Yellow Vests, a modern Anti – austerity crusade: What does the future hold?

Photo by Pascal Maga

The Yellow Vest anti – austerity campaign has been a recurring issue in the news and social media.  It is an important issue that largely marked the 21^st century, a century of contestation and resistance, with a variety of social movements emerging as a result of crises of the neoliberal status quo.  These crises have actually empowered populist movements like the Yellow vests to spread all around the world, pressuring for more and more change at a regional and international level.  Essentially, it has been a contemporary crusade fought by tools like demonstration and non – compliance and resistance to the repressive nature of the system.  In this blog post, I will analyse this modern form of crusade, which has a banner and a symbol which makes it a full - grown resistance to the elites and the globalized structure they created.

Afghanistan and the Enlightenment Movement: modernisation in troubled times.

Since the withdrawal of the international forces from Afghanistan in 2014, insecurity, political unrest, rapid economic deterioration and the number of suicide attacks has dramatically increased in the country. The Taliban are not only gaining confidence on the ground in terms of engaging in fierce battles against the Afghan National Army, but they are also gaining more international military support particularly from Iran and Russia; therefore, Taliban’s controlled territory is continuously expanding.

Photo by Todd Huffman

On July 23, 2016, when the Enlightenment Movement had organised a mass demonstration in Kabul, a suicide bomber who belonged to an ISIS group operating in Afghanistan, has managed to penetrate inside the protesters and blew himself up. This resulted in more than 80 members of the Enlightenment Movement losing their lives. In this blog post, I will report on Afghanistan’s new generation behind the Enlightenment Movement and their struggle for modernisation.