal act, brandishing those on the move as “illegal” as a way of justifying onshore and offshore immigration detention.

Racialised people living in the community have also been subject to increased policing, regardless of their migration status.

In the US, UK and Australia, this criminalising language, once the preserve of the right-wing press, is now echoed by politicians across the political spectrum and enshrined in legislation. This has accelerated what migration expert Alison Mountz has termed “the death of asylum”, and normalising deportations.

In Australia, for example, the government lowered the threshold for visa cancellations in 2014, resulting in people with minor offences being detained and scheduled for deportation. Those who could not be returned to their home countries continued to languish in detention until a 2023 high court ruling mandated their release.

Despite having served their sentences, in addition to protracted periods in immigration detention, a media frenzy framed these people as a major threat to the community. The Labor government then legislated to deport them, in addition to thousands of others on precarious visas, to a third country.

Deportations have also been a central facet of US immigration enforcement for many years.

Former President Barack Obama was branded “Deporter in Chief” for achieving a record three million deportations while in office.

While Obama focused on “felons not families”, Trump has equated migration itself with crime and insecurity. His administration has cast a much wider net, rounding up those with and without criminal convictions, including citizens.

Detentions and deportations have also been used to suppress political dissent on issues, such as the genocide in Gaza.

To expedite his pledge to deport one million people in his first year, the Trump administration hastily set up detention centres in former prisons and military bases, including at Guantánamo Bay.

Reports suggest the government has also approached 58 third countries to accept deported non-nationals. Countries that have agreed, or already received people, are shown in the map below.

In many cases, people are then re-detained on arrival in hotels, prisons and camps, with some subject to further deportation.

Rising authoritarianism

These recent developments reveal an explicit authoritarianism in which deportations are achieved through the elimination of procedural fairness. Reducing notice periods, the ability to appeal decisions, and access to legal counsel allows for rushed and opaque procedures.

In June, eight people were deported from the US to South Sudan without the chance to contest their removal. After a failed court intervention, the three liberal US Supreme Court justices stated:

The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.

In the UK, the Labour party expanded the “Deport Now Appeal Later” scheme in August, extending the countries to which people can be deported without appeal rights from eight to 23.

And this month in Australia, the Migration Act was amended to expunge the rules of natural justice for people scheduled for deportation.

Across all three countries, the rapid expansion of detention and deportation practices terrorise those targeted, leaving whole communities living in fear. Australian human rights lawyer Alison Battisson described deportation as “a creeping death to the individuals and their families”.

These policies have also legitimised and emboldened far-right, neo-Nazi groups, who have taken to the streets in both the UK and Australia in recent weeks calling for an end to migration. In both countries, the effects of decades of neoliberal policies, such as a lack of affordable housing, jobs, and health care, are redefined as a problem of migration.

How communities are responding

Communities are now organising and making the case for a different sort of politics.

In Los Angeles, for example, grassroots organisations mobilised earlier this year to counter escalating raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Networks also began providing information and support to those targeted by ICE arrests. In July, Detention Watch Network relaunched the Communities Not Cages coalition of grassroots campaigns against detention.

In the UK, far-right rallies at asylum hotels have been met by counter demonstrations, with people insisting on a politics of welcome and unity.

But the challenge remains how to turn local and national opposition into a coalition capable of confronting this rise in authoritarian politics of exclusion and expulsion.

Ċetta Mainwaring is currently funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

Andonea Jon Dickson and Thom Tyerman do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Around the world, migrants are being deported at alarming rates – how did this become normalised? – https://theconversation.com/around-the-world-migrants-are-being-deported-at-alarming-rates-how-did-this-become-normalised-264790

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Emily Brayshaw, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

The iconic feathered showgirl was born amid the chaos of the first world war, when the wealthy, global French superstar Gaby Deslys entertained Parisians and Allied soldiers in a 1917 show called Laissez-les tombe! (Let Them Fall), a dazzling spectacle of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and beauty.

