paraphrasing text means

• TEFL Internship
• TEFL Masters
• Find a TEFL Course
• Special Offers
• Course Providers
• Teach English Abroad
• Find a TEFL Job
• About DoTEFL
• Our Mission
• How DoTEFL Works

Forgotten Password

• What is Paraphrasing? An Overview With Examples
• Learn English
• James Prior
• No Comments
• Updated February 23, 2024

What is paraphrasing? Or should I say what is the definition of paraphrasing? If you want to restate something using different words whilst retaining the same meaning, this is paraphrasing.

In this article, we cover what paraphrasing is, why it’s important, and when you should do it. Plus, some benefits and examples.

Table of Contents

Paraphrase Definition: What is Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is when you restate the information from a source using your own words while maintaining the original meaning. It involves expressing the ideas in a different way, often to clarify or simplify the content, without directly quoting the source.

When you paraphrase, you are not only borrowing, clarifying, or expanding on the information but also ensuring that you do all of these actions without plagiarizing the original content. It’s therefore definitely worth learning how to paraphrase if you want to improve your writing skills.

Why is Paraphrasing Important?

Paraphrasing is a valuable skill that allows you to convey information in your unique writing style while still giving credit to someone else’s ideas. It’s important for several reasons, and it serves various functions in both academic and professional writing.

Here are some key reasons why you should paraphrase:

• Paraphrasing allows you to present information from sources in your own words, reducing the risk of plagiarism. Proper in-text citation is still necessary, but paraphrasing demonstrates your understanding and interpretation of the material.
• When you paraphrase, you are required to comprehend the original content fully. You actively engage with the information, helping you better understand complex concepts and ideas. This process of restating the information in your own words showcases your understanding of the subject matter.
• By paraphrasing, you can clarify complex ideas or technical language and convey information in a clearer, shorter, and simpler form. This makes it more accessible to your audience and ensures they grasp the key points. This is particularly important when communicating with readers who may not be familiar with specialized terminology.
• Paraphrasing is valuable when synthesizing information from various sources. It enables you to blend ideas cohesively while maintaining a consistent writing style throughout your work.
• Paraphrasing allows you to inject your unique writing style and voice into the content. It helps you present information in a way that is more aligned with your personal expression and perspective.
• In certain situations where you need to meet specific length requirements for assignments or publications, paraphrasing allows you to convey information more concisely while still preserving the essential meaning.
• Paraphrasing helps maintain a smooth flow and cohesiveness in your writing. It allows you to integrate information seamlessly, avoiding abrupt shifts between your own ideas and those from external sources.
• Depending on your audience, you may need to adapt the language and level of technicality of the information you present. Paraphrasing allows you to tailor the content to suit the needs of your specific readership.

Incorporating paraphrasing into your writing not only showcases your understanding of the material but also enhances the overall quality and originality of your work.

When Should You Paraphrase?

Knowing when to paraphrase is an important skill, especially in academic writing and professional communication. Here are some situations in which you should consider paraphrasing:

• To Avoid Plagiarism:  Whenever you want to incorporate information from source material into your own work, but don’t want to use a direct quotation, paraphrasing is necessary to present the ideas in your own words while still acknowledging the original source.
• To Express Understanding:  Paraphrasing demonstrates your understanding of a topic by rephrasing the information in a way that shows you have processed and comprehended the material.
• To Simplify Complex Information:  If you encounter complex or technical language that may be difficult for your audience to understand, paraphrasing can help you clarify and simplify the information to make it more accessible and digestible.
• To Integrate Multiple Sources:  When synthesizing information from multiple sources, paraphrasing allows you to blend the ideas cohesively while maintaining your own voice and perspective.
• To Maintain Consistency in Writing Style:  In academic writing or professional writing, paraphrasing can help you maintain a consistent writing style throughout your work. This helps to ensure that all sections flow smoothly and are coherent.
• To Meet Specific Requirements:  Some assignments or publications may have specific requirements. This could relate to the number of words or concern the use of direct quotations. In such cases, paraphrasing allows you to meet these requirements while still incorporating relevant information from your sources.

What Are the Benefits of Paraphrasing?

Rewriting information in a clearer, shorter, and simpler form is called paraphrasing, so one of the benefits of paraphrasing is already clear! However, it can also be a useful exercise for other reasons, which are outlined below:

Avoiding Plagiarism

One of the main benefits of paraphrasing is mastering the ability to present information from external sources in a way that is entirely your own. By restructuring the content and expressing it using your words, you create a distinct piece of writing that reflects your comprehension and interpretation of the original material. This not only showcases your academic or professional integrity but also safeguards against unintentional plagiarism.

Paraphrasing is a fundamental skill in academic and professional settings, where originality and proper attribution are highly valued. This is especially true when it comes to writing research papers, where you’ll often need to reference someone else’s ideas with appropriate citations.

When you paraphrase effectively, you communicate to your audience that you respect the intellectual property of others while contributing your unique insights. This ethical approach to information usage enhances your credibility as a writer or researcher and reinforces the integrity of your work.

Enhancing Understanding

When you engage in paraphrasing, you actively participate in the material you are working with. You are forced to consider the ideas presented in the source material. You need to discern the essential concepts, identify key phrases, and decide how best to convey the message in a way that resonates with you.

This active engagement not only aids in understanding the content but also encourages critical thinking as you evaluate and interpret the information from your own standpoint.

By expressing someone else’s ideas in your own words, you deepen your understanding of the content. This process requires you to dissect the original text, grasp its nuances, and then reconstruct it using your language and perspective. In this way, you go beyond mere memorization and truly internalize the information, fostering a more profound comprehension of the subject matter.

Tailoring Information for Your Audience

Paraphrasing empowers you to adapt the language and complexity of the information to suit the needs and understanding of your audience. As you rephrase the content, you have the flexibility to adjust the level of technicality, simplify complex terminology, or tailor the tone to make the information more accessible to your specific readership.

Consider your audience’s background, knowledge level, and interests. Paraphrasing allows you to bridge the gap between the original content and the understanding of your intended audience.

Whether you are communicating with experts in a particular field or a general audience, the ability to paraphrase ensures that the information is conveyed in a way that resonates with and is comprehensible to your readers. This skill not only facilitates effective communication but also demonstrates your awareness of the diverse needs of your audience.

Improves Writing Skills

Paraphrasing helps in the development and refinement of your writing skills. When you actively engage in the process of rephrasing someone else’s ideas, you hone your ability to express concepts in a clear, concise, and coherent manner.

This practice refines your language proficiency, encouraging you to explore different types of sentence structure, experiment with vocabulary, and ultimately develop a more sophisticated and nuanced writing style.

As you paraphrase, you gain a heightened awareness of grammar, syntax, and word choice. This translates into improved writing, helping you construct well-articulated sentences and paragraphs. Moreover, paraphrasing allows you to experiment with different writing tones and adapt your style to suit the context or purpose of your writing, fostering versatility and adaptability in your expression.

Saves Time and Energy

Paraphrasing can significantly reduce the time and energy spent on the writing process. Rather than grappling with the challenge of integrating lengthy direct quotations or struggling to find the perfect synonym, paraphrasing allows you to distill and convey information in a more streamlined way.

This becomes particularly advantageous when faced with strict deadlines. By mastering paraphrasing, you empower yourself to produce well-crafted, original content in a shorter timeframe, allowing you to meet deadlines without compromising the quality of your work.

Examples of Paraphrasing

Here are some examples of paraphrasing:

• Original:  “The advancements in technology have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other.”
• Paraphrased:  “Technological progress has transformed how we interact and communicate with one another.”
• Original:  “Deforestation poses a significant threat to global ecosystems and biodiversity.”
• Paraphrased:  “The impact of deforestation represents a substantial danger to ecosystems and the diversity of life on a global scale.”
• Original:  “Effective time management is essential for achieving productivity in both professional and personal spheres.”
• Paraphrased:  “Efficient management of time is crucial for attaining productivity in both professional and personal aspects of life.”
• Original:  “The restaurant offers a diverse selection of culinary choices, ranging from traditional dishes to modern fusion cuisine.”
• Paraphrased:  “The restaurant provides a variety of food options, including both traditional and modern fusion dishes.”
• Original:  “The novel explores the complexities of human relationships in a rapidly changing society.”
• Paraphrased:  “The book delves into the challenges of human connections in a fast-changing world.”
• Original:  “Regular exercise is crucial for maintaining optimal physical health and preventing various health issues.”
• Paraphrased:  “Exercising regularly is important for keeping your body healthy and avoiding health problems.”

In these examples, you can observe the use of different wording, sentence structure, and synonyms while preserving the core meaning of the original sentences. This is the essence of paraphrasing.

What Are the Differences Between Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Summarizing?

So, we’ve established that successful paraphrasing is a way of rewriting someone else’s words whilst retaining their meaning and still giving credit to the original author’s ideas. But how is this different from quoting and summarizing?

While paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing are all ways of incorporating information from source material into your own writing, there are key differences between them:

Paraphrasing

• Definition:  Paraphrasing involves rephrasing someone else’s ideas or information in your own words while retaining the original meaning.
• Usage:  You use paraphrasing when you want to present the information in a way that suits your writing style or when you need to clarify complex ideas.
• Example:  Original: “The study found a significant correlation between sleep deprivation and decreased cognitive performance.” Paraphrased: “The research indicated a notable link between lack of sleep and a decline in cognitive function.”
• Definition:  Quoting involves directly using the exact words from a source and enclosing them in quotation marks.
• Usage:  You use quoting when the original wording is essential, either because of its precision or uniqueness, or when you want to highlight a specific phrase or concept.
• Example:  Original: “The author argues, ‘In the absence of clear guidelines, individual judgment becomes paramount in decision-making.'”

The use of quotation marks is vital when quoting.

Summarizing

• Definition:  Summarizing involves condensing the main ideas of a source or original passage in your own words, focusing on the most crucial points.
• Usage:  You use summarizing when you need to provide a concise overview of a longer piece of text or when you want to capture the key points without including all the details.
• Example:  Original: A lengthy article discussing various factors influencing climate change. Summary: “The article outlines key factors contributing to climate change, including human activities and natural processes.”

In summary, paraphrasing is about expressing someone else’s ideas in your own words, quoting involves directly using the original words, and summarizing is about condensing the main points of a source.

Each technique serves different purposes in writing and should be used based on your specific goals and the nature of the information you are incorporating. If you want to level up your writing skills you need to be able to do all three of these.

Conclusion (In Our Own Words)

Paraphrasing is a valuable skill with numerous benefits. It helps you understand complex ideas, refine your writing style, and demonstrate ethical information use. It also allows you to tailor information for different audiences and can save time in academic and professional writing.

So, if you want to incorporate information from external sources into your writing in a way that is clear, concise, and respectful of the original author’s work, it’s worth mastering the art of paraphrasing.

• Recent Posts

• How to Teach Business English - May 27, 2024
• 93 Business Idioms With Their Meanings & Examples - May 26, 2024
• How to Motivate Yourself for Studying: 25 Study Motivation Tips - May 24, 2024

More from DoTEFL

How to Paraphrase Without Plagiarizing

Businesses or Business’s or Business’? What’s the Difference?

• Updated March 30, 2023

How to Teach English to Young Learners: 9 Helpful Strategies

• Updated May 2, 2024

How to Become an EFL Teacher: A Quick Guide

• Updated March 7, 2024

7 Tips For Setting Up Your Teaching Plan For The Year

• Updated April 28, 2023

How to Brand Your Business to Get More Clients

• Updated April 26, 2024
• The global TEFL course directory.

• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Use Paraphrase

I. What is a Paraphrase?

A paraphrase (pronounced par – uh -freyz) is a restatement or rewording of a paragraph  or text,  in order to borrow, clarify, or expand on information without plagiarizing. Paraphrasing is an important tool to use when writing research papers, essays , and pieces of journalism.

II. Examples of Paraphrasing

For examples of paraphrasing, consider these possible re-wordings of the same statement:

She angered me with her inappropriate comments, rumor-spreading, and disrespectfulness at the formal dinner table.

She made me angry when she was rude at dinner.

This paraphrase is an example of a rewording which shortens and simplifies while maintaining the same meaning.

Her impoliteness, gossiping, and general lack of respect at dinner infuriated me.

This rephrasing maintains the same meaning but is rearranged in a creative way.

I was mad when she started spreading rumors, making inappropriate comments, and disrespecting other guests at our dinner.

Another paraphrase, this rewording properly and interestingly rearranges the information provided in the original sentence.

III. Types of Paraphrasing

A. change of parts of speech.

Parts of speech ranging from verbs and nouns to adjectives and adverbs are replaced with new parts of speech in this type of paraphrasing. Here is an example:

Original Sentence:

The boy quickly ran across the finish line, seizing yet another victory.

Paraphrase:

The quick boy seized yet another victory when he ran across the finish line.

In this example, many parts of speech are changed: the adverb quickly becomes the adjective quick, and the verb phrase with the gerund seizing becomes the verb seized.

B.  Change of Structure

This type of paraphrasing involves changing the sentence’s structure, sometimes creating a passive voice from an active voice and vice versa. The change in structure can be used to reflect the writer’s interpretation of the original quote. Here is an example of change of structure paraphrasing:

Puppies were adopted by numerous kind souls at the puppy drive.

Many kind souls adopted puppies during the puppy drive.

In this example, the object of the sentence (kind souls) becomes the subject with an active voice (adopted) rather than a passive voice (were adopted).

C. Reduction of Clauses

Reduction of clauses paraphrases reduce the number of clauses in a sentence, which can be interruptive or confusing, by incorporating the phrases into the sentence. Here is an example of reduction of clauses paraphrasing:

While I understand where you’re coming from, and truly respect your opinion, I wish you would express yourself more clearly, like Clara does.

I understand where you’re coming from and respect your opinion, but I wish you would be more like Clara and express yourself more clearly.

D. Synonym Replacement

Synonym replacement paraphrasing is one of the simplest forms of paraphrasing: replacing words with similar words, or synonyms. Here is an example:

The older citizens were honored with a parade for those once in the military.

Senior citizens were honored with a march for veterans.

In this example, many synonyms are used: older citizens are senior citizens, a parade becomes a march, and those once in the military refers to veterans.

IV. The Importance of Using Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is a way of referencing a source without directly quoting it or of further explaining a selected quote. Correct paraphrasing is important in that poor paraphrasing can result in accusations of plagiarism, or copying from a source without correctly citing it. Paraphrasing allows writers to examine the meaning of others’ work, creatively rephrase their statements, and craft information to suit an essay or composition’s goal or focus.

V. Paraphrase in Literature

Paraphrasing can be found in a variety of journalistic sources from newspapers to film documentaries to literary journals. Here are a few examples of paraphrasing in literature:

Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too.

In John Berendt’s nonfiction novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , a character references what someone has once written by paraphrasing their message.

I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here… rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness… give me truth.

In this example from the nonfiction novel Into the Wild , Jon Krakauer paraphrases Thoreau’s larger message of transcendence.

So far, Laurance’s critiques of new road-building schemes have been well received, but he expects that to change.

In Michelle Nijhuis’ article “What Roads Have Wrought,” William Laurance is paraphrased rather than quoted to express his general viewpoint.

VI. Paraphrase in Pop Culture

Paraphrasing is often found in pop culture when attempting to translate the language of older plays, poems, and stories, such as Shakespeare’s works. Here are a few examples of paraphrasing in pop culture:

10 Things I Hate About You (1999):

Just a minor encounter with the shrew… the mewling, rampalian wretch herself.

In the modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew , many characters ’ lines paraphrase Shakespeare’s originals. Here is Shakespeare’s version:

A meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew.

A Different World: Romeo, Oh Romeo

First, the student reads Shakespeare’s original words:

Oh gentle Romeo. If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. Or if thou thinkest I’m too quickly won, I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo.

Then, she paraphrases to translate its meaning for modern ears:

It’s all about translation. Oh, sweet thang Romeo. If you think I’m all that, then step to me correctly. But if you think I’m a skeeze, I’ll be dissin’ and dismissin’, then you’ll be workin’ overtime getting’ me back.

VII. Related Terms

Like paraphrases, summaries are rewordings of original statements. Whereas paraphrases are precise and specific, summaries are brief and selective. Summaries report main points in a shortened version of the original, whereas paraphrases simply restate the original statement in a new way. Here is an example of summary versus paraphrase:

Original Statement:

At the party we had delicious red punch, a bunch of different appetizers, and a cookout. Since it was at the park, we played volleyball, went swimming, and sunbathed for fun.

At the party we enjoyed food and drink and various outdoor activities.

Here, the summary purposefully shortens the original statement while covering its major points.

At the party we drank some punch, ate a handful of appetizers, and had a cookout. The park allowed us to enjoy a number of enjoyable activities from volleyball to swimming to sunbathing.

As this example shows, the paraphrase rephrases the original statement and keeps more of its original content than the summary.

Translation

Although paraphrase sometimes translates difficult phrasing into more understandable phrasing, it is not literally considered translation. For something to be a translation, it must change writing in one language to another language. Here is an example of translation versus paraphrasing:

Original Phrase:

That’s life.

Translation into French:

C’est la vie.

That’s just how life goes sometimes.

Although we loosely may refer to paraphrase as translating ideas, technically it is not a tool of translation.

VIII. In Closing

Paraphrasing is an important tool for nonfiction writers, journalists, and essayists alike. It is a common proponent of news and reporting. Correct paraphrasing protects writers from plagiarism and allows them to creatively rephrase original works, incorporating them into their own compositions.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

Paraphrasing - an overview

Paraphrasing is ..., what are the differences between quoting, paraphrasing & summarising .

