The SNP’s victory and the enlargement of the pro-independence parties’ absolute majority in the 6 May election to the Scottish Parliament has strengthened the Scottish government’s call for a second self-determination referendum. But the UK government’s refusal to negotiate and the threat of a court case make a vote unlikely in the short term. Keep reading

The land that poets once described as “paradise on earth” has for decades been the world’s most densely militarised territory. Since the Indian subcontinent gained independence from the UK in 1947, Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, has been mired in a long-running dispute between that country and neighbouring Pakistan. This is a long history where the ghosts of the subcontinent’s partition, the instrumentalisation of the conflict by Narendra Modi’s ultra-nationalist Hindu government, and the economic interests of three nuclear powers are intertwined. Since 5 August 2019, Kashmir has been undergoing a new phase of repression and suspension of rights and freedoms, aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which some critics describe as a siege within a siege. Keep reading

The French National Assembly has passed a bill that opens the door to implement language immersion through the medium of minoritised languages in public schools, as well as to allow for better funding of immersive, community-run private schools. The approval has been described as “historic” by several organisations working in favour of those languages, such as Breton, Catalan, Occitan, Basque or Corsican. Keep reading