The language of inequality is not enough to capture the extreme conditions we are confronting across much of the world. Inequality is a distribution, and it has long been present. What matters in the current period is the specific mix of conditions that have made it so extreme and expelled...

Ni el Protocolo de Kioto (PK) ni la Convención Marco de Naciones Unidas sobre el Cambio Climático (CMNUCC) contienen referencias específicas a la actuación de los gobiernos locales y municipales. Sin embargo, en los dos últimos años, cada vez más políticos nacionales recitan sin cesar, casi...

Street struggles and demonstrations have long been part of our history. What is different today is that they are happening simultaneously in so many parts of the world: the uprisings in the Arab world, Occupy Wall Street spreading to more and more U.S. cities, the daily neighborhood protests in China's...

By Saskia Sassen and Razi Ahmed

Here is another revelation brought forth by the floods in the form of four actors that are, or considered to be, at the centre-stage of rescuing flooded Pakistan: a newfound power for civil society organizations intersecting with global partners for coping with state-failure.

Saskia Sassen and Razi Ahmed

Pakistan's civil society organizations fighting state failure are at risk of being written out of the AFPAK script. The damaging information about collaboration with the Taliban in the just-released Wikileaks, along with the Foreign Policy ranking of Pakistan as the 10th worst failed state now...

Below is a manifesto (see The Guardian, Comment is Free) by citizens from across Europe who
1) object to the choice of "solutions" adopted by European governments confronted with the financial disaster engineered by the financial sector: cuts in social security, cuts in wages, cuts in pensions, massive...

Students in Iran, in Greece, in Puerto Rico -- all have shown a noticeable endurance to fight on for weeks against governments which are threatening their basic rights. Even more important, in this struggle they are not only protesting but developing the elements for alternative politics and social settings. The...

The US has resorted to fairly extreme state action in order to control undocumented immigrants. This is a long history, with ups and downs. The current phase of strong-state action began in the 1990s with Clinton. The US is not alone. Some of the most powerful states in the world...

Last week, the "Shadow Elite" column began a look at executive power, its expansion over the decades and recent controversies involving President Obama's use of those powers. This week, sociologist Saskia Sassen examines how the growth of the globalized economy has led to a permanent expansion in executive...

When the devastating earthquake hit, Haiti was already facing two other major crises. One was the massive destructions from the four major hurricanes that hit Haiti in 2008. At the time, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, described the four hurricanes of 2008 as the "worst disaster in...

If 1 trillion dollars would have been channeled through the 6,000 plus small banks we have in the US, these banks would have been strengthened and the dollars would have potentially reached millions of households, firms, and pension funds. It is also one way of beginning to build a distributed,...

The real challenge we face is how to switch out of the hyper-financial mode of the last two decades. It is not to rescue zombie banks.

The economy, even our continental-sized economy, functions in billions, not in trillions. This needs to be said at a time when the financial...

There is a basic economic perspective in Obama and Paul Volcker when they speak about the crisis and what we need to do. It is still somewhat inexplicable to me how Obama could chose Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner as his two top "economic" czars, they of the House of...

The Mumbai attacks are part of an emerging type of urban violence. These were organized, simultaneous frontal attacks with grenades and machine guns on at least ten high-end sites in the central business district.

Then there are the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce...

The Fed has lent $1.5 trillion in taxpayers' money to banks, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. This does not include the $700 billion bailout authorized by Congress. As collateral, the Fed is accepting a bunch of securities -- but it is not telling us what these securities are.

Traditional banking is about selling money you have. Finance, unlike traditional banking, is about the money that is not there. Thus finance is getting from whatever amount of money you have (10 thousand or ten billion) to its doubling, tripling. This means that pumping taxpayers money into the financial system...