Dimensions of conflict including human rights and environmental issues, humanitarian and arms control issues, and post-conflict transition.
Inside Afghanistan’s Compounding Crises
Inkstick, January 2026
As donors debate engagement and isolation, millions of Afghans confront hunger, homelessness, and a future with shrinking options. The past few months in Kandahar have been ruthless, Gul Mohammad Aryan tells me over a spotty internet connection. As director of the Sustainable Goals Organization for Afghanistan, he has been trying to support Afghan refugees who are now coming back from other countries in the region. More than 2.86 million people returned last year, the vast majority from Pakistan and Iran. “They have left everything in Pakistan, they have left everything in Iran,” Aryan says. “They just came with their clothes. They don’t have enough.”
(Image: WFP/Isheeta Sumra.)
Darkness of the heart: Montréal rallies for Darfur amid inaction over genocide
rabble, November 2025
“I speak for the heart that the world pretends not to hear,” says activist Samia Hamid, addressing around two hundred people gathered at Square Phillips in downtown Montréal on Sunday. The El Fasher massacre has renewed calls by Canadian peace groups to end arms trade with the UAE, one of Canada’s favoured military clients and boasting $7 million CAD worth of weapons exports last year. But as Darfur’s horror unfolded, Canada merely expanded trade with the UAE this summer.
The Betrayal of Darfur: Decades of broken promises paved the way for a resurgence in genocidal violence in Sudan
The Progressive, November 2025
Even prior to the city’s fall to the RSF, October had been a particularly deadly month for el-Fasher, with RSF forces targeting mosques and hospitals in deadly bombings since the beginning of this year. … Raised banks of sand or gravel built by the RSF, known as berms or earthen walls, hinder its residents from escaping attacks, creating what an August report from the Yale School of Public Health called “a literal kill box.” As long as the gunfire continues, Saeneen says, they are “waiting for their fate.”
Conservationists endorse the age of synthetic biology
Truthdig, October 2025
From restoring coral reefs and increasing frogs’ pathogen resistance, to reviving extinct species of wolves and engineering microbes to gobble up industrial pollution, synthetic biology offers novel ways to rewrite natural history. At the same time, it is threatening to erode some of the foundational principles of conservation. The growing divide over the future of biotech was on full display during this month’s World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, the quadrennial conference of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
(Graphic by Truthdig; images via AP Photo, Adobe Stock)
NATO War-Games Climate Collapse
Truthdig, October 2025
It’s the 11th hour for countries to respond to irreversible climate change, security experts agreed at the fourth annual NATO Climate Change and Security Summit. With militaries responsible for approximately 5.5% of the world’s greenhouse emissions, inaction is deepening existential risk and increasing calls from the scientific community for arms control and conflict prevention.
(Graphic by Truthdig; images via AP Photo, Adobe Stock)
Greed is a hell of a drug
Truthdig, October 2025
Humanitarian experts see lenacapavir as a potential game changer for marginalized and criminalized communities. But Gilead’s decision to forbid generic producers from exporting the drug to countries outside the license list has earned accusations that the company is contravening the spirit and letter of the 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and public health.
(Graphic by Truthdig; images via AP Photo, Adobe Stock)
Ecuador’s Social Transparency law deepens Noboa’s authoritarian rule
FairPlanet, October 2025
The trial of Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza has pulled back the curtain on a sweeping state surveillance campaign in Ecuador, exposing undercover operations, and a wave of new laws critics say are dismantling civil society. As President Daniel Noboa pushes through neoliberal reforms under a permanent state of emergency, Indigenous and environmental defenders warn the country is sliding into authoritarian rule.
( Image : Amazonian Indigenous leaders from Pastaza Amazon convene a press conference to voice their demands to the government as part of the nationwide strike. mullu.tv )
“The Amazon is not for sale”
Truthdig, September 2025
More than 2 million hectares of Amazonian rainforest are under imminent threat from plans to auction 14 oil blocks along the Ecuador-Peru border by early next year. The Andwa, Shuar, Achuar, Kichwa, Sápara, Shiwiar and Waorani nations reject this development on ancestral territories without their consent. “We have not and will never give consent for the [oil auction] in our territories,” Kichwa leader Nadino Calapucha said, stressing that sacrificing the Amazon for economic prosperity “will not generate development, but impoverishment and destruction.”
