Going Global

By Prof. Jay Rosen, Chairman
NYU Dept. of Journalism & Mass Communications

The Freedom Forum, a foundation dedicated to "free press, free speech, free spirit," supports a yearly group of international fellows at NYU. We in the journalism program are lucky to provide their home. For they not only study with us, they bring the results of their earlier studies to us. Here, three of this year's fellows write about the very different picture of class in their home nations.

Loreta Budin tracks the plight of refugees in Romania, which has become a transit point for the dispossessed. She writes of those who have settled in her country, and those that are seeking routes to the West.

Maria Fyodorova focuses on a more hopeful, but far from complete development: the emergence of a Russian middle class between the ruling elite and the huge majority of poor. Ranging from 20 to 30 percent by (faulty) estimates, the middle class in Russian scarcely compares to what's called middle class in the Western Democracies. But it is, in a way, a new actor on the stage.

Claudia Sandoval Gomez writes of a displaced class in Colombia, driven from home and land by the guerilla war involving rebels, paramilitary groups, the government, and drug traffickers. They are urban dwellers, but not by choice. The cities are where they wind up when there is no place else to go.

And Anny Quijano takes a look at the widening political class in her native Peru, not a new development, but one gaining in size since the mid-1980s.

We are told more and more that the world is going global. But as these reports tell us, the nation, not the globe, is where most people live. Class, then, is a local story, and will always need journalists who can look it straight in the eye.

To find out more about Freedom Forum programs worldwide, click here.

ROMANIA: A WAITING ROOM FOR PARADISE Refugees and Refugees-in-Transit
by Loreta Budin
Three of the children of Somali woman Egall Aden Jawahir were born in Romania and raised in the Bucharest refugee camp -- the ghetto of Tudor Gociu No. 26A Street. Ten years ago, Romania granted political asylum to both her and husband, upon their request. Ever since then, the woman receives welfare payments that are barely sufficient for survival and the roof over her head in a miserable building in the capital. (read more)

Does a middle class exist in Russia?
by Maria Fyodorova
The middle class in Russia scarcely resembles the middle class in the United States or Western Europe where it represents more or less the majority of the population and is defined by a certain (high) level of income, an educated and professional status, ownership of a decent real estate, a healthy political conservatism and an interest in maintaining the status quo. According to some analysts, the middle class per se does not yet exist in post-Communist Russia, with its huge gap between the living standard of a small elite and the rest of the population. (read more)

The Peruvian Political Class
by Anny Quijano
The past few decades have brought a great number of changes to Peruvian culture, particularly in the practice of politics. One of the most significant changes has been the gradual inclusion of various social sectors that previously depended upon the intervention of representatives from the upper class. Although popular participation in politics began in the 1930s when the Peruvian Aprista party was founded, large-scale mobilization has begun to gain greater momentum since 1985. (read more)


The Drama of the Displaced in Colombia
by Claudia Sandoval Gomez
They ask for help in the streets of large cities, in governmental offices, on buses, in restaurants and yet, they are not beggars. What is more, many own their own houses and land, and others have even been employed as teachers or merchants. However, everything that these people had gained over the course of their lives one day became reduced to the little that could be packed into a bag before fleeing their homes. They are Colombia's displaced, created by the civil war that has plagued the country over the course of the last 40 years.(read more)