In 2016, a landmark accord between the Colombian government and FARC’s Marxist fighters saw fighters lay down their arms after decades of conflict. Although the deal was controversial, many hoped it would lead to a new era of calm and prosperity. But five years on, the inequality and poverty that led to the armed uprising have not gone away, amid claims the terms of the agreement have yet to be fully implemented by both sides. When anti-government protests earlier this year were met with a...

In 2020, public fury at alleged corruption among Bulgaria's political elite erupted into widespread protests, Since then, the crisis has seen two inconclusive elections, various prominent officials mired in scandal, and a three-term prime minister, Boyko Borissov, forced from office. His almost 14-year reign came to an end in April 2021 when he failed to secure enough votes to form a government. A new poll was scheduled for July, which this time Borissov's GERB party lost outright. But the...

When Myanmar’s military regime ended its flirtation with the representative government in February 2021, it marked the moment by killing several hundred anti-coup protesters and detaining thousands more - including Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the National League for Democracy. So now some activists are taking a more aggressive approach to the Tatmadaw, as the country's armed forces are known. They have been heading to remote jungle regions to seek support from armed...

At its closest point, the Greek island of Samos lies barely two kilometres off the coast of Turkey, which has long made it a target destination for refugees and migrants seeking to enter Europe. Those who make it across the Aegean Sea are housed in and around a camp close to the capital Vathy. Some have been there for years, waiting for their paperwork to be processed through the tortuously slow Greek bureaucracy. Living conditions are atrocious. In the official camp, people sleep in...

Since early 2020 the world has been in the grip of a pandemic that has cost millions of lives and affected billions more of us through sickness, economic contraction and restrictions on our movements. Much of this story has been exhaustively documented - on Al Jazeera and elsewhere - but the crisis has also thrown up a question that has received far less attention. Have measures taken by governments and employers in the name of defeating COVID-19 also done lasting damage to our civil...

Since the late 1970s, some one million square kilometres of Amazonian forest have been destroyed, mostly through industrial activities and large-scale agriculture like cattle-ranching, soy farms and irrigation projects. Sixty percent of the Amazon lies within Brazil, which is where the most rapacious deforestation has taken place. By the turn of the century, under growing international pressure, Brazil enacted new environmental legislation and stricter enforcement of the laws. But about a...

Now well into its second year, the coronavirus pandemic has devastated communities around the world - not just in terms of the fatalities, ill health and mental anguish endured by so many, but also socially and economically, as the effects of lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing and commercial contraction have hit home. Large, densely populated cities - as key vectors of infection - have been particularly vulnerable to these problems. One such example is New York. For a time in...

As South Africa's apartheid government fought to cling onto power in the latter half of the 20th century, it routinely imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents in the liberation movement. Controversially, in the years that followed the end of white minority rule, many of those crimes went unpunished. In 1995, President Nelson Mandela's new African National Congress (ANC) administration established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help heal the country by revealing the facts...

Latin America has seen a remarkable number of revolutions and coups d'etat over the last century. However, whether military endeavours, covertly backed by foreign governments, or the result of purely domestic political pressure, they have not always been successful or achieved their aims. Yet few can have failed quite so miserably as a woeful attempt in May 2020 to overthrow the Venezuelan government. The plot of this often bizarre tale has many elements that will be familiar to students of...

Poland is widely regarded as Europe's most socially conservative country, so it is not especially surprising that its current right-wing government and its Catholic Church enjoy a mutually supportive relationship based around shared values. But critics say this concord has become increasingly toxic in recent years; that in the interests of advancing its moral agenda, the Church has stood by while the government eroded democratic norms, and that both have drawn strength and popularity from...

In the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), increasing numbers of babies are being born with horrific birth defects. Some of this, scientists say, is due to a huge surge in the global demand for cobalt - a metallic element that is playing a key role in the battle to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change. Cobalt is vital for the manufacture of lithium batteries used in electric cars and the DRC has at least 60 percent of the world's reserves - mostly in and...

Mexico's Sinaloa cartel is one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in the world, its multibillion-dollar revenue gained mostly from trafficking narcotics such as cocaine, heroin and fentanyl into the United States. Its activities are deadly and harmful, not just for many consumers of its products but also for those who cross it or try and stand in its way. Along with rival cartels, it is responsible for tens of thousands of brutal murders and it corrupts almost everything it touches -...

