Global Unrest Is Spiraling Out of Control
Fundamentally, we are seeing a rise in authoritarianism and economic collapse. There is increasing austerity alongside the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few people. Armed conflicts tied to energy and other resources abound. Environmental catastrophe will increasingly devastate communities and strain social order — and yet little is being done in this country to address it. This is the big one that won’t go away.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is the Quaker organization that has done remarkable international work since its founding in 1917. Quakers in this country have tended, by contrast, to focus on peace and justice issues closer to home. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) has had real success building a network of Friends connected to their members of Congress — but that work has grown harder: nearly unrestricted money now flows from corporate lobbyists, and Congress has become increasingly unable to pass the legislation any of this actually requires.
I’ve recently reevaluated my own writing with a more global perspective. These are the throughlines I found:
- Democracy and Authoritarianism
- Palestine and Gaza
- War and Conscientious Objection
- Pipelines and Standing Rock
- Wet’suwet’en and Unist’ot’en
- Climate Change
- Treaties and Sovereignty
- Race, Policing and Prisons
An early example of engaging more globally was my work in support of the Wet’suwet’en people’s fight to stop a pipeline from being built through their land in British Columbia. I did what I could from here — writing about what was happening there, and about how closely it echoed pipeline fights and colonialism in this country.
Global Unrest, Surveyed
I built an application from my own writing that lays all eight of these out together: https://kislingjeff-oss.github.io/GlobalUnrestSurveyed/
It has two views. At the top is a timeline of the issues. At the bottom is a topic index, one panel per group of issues — click any panel to open a detailed fact sheet on that topic.
(The timeline continues down the page)
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