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ALL Foreign Coverage The New York Times

Oil’s Bounty – and its Costs

Photos by Keisha Scarville

Read my dispatch for the New York Times’ Headway Initiative about the discovery of oil in Guyana, its echoes of a colonial past and the questions about climate and energy futures that it begs.

Photo by Keisha Scarville

“The world is at a critical juncture, and Guyana sits at the intersection. The country of my birth is a tiny speck on the planet, but the discovery of oil there has cracked open questions of giant significance. How can wealthy countries be held to account for their promises to move away from fossil fuels? Can the institutions of a fragile democracy keep large corporations in check? And what kind of future is Guyana promising its citizens as it places bets on commodities that much of the world is vowing to make obsolete?”

And read “Geopolitics, in First Person,” my short essay for Nieman Reports, about the editorial and ethical decision to weave myself into the story as a first-person narrator.

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ALL Book Reviews Essays Foreign Coverage Politics

Risker, Risk

With support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I produced a package of stories on the long-lasting effects of U.S. Cold War intervention on politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the northeastern shoulder of South America.

Risker, Risk
The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2015
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CIA Meddling, Race Riots and a Phantom Death Squad: Why a tiny South American country can’t escape the ugly legacies of its idiosyncratic past.
Foreign Policy, July 31, 2015
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Of Love and Other Demographics
Warscapes, June 11, 2015
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‘Dougla’ Politics
Warscapes, June 15, 2015
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The Terror and the Time
Pulitzer Center Blog, August 4, 2015
Categories
ALL Articles Foreign Coverage Ms. Magazine Politics

“Should My People Need Me”

My profile of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi runs on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s Winter 2012 issue. The woman who has long personified the fight for democracy and human rights in Burma has finally decided to engage with one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is running for a seat in a parliament created by the military junta that put her under house arrest for almost two decades, after stealing an election from her. Read about the challenges facing her as she attempts a shift from moral icon to politician. As she told Congressman Bill Richardson in 1994, “I look upon myself as a politician, and that isn’t a dirty word, is it, Congressman?”

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ALL Articles Foreign Coverage Global Post Migration Politics

The whites-only BNP, founded in 1982 as a breakaway from the neo-Nazi National Front, has been trying to shed its nutter image as part of a bid for respectability in mainstream politics. It was recently given a platform far more prominent than Speakers’ Corner, when its chairman, Nick Griffin, appeared on the BBC flagship program “Question Time” alongside members of the political establishment. Griffin was elected to the European Parliament in June.

This weekend, at its annual convention at an undisclosed location, 300 core BNP members will debate changing its constitution, which currently restricts membership to “indigenous Caucasians.” The move resulted from a lawsuit against the BNP by the country’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, but Griffin is spinning it as further proof of a changed party.

Read my piece about the far-right for GlobalPost. Part One: A Far-Right Party Makes a Bid for the Mainstream and Part Two: How Britain’s All-White Party Gained Its Following.

UK_11_13_09_British_National_Party

Categories
ALL Articles Foreign Coverage Migration Ms. Magazine

Survival Sex

Sajida can’t talk openly about what war and displacement have forced her to do. She banters with male customers at the cafe where she works in Damascus, Syria. But the men want more from this 43-year old divorced mother of two, a refugee from Iraq. And she can’t refuse; her boss has seized her passport. “I am a slave in his hands,” Sajida says.

Continue reading my piece about Sajida and other Iraqi refugees forced into prostitution in Syria in Ms. Magazine’s Summer 2008 issue.

You can also listen to an interview about the article at 9 minutes past the hour on Doug Clifford’s Hour of Hope.