( Image : Jason DeCrow for Amazon Frontlines )
Afghan refugees face deportations in Pakistan
Inkstick, September 2025
“Pakistan has a law for the protection of animals,” says Ihsan Ullah Ahmadzai, Pakistan-born Afghan journalist living in exile. “But not for refugees and Afghans.”
“This is not just a refugee issue, it is fundamentally a human rights issue that tests our collective conscience,” says Moniza Kakar, Karachi-based human rights lawyer and coordinator for Pakistan’s Joint Action Committee for Refugees (JACR).
When the Proof of Registration cards of 1.4 million Afghan refugees expired on June 30, Karachi authorized its latest controversial wave of deportations in the third phase of its “Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan.” Following an extension to the deportation deadline last month, round-ups were restarted in September. Despite Pakistani authorities emphasizing voluntary return — what a Khyber official described as “honorable and dignified” — many Afghans who have lived in Pakistan for decades feel pressured and blindsided.
( Image : Mohammad Hassan Mukhtar Ahmad )
When a bridge is not just a bridge
rabble, September 2025
As the Chenab bridge was inaugurated, the spectacular bridge became a focal point for international pressure on companies and investors continuing to quietly profit off India’s military occupation and human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.
( Image: Chenab bridge ; via Konkan Railway Corporation Limited )
River politics and silent disappearances in Buenaventura, Colombia
FairPlanet, September 2025
Long on the margins of South America’s shipping hubs, the industrial city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast is seeing massive changes. Port expansion is ushering in a new era of maritime trade. But justice for victims of armed conflict remains unresolved and their memory is slipping away.
The region’s river communities have endured some of the worst horrors perpetrated against civilians during the height of war, including enforced disappearances. Buenaventura began dredging the San Antonio estuary in 2018 to allow the passage and docking of ships. But the port’s expansion and commercial activity have threatened to disturb the remains of missing persons and interfere with the search and recovery process in what is considered one of Colombia’s largest mass graves.
( Image: Vladimir Oprisko / @captoprisko )
Millions of Afghans forced to return to a hellscape the world forgot
Responsible Statecraft, August 2025
Iran and Pakistan are deporting people in en masse back to a country where Taliban revenge and abuse, no jobs or food, and grinding poverty, await. As millions of Afghans are being deported or leaving ‘voluntarily’ from Iran and Pakistan, some regional relationships with the Taliban are normalizing.
( Image: Vladimir Oprisko / @captoprisko )
When aid fails in Uganda
FairPlanet, August 2025
The escalation of conflict in eastern DRC this year has driven thousands into Uganda’s Kyangwali settlement, where dwindling humanitarian funding and World Food Programme ration cuts have left over half the population without assistance. Refugees with disabilities are among those excluded, often with no recourse.
( Image: Jack Taylor, Getty Images )
Copper mining and green sacrifice in Putumayo
NACLA, Fall 2025 issue
Communities around Mocoa are fighting a single Canadian copper mega-mine, but this unique and precious ecosystem where the Andes meet the Amazon is seeing the onset of mining development. At least thirty-seven Canadian projects across nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have been linked by Amazon Watch to corporate abuses.
Making Montréal-Est
Maisonneuve, Summer 2025 issue
A sulfur processing plant. An oil refinery. A chemical warehouse. Corrals of shipping containers. A depot for petroleum coke, a by-product of oil refining. Oil tank cars lined up along the street in a long row. Manufacturing centres, factories and the carcass of a building still bearing the marks of an old fire. The site of a soon-to-be-constructed airport fuel storage terminal along the northern bank of the Saint-Laurent River. These are the landscapes of Montréal-Est, a city on the eastern end of the Island of Montreal. The lines of division between it and Montreal are as olfactory as they are carved by CN rails: base and acrid, the dense warmth of gasoline and the cold musk of cement, dust and exhaust.
Home to fewer than five thousand residents, this is a city unlike any other. It was built almost entirely on the back of the oil industry, with residents considered an afterthought for decades. The city is now attempting to reinvent itself under the banner of urban revitalization. But Montréal-Est, despite its closeness to Montreal, stands apart: far enough on the periphery to keep one from looking too closely at the significant ways it diverges from those visions.