• Why Paraphrase?
• Paraphrasing versus Plagiarism
• The Do's and Don'ts of Paraphrasing
• Paraphrasing - examples
• Further Information

Paraphrasing is 'a restating of someone else’s thoughts or ideas in your own words. You must always cite your source when paraphrasing’ (Pears & Shields, 2019 p. 245).  

(Solas English, 2017)

• Quoting means using someone else’s exact words and putting them in quotation marks.. 
• Paraphrasing means expressing someone else’s ideas in your own voice, while keeping the same essential meaning.
• Summarising means taking a long passage of text from someone else and condensing the main ideas in your own words.

Watch the video below for more information.  

(UNC Writing Center, 2019)

• Next: Why Paraphrase? >>
• Last Updated: Apr 10, 2024 3:42 PM
• URL: https://lit.libguides.com/paraphrasing

The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

A paraphrase is a restatement of a text in another form or other words, often to simplify or clarify meaning .

"When you paraphrase," says Brenda Spatt, "you retain everything about the original writing but the words."

"When I put down words that I say somebody said they needn't be the exact words, just what you might call the meaning." (Mark Harris, The Southpaw . Bobbs-Merrill, 1953

Paraphrasing Steve Jobs

"I've often heard Steve [Jobs] explain why Apple's products look so good or work so well by telling the 'show car' anecdote . 'You see a show car,' he would say (I'm paraphrasing here, but this is pretty close to his words), 'and you think, "That's a great design, it's got great lines." Four or five years later, the car is in the showroom and in television ads, and it sucks. And you wonder what happened. They had it. They had it, and then they lost it.'" (Jay Elliot with William Simon, The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation . Vanguard, 2011

Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation

"A summary , written in your own words, briefly restates the writer's main points. Paraphrase , although written in your own words, is used to relate the details or the progression of an idea in your source. Quotation , used sparingly, can lend credibility to your work or capture a memorable passage." (L. Behrens, A Sequence for Academic Writing . Longman, 2009

How to Paraphrase a Text

" Paraphrase passages that present important points, explanations, or arguments but that don't contain memorable or straightforward wording. Follow these steps: (R. VanderMey, The College Writer . Houghton, 2007

• Quickly review the passage to get a sense of the whole, and then go through the passage carefully, sentence by sentence.
• State the ideas in your own words, defining words as needed.
• If necessary, edit for clarity, but don't change the meaning.
• If you borrow phrases directly, put them in quotation marks .
• Check your paraphrase against the original for accurate tone and meaning."

Reasons for Using Paraphrase

" Paraphrasing helps your readers to gain a detailed understanding of your sources , and, indirectly, to accept your thesis as valid. There are two major reasons for using paraphrase in your essays .

1. Use paraphrase to present information or evidence whenever there is no special reason for using a direct quotation . . . . 2. Use paraphrase to give your readers an accurate and comprehensive account of ideas taken from a source--ideas that you intend to explain, interpret, or disagree with in your essay. . . .

"When you take notes for an essay based on one or more sources, you should mostly paraphrase. Quote only when recording phrases or sentences that clearly merit quotation. All quotable phrases and sentences should be transcribed accurately in your notes, with quotation marks separating the paraphrase from the quotation." (Brenda Spatt, Writing From Sources , 8th ed. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011

Paraphrase as a Rhetorical Exercise

"A  paraphrase differs from a translation in not being a transfer from one language to another. . . . We generally associate with paraphrase the notion of an expansion of the original thought by definitions , periphrasis , examples , etc., with a view to making it more intelligible; but this is not essential. Here is meant the simpler form, in which the pupil reproduces in his own words the complete thought of an author, without attempting to explain it or to imitate the style .

"It has been frequently urged against this exercise, that, in thus substituting other words for those of an accurate writer, we must necessarily choose such as are less expressive of the sense. It has, however, been defended by one of the greatest rhetoricians-- Quintilian ." (Andrew D. Hepburn, Manual of English Rhetoric , 1875

Monty Python and Computer Paraphrasing

"In the famous sketch from the TV show 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' the actor John Cleese had many ways of saying a parrot was dead, among them, 'This parrot is no more,' 'He's expired and gone to meet his maker,' and 'His metabolic processes are now history.'

"Computers can't do nearly that well at paraphrasing . English sentences with the same meaning take so many different forms that it has been difficult to get computers to recognize paraphrases, much less produce them. "Now, using several methods, including statistical techniques borrowed from gene analysis, two researchers have created a program that can automatically generate paraphrases of English sentences." (A. Eisenberg, "Get Me Rewrite!" The New York Times , Dec. 25, 2003

The Lighter Side of Paraphrasing

"Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply.' But not in those words.” (Woody Allen)    "The other important joke for me is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious . And it goes like this--I'm paraphrasing --'I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.' That's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women." (Woody Allen as Alvy Singer in Annie Hall , 1977)

Pronunciation: PAR-a-fraz

• Question Mark Definition and Examples
• Examples of Great Introductory Paragraphs
• Common Keyboard Symbols: Names, Uses, and Styles
• How and When to Paraphrase Quotations
• What Is Plagiarism?
• A Guide to Using Quotations in Essays
• Definition and Examples of Quotation in English Grammar
• Definition and Examples of Direct Quotations
• What Is a Written Summary?
• Examples of Signal Phrases in Grammar and Composition
• Quotation and Quote
• Guidelines for Using Quotation Marks Correctly
• Difference Between "Quote" and "Quotation": What Is the Right Word?
• How to Use Dialogues in Class
• An Introduction to Academic Writing

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of paraphrase in English

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

• din something into someone
• drum something into someone
• flog yourself to death idiom
• labour the point idiom
• repetitively
• restatement
• I would take issue with your paraphrase of my position .
• She does not follow Shakespeare's text but has devised her own paraphrase of it.
• Allow me to end my first speech with my own paraphrase of the statement .

paraphrase | American Dictionary

Examples of paraphrase, translations of paraphrase.

Get a quick, free translation!

Word of the Day

have your head in the clouds

to not know the facts of a situation

Apples and oranges (Talking about differences, Part 2)

Learn more with +Plus

• Recent and Recommended {{#preferredDictionaries}} {{name}} {{/preferredDictionaries}}
• Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English English Learner’s Dictionary Essential British English Essential American English
• Grammar and thesaurus Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English Grammar Thesaurus
• Pronunciation British and American pronunciations with audio English Pronunciation
• English–Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Simplified)–English
• English–Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Traditional)–English
• English–Dutch Dutch–English
• English–French French–English
• English–German German–English
• English–Indonesian Indonesian–English
• English–Italian Italian–English
• English–Japanese Japanese–English
• English–Norwegian Norwegian–English
• English–Polish Polish–English
• English–Portuguese Portuguese–English
• English–Spanish Spanish–English
• English–Swedish Swedish–English
• Dictionary +Plus Word Lists
• English    Verb Noun
• American    Verb
• Translations
• All translations

To add paraphrase to a word list please sign up or log in.

Add paraphrase to one of your lists below, or create a new one.

{{message}}

Something went wrong.

There was a problem sending your report.

• More from M-W
• To save this word, you'll need to log in. Log In

Definition of paraphrase

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of paraphrase  (Entry 2 of 2)

intransitive verb

transitive verb

Did you know?

When we paraphrase, we provide a version that can exist beside the original (rather than replace it). We paraphrase all the time. When you tell a friend what someone else has said, you're almost always paraphrasing, since you're not repeating the exact words. If you go to hear a talk, you might paraphrase the speaker's main points afterward for your friends. And when writing a paper on a short story, you might start off your essay with a paraphrase of the plot. Paraphrasing is especially useful when dealing with poetry, since poetic language is often difficult and poems may have meanings that are hard to pin down.

• restatement
• translating
• translation

Examples of paraphrase in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'paraphrase.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Noun and Verb

Middle French, from Latin paraphrasis , from Greek, from paraphrazein to paraphrase, from para- + phrazein to point out

1548, in the meaning defined at sense 1

1598, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Articles Related to paraphrase

The Words of the Week - Jan. 5

Dictionary lookups from Europe, higher education, and the new year

Dictionary Entries Near paraphrase

paraphrasis

Cite this Entry

“Paraphrase.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paraphrase. Accessed 28 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of paraphrase.

Kids Definition of paraphrase  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on paraphrase

Nglish: Translation of paraphrase for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of paraphrase for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about paraphrase

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Can you solve 4 words at once?

Word of the day.

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Popular in Grammar & Usage

More commonly misspelled words, commonly misspelled words, how to use em dashes (—), en dashes (–) , and hyphens (-), absent letters that are heard anyway, how to use accents and diacritical marks, popular in wordplay, pilfer: how to play and win, the words of the week - may 24, flower etymologies for your spring garden, 9 superb owl words, 10 words for lesser-known games and sports, games & quizzes.

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Paraphrase: Write It in Your Own Words

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Paraphrasing is one way to use a text in your own writing without directly quoting source material. Anytime you are taking information from a source that is not your own, you need to specify where you got that information.