Although showgirls first appeared in late-19th century music halls, the red, white and blue feathered costumes in Deslys’ revue offered Paris something new and triumphal. The massed plumes, wild dancing and bodily displays celebrated French aesthetics and extravagance and communicated that France and her allies would not bow to Germany.

Prior to 1914 Deslys’s expensive jewellery, haute couture and expansive feathered hats – along with her affairs with powerful men such as department store magnate Harry Selfridge and King Manuel II of Portugal – created countless headlines.

But she was also outspoken about a woman’s right to support herself financially and worked tirelessly during the war raising funds for the Allies. Deslys was so passionate about aiding the devastated Parisian nightlife that she paid for all the costumes in Laissez-les tombe! herself.

Deslys’s cultural impact has inextricably linked feathers, high fashion, celebrity and showgirls ever since.

From France to Broadway

Feathered showgirl revues were so popular that they quickly went global. In 1920s New York, impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld staged luxurious Broadway productions that glorified the American showgirl.

But he made exceptions to American women. One of Ziegfeld’s most famous showgirls, Dolores, was born into poverty in London’s East End as Kathleen Mary Rose. She rose to become a supermodel who walked for the couturier Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile.

Ziegfeld considered Dolores one of the world’s most beautiful women. Tall, slender and graceful, she drove audiences wild when she glided across Ziegfeld’s stage and posed in opulent costumes.

On becoming a showgirl, Dolores used her modelling ability to make her fortune, earning today’s equivalent of US$10,000 a week by 1923.

Other performers harnessed the feathered showgirl aesthetic, including the celebrated twins Jenny and Rosie Dolly, who came from humble origins and used their beauty, talent and hard work to dominate American and European stages in the 1910s and 1920s.

Ziegfeld paid the Dollys the equivalent of US$64,000 weekly in 1915. Like Deslys, they became notorious for their consumption of fashion and affairs with famous men.

However, stage revues became unpopular around 1930 due to their vast expense and the rise of cinema – so the showgirl travelled to Hollywood.

There, she was celebrated in biopics such as The Great Ziegfeld (1936) with its glittering, feathered costumes by the designer Adrian.

In the second world war, showgirls boosted troop morale, like Deslys did in 1917.

Hollywood made feel-good films including the biopic The Dolly Sisters (1945), which reimagined the brunette twins as all-American blondes by casting 1940s pinup stars Betty Grable and June Haver.

From Hollywood to Vegas

From there, the American showgirl arrived in Las Vegas, performing in every hotel and casino on the strip during the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the showgirls of yore, these performers’ allure was their grace, beauty, and extravagant, expensive costumes, produced by the world’s leading designers.

Showgirls remained a fixture of Las Vegas entertainment throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Choreographers including Donn Arden and Madame Bluebell (who also worked in the Parisian revues) created hallmark, visual spectacles featuring costumes by Bob Mackie.

Jubilee!, which opened at the old MGM Grand casino in 1981, was one such revue. In addition to the vast volume of plumes, it was claimed the show had caused a global shortage of Swarovski crystals because the costumes had used them all.

In 1986 the old MGM Grand became Bally’s Casino, but Jubilee! stayed. The costumes, some of which cost more than US$7,000 each (roughly US$25,000 today), were used six nights a year for 35 years and maintained by 18 wardrobe staffers.

Jubilee! closed in 2016, but its costumes live on as valuable cultural artefacts that celebrities borrow to reinterpret the American showgirl for 21st-century audiences.

This includes demonstrating that showgirls are independent, hardworking and talented women.

From Vegas to Taylor Swift

Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese draws on the American showgirls’ legacy by wearing costumes from Jubilee! in her Las Vegas cabaret, and called the 1945 Dolly Sisters film one of her inspirations.

Pamela Anderson wore Jubilee! costumes in The Last Showgirl (2024), a film that highlights the sacrifices female performers often have to make to pursue their dreams.

Taylor Swift is the latest superstar to harness showgirl iconography.
Photographs from her new album show Swift wearing the Jubilee! “Diamond” and “Disco” costumes by Mackie.

