Since 7 October 2023, German authorities have imposed a far-reaching domestic crackdown on Palestine solidarity in tandem with the government’s political, diplomatic and material backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In this blog, Josephine Solanki shares the findings of her recent reportfor the Transnational Institute. She analyses and contextualises this crackdown, which ranges from legal changes, protest bans and police violence, to smear campaigns, cultural de-platforming, workplace reprisals, and the instrumentalisation of migration and asylum law. Together, these measures illustrate the emergence of a repressive infrastructure in Germany which criminalises almost any effective form of solidarity with Palestine and threatens broader civil liberties.
Aimé Césaire’s wrote that the methods of domination, racism and dehumanisation forged in Europe’s colonies eventually “boomerang” back, corroding democracy and being redeployed as repression inside Europe itself. Germany’s support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid regime abroad – with more than €485 million in arms transfers to Israel granted – has translated into repressive policies, mass surveillance, police brutality, and a shrinking space for free expression at home. A recent report titled ‘Solidarity under Siege: Germany’s repression of the Palestine movement’ I wrote for the Transnational Institute synthesises interviews with seven activists from the Palestinian solidarity movement, including Palestinians and German, Muslim and Jewish people, among other (overlapping) identities, legal and political analysis and case evidence to identify four main pillars of repression:
The legal-political architecture that deliberately conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism; using lawfare as a deterrent against political participation (with an estimated 12,000 Gaza-related cases currently pending), and specifically the instrumentalisation of asylum and migration law against those without German citizenship
Police violence and the crackdown on protests, with hundreds of demonstrations having been simply banned since October 2023
Cultural censorship, including the cancellation of events or exhibitions and uninviting of critical artists, funding cuts for both Palestinian and other organisations, and deplatforming of Palestinians and those standing in solidarity with them
workplace and economic consequences, including dozens of cases of people losing their jobs
Central to the repression of the Palestinian solidarity movement is the deliberate conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Germany’s historic responsibility for the Holocaust is routinely used to justify another genocide and the repression of those who try to stop it. Critics of Israel, many of whom are Jewish, are labelled as antisemitic and Palestinians who mourn their dead and demand justice are cast as a threat to public order.
This crackdown is not enforced by state power alone. As I show in the report, media outlets play a direct role in manufacturing consent by consistently justifying the genocide in Gaza and the violence inflicted on the West Bank as ‘Israel’s right to self-defence’. Domestically, they have uncritically echoed official German and Israeli state political and police narratives, dismissing or even inciting violence against the solidarity movement and ignoring the rapidly shrinking space for dissent. Meanwhile, many civil society actors have effectively self-policed their members, disinvited Palestinian speakers, cancelled events, and remained silent in the face of repression. Even sectors of the German left and social movements, fearing reputational damage or funding cuts, have failed to resist Germany’s authoritarian shift. Worse, in many cases they have actively enabled it.
A dangerous development in this context is the instrumentalisation of migration and asylum law. Under the pretext of combating antisemitism and extremism and in a general climate of increasingly inhumane, harmful and at times deadly migration policies, the state has refused visas, reopened asylum processes or blocked people’s naturalisation processes (both Palestiniansa nd others) for their Zionist stance. Thousands of people are currently threatened by deportation because of their activism, and at least one person has lost their citizenshipafter it was granted due to a revised 2024 citizenship law. Essentially, Germany has already turned into a two-tier society where people without citizenship have to think twice about what they post on social media, whether they attend a protest, and how they want to engage politically. Furthermore, while state actors continue to single out rising antisemitism, other forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia, have surged, with people paying for this with their health and lives.
This crackdown is not occurring in a vacuum. It is part of a broader shift towards the hard-right and the securitisation and militarisation of various domains in German and in global politics. What we are witnessing is not only complicity in a genocide, but an attempt to remilitarise German society, to redefine dissent as extremism, and to equate liberation movements with Nazism. Measures tested on the Palestinian solidarity movement may well be extended to other dissenting groups, from environmentalists to anti-militarists. With the EU and especially Germany actively preparing for war, the government is gearing up to suffocate the slowly reawakening anti-war movement.
