Duhok Film Festival Film Screening and Panel Discussion

As part of the RLS Food Sovereignty initiative in Iraq/Kurdistan, the RLS short film "Gwez w Nakhl" was screened on December 13th, 2023, during the short film screening section of the Tenth Duhok International Film Festival. The screening took place at Duhok Mall, and was accompanied by four other short films.

Conflict-Post-Conflict

Rosa Luxemburg Beirut office

RLS has been working in Lebanon since 2017. The Beirut office currently works within Lebanon and Iraq as its main countries of cooperation, in close coordination with local partner institutions, groups, and individuals. RLS also cooperates with Syrian communities in exile and analyzes developments in Iran. The office’s programs focus on Migration and Forced Migration, Conflict and Post Conflict, Political Economy and Social Rights, Food Sovereignty and Feminist politics.

Rosa-Lux-In-Action

Who is Rosa Luxemburg?

Rosa Luxemburg was arguably one of the most iconic figures of the German and international workers' movement of the last centuries. She still inspires us today with her steadfastness for peace, her eloquent critical intellect, and her lifelong commitment to democratic socialism from below.Rosa Luxemburg was arguably one of the most iconic figures of the German and international workers' movement of the last centuries. She still inspires us today with her steadfastness for peace, her eloquent critical intellect, and her lifelong commitment to democratic socialism from below.

Programs

Publications

Abstract
Relying on extensive fieldwork, this article provides a summary of research exploring the interconnectedness of image, imagination, and space, with a specific focus on the experiences of migrants and refugees. It investigates the intricate relationship between economic development, geography, and narratives surrounding guilt and racism within a capitalist system. Through the analysis of political ideologies, media representation, social discourse, and historical experiences, the research sheds light on the social, economic, and political implications of the spatial fix.
As part of the RLS interview series, Yalda, who was visiting Beirut from Germany, February to
May, conducted this interview with Rania, a psychologist, from Al Najdeh Association.
Yalda Wardasbi is a scholarship holder of the RLS and is undertaking her BA degree in
Political Science in Berlin.
Rania Al Sous is an architect and clinical psychologist. She works in refugee camps in
Lebanon and is a volunteer online psychologist.
Peasants in the region continue to suffer from the impacts of conflicts both old and new.
War and imperial violence have not only shaped society and the political structures in Iraq, but have an impact on contemporary agricultural relations. Agriculture and the reproductive labour performed by farmers in Kurdistan has historically played a major role in sustaining resistance to the former Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein. Whether in central Iraq or Kurdistan, war continues to have devastating consequences for the security of peasants.
If you don’t know where it is, you might simply walk past it: a place where the bodies of hundreds of women and children killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacre are buried. An invisible graveyard whose location seems to have been chosen chaotically and by chance. As if there had been nowhere else to put them.
It’s a hidden place, but Nuhad Srour Mirai always finds it, sometimes she even wanders there in her sleep. With sure steps she makes her way through people, scooters, chickens, and stalls. Between a stall selling vegetables and one selling clothes, she turns to the right.
Barely four months after independents entered the Lebanese parliament, their meagre progress points to the need for a more radical approach.
When the results of the elections in Lebanon were announced in May this year, the excitement within the opposition movement was palpable: 13 opposition candidates who were not affiliated to any of the establishment parties entered parliament. In some areas, they replaced candidates who had dominated local politics for decades.
Faced with diminished seed diversity, local farmers are raising demands to strengthen food sovereignty in the country
In 2003, Iraq’s central seed bank, located in Abu Ghraib, was destroyed by a bombing raid carried out by the US military. The seed bank was tremendously important for agriculture in Iraq and the entire region. Some 1,400 seed varieties had been stored there since the 1970s, some of which have now become extinct. The loss of this thousand-year-old collection of various seeds has had grave consequences for biodiversity and agricultural production in Iraq.
This guide is based on recent experiences with food, worker, and feminist cooperatives in Lebanon between 2015 and 2022. It also benefits from cross-country conversations and networks attempting to adapt cooperation to platform economies and understand how artificial intelligence will impact labor rights in the coming years. You can use it for your own learning but also as a tool to discuss with others. It draws learnings from failed and successful attempts equally - and most initiatives sit somewhere between the two.
We focus here on two types of cooperatives important to our context and time: food coops and worker coops.
This paper is a political portrait of Salameh Kaileh (1955-2018), a Palestinian Marxist thinker and internationalist whose writing and activity represent a rather anomalous mixture of a fidelity to and disenchantment with the Arab communist movement. Kaileh urged the embrace of an Arab internationalism; the innovation of old communist organizational forms; the reappraisal of Arab communist history; and the criticism of Marxism, which he argued “is commanded from within.” As a political agitator, Kaileh remained at arms length from political movements across the region.
The institutional confinement and seclusion of people with disabilities is the inevitable outcome of stereotypes that foster ableist prejudice; in fact, the practice of secluding people with disabilities itself furthers these stereotypes. Efforts to institute a policy of secluding people with disabilities led to their removal from their natural surroundings, such as their families and local environments. Thus began a process whereby the original portrayal of people with disabilities eroded and was replaced by the current, stereotypical portrayal of people with disabilities that has taken root in the public imagination and in popular discourse.
This paper is concerned with a relatively small Syrian communist organization called Kassioun. It traces the history and evolution of Kassioun from an unlicensed organization (1999-2012) into a legal party (2012-2015), as well as the changing relations between Kassioun and the Syrian regime, on the one hand, and between Kassioun’s leadership and its members, on the other. In the first section, I chronicle Kassioun’s role in the struggle for inner-party democracy within the Syrian Communist Party – Bakdash between 1999 and 2003, and its emergence as an unlicensed organization following its split from the party in 2003.
On March 14, 1992, the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahar resumed the publication of its cultural supplement al-Mulhaq after an eighteen-year hiatus. The Civil War had ended when Lebanese deputies approved the agreement negotiated in the Saudi city of Taif in 1989, and following an operation launched by the Syrian military on October 13, 1990 to topple General Michel Aoun, the last political figure to reject the newly-formed government.