Another photograph shows Swift in a cloud of ostrich plumes and rhinestones wearing a dark, bobbed wig: a direct reference to 1920s American showgirls and performers such as the Dolly Sisters.

Swift’s stage costumes are by the world’s leading fashion designers, while her songs often reference historical celebrities to critique how the entertainment and media industry treat female performers.

Choosing Mackie’s Jubilee! costumes allows Swift to become the American showgirl (Taylor’s Version), by tapping into a century of glamour and signalling that she too has worked hard and made sacrifices to reach the top.

Emily Brayshaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Taylor Swift has branded herself a showgirl. These hardworking women have a long and bejewelled history – https://theconversation.com/taylor-swift-has-branded-herself-a-showgirl-these-hardworking-women-have-a-long-and-bejewelled-history-263188

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

On Sunday, a gunman launched a horrifying attack on people at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan.

Thomas Jacob Sanford allegedly rammed his pickup truck, adorned with American flags, into the doors of the chapel as a service was taking place. Authorities stated he shot at worshippers with an assault weapon, then set fire to the building. Four people died, and police killed Sanford at the scene shortly afterwards.

Media reports and government spokespeople suggest Sanford was motivated by a pronounced hatred of followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), widely known as Mormons.

According to a childhood friend, Peter Tersigni, Sanford became fixated with the church when he started dating one of its members while living in Utah:

He started dating this girl and then investigated and learned about Mormons because she was a Mormon. And I know that also, he got into meth really hardcore. It messed his life up and it messed his head up. And it just happened to be at the time he was around Mormons.

The language Sanford is reported to have used to describe Mormons – calling them “the antichrist” and saying “they are going to take over the world” – taps into a conspiracist suspicion of Mormons that has existed in America since the LDS church was founded in 1830, and which is still widespread in some subcultures today.

Anti-Mormonism in American history

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, had enemies from the beginning. New Christian sects were proliferating in America, but Smith went further than most. He declared himself a “prophet” and claimed to have a new religious scripture that was equal to the Bible.

Many denounced Smith as a fraud, and his neighbours feared the political power he wielded over his growing community of followers. After the Mormons were forced out of Missouri by a state Extermination Order and a subsequent massacre, Smith was assassinated by an anti-Mormon militia in Illinois in 1844.

The Mormons fled to Utah in 1847 under the leadership of Brigham Young. There they endured decades of federal government pressure to abandon the practice of polygamy and submit to the authority of the United States, which sometimes brought in armed forces.

This may seem like remote history, but to this day many evangelical Christians fear the fast-growing but “false religion” of Mormonism will lure people away from true Christianity. There is a cottage industry of YouTubers, some of them ex-Mormons, dedicated to disproving the teachings of Joseph Smith.

Nor has the violent past been forgotten. Earlier this year Netflix released a series depicting the Mountain Meadows Massacre, perpetrated by a Mormon militia in 1857.

Jon Krakauer’s 2003 bestselling book, Under the Banner of Heaven, also made into a streaming series, explored 1980s murders in a Mormon splinter sect. The book emphasised the prevalence of violence in early LDS history.

Anti-Mormonism today

Anti-Mormon violence is relatively rare in America today, but aversion to Mormons is not.

A 2022 YouGov poll of Americans found 39% of respondents held unfavourable views of Mormons, compared to just 17% with favourable views. This net negative approval was comparable to American attitudes towards Muslims, and more negative than American attitudes towards atheists.

I argued in a 2014 study that Mormons face hostility from both sides of America’s culture wars. Many conservative Christians believe Mormons are not real Christians. At the same time, many liberal and secular-minded people associate Mormons with the Christian-right.

In 2012, the high-profile Mormon Mitt Romney became the Republican candidate for the presidential election. The number of liberal and non-religious people who said they would not vote for a Mormon for president increased significantly between 2007 and 2012, despite the fact Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was also a Mormon.

The LDS church was also prominent in campaigns against same-sex marriage in western states in the late 2000s. This led to protests and some acts of vandalism at LDS houses of worship, prompting expressions of solidarity by other conservative religious groups.