The consequences of the repression are of course also deeply personal. For many Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and anti-Zionist Jewish residents in Germany, daily life has become a climate of violence and fear. Even so, people are resisting. Protests continue, even in the face of police violence. Palestinian voices remain defiant.
About the author:
Josephine Solanki
Josephine Solanki works at the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable planet. She holds an MA degree with distinction in Development Studies from the ISS and a BA degree in Philosophy and Economics.
But is this really a true ‘reset’? And for whom is the system being ‘reset’? Similar promises were made following the World Humanitarian Summit and associated ‘Grand Bargain’ in 2016, but these initiatives were characterized as top-down, and in some cases quite removed from the daily lived realities of people affected by crisis, and the people and organizations that respond to crisis.
This blog follows a discussion held by members of the Humanitarian Observatory movement: a network of 16 grounded, self-governing, and multi-actor spaces that aim to foster humanitarian knowledge sharing, research, advocacy, coordination, and dialogue. During the Observatory Network meeting in October 2025, held in Istanbul in the lead-up to the IHSA Conference, more than 25 people representing 16 Observatories discussed the ‘Humanitarian Reset’ (split into groups), critically analysing its relevance in the real world and imagining a more relevant a poignant reset. This meditation on the Reset joins several others, including a statement by NEAR Network, ICVA, and even a recently-released think piece by the CHA thinktank in Berlin heralding the ‘fading’ of the Reset.
This blog is based on those discussions, with three main themes having emerged:
Theme 1: A Humanitarian Reset focusing only on better responses is partial
Across multiple groups, Network members discussed a perceived focus only on making humanitarian response better within the Humanitarian Reset. Multiple groups highlighted the need for a more holistic and long-term approach to humanitarian action if the Reset was to be made more relevant. This approach should be cognizant of and try to combat past historical injustices that have affected how people in various contexts are able to ‘deal with’ humanitarian crisis: “we should focus on the structural and historical issues, including everyday threats to people’s lives”, and “a lot of crises are structural and based in power and historical structures.” It was felt across various groups that formal humanitarianism focusing only on responding to disasters is missing quite a lot of ingrained and historically-related precarity that affects people’s day-to-day lives more than technical disaster response improvement does.
Meanwhile, multiple groups also highlighted that with the ever-growing effects of climate change leading to a “permanent state of emergency”, the nature of humanitarianism is changing and thus the Reset should consider taking a different and more cyclical approach: “Why is the current system not working? It is designed for quick fixes and emergency management”. In general, the groups saw a lack of attention in the Reset documents and discourse around Disaster Risk Reduction, Anticipatory Action, and other longer-term projects and initiatives that try to reduce people and societies’ vulnerabilities. One contributor quipped that the Reset seems to be trying to make the formal humanitarian system more resilient to funding cuts, rather than making societies more resilient to disasters; especially due to its call for ‘hyper prioritisation’.
Theme 2: The Humanitarian Reset should pay attention to a wider range of actors as being part of the ‘humanitarian system’
Across all discussions, Observatory Network members highlighted that the Humanitarian Reset seems to spend too much time focusing on the work of the ‘formal’ humanitarian system; for example iNGOs, UN Agencies, and some national organisations (depending on the context). This leads to a partial definition of ‘who’ and ‘what’ needs to be ‘reset’, and also reduces the transferability of its proposed changes. The focus on the international organisations leading local also led to discussions on the Reset as a form of neo-coloniality.
For example, several groups highlighted that the Reset up until this point has not particularly engaged with state actors, which are becoming ever-more pertinent humanitarian actors (or: actors with humanitarian aid roles), and especially with reference to slower-moving crises caused by climate change, such as extreme heat. The axing of most USAID programmes in early 2025 underlined this experience in Namibia: “it was a wake up call to the government, to work on its own and sustain its own people. This is something of a positive, it has helped push the government to provide for its communities… there is a new youth empowerment programme, whether the government is giving funding for young people to start up projects.” Meanwhile in South Asia, colleagues found that following USAID cuts they could pivot to work with affected people to define their own recovery from disaster (in this instance, extreme heat).
