Debbie Ransome

London

Editor and Journalist at Freelance

Commonwealth watcher/freelance editor. Ex BBC Caribbean Head. For Caribbean news: @caribintelligen Commonwealth: @CWRoundTable and @CommonwealthJA

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Articles

Research Article: Widening the reparations debate

1 week ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]Ethiopia illustrates the scope of the trade well beyond its shores. Its rulers did not just use men and women in their courts and palaces but also sold them as slaves across the Red Sea to Arabia (Bonacci & Mecklenburg, Citation2017, p. 5). Traders took Ethiopian captives to India. Some may have been among the African slaves imported by China (Jákl, Citation2017, p.
Opinion - South Africa’s ‘government of national unity’: One year on

1 week ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.
Opinion: The Commonwealth at COP29 and the road to COP30

2 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies. Opinions expressed do not reflect the position of the Round Table editorial board.]The handling of COP29 led many in the climate action community to question the point and, especially, the effectiveness of the conference.
Resilient Together: Reflecting on Commonwealth Trade Priorities in a Fractured Global Trading Landscape

2 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

Commonwealth Trade Ministers will gather in Windhoek, Namibia, in June 2025 for their biennial Ministerial Meeting at a tumultuous time for global trade. Formidable headwinds are buffeting a global trading system already reeling on the back of the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, escalating geopolitical tensions, increasing fragmentation of the global economy, and disruption and destabilisation of global supply chains.
Podcast: Exploring dementia

2 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

Rianna Patterson was the winner of the 2024-25 Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award for a PhD student registered at a university in the UK. She is a Dominican PhD candidate in applied psychology at the University of Nottingham. She is the founder of the Dominica Dementia Foundation, which she founded at eighteen in memory of her grandfather. She has been a voice for older people in forums such as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
Children get your culture: Rare Roots Reggae reissued

3 weeks ago | caribbeanintelligence.com | Robert Plummer |Debbie Ransome

By Robert PlummerOne of Jamaica’s all-time greatest roots reggae outfits, Culture, now have all their early singles together in one place on a new double CD entitled See Them A Come – The Joe Gibbs Collection. It’s out on 13 June 2025 on the Doctor Bird label via Cherry Red. These are sad times for lovers of Jamaica’s greatest musical export. Since the start of 2025, a trio of classic reggae singers have died, leaving behind a powerful and eloquent legacy.
Indo-Pakistan tensions

3 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

The brutal terrorist attack on 22 April 2025 in Pahalgam was reminiscent of the 1995 attack in the same beauty spot in the valley of Kashmir, where a little known militant group, Al Faran, kidnapped five western tourists. A Norwegian, Hans Christian Ostro, was beheaded, the others never found, presumed dead.
Could do much better - Workers’ rights in Commonwealth countries

3 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

The latest survey of workers’ rights around the world shows that the Commonwealth is doing slightly better than treading water as other countries sink further. And there are some signs of improvement already underway – against a background described as “a worsening global crisis” and compared with the decline in workers’ rights identified in the same survey last year.
Book Review - Understanding colonial Nigeria: British rule and its impact

3 weeks ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]Professor Toyin Falola has a formidable reputation. The late D.A. Low (former Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge University), writing to the reviewer in 1999, called him the ‘ablest African historian I have come across’.
Roundtable - American tariffs and Anglo-Canadian trade: An historical perspective

1 month ago | commonwealthroundtable.co.uk | Debbie Ransome

[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]In light of the unfolding situation around deleterious American tariffs on Canadian goods, a brief and, therefore, necessarily selective account of historical episodes of American protectionism and their consequences for Canadian trade is useful to bear in mind. This account concerns, in particular, the consequences for Canada’s trade with the United Kingdom.