Features

For centuries, museums have held human remains as artefacts – including those sold, looted and smuggled out of colonized countries. Hana Pera Aoake explains how New Zealand/Aotearoa has become a world-leader in repatriation. What can be learned from the Indigenous-led programme driving the push to bring ancestors home?

In a time of toxic ‘culture wars’, it may be hard to see the liberating potential of transgender rights for us all. But this piece from 2015, by Vanessa Baird, did just that – while taking a pop at the tyranny of the binary.

After 17 years, Zapotec Indigenous communities in Mexico finally gain control over their water sources, reports Magdalena Rojo.

Rap is a genre intertwined with politics, but the political courage of Iran’s rappers takes some beating, Lorraine Mallinder finds.

As Scotland bids farewell to first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Conrad Landin looks at the state of the democracy she leaves behind.

Husna Ara speaks to Dr Samara Linton about The Colour of Madness, her co-edited anthology that brings to life the varied experiences of alienation for migrants and people of colour in the UK.

Tooba Syed on how Pakistan’s gender non-conforming community are fighting renewed attacks on their age old existence and customs – through queer kinship.

Success coaches, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists. Popular influencers are preying on men and boys’ emotional isolation. Daisy Schofield reports on how we might intervene.

From rank and file unionist heroes to industrialist lone wolves, Bollywood storytellers and ‘content creators’ have shifted to write out India’s collective spirit. Ishika Saxena questions what this means for how the country’s citizens can be brought together.

Work from home policies aren’t going anywhere. So, with many workers in the UK feeling the strain of isolation, now is the time to ramp up trade union organizing, writes Eve Livingston.

Initiatives, action, and further reading on loneliness.

Loneliness and social isolation have become chronic issues across the world. We must resist attempts to close down meaningful human interaction, writes Husna Ara.

Around the world, people are chanting ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ in solidarity with the women’s uprising in Iran – dubbing it the ‘first feminist revolution in the world’. Not so, argues Rahila Gupta, as she examines its precursor: a Kurdish feminist revolution in Rojava.

In India, a Hindu supremacist government is intent on erasing the country’s Islamic history. Tarushi Aswani reports.

Faced with monumental change, we all tend to convince ourselves that our lives will continue unscathed. In the first of our new series, with picks from the New Internationalist archive, we go back to 1990 when Anuradha Vittachi explained why, in the case of climate change, denial – that basic human trait – could bring about our downfall.

Art does not simply reflect the world – but frames and shapes our future. A meditation by the Raqs Media Collective.

Wales is pioneering a law supposed to ensure that public organizations protect future generations, as well as the living. Rebecca Wilks explores the results so far.

Nick Dowson looks to the future of democracy – and considers how we can make it our own.

The ghost of Dinyar Godrej looks back from 2073 to see how personal revolutions built a society that is truly social.

Could a Kenyan court case point the way towards a more just tax system? Amy Hall investigates.