Features

According to the old adage, ‘the economy is a subset of society’. Now, more than ever, we need to act like we believe it, says Dinyar Godrej.

Our dysfunctional food system was failing before Covid-19.

The pandemic has left millions of people on the brink of starvation. Hazel Healy asks why our food system is failing the poorest so badly – and offers a glimpse of a more equitable path. With extra reporting by Mohamed Camara.

As Covid-19 spread across the world, greenhouse-gas emissions plummeted, thanks to a reduction in human activity. But meanwhile, writes Amy Hall, some of the world’s most polluting companies and industries have been using the pandemic to maintain and even ramp up their environmentally ruinous activities.

How to finance a Green New Deal that is truly global? Fadhel Kaboub has a proposal that builds in colonial and climate reparations.

Can we rescue the notion of global health from the jaws of the pandemic? asks Dinyar Godrej.

Covid-19 related research and advocacy groups to support.

How can we transform the calamity that has befallen us and create healing? Vanessa Baird on the change we can be.

A clamour to return to the status quo after Covid-19 would be bad news for people and the planet, argues Richard Swift. We may never get a better chance for a new normal.

Husna Rizvi rounds up some of the lesser-known pandemic stories from around the world.

Hazel Healy re-connects with communities in Sierra Leone.

Western volunteers on why they fight for Rojava.

Abdullah Öcalan’s journey to democratic confederalism.

No mercy for Iran’s mountain smugglers.

Longing for a return to Turkish Kurdistan’s shattered city centre.

Key events in recent Kurdish history.

Lorraine Mallinder gets inside the proto-petro-state of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkey wants to undo the revolution in North and East Syria. But the women of Rojava are resisting, writes Dilar Dirik.

The Kurds – the fourth-biggest ethnic group in the Middle East – are described as ‘the largest nation without a state’. (Where accurate statistics are lacking, we have gone with ‘reasonable’ estimates.)

There are scores of different Kurdish political factions, parties and movements, some of which connect with each other, others that are radically and bitterly opposed. Here, in simple form, are the key players.