Immediate Release: 11 March 2025
A growing network of Southeast Asia-rooted, real-world grounded scholars and activists – known as FORSEA – welcomes Dr Mireille Fanon Mendes France, a well-known jurist, militant and activist, and President of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, to its voluntary board of directors.
SOAS historian and Professor Michael Charney of FORSEA, said, “We on the FORSEA Board are honoured to be joined by jurist and activist Mireille Fanon Mendes France. Mireille’s expertise, experience, and activism will strengthen our mission to empower those who stand against political, economic, and social injustice. We look forward to working with Mireille as we shape a better future for the world together.”
Dr Mireille Fanon Mendes France is a well-known jurist, militant and activist on international law issues. She has served as a United Nations expert on the issues of institutional and structural racism, with particular reference to people of African descent and Africans.
One month into what subsequently came to be seen worldwide as Israel’s textbook genocide, with arms, money, political, diplomatic and propaganda support, from not only the US but also Europe and Canada, the French activist called for global resistance against the brazenly open settler colonial onslaught against Palestinian people by “the western civilization” when she wrote, “(i)t is no longer time to be indignant, it is time to resist and support the Palestinian people murdered before our eyes. Palestinian resistance will triumph!”
For the 10-March 2025 marathon YouTube event entitled “Trump USA and Its Dark Global Consequences”, she wrote:
(s)ince January 2025, we have definitively entered into a world where the law of the strongest prevails, where this law is accepted in international relations, and where those who reject it become the enemies of those who draw the contours of the axis of good: law and order based on institutional racism, exclusion of workers, redefinition of international relations, and the blurring at the state level of private and public interests.
With the reality of a single dominant and hegemonic power on the international stage, the North American power, combined with the existence of a single and unique possible international social model, the most established notions of international law are undergoing a profound crisis, ranging from the erosion of the prohibition on the use of armed force, which is already under attack, to the notion of “preventive war,” which deals a severe blow to international law, indirectly dismantling the entire system of collective security, revisiting the notion of self-defense.”
She established the Frantz Fanon Foundation with the late Aimé Césaire, as its honorary president, the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician who co-founded Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans.
Dr. Mireille Fanon Mendes France is currently working on the issue of reparations in a decolonial perspective while organizing the centenary of her revolutionary father, Frantz Fanon (20 July 1925-6 December 1961), in France which has still blacklisted the author of the hugely influential books, inter alia The Wretched of the Earth where Fanon advocated an utter and complete rejection of the colonial/racial supremacist relations, in all their manifestations, as a decisive first-step towards emancipation of the oppressed peoples.
“I am so incredibly pleased that a fellow anti-white supremacist/anti-imperialist activist and the daughter of Frantz Fanon, who has been a major intellectual inspiration for many of us anti-imperialist resisters around the world, chose to publicly join our grassroots radical network,” said the network’s cofounder Maung Zarni.
Dr Mireille Fanon Mendes France speaking at the International Conference on the Situation of Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh co-organized by France-Bangladesh Friendship Group, National Assembly of France and the Free Rohingya Coalition, 1 June 2018 (photo by Zarni)
Among the leading activists and scholars who serve voluntarily on the FORSEA Board are: Northern Irish peace activist and Nobel Laureate Máiread Corrigan Maguire of The Peace People – Working for non-violence since 1976; anti-imperialist, humanist, and activist and FORSEA co-founder Hishamuddin Rais; Hafsar Tameesuddin, the New Zealand-based Rohingya refugee activist who chairs the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN); Gill H. Boehringer, who is former Dean, now Honorary Professor at Australia’s Macquarie University Law School; Omar Haramy who directs Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in the West Bank, Palestine; Azeezah Kanji, a legal academic and writer and Director of Programming at Noor Cultural Centre, Toronto, Canada; Sunita Viswanath, Co-Founder of Hindus for Human Rights; Penny Green FAcSS, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Founder and Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London; and Toru Kubota, a Japanese documentary filmmaker and activist.
A collective initiative by leading revolutionary exiles and dissidents from Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Singapore, FORSEA was launched Kualur Lumpur in February 2019, with the support of Noam Chomsky and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the then Prime Minister of Malaysia.
FORSEA has been engaged in educational and organizing efforts supporting human rights, democratic and liberation struggles across national boundaries and geographic regions, from Myanmar and Thailand to Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) India and the US-Israel joint genocide occupied Palestine.
FORSEA has organized and hosted a FORSEA Dialogue Series on democratic struggles, and, with the Free Rohingya Coalition, a podcast series on genocides.
As members of the Managing Board of FORSEA, we are committed to pursuing, through our educational initiatives, the advancement of human welfare, the protection of vulnerable national minorities, the propagation of fundamental human rights, labour rights, gender equality, the fostering of harmony between faith-based communities, the spread of ecological consciousness, and the promotion of a democratic ethos among future generations. (See CHARTERS – FORSEA)
FORSEA