A paraphrase is...

• Your own rendition of essential information and ideas expressed by someone else, presented in a new form.
• One legitimate way (when accompanied by accurate documentation) to borrow from a source.
• A more detailed restatement than a summary, which focuses concisely on a single main idea.

Paraphrasing is a valuable skill because...

• It is better than quoting information from an undistinguished passage.
• It helps you control the temptation to quote too much.
• The mental process required for successful paraphrasing helps you to grasp the full meaning of the original.

6 Steps to Effective Paraphrasing

• Reread the original passage until you understand its full meaning.
• Set the original aside, and write your paraphrase on a note card.
• Jot down a few words below your paraphrase to remind you later how you envision using this material. At the top of the note card, write a key word or phrase to indicate the subject of your paraphrase.
• Check your rendition with the original to make sure that your version accurately expresses all the essential information in a new form.
• Use quotation marks to identify any unique term or phraseology you have borrowed exactly from the source.
• Record the source (including the page) on your note card so that you can credit it easily if you decide to incorporate the material into your paper.

Some examples to compare

Note that the examples in this section use MLA style for in-text citation.

The original passage:

Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes. Lester, James D. Writing Research Papers . 2nd ed., 1976, pp. 46-47.

A legitimate paraphrase:

In research papers, students often quote excessively, failing to keep quoted material down to a desirable level. Since the problem usually originates during note taking, it is essential to minimize the material recorded verbatim (Lester 46-47).

An acceptable summary:

Students should take just a few notes in direct quotation from sources to help minimize the amount of quoted material in a research paper (Lester 46-47).

A plagiarized version:

Students often use too many direct quotations when they take notes, resulting in too many of them in the final research paper. In fact, probably only about 10% of the final copy should consist of directly quoted material. So it is important to limit the amount of source material copied while taking notes.

A note about plagiarism: This example has been classed as plagiarism, in part, because of its failure to deploy any citation. Plagiarism is a serious offense in the academic world. However, we acknowledge that plagiarism is a difficult term to define; that its definition may be contextually sensitive; and that not all instances of plagiarism are created equal—that is, there are varying “degrees of egregiousness” for different cases of plagiarism.

• Daily Crossword
• Word Puzzle
• Word Finder
• Word of the Day
• Synonym of the Day
• Word of the Year
• Language stories
• All featured
• Gender and sexuality
• All pop culture
• Writing hub
• Grammar essentials
• Commonly confused
• All writing tips
• Pop culture
• Writing tips

Advertisement

[ par - uh -freyz ]

• a restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form, as for clearness; rewording.
• the act or process of restating or rewording.

verb (used with object)

to paraphrase a technical paper for lay readers.

Synonyms: explain , summarize

verb (used without object)

• to make a paraphrase or paraphrases.

/ ˈpærəˌfreɪz; ˌpærəˈfræstɪk /

• an expression of a statement or text in other words, esp in order to clarify
• the practice of making paraphrases
• to put (something) into other words; restate (something)
• A restatement of speech or writing that retains the basic meaning while changing the words. A paraphrase often clarifies the original statement by putting it into words that are more easily understood.

Discover More

Derived forms.

• paraphrastic , adjective

Other Words From

• para·phrasa·ble adjective
• para·phraser noun
• mis·para·phrase verb misparaphrased misparaphrasing
• un·para·phrased adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of paraphrase 1

Synonym Study

Example sentences.

When Obsessive Loser Duncan Stevens suggested examples for this contest — one of several Shakespeare-centered challenges he’s proposed — I told him that I wanted to stick to modern paraphrases, rather than taking him humorously out of context.

To paraphrase Peter Tosh, if Illinois were to legalize it, would you advertise it?

To paraphrase the renegade philosopher Hannibal, I love it when science comes together.

To paraphrase Fox Friends, don't get caught beating women on camera and you're safe to play in the NFL.

Barry Goldwater is not the sort of man you might expect Stephen F. Cohen to paraphrase.

To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys—we are not the victims here.

A man may weep and weep, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "and be a villain!"

The omissions are the most sensible that I have found in a paraphrase.

This is not paraphrase; it is sheer misapprehension of the Old English.

As the language in which it is written is not easily intelligible, I have added a paraphrase on the opposite pages.

Instead of "Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion," we have the paraphrase, "That maketh and transformeth all things."

More About Paraphrase

What does paraphrase mean.

A paraphrase is a restatement of a text in your own words while giving credit to the person who originated the thought. For example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” You might paraphrase it in an essay by writing, “To paraphrase FDR, we have nothing to be afraid of, and we can’t let fear hold us back.”

To paraphrase means to restate something in your own words. You might paraphrase complicated information in order to make it easier for your audience to understand. You also might paraphrase something when you can’t remember or can’t verify the exact wording. It’s important to remember that you still need to credit the originator of the statement you’re paraphrasing .

Example: If you cannot remember the exact quote, you can paraphrase with precise detail.

Where does paraphrase come from?

The first records of the term paraphrase come from the mid-1500s. It ultimately comes from the Greek paráphrasis . Typically, the suffix para – means “side by side,” so a paraphrase is a “side by side phrase,” or “a phrase that means the same but looks or sounds different.”

Sometimes, people will paraphrase famous quotes, quotes from important figures, or quotes from research and change key parts of it or the overall wording to make the quote seem like it supports their claim when, in fact, it does not. For example, someone may paraphrase a quote from a research article but leave out certain details to make the research support their argument while the actual quote might not. When looking at an argument that uses a lot of paraphrases as evidence, it’s a good idea to find the original quotes to see if they truly support the argument.

Did you know … ?

What are some other forms related to paraphrase ?

• paraphrasable (adjective)
• paraphraser (noun)
• misparaphrase (verb)
• unparaphrased (adjective)

What are some synonyms for paraphrase ?

What are some words that share a root or word element with paraphrase ? 

What are some words that often get used in discussing paraphrase ?

How is paraphrase used in real life?

News, research, and academic writing often use paraphrasing to tell their stories.

To paraphrase: How long does it take to write a screenplay? Your whole life plus the time it takes to type it. — Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) November 8, 2015

FAQ: How many in-text citations do I need in a paragraph when I am paraphrasing (e.g., after every sentence or just once at the end)? A: The “Long Paraphrases” section of this #APAStyle page has practical guidelines and examples: https://t.co/eH9tg2nf4M — APA Style (@APA_Style) December 1, 2021

to paraphrase shigeru miyamoto, a delayed album is eventually good, but a rushed album is forever bad — xander (@mura_masa_) December 30, 2015

Try using paraphrase !

True or False?

To paraphrase someone is to quote their words precisely.

Mobile Menu Overlay

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

A Proclamation on Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day,   2024

     This Memorial Day, we honor the brave women and men who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation’s freedom.  We recommit to keeping our sacred obligation to their survivors, families, and caregivers.  Together, we vow to honor their memories by carrying on their work to forge a more perfect Union.

     Since our Nation’s founding, members of our Armed Forces have been willing to lay down their lives — not for a person or a place but for an idea unlike any other in human history:  the idea of the United States of America.  We are the only Nation in the world founded on the idea that we are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our entire lives.  Generations of America’s beloved daughters and sons have dared all, risked all, and given all for this idea.  Today, as they lie in eternal peace, we continue to live by the light of liberty they kept burning bright.

     To all those grieving the loss of a loved one who wore the uniform, including our Gold Star Families, and to all those who have a loved one still missing or unaccounted for:  Our country sees you and mourns with you.  I know how painful this day can be — how it can bring you back to the day you lost a piece of your soul.  It is overwhelming.  No words can ease that grief.  But I hope you find a small measure of solace in knowing that we will never forget the price your loved one paid for our freedom — and we will never stop trying to repay the debt of gratitude we owe you and them.

     That is our vow today — and that is our vow always.  May God bless our fallen heroes.  May God bring comfort to their families.  May God protect our troops.

     In honor and recognition of all of our fallen service members, the Congress, by a joint resolution approved May 11, 1950, as amended (36 U.S.C. 116), has requested that the President issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period on that day when the people of the United States might unite in prayer and reflection.  The Congress, by Public Law 106-579, has also designated 3:00 p.m. local time on that day as a time for all Americans to observe, in their own way, the National Moment of Remembrance.

     NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Memorial Day, May 27, 2024, as a day of prayer for permanent peace, and I designate the hour beginning in each locality at 11:00 a.m. of that day as a time when people might unite in prayer and reflection.  I urge the press, radio, television, and all other information media to cooperate in this observance.  I further ask all Americans to observe the National Moment of Remembrance beginning at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day.

     I request the Governors of the United States and its Commonwealths and Territories, and the appropriate officials of all units of government, to direct that the flag be flown at half-staff until noon on this Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels throughout the United States and in all areas under its jurisdiction and control.  I encourage families, friends, and neighbors to post tributes to our fallen service members through the Veterans Legacy Memorial at vlm.cem.va.gov so that we may learn more about the lives and contributions of those buried in National, State, and Tribal veteran cemeteries.  I also request the people of the United States to display the flag at half-staff from their homes for the customary forenoon period.

     IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fourth day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.                                    JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Stay Connected

We'll be in touch with the latest information on how President Biden and his administration are working for the American people, as well as ways you can get involved and help our country build back better.

Opt in to send and receive text messages from President Biden.

Have a thesis expert improve your writing

Check your thesis for plagiarism in 10 minutes, generate your apa citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Working with sources
• How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on 8 April 2022 by Courtney Gahan and Jack Caulfield. Revised on 15 May 2023.

Paraphrasing means putting someone else’s ideas into your own words. Paraphrasing a source involves changing the wording while preserving the original meaning.

Paraphrasing is an alternative to  quoting (copying someone’s exact words and putting them in quotation marks ). In academic writing, it’s usually better to paraphrase instead of quoting. It shows that you have understood the source, reads more smoothly, and keeps your own voice front and center.

Every time you paraphrase, it’s important to cite the source . Also take care not to use wording that is too similar to the original. Otherwise, you could be at risk of committing plagiarism .

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Be assured that you'll submit flawless writing. Upload your document to correct all your mistakes.

Table of contents

How to paraphrase in five easy steps, how to paraphrase correctly, examples of paraphrasing, how to cite a paraphrase, paraphrasing vs quoting, paraphrasing vs summarising, avoiding plagiarism when you paraphrase, frequently asked questions about paraphrasing.

If you’re struggling to get to grips with the process of paraphrasing, check out our easy step-by-step guide in the video below.

The only proofreading tool specialized in correcting academic writing

The academic proofreading tool has been trained on 1000s of academic texts and by native English editors. Making it the most accurate and reliable proofreading tool for students.

Correct my document today

Putting an idea into your own words can be easier said than done. Let’s say you want to paraphrase the text below, about population decline in a particular species of sea snails.

Incorrect paraphrasing

You might make a first attempt to paraphrase it by swapping out a few words for  synonyms .

Like other sea creatures inhabiting the vicinity of highly populated coasts, horse conchs have lost substantial territory to advancement and contamination , including preferred breeding grounds along mud flats and seagrass beds. Their Gulf home is also heating up due to global warming , which scientists think further puts pressure on the creatures , predicated upon the harmful effects extra warmth has on other large mollusks (Barnett, 2022).

This attempt at paraphrasing doesn’t change the sentence structure or order of information, only some of the word choices. And the synonyms chosen are poor:

• ‘Advancement and contamination’ doesn’t really convey the same meaning as ‘development and pollution’.
• Sometimes the changes make the tone less academic: ‘home’ for ‘habitat’ and ‘sea creatures’ for ‘marine animals’.
• Adding phrases like ‘inhabiting the vicinity of’ and ‘puts pressure on’ makes the text needlessly long-winded.
• Global warming is related to climate change, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing.

Because of this, the text reads awkwardly, is longer than it needs to be, and remains too close to the original phrasing. This means you risk being accused of plagiarism .

Correct paraphrasing

Let’s look at a more effective way of paraphrasing the same text.

Here, we’ve:

• Only included the information that’s relevant to our argument (note that the paraphrase is shorter than the original)
• Retained key terms like ‘development and pollution’, since changing them could alter the meaning
• Structured sentences in our own way instead of copying the structure of the original
• Started from a different point, presenting information in a different order

Because of this, we’re able to clearly convey the relevant information from the source without sticking too close to the original phrasing.

Explore the tabs below to see examples of paraphrasing in action.

• Journal article
• Newspaper article
• Magazine article

Once you have your perfectly paraphrased text, you need to ensure you credit the original author. You’ll always paraphrase sources in the same way, but you’ll have to use a different type of in-text citation depending on what citation style you follow.

Generate accurate citations with Scribbr

It’s a good idea to paraphrase instead of quoting in most cases because:

• Paraphrasing shows that you fully understand the meaning of a text
• Your own voice remains dominant throughout your paper
• Quotes reduce the readability of your text

But that doesn’t mean you should never quote. Quotes are appropriate when:

• Giving a precise definition
• Saying something about the author’s language or style (e.g., in a literary analysis paper)
• Providing evidence in support of an argument
• Critiquing or analysing a specific claim

A paraphrase puts a specific passage into your own words. It’s typically a similar length to the original text, or slightly shorter.

When you boil a longer piece of writing down to the key points, so that the result is a lot shorter than the original, this is called summarising .

Paraphrasing and quoting are important tools for presenting specific information from sources. But if the information you want to include is more general (e.g., the overarching argument of a whole article), summarising is more appropriate.

When paraphrasing, you have to be careful to avoid accidental plagiarism .

Students frequently use paraphrasing tools , which can be especially helpful for non-native speakers who might have trouble with academic writing. While these can be useful for a little extra inspiration, use them sparingly while maintaining academic integrity.

This can happen if the paraphrase is too similar to the original quote, with phrases or whole sentences that are identical (and should therefore be in quotation marks). It can also happen if you fail to properly cite the source.

To make sure you’ve properly paraphrased and cited all your sources, you could elect to run a plagiarism check before submitting your paper.

To paraphrase effectively, don’t just take the original sentence and swap out some of the words for synonyms. Instead, try:

• Reformulating the sentence (e.g., change active to passive , or start from a different point)
• Combining information from multiple sentences into one
• Leaving out information from the original that isn’t relevant to your point
• Using synonyms where they don’t distort the meaning

The main point is to ensure you don’t just copy the structure of the original text, but instead reformulate the idea in your own words.

Paraphrasing without crediting the original author is a form of plagiarism , because you’re presenting someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.

However, paraphrasing is not plagiarism if you correctly reference the source . This means including an in-text referencing and a full reference , formatted according to your required citation style (e.g., Harvard , Vancouver ).

As well as referencing your source, make sure that any paraphrased text is completely rewritten in your own words.

Plagiarism means using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own. Paraphrasing means putting someone else’s ideas into your own words.

So when does paraphrasing count as plagiarism?

• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if you don’t properly credit the original author.
• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if your text is too close to the original wording (even if you cite the source). If you directly copy a sentence or phrase, you should quote it instead.
• Paraphrasing  is not plagiarism if you put the author’s ideas completely into your own words and properly reference the source .

To present information from other sources in academic writing , it’s best to paraphrase in most cases. This shows that you’ve understood the ideas you’re discussing and incorporates them into your text smoothly.

It’s appropriate to quote when:

• Changing the phrasing would distort the meaning of the original text
• You want to discuss the author’s language choices (e.g., in literary analysis )
• You’re presenting a precise definition
• You’re looking in depth at a specific claim

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

Gahan, C. & Caulfield, J. (2023, May 15). How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 27 May 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/working-sources/paraphrasing/

Is this article helpful?

Courtney Gahan

Other students also liked, harvard in-text citation | a complete guide & examples, how to avoid plagiarism | tips on citing sources, apa referencing (7th ed.) quick guide | in-text citations & references.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• NEWS EXPLAINER
• 22 May 2024

Singapore Airlines turbulence: why climate change is making flights rougher

• Carissa Wong 0

Carissa Wong is a science journalist in London.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Emergency masks were deployed during the Singapore Airlines flight that experienced severe turbulence this week, killing one man. Credit: Reuters

Severe turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore has left a 73-year-old man dead and injured more than 70 people. The incident, although rare, is raising questions about what caused such a serious disruption to the flight — and whether climate change will make the strength and frequency of turbulence on planes worse.

The plane, which departed on 20 May, experienced a sudden drop of around more than 1,800 metres that launched people and objects towards the cabin roof. It is the airline’s first fatal incident in 24 years.

“Severe turbulence is the one that turns you into a projectile,” says atmospheric researcher Paul Williams at Reading University, UK. “For anyone not wearing a seatbelt it would have been a bit like being on a rollercoaster without any restraint in place — it would have been terrifying,” he says.

Nature looks at the science of air turbulence and how climate change will influence it.

What causes turbulence in aeroplanes?

Most flights experience some level of turbulence. Near the ground, strong winds around the airport can cause turbulence as planes take off or land. At higher altitudes, up- and downwards flows of air in storm clouds can cause mild to severe turbulence as planes fly through or near them. “Nobody likes flying through a storm,” says Williams.

Air flows that move upwards over mountain ranges can also create turbulence. “As the air blows over the mountain, the plane gets lifted up and can become turbulent,” says Williams. Moreover, turbulence often occurs on the edges of jet streams, which are strong air currents that circle the globe. Any turbulence that occurs outside of clouds is called “clear air” turbulence. It could take weeks to establish what kind of turbulence caused the Singapore Airlines incident, says Williams. “Provisionally, there was a storm nearby, but also the conditions were right for clear air turbulence — we need to do some more digging before we can say,” he says.

Damage in the galley of the Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 aeroplane. Credit: Reuters

Is climate change making turbulence worse and more frequent?

Climate change is making turbulence more frequent and severe, says atmospheric researcher Jung-Hoon Kim at Seoul National University.

In a study published last year 1 , Williams and his colleagues found large increases in clear-air turbulence between 1979 and 2020. Over the North Atlantic, severe clear-air turbulence — which is stronger than Earth’s gravity — became 55% more frequent. There were similar increases in turbulence all over the world, he says. The increase is almost certainly the result of climate change, which is strengthening the jet streams that cause turbulence, says Williams. “We already know it’s having an impact,” he says.

In another study 2 , Williams and his colleagues used a climate model to predict that clear-air turbulence would become more severe and frequent as the climate warms. The researchers estimated that severe turbulence would increase in frequency more than light or moderate levels of turbulence. In line with this, Kim and his colleagues found that clear-air turbulence around clouds and mountains would become more frequent with climate change, in a study published last year.

Despite the probable rise in turbulence, most flights will carry on as they do now — with light or mild turbulence, says Williams. “It is not that we’ll have to stop flying, or planes will start falling out of the sky,” says Williams. “I’m just saying that for every 10 minutes, you’ve spent in severe turbulence in the past, it could be 20 or 30 minutes in the future,” says Williams.

Can we predict and prevent bad turbulence?

Pilots use turbulence projections to plan flight paths. Researchers at weather centres can predict turbulence based on data collected from ground-based sensors and satellites and communicate predictions to pilots. On the plane, pilots use radar to identify storm clouds to avoid. This relies on radiowaves being sent out from the aircraft, which are then reflected back towards sensors that map out the surrounding area.

But radar cannot detect cloudless clear air turbulence. Another technology called LiDAR could help, says Williams. “LiDAR is similar to radar but uses a different wavelength of light,” says Williams, “Unfortunately it’s expensive, and requires a big heavy box, but it can see invisible clear air turbulence.” If the box can be miniaturised and the cost comes down, it could soon be used, he says. “I’ve seen some experimental flights, and you can indeed see clear air turbulence 20 miles, for example, ahead of the aircraft,” he says.

Until then, “I hope that everybody when they travel, please fasten your seat belts,” says Kim.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01542-2

Prosser, M. C., Williams, P. D., Marlton, G. J. & Harrison, R. G. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50 , e2023GL103814 (2023).

Article   Google Scholar  

Storer, L. N., Williams, P. D. & Joshi, M. M. Geophys. Res. Lett . 44 , 9976–9984 (2017).

Download references

Reprints and permissions

• Climate sciences
• Climate change

Monsoons are changing in India — here’s how to climate-proof the economy

World View 28 MAY 24

Risks of bridge collapses are real and set to rise — here’s why

Comment 28 MAY 24

Why role-playing games can spur climate action

World View 22 MAY 24

Postdoctoral Associate- Neuroscience

Houston, Texas (US)

Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

Call for applications- junior and senior scientists

The BORDEAUX INSTITUTE OF ONCOLOGY (BRIC U1312, https://www.bricbordeaux.com/) is seeking to recruit new junior and senior researchers

Bordeaux (Ville), Gironde (FR)

INSERM - U1312 BRIC

Postdoctoral Scholar - Organic Synthesis

Memphis, Tennessee

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC)

Postdoctoral Scholar - Chemical Biology

Postdoctoral scholar - clinical pharmacy & translational science.

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

• Facebook Icon
• Twitter Icon

What Does Left Internationalism Mean in the 21st Century?

• Back Issues

“Religion,” our new issue, is out now. Subscribe to our print edition today.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has put international concerns front and center for the US left today. Jacobin spoke with three leading internationalist organizers about how leftists should think about international solidarity in the 21st century.

Students of City College of New York camp on the campus and take part in Gaza protest against Israeli attacks in New York, United States on April 25, 2024. (Fatih Aktas / Anadolu via Getty Images)

The new US socialist movement that sprung from the 2016 presidential campaign was, in a certain sense, an “America First” left. Not because it was nationalistic, xenophobic, or isolationist, but because it focused largely on domestic political questions: Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and police racism and violence, among others.

October 7 changed this overnight. Since last fall, the overwhelming focus of the US left has been on protesting the US government’s deep complicity in Israel’s murderous retaliation against Palestinians. One of the biggest stories in American politics today is the wave of protest and repression that has swept university campuses, and which seems poised to affect the outcome of this fall’s presidential election. Commencement day has already arrived for many students, but one thing seems clear — summer vacation will not end the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The Palestine solidarity movement raises a set of larger questions that the new left has yet to address. What is the meaning of internationalism today? What should socialist internationalism look like in an increasingly multipolar era? Would a multipolar world be more peaceful and progressive or just the latest version of great-power geopolitics? Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano recently spoke with three leading practitioners of internationalism on the US left — Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher Jr, and Van Gosse — about their experiences in this field and their views of what it means to be an internationalist in the twenty-first century.

What was your path to internationalist politics?

For me, it was a matter of timing. I graduated high school in the big year of the anti–Vietnam War movement, which was 1968. If you went to college or were around universities, it was hard not to get pulled into antiwar stuff.

The draft played a huge role in that because people were directly affected. But it wasn’t only that; it was also a moment of what we would now call intersectionality. This was the height of the black student uprisings where I was in school in California. There was also a Latino student mobilization, and the student-rights issues were all over the place. The cops were on campus every other week, and the responses were dramatic.

I spent my childhood and youth as a hardcore Zionist — I suppose that’s a perverse kind of internationalism in a way. But I left all that stuff behind and went off to work on Vietnam.

Several years later, after studying imperialism and colonialism — because that’s what you did if you were a young lefty in those days — I realized this Israel stuff I always assumed was correct no longer sounded right. I went to my father’s library and read Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and found his letters to Cecil Rhodes where Herzl asked Rhodes for his support because, as he put it, their projects were “both something colonial.” That was that, and I started looking at Palestinian rights.

It was definitely the Vietnam antiwar movement for me. My parents were academics in a typical college town, and it came up as the thing that was happening there. When I was ten, in 1968, my older brother explained to me that what the Vietnamese were doing was like what the Americans had done in 1776. They were fighting for their freedom as a country, and they were on the right side, and it suddenly made total sense.

I got involved in antiwar politics as a boy — I went to the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam with my mother. I was in New York City at that point, and if you were in New York City in the late 1960s or early ’70s the antiwar movement was all around you. There was a lot of electoral work too, like the George McGovern campaign in 1972.

In 1982, I got involved in El Salvador solidarity and stayed in that for thirteen years. That was really the formative thing for me, but everything was shaped by Vietnam.

I’ve been interested in international issues since I was very young, like nine or ten years old. I was very influenced by anti-communist propaganda in connection with the Vietnam War. Then in 1965, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic (DR). I had an uncle who had been a member of the Communist Party; after the Dominican Republic invasion, he came over to my great-grandmother’s house, where I was for some reason, and he was furious about it in a way you rarely see when something is not happening to someone personally. This shook me and shook my backward views.

That incident in connection with the DR left an impression on me that worked its way around in my head. A couple of years later, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X , and that was the defining moment in terms of who I was to become and what I wanted to do. Malcolm’s internationalism was very influential on me, and subsequently I became very close to the Black Panther Party. I became very involved in Vietnam work and issues around Africa.

The post-9/11 antiwar movement was very formative for me. I was in college when 9/11 happened, and I very quickly threw myself into antiwar organizing with my friends on campus. The three of you were involved in founding United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which organized a number of very big antiwar demonstrations that I went to and remember quite well. What was your motivation for starting the group, and what in your estimation did it accomplish?

During the Vietnam antiwar movement, there was a broad movement that was basically saying, “Get the troops out, the US should not be there, the US should stop intervening,” and so on. Then there was a smaller core within that movement who said the Vietnamese are right. The chant was, “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, we’re on the side of the Vietcong.” It clearly identified with the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese. That was never a major component of the antiwar movement in terms of its numbers, but it was central to building the movement.

During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, there was a similar situation. I was in the middle of one of the big antiwar coalitions, the precursor to UFPJ ten years later. We thought there was nothing progressive about the Iraqi government, which had actually been supported by the United States for many years — but others did, which was why there were two coalitions at the time.

The same split happened again ten years later. We thought US troops should get out of the Middle East, but we also recognized there were huge human rights issues in countries like Iraq. In the case of the Vietnamese, unlike Iraq, [the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam] were fighting for a kind of progressive social program. They didn’t do it well all the time, but it was a set of principles we believed in too. That was true in the Central American wars and in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. But it was not the case in the first Gulf War or the Iraq War or the Afghanistan war.

The day after 9/11, some of us met at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and started talking about how a disastrous war was inevitably coming and how it was going to shape the next political period. We thought that what was needed after the attacks was justice, not vengeance. So we initiated a statement called “Justice, Not Vengeance” and worked with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover to get other high-profile people to sign it.

Our sense was that the American people were not being given any other options for how to respond to such a horrific crime. They were not being told that there were options other than war. The government and the media told the American people, either we go to war or we let the perpetrators get away with it. This was the context in which the three of us and a bunch of other people came together to form UFPJ.

I was on vacation in the summer of 2002. One day it really hit me that George W. Bush was going to take us to war — that it wasn’t just rhetoric. So I got on the phone with Van and I said, what the hell? What are we going to do?

Van went to work on this, and we both started thinking about people to bring together. Some efforts had already been started; Medea Benjamin had put together a website that was called United for Peace. Then, on October 25, 2002, we founded UFPJ. It was the broadest of the antiwar coalitions. It was very anti-sectarian, which distinguished it from ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism]. We did some remarkable work, and the work that led to the February 15, 2003, global march against the war was amazing.

The work was so good that we missed some important things that we should have been thinking about, like how difficult it is to stop a ruling class from pulling the trigger unless there are real fractures and divisions within that ruling class. We also didn’t have much in the way of a strategy for what to do after the war started.

I was organizing director of Peace Action for five years, from 1995 to 2000. We did some good work, but there was a kind of political abstentionism going on in the peace movement after the Cold War, in the sense that none of the national peace organizations was prepared to call for full-on national mobilization. There was lobbying, “dear colleague” letters, and what have you.

ANSWER walked into that vacuum. That was extremely problematic because it meant when you wanted to protest the bombing of Kosovo, you went to a demonstration where there were people with big photos of Slobodan Milošević. I don’t want to be marching with Milošević photos. By the spring of 2002, it was clear that the United States wanted to go to war in Iraq. I remember thinking, are we really only going to have a narrow, sectarian coalition? A coalition in name only, really; there was no national organization in it.

We didn’t have a strategy. We were just desperately trying to stop the war. I remember Phyllis saying to us at a meeting that we had a chance to stop it, and I think we did. What nobody seems to remember is that around 60 percent of the House Democratic caucus voted against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and almost a majority of the Democratic caucus in the Senate did. The potential was there; there was nothing like lockstep support for war in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The origins of that February 15, 2003, protest were not with UFPJ — it came out of the global justice movement in Europe, particularly the European Social Forum meeting in Italy that happened in November 2002. There were two or three thousand people crammed into the meeting place.

They were not mainly antiwar people; it was basically people from the anti–corporate globalization movement, which was on a roll at that point. That movement pivoted to focus on stopping this war. That was an incredible moment. UFPJ was pulled into that as the clear US counterpart to the Europeans and the Asian contingents that were part of it. There was less participation in planning from Africa and Latin America, but it was quite international when it took place.

What I regret the most, in some ways, is we didn’t recognize sooner that it was not a failure. Mobilizing fifteen million people in eight hundred cities around the world on one day was going to have an impact in the future, and we couldn’t anticipate exactly what that would look like at the time. But we know now that it’s one of the big reasons why Bush did not go to war against Iran in 2007. It’s one of the things that gave rise to the leadership of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Protests almost never win the exact demand they’re fighting for now, but they set the stage for future mobilization, and we didn’t recognize that enough.

Bill and Van, some years ago you wrote an essay called “ A New Internationalism .” In that essay, you argued:

In the second decade of the 21st century, however, our practice of internationalism is confused and stuck in old habits and discourses left over from the era of Third World liberation, beginning early in the twentieth century, and the Cold War of 1945–1991.

What did you mean by that, and do you still think this is the case?

A rift has developed within the global left and progressive movements around international issues and authoritarianism. In 2002 or 2003, there was massive repression in Zimbabwe under then president Robert Mugabe. All kinds of dissidents were being jailed. Trade unionists, including people that I knew personally, were jailed and tortured.

I had become the president of TransAfrica Forum (2002) and was in the leadership of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) around this time. The BRC’s coordinating committee discussed the Zimbabwe repression. An organization called Africa Action put out a sign-on letter protesting the repression in Zimbabwe; the letter came to us in the BRC, and the coordinating committee unanimously said, let’s sign onto this on behalf of the BRC.

Lordy, did all hell break loose. It became clear there was a whole section of the organization that was defiantly pro-Mugabe, which took the position that Mugabe was right to carry out this repression against alleged counterrevolutionaries, completely ignoring the neoliberal economic policies his government was carrying out. The coordinating committee had made a mistake in assessing what was going on within the organization.

But separate from that was the difference that was emerging about what constitutes internationalism, and how you deal with contradictions within countries that claim to be anti-imperialist, or at a minimum, anti–United States. It was a shock to the system for me, and at that point I realized the Left was in a whole new ball game — that we were going to have to rethink how we approach the global situation.

We had a similar debate at IPS about Zimbabwe, but we didn’t have a project at that point dealing with African policy so it wasn’t as sharp. But we’re seeing it now around Nicaragua and around Venezuela, and it’s no easier.

I have my own criticisms of what governments that I once supported when they were liberation movements are doing now, and I am not so happy about them now. But I’m not there. It’s not my place to be organizing against what the Vietnamese, for example, have done over the years in terms of labor rights or environmental concerns. But we certainly don’t defend it, and we do call it out. I still think our main work is challenging what our government is doing — but as internationalists we do recognize other governments’ human rights or other violations as well, and at times join with social movements in other countries to fight back against those violations.

It goes to the question of what we say about what our government is doing. One thing that’s hovering over this is our differences around Ukraine, which are less about what happened or what’s happening there than what the US government does about it. That is, I think, a more useful area of contention and debate within the Left, because people can have all kinds of different views about history and about who’s on what side.

There is still this reflexive mode of thinking you should be on the side of whoever the United States is opposed to. It’s crude thinking, and I felt it long before the Ukraine crisis. I remember talking to you, Bill, in 2002 or 2003 about the Taliban and Afghanistan, and you said the Taliban is a form of clerical fascism, and I thought that’s getting right at it.

There’s an idea dating from the twentieth century that anti-imperialism is necessarily on the Left or progressive, and that’s inaccurate historically. Plenty of anti-imperialism has come from the Right — from traditional power holders, warlords, religious leaders who have been displaced by the modern imperialists and are going to fight back.

This requires a certain kind of analysis of what is actually going on. It doesn’t mean you take the side of the imperialists. But that inability to name what the Taliban actually was was striking. Many of these people, whether the Taliban or Saddam Hussein or others, had been supported by the United States at one point or another.

The idea that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” discredits us as a left. I remember sitting in a living room in 1973 or ’74 with a representative from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angola who gave an incredible Marxist analysis of the struggle there and of what he claimed UNITA stood for, and his criticism of many other movements within the continent in terms of what they were doing.

Most of us were very familiar with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the MPLA, which was seen by us as problematically pro-Soviet. When UNITA emerged, many of us thought it was great. But then we found out that the story behind UNITA was a lot more complicated, including a mixture of legitimate revolutionaries with Portuguese agents and with tribalist forces in Angola. In fact, the guy that I met was later executed by Jonas Savimbi.

When it came to the Khmer Rouge, at the time many of us [thought] that the situation couldn’t have been that bad. Many of us refused to acknowledge what was going on. What that all taught me was the need for humility, and the need to investigate. I’ve seen countless people visiting the United States from alleged national liberation or left groups, and they say all the right things. But it’s not clear who they are, and you can easily jump to conclusions. We need to be prepared to do a concrete analysis and be willing to admit when we just don’t know.

Going back to when the repression went down in Zimbabwe, I remember having a discussion with this younger African American guy about it, and he was giving me the whole routine about Mugabe’s alleged anti-imperialism. I said, but they’re torturing people; I know people that are being tortured. What do you have to say about that? And this guy had no way of responding to it. That told me a lot about some of the deep weaknesses within the Left.

I had different kinds of experiences that led me to some of the same concerns around Vietnam. I was in Vietnam at the end of 1978, and it was just a couple of years after the war ended. Vietnam was still devastated.

The process of integration between north and south was just beginning, and Cambodia was still pretty much in a civil war. It wasn’t at the same level it had been, but the war was still going on. We began hearing strange rumors that the Vietnamese were thinking of going over the border and taking out the Khmer Rouge. I was there with an official delegation, and the Vietnamese officials who were with us assured us, no, that’s not going to happen.

We accepted that and went home, but shortly after we got back, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. We were like, whoa, let’s rethink all this.

It led to a sense that we need to be a little more careful. We had been hearing all this stuff about how terrible the Khmer Rouge were, and having the Vietnamese do what they did made those claims easier in some ways to accept because we still respected them so much. This kind of proved the claims about the Khmer Rouge to us, and it came at a time when it was hard to imagine how it could have been OK for the Vietnamese — who had always fought against China, Japan, France, and the United States for the notion of national sovereignty being primary — to overthrow another country’s government.

The other place where these concerns come up is on the question of armed struggle. We know that a nation under military occupation has the right to use military force to oppose that occupation. It does not have the right to use that force against civilians. We all know how to spout that idea about armed struggle in principle, but it doesn’t tell us when it’s the right thing to do.