The dark side of Balochistan’s copper rush
The Contrapuntal, July 2025
While copper mining has promised to be an economic boon in Balochistan, the Pakistani state’s own impunity and the rule of violence are undermining just and equitable development by further alienating its most marginalized populations. For communities that have been burned by past exploitative resource extraction, the persecution of dissenting voices has been ignored by international authorities and financial institutions, while Pakistan itself is doing little but tightening the noose.
( Image: Baloch mothers holding pictures of their sons who have been forcibly disappeared or killed. Jan 14, 2024. Via Baloch Yakjehti Committee )
The silent return of landmines in Europe
FairPlanet, July 2025
As Ukraine becomes one of the most landmine-contaminated countries in the world, a growing number of Eastern European states are abandoning a landmark international treaty banning their use.
( Image: Baloch mothers holding pictures of their sons who have been forcibly disappeared or killed. Jan 14, 2024. Via Baloch Yakjehti Committee )
Stonewalling voices at risk: Human rights obligations at Canadian embassies dead on arrival
rabble, July 2025
Canadian embassies are failing to stand up for activists in foreign countries who seek to protect their land and resources from exploitation by Canadian corporations.
( Image : A protest in 2019 to protect clean water in Bucaramanga, Colombia. Comité Santurbán. )
As DULF Prepares for Trial, Eris Nyx Calls for Direct Action Over “Policy Wish-Testing”
FILTER, July 2025
Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) cofounder Eris Nyx spoke of the lives lost while waiting for the government to effectively respond to the overdose crisis. DULF’s punk ethos is about direct action—as a human rights emergency unfolds amid an escalating housing crisis and a collapsing health care system, there’s no time for slow bureaucracy. British Columbia first declared the opioid-involved overdose crisis a public health emergency in April 2016. In 2020, faced with the province’s inaction, DULF began distributing pure heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine to 52 pre-screened members of its compassion club in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Canada hosts pre-NATO Summit rearmament affirmation confab
Responsible Statecraft, June 2025
As governments scramble to speed up procurement, CANSEC, North America’s largest arms trade show last week, literally sold the military industry as a tool of foreign policy. Former NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson invoked the spirit of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 speech: “Only by preparing for war will we be able to protect peace.” “In the ideal, our defense attachés would be champions of our defense industries. They are not today because we do not have a tradition of using our military to champion industry,” said Wendy Hadwen, Assistant Deputy Minister developing the country’s first national military industrial strategy at Canada’s Department of National Defence.
( Image : Justin Tang / The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press )
Roadmap for an arms embargo
Canadian Dimension, June 2025
Inside the arms fair, the focus was on Canada-US relations, European militarization and NATO commitments. But protesters outside were highlighting the presence of weapons companies and parts manufacturers implicated in Israeli war crimes. Amid Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza and the continued blockade of humanitarian aid, they were calling for an immediate and full arms embargo and divestment from companies complicit in war crimes and illegal occupation.
( Image : Israeli troops on the edge of the Gaza Strip. Photo courtesy the Israel Defense Forces / Telegram )
The end of Canada’s geographical naïveté
Truthdig, May 2025
“We’ll need to develop an autonomous defense policy, which is something we’ve never done,” said Philippe Lagassé, professor of international affairs at Carleton University and defence policy analyst. With a threatening and unpredictable U.S. to the south and a mining scramble in the Arctic, Canada struggles in a new security landscape.
When natural disaster strikes, the junta tightens its grip
FairPlanet, May 2025
Humanitarian experts working in Myanmar are questioning why international aid organisations are willing to work with the junta despite the decades of human rights violations but not with a plethora of local actors. Wherever humanitarian aid is politicised, civilians bear the burden.
Canada remains silent on India’s crimes against humanity in Kashmir
rabble, April 2025
Recently hinting at revisiting trade deals with India, newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney sees Canada’s trade relationship with the country as based on a “shared sense of values.” Despite years of appeals to hold the Indian state accountable for crimes against humanity, Canada continues aiding and abetting the Indian state through political, economic, and military support.
Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia
Waging Nonviolence, April 2025
Despite facing existential threats, unarmed Indigenous guards are at the forefront of the struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands and end oil drilling in the Amazon.
Sharing a border with Ecuador and Peru, the southern Colombian department of Putumayo takes its name from the Quechua term for “gushing river.” For some, its landscapes are a sacred doorway to the Amazon rainforest, a world unfathomably greater than the human. For others, however, this land looks more like oilfields and military bases, optimized waterflood assets and strategic trafficking corridors. This difference in worldview is at the heart of peacebuilding in Putumayo and the Indigenous struggle to reclaim ancestral territories across the Amazon basin.
Despite regional opposition, a Canadian company pursues mining in Santander
NACLA, March 2025
“Do you see the mountain over there? That mountain is going to disappear. One day, a machine will come and eat the mountain.” Mayerly López, an activist with the collective Comité Santurban, recounted the words of late artisanal mining activist Mariluz Lizcano, who stirred López into lifelong environmental activism. … In the face of rifts over securitization issues and calls for conservation, Aris Mining intends to launch the Soto Norte mine in Santander, Colombia, in 2029.
Catatumbo crisis marginalises northeast Colombia communities
FairPlanet, March 2025
Colombia’s worst humanitarian crisis in over a decade has the country’s President in a bind: while his leftist platform appealed to Colombians’ hopes for peace and progressive reforms, a growing turn toward militarisation is being criticised as echoing his trigger-happy right-wing predecessors who carved up and abandoned the country’s most marginalised communities. With Trump doubling down on an old drug war playbook for Colombia, and Petro already folding to Trump’s executive order to deport Colombians, Catatumbo is now in a critical moment that threatens to deepen social divides.
New frontlines and an uncertain future for mine clearance in Colombia
The Progressive, March 2025
Nearly a decade after the landmark 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and a communist guerilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the prevalence of landmines remains a critical issue in the country. As mine clearance efforts turn toward active conflict zones in Colombia where humanitarian law is disregarded, buried and improvised explosives aren’t the only risks for some Colombian humanitarian workers on the frontlines of neutralizing minefields.
( Image : Algeciras, Huila. Juan Arredondo for UNMAS. )
Activists denouce conflict minerals and green militarism at mining convention in Toronto
rabble, March 2025
A coalition of groups called for a greater recognition of Indigenous rights, and the use of critical minerals in weapons of war. Demonstrators denounced Canadian mining companies profiteering from war and complicit in human rights abuses abroad. But some of those same companies are moving headquarters from Canada to trade on foreign stock exchanges as Canada is becoming a target for foreign companies and takeovers amid an intensifying critical minerals race.
( Image : Sami activists speak at protest in Toronto. Lital Khaikin )
Out in the cold: Where does Canada stand on Sudan?
Canadian Dimension, March 2025
Activists have called for a boycott of the UAE, including a grassroots campaign led by Sudanese activists called the People’s Arms Embargo to stop global weapons shipments to the country. Refugees International have also called for more accountability by foreign states that are fuelling both sides of the war.
( Image : Demonstrators in Montreal. Lital Khaikin )
Doctors Collect Evidence of War Crimes Amid Decimation of Sudan’s Hospitals
The Progressive, February 2025
As Sudan’s brutal war between its military junta’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues into its second year, the resulting violence has laid siege to hospitals across the country on a catastrophic scale. Since April 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) has verified at least 119 attacks on medical facilities across Sudan, while medical and humanitarian aid workers have been attacked and killed by both warring parties.
Justice for Jani Silva: Colombian campesina activist threatened in Putumayo
rabble, February 2025
In this part of Colombia’s department of Putumayo, extractivism and militarism go hand in hand. Silva’s story is just one of many that remain in silence as human rights and land defenders face deadly risks. Investigations have revealed widespread impunity in Putumayo for the harassment and murder of activists opposing extractivism. Silva herself has recently stated, “We can’t deny the evident complicity between armed groups and oil companies, through the company’s sub-contractors.”
Guardians of Guaviare: Southern Colombia’s land fight
FairPlanet, November 2024
The Jiw (pronounced “Hue”) are a small Indigenous community in southern Colombia, also known as Guiabero. The 3000 members of this community live along the Guaviare River that snakes between the departments of Guaviare and Meta, settlements driven by a coca economy that, during the 1970s and 80s, turned Guaviare into the heartland of cocoa cultivation in Colombia. The Jiw have been repeatedly displaced by decades of colonial settlement, militarisation by the Colombian state and non-state armed groups, and agro-industrial projects in the lowlands.
⊸ On sidelines of UN nature summit in Colombia, Canadian mining companies pillage
The Breach, December 2024
These voluntary reporting mechanisms are not standardized and are entirely dependent on private sector adoption, meaning that the reporting power is ultimately in the hands of the companies themselves. If companies are unwilling to disclose sources, importers and specific risks in supply chains under Canada’s reporting law, how could they be expected to voluntarily disclose sources of conflict gold that has been mined under extortion and violent force?
⊸ Canada continues undermining binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights
rabble, December 2024
For over a decade, the world has struggled to reach an agreement on an international law on corporate accountability and prevention of human rights abuses.
⋉ Canada turns its back to Sudanese refugees
rabble, November 2024
Québec continues to exclude Sudanese refugees, Canada puts hefty price tag on asylum with no alternative humanitarian programs in sight.
⊟ Catering to Capitalism: How the informalization of hospitality labour is hurting workers
THIS Magazine, Fall 2024
For those whose livelihoods depend on the flexibility of catering work, there is also a price for this view into an often inaccessible world. While catering is the quintessential gig economy, temp-worker agencies and the informalization of labour in the sector pose new challenges for workers’ rights in a precarious industry—one that has long lacked many vital labour protections that are considered basic rights for other classifications of workers.
⊸ Privatizing the Building Blocks of Life
Truthdig, October 2024
Thanks to the rise of digital sequencing in commercial biotech, the most intimate building blocks of life are becoming as commodified as fossil fuels, cobalt and teakwood. Technological leaps in supercomputing and machine learning have enabled the sudden evolution of DSI analysis and sequencing technologies, and, as Regeneron’s Inmzeb’s story makes clear, international laws governing it have not kept pace.
⊸ DNA Data and Indigenous Rights : Tracing Genetic Exploitation
FairPlanet, October 2024
Indigenous peoples are demanding control over genetic data sourced from their lands. Will global policy protect their rights or allow exploitation to continue?
☊ Peace means self-determination
New Internationalist, September 2024
Karen activist Paul Sein Twa discusses revolutionary conservation and political turmoil in Myanmar.
⊸ Capital Pride and the commitment to solidarity
rabble, August 2024
Withdrawal of political and corporate support comes in wake of Capital Pride’s support for Palestinian human rights.
⊹ Aid organisations are halting operations as Myanmar violence escalates
FairPlanet, August 2024
International medical aid to Myanmar’s Rakhine State has been effectively paralysed amid an escalation of violence over the summer. As international aid programs remain severely underfunded and the need for humanitarian response in Myanmar is soaring, the United League of Arakan (ULA), an Arakanese political organisation, is filling the aid vacuum.
⊹ Veterans speak up at Assembly
The Eastern Door, July 2024
Veterans’ issues were on the margins of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) annual general assembly at the Palais de Congrès in Montreal [in July]. But opposition to a project in Saskatchewan by the First Nations Veterans Council has revealed how Harper-era policy encouraging privatization of veterans’ services is threatening progress with Veterans Affairs Canada.
⊸ Will Malaysia remain Canada’s plastic dumping ground?
FairPlanet, June 2024
With the global treaty on plastic pollution to be determined in South Korea this fall, Canada’s compliance with international agreements and accountability for the plastic waste it continues to dump on developing countries has come to light.
⊸ A common language: Critical metals and Québec’s clientelist relationship with France
Canadian Dimension, June 2024
François Legault is embracing a greenwashed future of critical metal dependency and multinational corporate monopolies.
⊸ The Gruesome Frontier of Thermobaric Weapons
Truthdig, May 2024
For militaries, thermobarics are efficient and useful. Few other non-nuclear technologies of mass death can compare. For human rights lawyers who specialize in war crimes, thermobarics are an object of outrage and loathing. As these “heat and pressure” explosive munitions become more widely used, observers say international law is “utterly inadequate.”
