It was a crowded, freezing Monday morning in late January, in the large university hospital in northern Italy where I was leading my fieldwork between 2017 to 2018. A muscular man in his late thirties rushed through the Emergency Room (ER) entrance sliding glass doors with a swoosh. He wore a leather biker jacket on one arm and lavish black tribal tattoos on the other. The man stopped in the middle of the waiting area, a large, enclosed room with eighty plastic seats, garishly lit by neon lights and painted a pale institutional green. He waved a broken glass bottle neck in his right hand ..read more

On Monday, May 25th, 2020, Cuba’s new president, Miguel Diaz-Canél, involuntarily found himself in the spotlight. Diaz-Canél had become the Cuban head of state two years before, and was widely seen as an uncharismatic successor to Fidel and Raúl Castro. That day, Diaz-Canél made an improvised statement during a meeting with government ministers, which will forever stick to his public image like a red nose. Seated in a leather chair on stage, the president gazed into the air and began to muse. “We have to have lemons in this country,” said the leader. Government officials scribbled notes as he ..read more

When Nadja was evacuated from the bomb shelter in eastern Ukraine, she took her cheese with her. She took the cheese from Luhansk to Kharkiv and almost to Odesa, disposing of the last of it somewhere west of the river Dnipro. The cheese was not precious to her – quite the opposite. It was what is known in Russian as kolbasnyj syr, approximately ‘sausage cheese’, a rubbery, processed cheese product shaped into a cylinder and scented with fake smoke. Nadja hated it. But kolbasnyj syr is shelf-stable, and what she was given to eat in the basement where she spent two weeks hiding from shells. Ther ..read more

One scalding hot June day in 2014 in a remote village health post in North Shewa, Ethiopia, I attended an event intended to provide information and advice about breastfeeding and nutrition for pregnant and lactating women. This content of the event adhered to national guidelines, drawn from global standards developed by the World Health Organisation and Unicef and adapted for the Ethiopian context by the government and its international partners (e.g. FDRE 2016a). Implementation of these guidelines is included in the ‘package’ of work for which state-employed health extension workers are ultim ..read more

In January 2020, the Senegalese President Macky Sall announced a nation-wide ‘Cleaning Day’. Together with a ‘Zero waste’ campaign and followed by monthly ‘Cleaning Days’, he invited citizens to contribute to the de-cluttering and cleaning of public spaces. The employees of the suburban train service called Petit Train de Banlieue would form an integral part of the cleaning campaign. Their national train service usually brought commuters from the capital Dakar to the suburbs and the neighbouring city Thiès. Since 2019, however, the trains had been suspended due to the construction of a ne ..read more

Whenever I meet Merule, a 42-year-old Nigerian citizen living undocumented in Milan, Italy, I am struck by the number of people he knows. Merule’s social network unfolds throughout San Siro, a square-shaped, public housing project in Milan’s northwestern area. Walking through San Siro’s long two-way boulevards or taking one of its side streets unravelling from the central square, Merule always greets someone. For each of them, he has a story to tell: a man who sold him his bike, another who sustained him financially in the past, a third who provided a short-term, informal job. Merule is always ..read more

Human rights are avowedly universal but must be translated by local activists to make sense in specific contexts, a process Sally Engle Merry called vernacularization. Human rights progress is conventionally measured through global quantitative indicators which give the illusion of control and comparability, but radically oversimplify social and political processes. How can we avoid “the seductions of quantification” and understand how human rights are materialized, appropriated, and implemented in everyday social justice activism? In her decades-long research on human rights, Sally Engle ..read more

The climate crisis is upon us. Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and fires are increasingly wreaking havoc around the globe. Even in the cosseted bubbles of Fortress Europe, there is growing awareness that we’re hurtling into disaster and that we’ve only a short time window to try and turn things around. And that turnaround will by necessity be urban. Most positivist/alarmist predictions forecast that by 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, making cities both a major driver of climate change and a key factor in seeking to mitigate ..read more

Between February 8 and 9, 2024, two fleets arrived in Brindisi, a port city in the southern Italian region of Puglia. The first came by land: a parade of 100 tractors that local farmers rolled in from the city’s countryside. Cutting their engines on the principal roadway leading to Brindisi’s center, they unfurled Italian flags and waved banners reading “Betrayed by Europe” and, in English, “No Farmers. No Food. No Future.” The second came by sea: a ship operated by a pan-European N.G.O. that carried ashore 261 African and Middle Eastern migrants, rescued in international waters. At the direct ..read more

Over 150 organisations called for citizens to mobilise against the new, controversial French immigration law deemed ‘an ideological victory’ by far-right leader Le Pen. They condemned this latest ‘clampdown’ on migration, including the suppression of statutory state medical aid for ‘irregular’ migrants and the reinstatement of the ‘illegal stay’ infraction. They also stressed that this law further undermines solidarity efforts providing support to migrant people[i] in precarious conditions (e.g. restricted access to emergency accommodation). Attacks on the principle of solidarity have been a l ..read more