Index travels to Germany to meet exiled newspaper editor Kyaw Min Swe, who faced torture and imprisonment at the hands of the military junta
Editor in exile: One journalist’s daring escape from Myanmar
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Liam Payne’s death signals an epidemic of silence in the music industry
While the future looks brighter, the mental health of artists has long been neglected
A story of forgotten fiction in Vietnam
The country’s rich literary history has been plagued by censorship and book bans
Unsung heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression
Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
Contents – Unsung heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression
Contents
Science in Iran: A catalyst for corruption
Index looks at why being a scientist in Iran is so dangerous, and what is left behind when advancement is hindered
The dangers of boycotting Russian science
As physics laboratory Cern ends co-operation with Russia and Belarus over the Ukraine war, Index talks to exiled scientists
How Putin’s Russia is weaponising psychiatry against its critics
The Russian leader is revisiting the Cold War playbook by using mental manipulation to silence dissidents and its use is growing
In India, the money from state advertising is too tight to mention
Angana Chakrabarti reports from the North Eastern region, where government advertising is used as a tool to control the media
Living in gangster times
Reporting on organised crime in the eastern state of Bihar is a deadly business
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.