THE 7 COMPONENTS OF TRANSFORMATIVE ORGANIZING THEORY
BY ERIC MANN
thestrategycenter.org, 2010

TRANSFORMATIVE ORGANIZING: TOWARD LIBERATION OF SELF AND SOCIETY
BY SOCIAL JUSTICE LEADERSHIP
sojustlead.org, 2010

If there is anything we have learned from the political struggles of the 20th-century United States, it has been the great importance of grassroots and mass-based organizing. From the IWW to the CIO, the early Communist Party to the rise of the civil rights movement, the question of how to organize and refine best practices has always remained central.

MEDITATIONS ON FRANTZ FANON’S WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
BY JAMES YAKI SAYLES
Kersplebedeb and Spear and Shield Publications, 2010

For more than twenty years, James Yaki Sayles (also known as Atiba Shanna) was one of the most profound theorists writing from within US prisons. Yaki turned his decades of confinement into a time to theorize and a place to strategize, working to maintain connections between what was happening inside prisons and what was happening outside of them.

Many Colombia observers hoped that the arrival of President Barack Obama in the White House would bring about a significant shift in US policy toward that troubled South American nation. The hope was that the new president would reduce aid to the military with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere and prioritize social and economic issues. That major shift did not occur during Obama’s first year in office. And to the degree that a shift in policy did occur, it constituted an increased militarization of US intervention in Colombia.

Today, central and southern Somalia are being ravaged by one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Since US-backed Ethiopian troops invaded the country in late 2006, shattering months of peace and stability, the conflict has left more than 1 million people internally displaced and 3.5 million on the brink of starvation. Although armed resistance forced the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in early 2009, Somalia still finds itself contending with the turmoil unleashed by this most recent foreign intervention.