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The purpose of this paper is to provide exploratory evidence about the use of the internet for disclosure purposes by non-financial companies listed on the Egyptian Exchange – and influences thereon – at two points in time: 2010 and 2011. Selection of these periods permits direct investigation of the extent to which the disruption caused by the popular uprising in early 2011 impacted on practice.

The sample comprises all of the 172 non-financial listed companies at the end of 2010. A disclosure index was developed to evaluate the content of the investigated websites in 2010 and 2011. Univariate and multivariate analysis is used to examine the cross-sectional determinants of disclosure both in total and in terms of three specific content categories.

The study reveals that 40.7 and 42.7 per cent of the sample companies provided some form of financial information via their websites in 2010 and 2011, respectively (i.e. pre and post the Spring 2011 political revolution). The results of the multivariate analysis indicate consistency across the two years in terms of total score determinants, but some variation in the disaggregated evidence.

This study indicates that Egyptian firms have started embracing the power of the internet as a disclosure channel, but the extent of these practices is still limited, with great variations evident amongst the sampled companies in this regard. Encouragingly, the disruption caused by the political upheaval in 2011 appears not to have caused reduction in the propensity to provide online disclosures.

Fuel subsidy removal has become a recurring issue in Nigeria. Successive governments in the country have interfaced with this issue as they attempted to reform the economy and the petroleum downstream to reduce corruption and waste and make the sector more effective. Importantly however, fuel subsidy removals have always met opposition from the citizens and civil society organisations. The remit of this article is to bring original and current perspectives into the issue and trajectories of fuel subsidy, which has become a major problem in Nigeria's development struggles. Previous works were dated and did not capture most recent popular uprising. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Purely primary, empirica and normative with primary insight.

A major mechanism that must be put in place is popular and unpoliticized anti-corruption mechanisms and networks especially to sanitize the oil sector in the minimum. Also, government must demonstrate transparency and accountability across sectors and spending including at the government house. Sufficient palliatives like public transport and dedicated social services for the really poor is important before subsidy is implemented. Until these are done, government's intention to successfully Remove Subsidy For Development (RS4D) may be a mirage!

This paper presents details of an international work with evolving issues.

The paper argues that subsidy removal that will lead to high fuel prices appears unjustified given the wide income gap between workers in Nigeria and those in other oil-producing nations.

The political crisis related to two main factors internal to the public revenue system, namely financial markets and the commercialisation of the state, and three related external factors, pertaining to the pandemic, popular discontent and inequality. The emphasis on financial markets since the mid-1990s expanded the commercialisation of the state while neglecting public accountability and government oversight. The efforts to shore up public finances through the tax system is increasingly undermined by the global tax architecture, enabling financial secrecy and illicit financial flows.

The pandemic revealed the significance of women’s work, paid as well as unpaid care work. The pandemic also exposed the limitations of a domestic economy, based on export-oriented development, over-reliant on tourism and remittances from migrant workers. Combining with the on-going dengue epidemic, the pandemic highlighted the urgency of climate adaptation. Meanwhile, the popular discontent conveyed an accumulation of grievances linked with cultural discrimination, political misrepresentation as well as economic maldistribution. The participation of new middle-class segments in the protests foregrounded new tendencies significant for strengthening the labour movement as well as working-class parties in their demands for redistribution, reframing democracy as well as citizenship.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the role of social networking sites (SNSs) in the 25 January 2011 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the “Arab Spring”.

The research methods used were an adaptive form of snowball sampling of a heterogeneous demographic group of participants in the Revolution, used to select focus groups to explore a range of relevant issues.

SNSs are shown to have played a central and pivotal role in the events known collectively as the Arab Spring. Their importance as a source of non‐governmental information and as a means of informing the external and internal community of internal events is highlighted by all participants.

The paper outlines research into contemporary events of global significance.

Online feminist activism has opened a different path for ordinary Iranians who are not necessarily versed in post-revolutionary discourses on feminism and political activism, nor are familiar with the names and past achievements of Iranian women’s activist pioneers since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Social media has helped to tease apart government statecraft that continually touts and reemphasizes Islamic values, at the same time providing a platform for a feminist consciousness that more recently has passionately supported individual rights, especially the right to privacy. This chapter delves into this move toward a more individualized form of dissent, surveying the generational, ideological, and technological divides that have emerged among Iranian women’s activists following popular uprisings that have been happening domestically since 2009.

In this introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxist Thought in South Asia’, we detail the long history of Marxist politics and theorizing in South Asia and highlight the unique contributions and perspectives of South Asian Marxists to global Marxism. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1) South Asian Marxists' approach to thinking about questions of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal continuities in Marxist theories from South Asia and (3) unique South Asian contributions to theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective.