Joseph Nevins is an American author, activist and associate professor of geography at Vassar College in New York.
Joseph Nevins studies socio-territorial boundaries and mobility, imperialism, global apartheid and forms of political violence, political ecology, and matters of human rights, international law and social justice in the aftermath of mass atrocities. He has conducted research in East Timor, Mexico, and the United States-Mexico border region. [1]
Nevins' writings have appeared in numerous journalistic publications, including Aljazeera English , Boston Review , CounterPunch , The Christian Science Monitor , the International Herald Tribune , The Nation , Los Angeles Times , The Progressive , and The Washington Post .
Born and raised in Boston to a working-class family, he attended the city's public schools, including the prestigious Boston Latin School. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1987. It was as a student there that he became politically active, engaging in solidarity work with Central America, and efforts to end CIA recruitment on campus. He received a Ph.D. in geography in 1999 from UCLA.
A long-time solidarity activist with East Timor, Nevins is a founding member of the East Timor Action Network. He visited East Timor many times during the years of the Indonesian occupation and was the first American to meet with the East Timorese guerrilla movement. Under the pen name Matthew Jardine, he authored numerous articles and two books on the war and occupation, and on U.S. and Western complicity in Indonesia's crimes. In 1999, he helped to organize and coordinate the largest non-governmental observer mission for the UN-run plebiscite in East Timor which resulted in the country's eventual independence.
A father of two girls, Nevins is also a board member of the Tucson-based BorderLinks, a bi-national organization that offers experiential educational seminars along the border focusing on the issues of global economics, militarization, immigration, and popular resistance to oppression and violence. He is also a founder and board member of La'o Hamutuk, the East Timor Institute for Reconstruction Monitoring and Analysis. [2]
He is a blogger for the North American Congress on Latin America's "Border Wars."
Solidarity, full name Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity", is a Polish trade union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. Subsequently, it was the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state. The union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981, representing one-third of the country's working-age population. Solidarity's leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is widely recognised as having played a central role in the end of Communist rule in Poland.
A warlord is a person who exercises military, economic, and political control over a region, often in a country without a strong national government; largely because of coercive control over the armed forces. Warlords have existed throughout much of history, albeit in a variety of different capacities within the political, economic, and social structure of states or ungoverned territories. The term is most often applied to China in the mid-19th century and the early 20th century. The term can also be used for any supreme military leader.
The Oregon Treaty is a treaty between the United Kingdom and the United States that was signed on June 15, 1846, in Washington, D.C. The treaty brought an end to the Oregon boundary dispute by settling competing American and British claims to the Oregon Country; the area had been jointly occupied by both Britain and the U.S. since the Treaty of 1818.
Michael Ryan Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism.
The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, which were predominantly characterized by the rise of left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights urgency, youth counterculture within the silent and baby boomer generations, and popular rebellions against state militaries and bureaucracies.
Operation Gatekeeper was a measure implemented during the presidency of Bill Clinton by the United States Border Patrol, aimed at halting illegal immigration to the United States at the United States–Mexico border near San Diego, California. According to the INS, the goal of Gatekeeper was "to restore integrity and safety to the nation's busiest border."
Israel's policies and actions in its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories have drawn accusations that it is committing the crime of apartheid. Leading Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have said that the totality and severity of the human rights violations against the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and by some in Israel proper, amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid. Israel and some of its Western allies have rejected the accusation, with the former often labeling the charge antisemitic.
Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist who has spent over twenty years working in humanitarian and social justice contexts in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and with refugee communities in Europe.
Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute, which has conducted over 3,500 research and policy projects throughout the world on environmental issues, resource planning, scenario analysis, and sustainable development. His research and writing has centered on propagating the Great Transition. Raskin has served as a lead author on a number of high-profile international reports, including the U.S. National Academy of Science's Board on Sustainability, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook, the Earth Charter, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report.
David Robert Loy is an American scholar and author, and teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
Richard Anderson Falk is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In 2004, he was listed as the author or coauthor of 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes. Falk has published extensively with multiple books written about international law and the United Nations.
Constructive engagement was the name given to the conciliatory foreign policy of the Reagan administration towards the apartheid regime in South Africa. Devised by Chester Crocker, Reagan's U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, the policy was promoted as an alternative to the economic sanctions and divestment from South Africa demanded by the UN General Assembly and the international anti-apartheid movement. Among other objectives, it sought to advance regional peace in Southern Africa by linking the end of South Africa's occupation of Namibia to the end of the Cuban presence in Angola.
Major John C. Cremony was an American soldier who wrote the first dictionary of the Apache language and later became a newspaperman in San Francisco.
Virginia Tilley is an American political scientist specialising in the comparative study of ethnic and racial conflict. She is Professor of Political Science at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in the US.
Global apartheid is a term used to describe how Global North countries are engaged in a project of "racialization, segregation, political intervention, mobility controls, capitalist plunder, and labor exploitation" affecting people from the Global South. Proponents of the concept argue that a close examination of the global system reveals it to be a kind of apartheid writ large with striking resemblance to the system of racial segregation in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, but based on borders and national sovereignty.
Quds Day, officially known as International Quds Day, is an annual pro-Palestinian event held on the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to express support for Palestinians and oppose Israel and Zionism. It takes its name from the Arabic-language name for Jerusalem: al-Quds. The event was initiated in 1979 in Iran, shortly after the Islamic Revolution. Nominally, it exists in opposition to Israel's Jerusalem Day, which has been celebrated by Israelis since May 1968 and was declared a national holiday by the Knesset in 1998.
Jacumba Valley is a valley in San Diego and Imperial Counties, California. Its head is at 32°37′00″N116°10′07″W Carrizo Creek has its source in Jacumba Valley, 1.2 miles north of the California-Mexico State boundary, at 32°38′09″N116°07′05″W at an elevation of 3,210 feet, on the west side of the divide between Jacumba Valley and the valley of upper Boulder Creek. Carrizo Creek flows west then north northwest through Jacumba Valley to its mouth at the head of Carrizo Gorge. Just south of the Jacumba and In-ko-pah Mountains, the terrain consists of large, flat desert plains and hills of granite boulders. The wider region, including the Jacumba Wilderness, which sits just east of the valley, has been greatly affected by the construction of the US/Mexico border and has become a site of great numbers of migrations along migrant paths.
A land defender, land protector, or environmental defender is an activist who works to protect ecosystems and the human right to a safe, healthy environment. Often, defenders are members of Indigenous communities who are protecting property rights of ancestral lands in the face of expropriation, pollution, depletion, or destruction.
The Tricontinental Conference was a gathering of countries that focused on anti-colonial and anti-imperial issues during the Cold War era, specifically those related to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The conference was held from 3rd to 16 January 1966, in Havana, Cuba and was attended by roughly 500 delegates from 82 different countries. It founded the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). The key issues discussed at the conference were countries that were in midst of revolutions, with a specific focus on Cuba and Vietnam.