On August 4, 2020, Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, was devastated by a huge blast. Some 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, stored - somewhat inexplicably - in a harbourside warehouse with a cache of fireworks, caught fire and then exploded with the force of a magnitude 3.5 earthquake. More than 200 people were killed, 6,500 were injured and homes, offices and public buildings were shattered across the city. The cost in damaged infrastructure alone was subsequently estimated at billions of...

As the coronavirus spread around the world in early 2020 and governments grappled with the speed and scale of the unprecedented threat, the consequences for millions of migrant workers in Asia and the Middle East - who often live far from home and in less-than-ideal conditions - attracted little attention. For several months we followed one such group in Singapore, where the authorities - who were lauded for their response to the pandemic in the general population - struggled at first to...

It has been more than a year since COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China and kicked off a devastating global pandemic which, at time of writing in February 2021, has infected more than 100 million people and killed more than two million worldwide. As the world has come to understand, a distressingly large number of those victims have been the elderly and infirm, especially those in care homes. But what is not yet widely known is the true effect the pandemic has had on disabled people, of all...

It has been more than a year since COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China and kicked off a devastating global pandemic which, at time of writing in February 2021, has infected more than 100 million people and killed more than two million worldwide. As the world has come to understand, a distressingly large number of those victims have been the elderly and infirm, especially those in care homes. But what is not yet widely known is the true effect the pandemic has had on disabled people, of all...

Finland has set itself one of the world's most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, promising to go carbon neutral by 2035. Even the coronavirus pandemic, which has diverted much of the international attention away from global warming over the last 12 months, has done little to deflect this mission, as Prime Minister Sanna Marin made clear when addressing the United Nations in July 2020. "Our generation of global leaders will be judged by the decisions we make over the course of this...

When a deadly new virus appeared in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, few would have imagined its wide-ranging effects. Within weeks COVID-19 was spreading around the world; within a year it had killed one a half million people and hospitalised tens of millions more, forcing nation after nation into lockdown and bringing many economies to a juddering halt. As international travel stalled in the face of movement restrictions, the consequences were sometimes calamitous - even in places more normally...

In late 2019, mass protests triggered by a fiercely disputed election forced Bolivia's first Indigenous president into exile after 14 years in power. As Evo Morales took stock in Argentina - and weighed up the prospects of a possible return - an interim government led by a former opposition senator, Jeanine Anez, announced plans for fresh elections, delayed until October 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In Morales's absence, supporters of his Movement for Socialism (MAS) rallied...

It is getting dangerous in Romania’s vast ancient forests. The figures are stark: Six rangers killed (two in 2019 alone) and a further 650 attacked with axes, knives and guns. The Carpathians, where 70 percent of Europe’s virgin forest is found, straddle Romania and Ukraine and are now the scene of a desperate battle between what has been dubbed the Timber Mafia and those risking their lives to protect this precious environment. So what is at stake? For the criminals this is easy: Many...

When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came to power in 2018, he promised a new era of democratic reforms and an end to years of autocracy. Political prisoners were freed, opposition parties were allowed to operate, and the new prime minister even won a Nobel Prize for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea after decades of an uneasy armistice. But since then, long-standing ethnic divisions have made the future of this complex country more uncertain. Earlier this year, we went to...

How is it possible that North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth, manages to finance a nuclear weapons programme? The answer is through Bureau 39, a secretive organisation hidden deep inside the government apparatus. Its aim is to procure foreign exchange, by any means possible, to fund Kim Jong Un's regime. From printing counterfeit dollars and profiting from slave labour sent overseas, to illegally selling arms, committing insurance fraud and widespread computer hacking, the...

How is it possible that North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth, manages to finance a nuclear weapons programme? The answer is through Bureau 39, a secretive organisation hidden deep inside the government apparatus. Its aim is to procure foreign exchange, by any means possible, to fund Kim Jong Un's regime. From printing counterfeit dollars and profiting from slave labour sent overseas, to illegally selling arms, committing insurance fraud and widespread computer hacking, the...

When, on March 11, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, formally announced that the pathogen known as COVID-19 had developed into a pandemic, it came as little surprise to anyone. By then, from its origins in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus had been spreading internationally for at least two months – already infecting 118,000 people in 114 countries and alarming many more. As we now know, tens of millions more would eventually be infected and to...

At 11pm on June 30, 2020, a new national security law came into effect in Hong Kong - just an hour before the 23rd anniversary of Britain's handover of the city to China. The legislation, which sparked an immediate international backlash, has significantly tightened Beijing's grip on Hong Kong and has stifled the huge protests that began sweeping the territory a year ago. Demonstrators say they have been fighting for democracy. Beijing's supporters describe them as "rioters" and insist the...