The Palestinians are the last population in the traditional situation of being occupied by the top rank of US imperialist allies. There’s no question that a military occupation means they have the right to use military force, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do strategically. It’s a different era now. We’re no longer in an era where armed force is taken for granted as part of a global struggle against colonialism. There isn’t an armed global struggle against colonialism underway around the world.

If we look at the difference between the First and Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprisings that began in 1987 and then again in 2000, what stands out was the mass character of the First — overwhelmingly nonviolent — Intifada. The Second Intifada was an armed uprising that did include a lot of military targets, but it had plenty of civilian targets too. The biggest impact it had on Palestinians, in my view, is that it eliminated the mass character of the First Intifada, because when people with guns come out, everybody else goes home because it’s not safe. The children, the elders, the women who all played such a key role in the First Intifada had no role in the second one.

Many of us in the boomer generation used to think that a legitimate revolutionary movement equaled armed struggle, and armed struggle equaled a legitimate revolutionary movement.  When you look at a lot of the splits that happened in the Left in the 1960s, they were precisely over the question of armed struggle raised to the level of principle, not over whether it was tactically the right thing to do in the given conditions. Is this what we really need to do, or are we saying that this is what one does if one’s a “real” revolutionary? Many people did not move past that framework.

There is a growing strategic question being posed globally around what one does under very adverse circumstances, when there don’t appear to be nonviolent options. That’s why I think we have to be cautious about certain things that we say. In Myanmar, do the people have any option other than armed struggle? Probably not. In Kashmir, what should happen there? I don’t know. How do you build an anti-occupation struggle when you have this semi-fascist government in New Delhi?

The twentieth-century left had a great deal of trouble acknowledging the dangers of militarism. There’s a quotation from Che Guevara that nobody ever cites where he says that every other road must be explored before you turn to armed struggle. He said that — but we know how he set the completely opposite example with disastrous consequences. Foquismo didn’t work, as far as I can see, anywhere, and it got a lot of people slaughtered.

Even the most justified armed struggle is still going to leave some deep wounds; there’s nothing positive about militarism. Violence will be inflicted on the innocent no matter what, and that’s a political and moral-ethical issue that people should take seriously. [On that point,] I think Dr Martin Luther King Jr was a great revolutionary with great strategic sense.

A lot of my thinking about this has been shaped by interest in and engagement with, from boyhood, the liberation struggle in Northern Ireland. There are people there who have a hundred or more years of history of unbroken anti-colonial struggle in their families. Seeing that, and the very negative consequences that have resulted from it, has taught me a lot about the costs of militarism. The Left has not really moved beyond the era of national liberation struggles, or ever really analyzed them and asked, what are the lessons to be learned?

Van, I think your point about militarization is a good one. Many of the national liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century won power on the strength of armed struggle, and as you’re saying, that has an effect on what comes next.

The means you use to achieve a political goal do a lot to shape the ends. In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the governments that resulted from victorious national liberation struggles took that militaristic quality with them into government, whether you’re talking about Zimbabwe or Nicaragua or wherever.

I don’t think the problems that many of these governments had when they emerged from armed struggle were principally because they engaged in armed struggle. There have been a series of problems about the question of democracy and democracy in transitional circumstances, particularly when you are moving from a former colonial regime or neocolonial regime into something else. How does democracy fit into this process? What does it look like beyond voting? Vanguardism and lack of humility can lead to a whole series of problems.

For example, Amílcar Cabral and a cohort of quite brilliant theorists and strategists led the struggle against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau. If you look at some of the writings from the war, you feel fairly certain that Guinea-Bissau is going to come out of this struggle and become a model for Africa. That is exactly what didn’t happen. Cabral was murdered. There were contradictions that very few people wanted to talk about between the Cape Verdeans and the Bissau-Guineans. There was certainly a military element, but the military was largely kept under control by the party, at least during the liberation struggle. But there were underlying problems and fissures that the movement didn’t tackle.

The other thing I would add is that if you think the leading force of a revolutionary change is omniscient, then you immediately run into problems about the contradictions between the regime or state that’s put into place and the people they govern. In Grenada, the revolution that unfolded there from 1979 to 1983 had important and dynamic leadership in the New Jewel Movement. But it also had people represented by Bernard Coard, who followed a very Soviet model that saw the party as all-knowing.

They could not figure out how to build on democracy and recognize what the actual mandate of the revolution was. In Grenada, the mandate was anti-imperialist and anti-corruption. It was not a mandate for socialism. Coard ignored that and decided to plow ahead, irrespective of popular sentiment. So the mass organizations associated with the movement started running into problems and drying up. This was not mainly a problem of militarism — it was much deeper.

Bill, in talking about what a movement’s mandate is, you’ve invoked a more fundamental issue in many ways, which is the legacy of Leninism. Leninism was the overwhelming political practice of people engaged in revolution. Even if they weren’t socialists or Marxists, they were still Leninists. Vanguardism is what Bill called it.

I think it does make sense to identify militarism as a challenge though — while certainly agreeing with both of you that it isn’t the only problem. The role of armed struggle within a broader movement strategy is a hard one.

I think the ANC [African National Congress] during the struggle period in South Africa did better than most at situating armed actions within a strategy with several different pillars, the most important had to do with mass mobilization. Armed action was relatively much less central than that. I’m not sure whether or how it was connected, but I don’t think it’s an accident that the ANC also had a strong strategy for mobilizing and building international solidarity. In fact, I think the openness of the South Africans working on building the case against Israeli genocide at the International Court of Justice to working with and taking seriously civil society is likely a reflection of that earlier strategic approach.

In addition to militarism, self-determination can be incredibly problematic when it’s taken as an absolute principle by anyone who claims it, because it’s ultimately about nationalism. Internationalism can get left behind.

I remember when Yugoslavia was breaking up, I wrote a piece about the transformation of nationalism from an almost-always progressive force — which, in retrospect, it wasn’t either — that existed largely in the Global South, in the formerly colonized countries, and was linked to socialism, anti-imperialism, and all the progressive ideas we supported. But suddenly all these new European nationalisms sprung up, micronationalisms if you will, that seemed to have no end.

Yugoslavia divided, violently, into seven small states. Within those states, there are “nationalist” movements. How do we define the right of self-determination in a way that makes it part of a struggle that makes people’s lives better, and lifts up the most oppressed?

I think what all of this points to is the question of what internationalism means today. This seems very unclear and very unsettled.

Something you hear very often on the Left — and it comes up all the time around Ukraine — is that our main job as leftists in the United States should be to fight our own imperialists. That is often used as a way of saying either that we should have nothing to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or that we should do nothing to support the Ukrainian resistance even if we oppose the invasion.

There is an old slogan, “Workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” It is not “workers, oppressed people, and progressive governments unite.” It says workers and oppressed people of the world, unite. If that is your North Star, our attitude toward specific governments is secondary to the question of the people, the masses in various countries. Regardless of who is waving what flag, when there is oppression, when there is exploitation, our internationalism should put us on the side of the oppressed — as opposed to an internationalism that is mainly about geopolitical relationships between states.

You hear a lot of people today saying that we need a multipolar world. With all due respect, that is wrong. We need a nonpolar world. We’ve seen multipolar worlds. September 1939 was a multipolar world; August 1914 was a multipolar world. In fact, when you look through the history of humanity, most of the time there’s a multipolar world.

Between 1945 and 1991, we had two superpowers, and that was fundamentally different, and then in the post-1991 period with US hegemony. The idea that having multiple poles creates better circumstances for peace and for freedom struggles and justice struggles is simply wrong. History does not back that up.

One of the most multipolar moments in European history, at least, was the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. It was about great power cooperation to protect the status quo against democratic revolution.

“Multipolar” is a polite way of saying a return to great power politics. Look at what that’s already produced — there’s nothing admirable about it.

Polarities in this sense are certainly a huge problem. And it doesn’t do any good to, for instance, expand the BRICS movement to incorporate wealthy and repressive Arab Gulf states into its ranks. It’s kind of like the perpetual effort for United Nations reform that always seems to come back to adding more wealthy and powerful countries to the five permanent members of the Security Council: Should they have a veto like the Perm Five, or maybe only a temporary veto? Why do we need to expand the number of privileged powers, rather than trying to democratize power? That’s a much harder challenge, I’m afraid.

• My View My View
• Following Following
• Saved Saved

Palestinian state: What does Spain, Norway and Ireland’s recognition mean?

• Medium Text

WHAT DID IRELAND, NORWAY SPAIN ANNOUNCE?

Who else has recognised palestine, why is this significant, how did israel, palestinians react, what did the united states say, what is the position of other european nations.

Sign up here.

Writing by Sharon Singleton; Editing by Nick Macfie, William Maclean

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group released on Tuesday a video that appeared to show Israeli hostage Alexander Trufanov, 28, who was kidnapped by militants on Oct. 7.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said on Tuesday that they received a report of an incident 33 nautical miles northwest of Yemen's Mocha.