Governments are properly concerned with security and public safety. Historically, this has been about external threats from foreign powers, but, increasingly, it is directed at actors within the state using violence to secure political ends.

In 1928, Somali seafarer Ibrahim Ismaa’il wrote an autobiography, extracts from which were published, some forty years later, by British-Ethiopian historian Richard Pankhurst in the journal Africa (32:2, 1977). It is one of the earliest accounts of life as a Somali seaman in Britain and arguably the first work of Anglo-Somali literature.

The plot picks up in the aftermath of a police blunder in the banlieue of Athena, just outside Paris, which resulted in the death of a young boy. The film focuses on the deceased boy’s brothers, who try to make sense of the events against a backdrop of unrest taking place in their banlieue.

Is denial a crucial component for all genocides? Genocide scholars, unsurprisingly, have mixed opinions on this.

Poems by Haroon Moghul.

Three poems by Rosie Jackson.

My choices of evil are predominantly products of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and industrialisation. My list is neither exhaustive nor definitive, but exemplary of destructive human phenomena from my 2023 perspective.