to load it down:
Mission
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution focused on stimulating intellectual debate that serves people’s aspirations.
Our History
The Meaning of the Tricontinental
In January 1966, the Cuban people hosted the Tricontinental, a conference of revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America (Primera Conferencia de Solidaridad de Los Pueblos de Africa, Asia, America Latina). This conference emerged from two dynamics.
States that emerged out of the anti-colonial movement had, by 1961, created the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which included not only radical regimes but also those with a more conciliatory attitude towards imperialism.
Outside NAM existed movements with unfinished anti-colonial wars of national liberation which had a more radical edge to them and which had been gathered together in 1957 in the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO).
The NAM and AAPSO platforms often collaborated together. They provided the cultural space from which the Tricontinental would emerge.
At the Tricontinental, AAPSO was expanded into the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), whose secretariat continues to function in Havana (Cuba). The Tricontinental put down a marker: peace and socialism were the goals, and whatever means would lead to this goal had to be utilized. From Havana, OSPAAAL provided the infrastructure for mutual understanding amongst the movements in the three continents. It continues to produce the fabulous magazine Tricontinental, which became famous as the purveyor of emblematic posters that carried forward the message of anti-colonial socialism.
From these histories – of both the NAM and OSPAAAL – came a series of important initiatives, many rooted in the United Nations. Some of these are inter-governmental organisations (such as The South Centre, based in Geneva), while others have little governmental support. What unites these initiatives is a commitment to The South – namely to the countries that continue to struggle against the histories and structures of imperialism – but also to humanity in general. A genuinely South-based social and political philosophy must expand out from the South and embrace the world and its possibilities.
We, at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, are a proud continuation of the heritage of the Tricontinental conference and are honoured to collaborate with OSPAAAL to work towards building a world of peace and justice. We stand, in the words of Franz Fanon, with the wretched of the earth to create a world of human beings.
The Researchers include employees and contractors.
Vijay Prashad Director Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of thirty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. He is the Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter and a Columnist for Frontline (India). He is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He has appeared in two films – Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017). vijay@thetricontinental.org Renata Porto Bugni Deputy Director Renata Porto Bugni is a public policy analyst, an activist and a teacher. She has a bachelor’s degree in international relations at UNESP. Her master’s degree from the University of São Paulo (USP) was on public policies for Brazilian women, notably in the fight against violence. Renata's political career began in Brazil's student movement. She is now a member of the political organisation Consulta Popular. Between 2014 and 2017, she was a professor in Brazil's public and private universities. Renata spent seven years working to develop public policies that address social justice at the State Secretariat for Justice and Defense of Citizenship as well as to develop indicators to measure aspects of social life such as education, health and public transit at City Hall of São Paulo. She is based in São Paulo. renata@thetricontinental.org Celina della Croce Coordinator Celina is an organiser and militant who works with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s publications, English-language editing, and translations. She worked in the labour movement for four years with the Service Employees International Union and the Fight for 15 as an organiser, union representative, and shop steward. She has been an active participant in the fight for social, economic, and racial justice in the streets from Missouri to Massachusetts; through the Anti-Racism Collective (St. Louis); and through Humans of St. Louis as an editor and photographer. celina@thetricontinental.org E. Ahmet Tonak Economist E. Ahmet Tonak is the author and editor of several books including Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (with Anwar Shaikh), Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (edited with Irvin Schick) and Marxism and Classes (edited with Sungur Savran and Kurtar Tanyılmaz). Trained as a mechanical engineer at Istanbul Technical University, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. Tonak taught for many years at Istanbul Bilgi University, Middle East Technical University, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and is currently a visiting professor at UMASS Amherst. He wrote for several Turkish dailies and contributes to sendika.org, an alternative news portal in Turkey. ahmet@thetricontinental.org Tings Chak Designer and Researcher Tings Chak is an artist, writer, and organiser whose work contributes to popular struggles across the Global South. Her current research focuses on the art of national liberation struggles. She received her Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto and is the author and illustrator of Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2017). She leads the Art Department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. tings@thetricontinental.org Ingrid Costa N. R. Guimarães Designer Ingrid Costa N.R. Guimarães is an artist and graduate of Communication and Multimedia Studies from the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). She interned at the PUC-SP and worked at Anhembi Morumbi University (UAM), where she specialized in the production of educational videos and animations. She is currently a designer with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and is based in São Paulo, Brazil. ingrid@thetricontinental.org Daniela Ruggeri Designer Born in Buenos Aires, Daniela is a teacher of visual arts, an illustrator, a designer, and a creator of fanzines. Her visual production is developed around comics, graphic design, and illustration, collaborating – especially in the latter – with worker cooperatives and empresas recuperadas (companies that have been reclaimed by and are run by workers). She works with self-managed book and fanzine-producing collectives as an editor and author and participates in the organisation of meetings and exhibitions of independent Argentine comic strips. She is part of the Art Department of the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research and responsible for art and design for the Buenos Aires Office. daniruggeri@thetricontinental.org Daniel Tirado Information Technology Manager Daniel is an activist and technologist. He organises Primavera Hacker, a conference of hackers in Santiago, Chile that focuses on technology, arts, and politics. His main interest is to develop technology that can be used to support people’s movements and transform our society. He also works with social movements in Sub-Saharan Africa on technical operations and training. daniel@thetricontinental.org P. Sainath Senior Fellow P. Sainath is India’s most important reporter. He has spent the past three decades covering rural India, work that resulted in the creation of the People’s Archive of Rural India. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen calls Sainath ‘one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger’. In 2000, Sainath was the first reporter to win Amnesty International’s Global Award for Human Rights Journalism and that same year he won the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation’s Boerma Prize. Sainath is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award (Asia’s most prestigious prize) and the 2014 winner of the World Media Summit Global Award. Sainath’s book – Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996) – has been reprinted in a 20th anniversary edition as a Penguin Classic. He has written the foreword for John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (LeftWord, 2018). sainath@thetricontinental.org Li Bo Senior Fellow Li Bo is the executive director of Shanghai Chunqiu Institute for Development and Strategic Studies and assistant dean at China Institute of Fudan University, one of the top national think tanks. Dr. Li obtained a PhD degree in economics from Kiel University in Germany. From 1994 to 2015, he served in a variety of senior executive roles in several prestigious domestic and foreign strategy consulting firms and public listed companies. Before joining Chunqiu Institute, Dr. Li served as the Academic Representative of Guancha Syndicate in Beijing. His research interests include the history of socialism, socialism in China, the digital economy, and development economics and geopolitics around China and the Global South. libo@thetricontinental.org Aijaz Ahmad Senior Fellow Aijaz Ahmad is a leading Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist. He is the author of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (1992), Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia (2001), and Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of Our Time (2004). He has been a Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Rajiv Gandhi Chair at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Chair at Jamia Millia University, and is currently the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California (Irvine). aijaz@thetricontinental.org Ghassane Koumiya Researcher Ghassane Koumiya is a Professor of Translation at the Institute of Leadership and Journalism in Rabat (Morocco). He is a political anthropologist who has worked on grassroots, political and popular movements from the Maghreb region. Ghassane has been active in the trade union movement and human rights movement in Morocco. He is currently completing his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Ljubljana University (Slovenia). ghassane@thetricontinental.org Pilar Troya Fernández Researcher Pilar is a militant and researcher. She is an Ecuadorian feminist anthropologist and has a master’s degree in women and gender studies. Her main areas of interest are social public policies, especially concerning gender equality and the feminist movement. Her activism began in college as part of the student movement and she was involved in the Women’s Assembly in Quito. She worked as a researcher with the System of Social Indicators (SIISE) and the Latin America Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), where she also taught classes on public policies and social indicators. She then served as an advisor to the Ministry of National Planning, and as an advisor and Deputy Minister to the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology of Ecuador. pilar@thetricontinental.org Manolo de los Santos Researcher Manolo is an organiser and educator. He owes his political education to people’s movements from the Caribbean to New York City. He was the founding director of the People’s Forum, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. manolo@thetricontinental.org Nitheesh Narayanan Researcher Nitheesh has been an activist with the Students' Federation of India (SFI) since 2003 and is currently working as a member of its central secretariat. He is a PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy of Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India), where he studies the connections between caste and class as well as the political mobilisation of the early communist movement in North Malabar. He is currently the editor of Student Struggle, SFI’s journal. Nitheesh received his MA in Politics with a specialisation in International Studies and his MPhil on the agrarian movement and caste question from the same university. Nitheesh writes about social and political issues in a number of periodicals and portals in English and Malayalam. nitheesh@thetricontinental.org Mikaela Nhondo Erskog Researcher Mika is an educator and researcher. She has an MA in history from the University Currently known as Rhodes (UCKAR) and is a graduate of the Unit for Humanities at Rhodes University fellowship program. She works closely with educational programming in the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). In the last few years, she has been dedicated to work that builds the international networks of social movements, trade unions, and people’s organizations on the African continent, with a particular focus on education and solidarity work. mikaela@thetricontinental.org Jie Xiong Researcher Jie Xiong is a Chinese technologist, translator, and editor. He has participated in the digitisation process of multiple leading enterprises in China. He has written and translated more than ten books, most of them related to information technology and digitisation. His latest translation is of Cybernetic Revolutionaries, a book about the Chilean technological Project Cybersyn during Salvador Allende’s administration. He has an MBA degree from the University of Liverpool and is a senior researcher at the Sichuan Institute for High Quality Development. jxiong@thetricontinental.org
Newsletter #51 - IF DDR Deutsch