⊸ Wholesale privatization, false solutions: CAQ continues decades-long legacy of dismantling Québec’s public health care system
Canadian Dimension, May 2024
The strain on the public sector has fuelled the wholesale privatization of Québec’s health system, inducing medical professionals to exit the public sector and cynically converting data such as emergency room wait times into evidence of the need for further privatization.
⊸ France’s pursuit of Mongolia’s metals sparks new wave of resource colonialism
FairPlanet, April 2024
Fuelling Europe’s need for electricity, Mongolia’s so-called “wolf economy” shows that resource colonialism has moved the needle on the compass.
⊹ Oil, conflict, and local disempowerment in Myanmar’s Rakhine State
FairPlanet, March 2024
Offshore oil & gas and special economic zone development off the coast of Myanmar’s Rakhine State remains caught in the armed conflict between the military junta and opposition forces this spring.
⊹ Conscription and crisis: Myanmar’s human rights catastrophe
FairPlanet, March 2024
The humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State is catalysed not only by armed resistance against the military junta’s rule but also by a complex struggle to control the state’s natural resources. The state is a strategic point for offshore oil and gas development, home to the South-Korean Shwe Gas project in the Andaman Sea.
⊸ In the renewable race, Mongolia chooses profit over humans and nature
FairPlanet, March 2024
Amid opposition to the greenwashing of Erdeneburen hydro dam, the Mongolian government ignores two years of UN appeals to comply with international human rights law. The criminalisation of Mongolia’s most prominent human rights defender and environmental activist signals a concerning climate for activism in the country. Mongolian human rights advocate Sukhgerel Dugersuren has spent nearly two years entangled in criminal charges that have politicised her activism.
⊸ Myanmar’s illicit rare earth industry grows despite insurgency
FairPlanet, February 2024
With nearly half of the world’s mines not being tracked for impacts amid the rare earth mining boom, stringent environmental regulation and accountability within an ethical supply chain system are vital for rare earths sourced from Myanmar.
⋉ De plus en plus dur d’accéder aux services sociaux et de santé dans Hochelaga-Maisonneuve
Pivot, février 2024
Les ressources publiques se font rares dans le quartier, surtout pour les habitant·es les plus pauvres, et la situation menace de s’aggraver avec la réforme Dubé.
⋉ Despair is the currency of massacre
Canadian Dimension, January 2024
The Palestinian humanitarian crisis has long since been reduced to a story of periodic suffering and a media sandbox topic for the perfection of algorithms. Canadian policy-makers pay marginal attention to the daily reality of the IDF’s detention and murder of Palestinian civilians at Israeli checkpoints, inhumane medical and living conditions, targeting and murder of journalists, bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and restricted mobility in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, now reduced to rubble.
⊸ In Québec’s aluminum towns, the green-tech future looks like the past
The Breach, November 2023
While aluminum giant Rio Tinto receives corporate welfare for green promises, Saguenay residents cope with the consequences of the industry’s last 100 years.
⋉ Québec public sector workers are ready for a general strike
Canadian Dimension, September 2023
An inter-union alliance representing 420,000 workers is mounting a serious challenge to the CAQ’s austerity program.
⋉ Consistent company and broken paradigms: Another year passes, Canada has still not ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture
Part 3 of series originally published with Canadian Dimension, Substack, April 2023
“[…] the relevance and implications of the OPCAT can be far-reaching, showing how closely the carceral system is related and integrated with Canadian healthcare and old age facilities. But neither public debate nor the implementation of OPCAT promised by two decades of Canadian governments have occurred.”
☊ Indigenous rights at heart of protecting biodiversity
Canadian Dimension, December 2022
“While activists called for the recognition of Indigenous-governed territories as protected areas, centring a human-rights based approach to biodiversity conservation, business lobbies showed how clever interpretation of language can leave room for abuse.”
⊹ Frictionlessness, and the media war over Ukraine
Canadian Dimension, May 2022
⋉ Amnesia and fragmentation in the narrative of Israel’s occupation of Palestine
Canadian Dimension, May 2021
“Where politicians fail to treat Israeli apartheid as a humanitarian emergency, and industry lobbies profit from it, decisive action by Canadian labour unions and interruptions to global supply chains could play an essential role in militant resistance to Israeli apartheid that does more than plaster slogans on social media.”
⊸ Canadian land grabs for rare earth metals continue outside the South American Lithium Triangle
Canadian Dimension, March 2021
Flying under the radar of Canadian media, Mongolia has long been one of Canada’s closest partners in Asia as a source of strategic metals and minerals, while occupying a fulcrum point between Southeast Asia, Russia and the Middle East. Canada has played a key role in shaping the extractive industry and policy reform in Mongolia, yet this receives minimal scrutiny against the broader background of post-Soviet states that have been carved out over the past decades. Little light is shed on the bleak implications of the increasing demand for lithium, and other strategic resources found across Central Asia that are essential to the energy transition.
⊹ Space neoliberalization agitates the frontiers of Canadian data privacy
Canadian Dimension, March 2021
“Navigating the dilemmas of extra-terrestrial territories and infrastructure has raised new concerns over data sovereignty and localization, while dredging up unresolved issues of privacy and data protection, such as the weakness of existing Canadian privacy and data legislation and revealing the extent to which the military-industrial complex underlies even the most ordinary of commercial internet service providers (ISPs).”
⋉ Unconscionable treatment continues in Canadian detention centres
Canadian Dimension, January 2021
⊹ Stumbling toward peace in Donbass
Canadian Dimension, November 2020
“Despite Canada’s long-standing support for the Ukrainian army—and the reverberations of Ukrainian nationalist politics through Canada’s electoral landscape—there has been almost no coverage of recent peace talks in the war-ravaged Donbass. More concerningly, few have analyzed the implications of stalled progress towards ending the over-six-year-long civil war, even as the Trudeau government continues to fund a military mission in an active conflict most have all but forgotten.”
⊹ WESCAM controversy highlights double standards in Canadian arms controls
Canadian Dimension, October 2020
“Beyond Nagorno-Karabakh, WESCAM’s deal with Turkey must be seen in intersection with major policy questions around the development of Canadian technologies for autonomous weapons systems, and their deployment in US proxy wars. It makes little sense for Trudeau to issue a mandate in support of a ban on LAWS, while finding no issue in exporting components for other countries to equip their increasingly AI-dependent militaries.”
⋉ An inconvenient coup: Canada’s disingenuous response to Mali’s revolt against a corrupt government
Canadian Dimension, October 2020
⊹ Machines in the chain of command
Canadian Dimension, September 2020
“Regulation of R&D for military use of AI must also contend with the potential of civilian technology to be co-opted. “Diffuse technologies” can be initially developed for seemingly innocent civilian applications—such as sorting items for an online retailer, for automated recruitment tools, or for medical and educational purposes—and then refined and applied for shooting missiles and killing people. As Project Ploughshares’ Branka Marijan explained, this could translate into the use of facial recognition for confirming targets, or image recognition for understanding an environment in which a weapons system is found.”
⋉ Canada drags its feet on international Convention against Torture
Canadian Dimension, September 2020
⊹ Screening for ideals: Social credit is alive and well in Canada
Canadian Dimension, August 2020
“As predictive software takes its natural course from military and policing applications to wider adoption at the consumer level—for ordinary tasks like renting an apartment or finding a job—it raises a few key issues around the generated risk scores. Using an algorithm to evaluate candidates for housing and employment, rather than person-to-person assessments, could have significant implications for accessibility, as those who are most vulnerable are subjected to an automated decision-making process that may be inherently biased against them—for which there is no meaningful form of legal recourse, at least for the moment.”
⊹ Shadowboxing with Russian bots
Canadian Dimension, August 2020
“Receiving approval on July 20 from DND to enter the third phase of development, Datametrex was awarded $208,800 to continue building what is ostensibly a “Fake News Filter” called the NexaNarrative tool. DRDC’s research in question, however, reveals more about how the Canadian security elite perceives democratic debate, and bodes ominously for adversarial journalism, with Datametrex flaunting its capabilities for “publisher classification.””
⊟ The Sparkplug
Free broadside. 2020 – 2022
Printed as a 1-2 sheet broadside, usually with two articles (A-side, B-side). Appeared periodically during pandemic.
