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.
By John Rodsted On a sultry Sunday afternoon, a group of people gathered in a public park for a BBQ. The BBQ was to raise money for charity. The day was hot and humid as they built a fire on the ground. The sky was threatening with rolling clouds, ominous signs of a possible tropical downpour. In the Solomon Islands you can almost set...
By Daniel Quinlan I couldn’t believe it when I read that Bangkok was sinking by as much as 1-2 cm a year. At first I assumed it was a misprint and they must have meant millimeters but the same figure appeared in other stories. Later I pitched it to an editor and did a short news video on it but I couldn’t get it out of my head. It seemed so...
By J.M Giordano I grew up in a lower middle class, white neighborhood and only attended community college. I saw Trump coming a mile away. What I didn't see coming was the sheer will of an almost unstoppable resistance to him and the racist and brutal policies that followed him - or, having already been weaved into the bloody fabric of American...
Download the PDF of MiddleGround's February Issue MiddleGround Issue 1 February 2021Download
Currently in India, farmers have marched on capital cities in force to protest the introduction of new laws that will tip the scales of the nation’s agricultural industry, against small small farmers, in favour of massive corporations that promise to absorb the smaller, traditional producers, upon which millions of livelihoods depend on. A...
Regeneration should be a part of all our lives. We live and work in a certain way but eventually most things lose their momentum and should be either changed or ended. At SafeGround, we have faced regeneration many times since our inception in 1992. As I type that date it drives home the huge amount of work...
Like many countries in South and Central America, peace is often fluctuating in and out of reach. Nicaragua is one such country; no stranger to revolution and uprising. For forty-three years, from 1936 to 1979, the country was ruled by the Somoza family. The Nicaraguan Revolution (1960’s to 1970’s) began as a result of the opposition to the...
By Iva Zimova A woman waves a red and white flag, adopted by the Belarusian opposition, from the window of an apartment block high above massed crowds of demonstrators who have come onto the streets to voice their opposition to the 2020 presidential election result, the Belarusian government, and above all President Alexander Lukashenko. The...
By Kasun Ubayasiri and Rwango Kadafi APRIL, 2020: At the onset of Africa’s COVID outbreak, residents of the Kakuma refugee camp, one of the largest in the world, live in fear of infection as they struggle to access the most basic protections like soap and clean water. Their situation is exacerbated by the cramped living conditions which...