by Blade Runner, Freedom News

The formal announcement of the PKK's dissolution has sparked mixed reactions among Turkey's Kurds and international supporters. However, it has been years in the making and comes as no surprise to long-term observers of the Kurdish movement and readers of Abdullah Öcalan's theory of Democratic Confederalism. The shift had been indicated months earlier and signifies a strategic transformation aligned with a broader vision of autonomy beyond the state, the party, and the armed struggle.

by JURIST Staff

We may not have the infrastructure, but we have the will.

—Banner held at protests across Syria, April 2025

In an unprecedented wave of demonstrations across government-held territory, the Syrian people have taken to the streets not to challenge their own leadership, but to protest Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities in Gaza and its repeated military strikes on Syrian soil.

This explainer breaks down what’s happening, what’s fueling the anger, and what it signals about a country emerging from decades of internal rule, and why Syrians are rallying around a cause that reaches far beyond their own country's borders.

by Ingrid Burke Friedman, JURIST

by Bill Weinberg, Skunk

This brief memoir of CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg's days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s first appeared in Canada's Skunk magazine in winter 2012-13. 

On Nov. 14, I went back to 9 Bleecker Street for the 63rd birthday bash of Aron Kay, the famous Yippie Pie-Man.

Aron is something of a legend in activist and radical circles in New York City. Of impressive girth and walking with a cane, he still sports beard and tie-dyed t-shirt, and is viewed as a kind of an elder statesman by some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Although his physical condition no longer allows him to engage in the daring tactic that won him notoriety, he has more than earned his sobriquet. Across his career, he has wafted pies into the faces of (in chronological order) right-wing pundit William F. Buckley, New York’s Senator Patrick Moynihan, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, anti-feminist mouthpiece Phyllis Schlafly, New York City Mayor Abe Beame, Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, CIA chief William Colby, Studio 54 empresario Steve Rubell, California governor Jerry Brown, Vietnam-era National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, H-bomb mastermind Edward Teller (who got a special mushroom pie—get it?) and anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry.

by Ingrid Burke Friedman, JURIST

Chiquita’s money helped buy weapons and ammunition used to kill innocent victims.

— US Government sentencing memo, 2008

In 2007, Chiquita—one of the world's largest banana producers — admitted that for years it had been knowingly paying a Colombian terrorist organization to protect its operations in the country. The consequence was predictably violent, allegedly resulting in thousands of murders, disappearances, and acts of torture. This week, nearly two decades later, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay upwards of $38 million in damages in the first of multiple waves of wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits.

by Uri Gordon, Freedom

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new decentralized structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. To get more insight into this change and its significance, Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime journalist and anarchist in New York City. His book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has been spending more time in South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas very closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex.org.

by Eugene Simonov and Jennifer Castner,
Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group

Over the last several decades, Russia has sought to expand its customer base for natural gas exports, efforts which necessitate the construction of pipelines from fossil fuel deposits in Russia's north to Europe and China. At the same time, fossil fuel exports are a valuable tool for Russia's geopolitical influence. Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, the economic and political stakes have skyrocketed. Russia's national and regional green movements have played a vital role in decision-making about pipeline routes and negotiations in parallel. In the last few years, however, their activity has attracted increasingly harsh scrutiny from the Russian government, which has seen a growing number of organizations branded "undesirable" or declared "foreign agents."

by Mariia Lazareva and Erik Kucherenko, Jurist

On August 21, 2023, Ukraine's capital of Kyiv hosted a large international conference entitled Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine: Justice to be Served. The conference was aimed at reinvigorating global efforts to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine—a crime which cannot be prosecuted under the current jurisdictional regime of the International Criminal Court. The conference was especially relevant given that, despite optimistic expectations at the beginning of the year, disagreements between Ukraine and its allies have left some wondering: in the end, will justice be served?