⋉ Criminalizing the most vulnerable: migrant surveillance in Canada
Canadian Dimension, June 2020
“If the pilot project is deemed successful, the CBSA aims to unroll the program nation-wide. But all of these methods raise questions about data collection in Canada, as well as moral issues of personal dignity, civil liberties and privacy rights; especially as COVID-19 has clearly escalated national rhetoric around surveillance technologies more broadly.”
⊹ Stealth F35s and the projection of imperial power in Israel
Toward Freedom, June 2020
“The F-35 Adirs are considered part of Israel’s Momentum missile defense plan, which was announced in October 2019. Referring to the Momentum Plan, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi stated Israel “has been in an accelerated process of preparation”. Contradictory rhetoric around Israeli militarism and one-sided “peace initiatives” are tightly woven into Israel’s posturing against Iran. Iran has been under growing pressure by the International Atomic Energy Association to access three presumed nuclear development sites.”
⊹ The right-wing checkpoint for Canada’s intervention in Ukraine
Canadian Dimension, May 2020
“Canada’s policy of providing Ukraine military aid has been disproportionately shaped by both Ukrainian far-right nationalism and the domestic right-wing lobby in Canada. The far-right in Ukraine holds a degree of military power and a corresponding threat of violence that surpasses that of other comparable European ultranationalist organizations. Numerous acts of violence by the far-right have directly contributed to enflaming and prolonging the drawn-out war, in some cases subverting action taken toward peace. Yet, Canada’s preference for fueling a military resolution has come at the expense of addressing the Donbass region’s complex underlying discontent, and at the cost of normalizing ultranationalist right-wing factions within the country.”
⋉ No Detention is Humane: COVID-19 Exacerbates Discrimination Against Asylum-seekers in Quebec
Canadian Dimension, April 2020
“…the impact of coronavirus is particularly daunting for non-status members of the community who are excluded from emergency support measures by all levels of the Canadian government. “The federal government and the province, none of them are talking about undocumented people,” said Muhamed [Barry].”
⊸ The Poland of Northeast Asia: Mongolia’s Lithium Frontier
Canadian Dimension, February 2020
⊸ Mining and the making of a sacrifice zone in Mongolia
Toward Freedom, January 2020
“Oyu Tolgoi’s majority owners, British-Australian company Rio Tinto, and Rio Tinto’s Canadian subsidiary Turquoise Hill Resources, have long exploited Mongolia’s lax environmental and economic regulations. Access to water and land, resource colonialism, and government corruption are ongoing issues that have led to sustained conflict. Despite ongoing criticism of the mine’s contracts and claims of corporate tax evasion, Mongolia’s government has persisted in granting dangerous concessions to the company.”
⊸ Between Sacred Waters and Natural Capital: Resistance to Hydroelectric Dams in Mongolia
Toward Freedom, July 2019
“In recent years, Mongolia has sought to expand its construction of hydroelectric dams in the northern provinces, where large watersheds connect Mongolia to the Buryat’ Republic in Siberia. Since the introduction of Mongolia’s Action Plan for Implementation of the Green Development Policy for the period of 2016–2030, the country has identified the river-systems in the northern provinces of Khövsgöl, Bulgan, Orkhon, and the Selenge as potential sources of hydroelectricity.”
⊸ Decay of the Third Kingdom: Israeli nuclear development and the future of the Negev Desert
Warscapes, May 2019
⊹ Start-up nation, apartheid state: The myth of peaceful R&D in Israel
Briarpatch, June 2018
“Where Israeli venture capitalism pursues new frontiers over the wasteland of razed Palestinian towns, a place in the battle is guaranteed even for the wide-eyed, utopian tech entrepreneur. Technological innovation is often seen as a neutral force striving for progress and social good outside of any partisan political agenda. But this erases the politics and power involved in sourcing, producing, investing, and exchanging resources between international collaborators. Israel’s high-tech market helps to normalize international relations with its apartheid settler state, rewriting territorial lines and narratives over the very ground in which the fiber-optic cables of private networks are buried.”
⊸ To Justify Land
Series, The Media Co-op & Berfrois, 2017
On development company Dream’s contested ZIBI condominium development on the Asinabka sacred site, and the expansion of hydroelectric development on the Kitchissippi.
CONTACT
FREELANCE
Reach out for inquiries and collaborations.
* For more secure email / Pour un courriel plus sécuritaire : [email protected] *
Lital Khaikin 
