David

“The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, often, the privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death knell for welfarism.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“La tarea más urgente de la humanidad en general es la tarea de reconocerse en el otro, la tarea de asumir la diferencia como una riqueza, la tarea de aprender a relacionarnos con los demás sin exigirles que se plieguen a lo que somos o que asuman nuestra verdad. Frente a los fascismos que hoy resurgen en tantos lugares del planeta se alza esta urgencia de hacer que en el mundo persista la diversidad de la que depende la vida misma. El triunfo de un solo modelo, de un solo camino, de una sola verdad, de una sola estética, de una sola lengua, es una amenaza tan grande como lo sería en el reino animal el triunfo de una sola especie o en el reino vegetal el triunfo de un solo árbol o de un solo helecho.”
― William Ospina, ¿Dónde está la franja amarilla?

“International law can be accurately and fairly described as a derivative of a colonial order and therefore structurally detrimental to former colonies, peoples still under colonial domination and individuals who lack nationality or who, like refugees, have been forcibly removed from their state and can no longer invoke its protection.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums