https://mailchi.mp/safeground/middleground-issue-15049729?e=23b7d288e2 Issue 1 2022Download
MiddleGround Issue 1 2022
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Acting as the media wing of SafeGround, MiddleGround seeks the stories of those people and places who have not yet found or are seeking SafeGround. Founded as a part of the 1997 Nobel Prize-winning Campaign to Ban Landmines, SafeGround has since worked to ban weapons and munitions with capabilities to kill indiscriminately.
Founded in 2020, MiddleGround is a quarterly publication that, in the name of public transparency, hopes to shed light on issues of conflict, human rights and international affairs – recognising those who haven’t yet found safe ground.
Our team consists of: Rhett Kleine as the managing editor and Isabella Porras and Margot Stewart as assistant managing editors.
Issue 2 June 2021
MiddleGround Issue 2Download
Australia drags its feet on autonomous weapons regulation
Fully autonomous weapons, those which select and engage targets in absence of human control, give rise to moral, ethical, legal and security threats. The efforts to introduce a ban on these ‘killer robots,’ also referred to as ‘lethal autonomous weapons systems’ (LAWS) continue to grow globally. World governments, civil society groups and the...
From The Editor
While scrolling one of my multiple news feeds, often time in bed escaping the morning, I find myself reading about stories all over the world: in Sheik Jarrah, the fight against COVID, Myanmar, or the US. I then often find myself lamenting the three month period we have between issues of MiddleGround. In that time the world seems to shake and...
Prologue
By Kasun Ubayasiri July 19 2013: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announces no asylum seeker arriving by boat will be settled in Australia. March 29, 2017: 79 boats arrived in Australia between July 19, 2013, and July 27, 2014. Of the individuals on board, 1,596 were transferred to the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, 1,523 were transferred to...
An Expensive Jab
By Siddhant Vashistha Amidst governmental failure and mismanagement in the current second wave of Covid-19, and beyond the lack of oxygen, hospital beds and drug shortages, India has a bigger problem – vaccination. India has vaccinated only 8% of its population. The free market farce India’s two major vaccine manufacturers have been unclear about...
The Tonle Sap
Text by Abby Seiff - Photography by Nicolas Axelrod Feb. 17, 2020 - Kampong Luang, Cambodia. © Nicolas Axelrod / Ruom One morning, I pulled up a satellite map of Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake on my computer and clicked my way around it. The water was a milky brown and at various points I could spot its floating villages if I squinted and kept my eyes...
The Last of the Koli?
Story and Photography by Rhett Kleine By some accounts, the Koli bloodlines on the seven islands of Mumbai stretch as far back as the stone age. Their people fished the waters of Maharashtra long before Alexander’s armies reached the tip of India or Asoka’s empire swept across the subcontinent. Generation after generation, the Koli have...
Music and the Farmers Protests
By Shreya Kapoor India has a rich history of musical and poetic movements that were explicitly political and iconoclastic in nature. The Bhakti and Sufi movements with prominent figures like Kabirdas, Meerabai, Basavanna, Khwaja Mouinuddin Chisti, Nizam-ud-din Auliya, Rumi, etc spoke of alternative value systems inclusive of the marginalised...