The bipartisan nature of anti-Mormonism arguably makes it one of the more socially acceptable biases in the US. But there is a world of difference between not wanting a Mormon president, or enjoying such mockery as the Book of Mormon musical, and physically attacking Mormons.

From prejudice to violence

Between 2015 and 2024, the FBI counted 160 hate crimes reported against LDS victims. These included 63 acts of vandalism and property destruction and 29 assaults. The states with the most incidents were Utah (25), California (23), Washington (14), Tennessee (12), Georgia (10) and Nevada (10).

A 2019 report in the LDS-owned Deseret News expressed concern over rising anti-Mormon hate crimes. But it pointed out this was part of a larger trend of rising hate crime in the US, and that anti-LDS incidents were dwarfed by hate crimes targeting Jews and Muslims during the same period.

Immediately after the Grand Blanc killings, President Donald Trump called the incident “yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America”.

This fits his culture-war framing of Christians being under constant attack. But it glosses over the specific animus Mormons face in American society, often from other Christians and conservatives (the alleged Grand Blanc shooter wore a Trump 2020 shirt in a social media post).

Since 2000, there have been nearly 500 homicides in American places of worship, three quarters of them by firearm. This is a bigger problem than the violence facing any one religious group.

David Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Michigan church shooting sits within a long history of hatred against Mormons in America – https://theconversation.com/the-michigan-church-shooting-sits-within-a-long-history-of-hatred-against-mormons-in-america-266481

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

With the passing of Dr Jane Goodall, the world has lost a conservation giant. But her extraordinary achievements leave a profound legacy.

Goodall was a world-leading expert in animal behaviour and a globally recognised environmental and conservation advocate. She achieved all this at a time when women were commonly sidelined or ignored in science.

Her work with chimpanzees showed it was wrong to assume only humans used tools. She showed us the animals expressed emotions such as love and grief and have individual personalities.

Goodall showed us scientists can express their emotions and values and that we can be respected researchers as well as passionate advocates and science communicators. After learning about how chimpanzees were being used in medical research, she spoke out: “I went to the conference as a scientist, and I left as an activist.”

As childhood rights activist Marian Wright Edelman has eloquently put it, “You can’t be what you can’t see”.

Goodall showed what it was possible to be.

Forging her own path

Goodall took a nontraditional path into science. The brave step of going into the field at the age of 26 to make observations was supported by her mother.

Despite making world-first discoveries such as tool use by non-humans, people didn’t take her seriously because she hadn’t yet gone to university. Nowadays, people who contribute wildlife observations are celebrated under the banner of citizen science.

Goodall was a beacon at a time when science was largely dominated by men – especially remote fieldwork. But she changed that narrative. She convinced famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to give her a chance. He first employed her as a secretary. But it wasn’t long until he asked her to go to Tanzania’s remote Gombe Stream National Park. In 1960, she arrived.

This was not easy. It took real courage to work in a remote area with limited support alongside chimpanzees, a species thought to be peaceful but now known to be far stronger than humans and capable of killing animals and humans.

Goodall is believed to be the only person accepted into chimpanzee society. Through calm but determined persistence she won their trust. These qualities served Goodall well – not just with chimps, but throughout her entire career advocating for conservation and societal change.

At Gombe, she showed for the first time that animals could fashion and use tools, had individual personalities, expressed emotions and had a higher intelligence and understanding than they were credited with.

Goodall was always an animal person and her love of chimps was in part inspired by her toy Jubilee, gifted by her father. She had close bonds with her pets and extended these bonds to wildlife. Goodall gave her study subjects names such as “David Greybeard”, the first chimp to accept her at Gombe.

Some argue we shouldn’t place a human persona on animals by naming them. But Goodall showed it was not only acceptable to see animals as individuals with different behaviours, but it greatly aids connection with and care for wildlife.

Goodall became an international voice for wildlife. She used her profile to encourage a focus on animal welfare in conservation, caring for both individuals and species.

A pioneer for women in science

With Goodall’s passing, the world has lost one of the three great “nonagenarian environmental luminaries”, to use co-author Vanessa Pirotta’s phrase. The other two are the naturalist documentary maker, Sir David Attenborough, 99, and famed marine biologist Dr Sylvia Earle, who is 90.

Goodall showed us women can be pioneering scientists and renowned communicators as well as mothers.

She shared her work in ways accessible to all generations, from National Geographic documentaries to hip podcasts.

Her visibility encouraged girls and women around the world to be bold and follow our own paths.

Goodall’s story directly inspired several authors of this article.

Co-author Marissa Parrott was privileged to have spoken to Goodall several times during her visits to Melbourne Zoo and on her world tours. Goodall’s story was a direct inspiration for Parrott’s own remote and international fieldwork, supported by her mother just as Goodall’s mother had supported her. They both survived malaria, which also kills chimpanzees and gorillas. Goodall long championed a One Health approach, recognising the health of communities, wildlife and the environment are all interconnected.

Co-author Zara Bending worked and toured alongside Goodall. The experience demonstrated how conservationists could be powerful advocates through storytelling, and how our actions reveal who we are. As Goodall once said:

every single one of us matters, every single one of us has a role to play, and every single one of us makes a difference every single day.

From the forest floor to global icon

Goodall knew conservation is as much about people as it is about wildlife and wild places.

Seventeen years after beginning her groundbreaking research in Gombe, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute with the mission of protecting wildlife and habitat by engaging local communities.

Her institute’s global network now spans five continents and continues her legacy of community-centred conservation. Researchers have now been studying the chimps at Gombe for 65 years.

Goodall moved from fieldwork to being a global conservation icon who regularly travelled more than 300 days a year. She observed many young people across cultures and creeds who had lost hope for their future amid environmental and climate destruction. In response, she founded a second organisation, Roots & Shoots, in 1991. Her goal was:

to foster respect and compassion for all living things, to promote understanding of all cultures and beliefs, and to inspire each individual to take action to make the world a better place for people, other animals, and the environment.

Last year, Roots & Shoots groups were active in 75 countries. Their work is a testament to Goodall’s mantra: find hope in action.

Protecting nature close to home

One of Goodall’s most remarkable attributes was her drive to give people the power to take action where they were. No matter where people lived or what they did, she helped them realise they could be part of the solution.

In a busy, urbanised world, it’s easier than ever to feel disconnected from nature. Rather than presenting nature as a distant concept, Goodall made it something for everyone to experience, care for and cherish.

She showed we didn’t have to leave our normal lives behind to protect nature – we could make just as much difference in our own communities.

One of her most famous quotes rings just as true today as when she first said it:

only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help shall all be saved.

Let’s honour her world-changing legacy by committing to understand, care and help save all species with whom we share this world. For Jane Goodall.

Euan Ritchie is a Councillor with the Biodiversity Council, a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Mammal Society, and President of the Australian Mammal Society.

Marissa Parrott works for Zoos Victoria, a not-for-profit conservation organisation. Zoos Victoria and partner zoos raise funds to help support the Jane Goodall Institute Australia, Gorilla Doctors and others organisations.

Zara Bending is affiliated with the Jane Goodall Institute as a resident expert on wildlife crime and international law.

Kylie Soanes and Marissa Parrott do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Only if we help shall all be saved’: Jane Goodall showed we can all be part of the solution – https://theconversation.com/only-if-we-help-shall-all-be-saved-jane-goodall-showed-we-can-all-be-part-of-the-solution-266572

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Donald Rothwell, Professor of International Law, Australian National University

The Israel Defence Force has intercepted a flotilla of humanitarian vessels seeking to deliver aid to Gaza, taking control of multiple vessels and arresting activists, including Greta Thunberg.

The interceptions took place in the Mediterranean Sea between 70-80 nautical miles off the Gazan coast. These are international waters where international law recognises high seas freedom of navigation for all vessels.

Israel has countered by arguing it has a maritime blockade which prohibits entry to Gaza by foreign vessels. Israel has also suggested the flotilla was supported by Hamas – an assertion the flotilla organisers have rejected.

Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas

The Global Sumud Flotilla was comprised of more than 40 boats carrying humanitarian aid (food, medical supplies and other essential items), along with several hundred parliamentarians, lawyers and activists from dozens of countries.

The flotilla departed Spain in late August and has been making its way eastwards across the sea, with stops in Tunisia, Italy and Greece. Along the way, the Italian and Greek governments deployed naval escorts to ensure their safe passage.

Passengers on the boats alleged they had been harassed by drones at mulitple points in the voyage.

This flotilla campaign is the latest iteration of a movement that has existed for over 15 years to challenge Israel’s long-running blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this year, a ship called the Conscience carrying activists and aid bound for Gaza was hit by explosions off the coast of Malta.

Israel then intercepted the Madleen, with Thunberg and other activists on board, in June, and the Handala in July.

And in 2010, a flotilla tried to reach Gaza carrying humanitarian relief and hundreds of activists. Israeli commandos boarded the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, leading to a violent confrontation that resulted in the deaths of ten activists. The deaths drew widespread condemnation and strained Israeli-Turkish ties for years.

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Read more:
There are clear laws on enforcing blockades – Israel’s interception of the Madleen raises serious questions

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The legality of Gaza’s naval blockade

The international law related to the actions of the flotilla vessels and Israel’s capacity to intervene is complex.

Israel has imposed blockades of Gaza in various forms for nearly 20 years.

The legal basis for the blockades and their consistency with international law, particularly the law of the sea, has been contentious, which was highlighted during a UN inquiry that followed the Mavi Marmara incident.

While Israel’s legal relationship with Gaza has varied during this time, Israel is now considered an occupying power in Gaza under international law.

The roles of occupying powers were codified in the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and built upon the legal obligations that Allied powers assumed in Germany and Japan at the end of the second world war. The Geneva Convention outlines the clear legal framework for occupying powers.

In recent decades, Israel has been both a de jure (recognised under the law) and de facto occupying power in Palestine.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was illegal under international law.

As an occupying power, Israel controls all access to Gaza whether by land, air or sea. Aid trucks are only permitted to enter Gaza under strict controls. Foreign air force aid drops that have occurred in recent months have only been permitted under strict Israeli control, as well.

Very little aid has arrived by sea since the war began because Israel has severely restricted maritime access to Gaza. The United States built a floating pier off the coast to deliver aid in 2024, but this was soon abandoned because of weather, security and technical issues.

This clearly indicated, however, that Israel was prepared to permit the flow of maritime aid from its closest ally, the US. This exception to the blockade was not applied to other humanitarian actors.

Intercepting ships in international waters

While delivery of aid by sea is legally problematic at the moment, there are limits to Israel’s ability to disrupt flotillas. The freedom of navigation is central to the law of the sea. As such, the flotilla is entitled to sail unimpeded in the Mediterranean Sea.

Any harassment or stopping of the flotilla within the Mediterranean’s international waters is therefore a clear violation of international law.

Crucial to this is the actual location where Israeli forces intercept and board flotilla vessels.

Israel can certainly exercise control over the 12 nautical mile territorial sea off Gaza’s shores. Its closure of the territorial sea to foreign vessels would be justified under international law as a security measure, as well as to ensure the safety of neutral vessels due to the ongoing war.

Flotilla organisers said their ships were intercepted between 70 to 80 nautical miles from shore, well beyond Gaza’s territorial sea.

No doubt this was done for operational reasons. The closer the flotilla came to the Gazan coast, the more difficult it would be for the Israel Defence Force to successfully intercept each ship, raising the possibility that at least one vessel may make landfall.

Scores of activists onboard the ships have reportedly been detained and will be taken into custody in the Israeli port of Ashdod. They will then likely be quickly deported.

The activists have protections under international human rights law, as well, including access to foreign diplomats exercising consular protection for their citizens.

Donald Rothwell receives funding from Australian Research Council.

– ref. Israel’s interception of the Gaza aid flotilla is a clear violation of international law – https://theconversation.com/israels-interception-of-the-gaza-aid-flotilla-is-a-clear-violation-of-international-law-266254