Amid a pandemic still not willing to fade away, the end of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is imminent: the Turkish government is initiating proceedings to get rid of it in a context in which party members have been unable to take to the streets to protest. Covid restrictions have obviously been used by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has not hesitated to ban mobilizations that go against his interests. Keep reading

Since Morocco broke the ceasefire in southern Western Sahara a year ago, thousands of young Sahrawis have been forced to choose between military or refugee life. Yusef and Nih, 28, fall between two stools: journalism and the front line. Mahyub and Ahmed, 23, between war, cinema, and care. Keep reading

Both Chile and the Mapuche people are going through a period of great political turmoil. Chile’s Constitutional Convention is working on the drafting of a new constitution for the South American country, which is scheduled to be ready in 2022. The new supreme law will replace the current one, which dates back to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The Convention, with a left-wing majority and chaired by Mapuche academic Elisa Loncón, is struggling to coexist with a Congress of Deputies dominated by the right. At the behest of Chile’s conservative president, Sebastián Piñera, the Congress extended earlier in November a state of emergency in four provinces in the heart of Wallmapu (as the Mapuche call their land) which had been decreed by Piñera himself on 12 October. Keep reading

This year marks the 20th anniversary of a low-intensity conflict in North Macedonia that was the last in a string of wars ravaging the Western Balkans at the end of the 20th century. The conflict lasted less than a year, in 2001, and pitted the Albanian and Macedonian communities —25 per cent and 65 per cent of the population— against each other. The spiral of violence was halted because the US and the EU promptly intervened and helped broker an agreement that, while ambiguous, satisfied the actors involved. The Ohrid Accords thus granted basic rights to the Albanians, and allowed the Macedonians to avoid a war they could lose. In return, the deal left a bitter aftertaste in one of the parties: the Macedonian people, who despite being the country’s majority, could not find a formula that helped them enforce their vision of how the rest of the communities in Macedonia should be integrated. Fuelled by politicians who continue to profit from the ethnic divide, the gap between the two communities resonates in and is widened by stereotypes circulating in segregated neighbourhoods, bars, and schools in the country’s main cities. Keep reading