HO Network members brought attention to the point that most of the actors addressed by the Humanitarian Reset’s priorities are part of the established or ‘formal’ humanitarian system: “I haven’t really seen any region where the reset is happening or being driven by people on the ground. It is very top down”, and “most of the humanitarian [work] is coming from the North to the South, and this is part of the problem.” One group brought up the continuing presence of UN Agencies as being the main funding channels as an example that the approach taken in the Reset is unnecessarily narrow. The impression for many members of the Network is that the reset is a Global North-led initiative, that hasn’t really begun to approach shifting the centre of humanitarian work from its historic headquarters. In Kenya, for example, despite its ambitions, Reset-led initiatives it have not yet demonstrated a meaningful shift toward locally led decision-making or recognising the leadership of actors responding to climate-related crises, especially in the Kenyan arid/semi-arid regions. This theme also raised questions about accountability: you cannot genuinely reset a system if governments (and the donors supporting that system) do not feel accountable for causing the conflict or crisis (e.g. in Palestine and Sudan).
However, many of the groups did note that the number of people and organisations doing humanitarian work is broadening as a response to their context. Trends highlighted include several donors (for example, Gulf Donors) preferring to channel their funds directly to local or national actors.
Theme 3: A Humanitarian Reset cannot be ‘one size fits all’, and should be contextual
“We need to break down the universalism of the humanitarian system, as there are multiple humanitarian systems in place”. Many members of the Observatory Network observed that assumptions of universal applicability of many humanitarian reform initiatives hamper actual, real-world reform. Several people also highlighted that the language of humanitarianism used in many of the Reset documentation is not an accurate reflection of most people’s lived realities, and drew parallels to HDP Nexus initiatives: “it is now becoming detached from reality, and is becoming only useful for donors.” It is also important to highlight that a universal attempt to reform the humanitarian system minimises the differences in how change happens in diverse contexts. For example, in DRC, Network members noted that change will require bringing together national Civil Society organisations, not just (i)NGOs. “In our experience, changes are not linear. It is like a farmer; you plant seeds and wait. Something is happening [under the surface], but it is hard to see each step.” Meanwhile, the more diverse and plural the reset, the more effective it is likely to be in South Asia. Standardization is useful, and as a start, to lead to many local blooming of reset that is harmonized, localized, and contextualised.
Other takeaways
Within the group, several people noted that the Humanitarian Reset documents and statements mention further collaboration with the Private Sector as a way to increase efficiencies, funding, and broaden service provision. Whilst participants generally mentioned the potential possibilities of (further) Private Sector inclusion in humanitarian aid provision, for example by allowing displaced people living in Thailand to work in the private sector, obtain a wage, and live with more dignity, many sounded cautionary notes:
In India there is a discussion that there is a huge focus on corporate organisations taking humanitarian action. A lot of privatisation is taking place. A lot of monetisation is taking place in the name of cash transfers. The victims are not seen as victims, but as a potential workforce. HOISA finds that Reset must move from this ahead to make each victim an agent of new, safe, and less at risk community and nation with the help of the authorities and corporations as soon as possible.
In Kenya, meanwhile, there are discussions within the observatory network that increasing private sector involvement in drought response and climate services, while useful in some cases, is also creating concerns. In several contexts, essential services risk becoming commercialised, with vulnerable households treated more as customers than rights-holders. Hence, the need for safeguards to ensure that private sector engagement supports resilience rather than deepening existing inequalities.
In general participants also called attention to issues with “hyper prioritization”, which may lead to humanitarians having to make choices between contexts undergoing moderate severity crisis versus high severity crisis, with one participant saying that the approach might lead to “not providing food aid to the hungry, to allow provision to the starving”.
Conclusion – Reset how?
The Humanitarian Reset has the same potential as other reform initiatives led by the UN (as one participant highlighted: “this isn’t a new initiative”) including the Grand Bargain, but it might be better for the UN to take a more introspective look and propose reform, for example via the UN80 initiative. Within the Reset, there is a lot of talking happening, but this risks of becoming performative, rather then genuine transformation and meaningful action. Unfortunately, the Reset’s narrow focus in several ways means that it is likely to be a tool for funders and institutions that consider themselves part of the ‘formal’ humanitarian system. Indeed, several people highlighted that the slashing of USAID funding and programming caused bigger on the ground shifts due to necessity. Whilst there are new developments in multiple humanitarian contexts, including bigger roles for local/national organisations, inclusion of networks and citizens’ groupings in programming, and new forms of funding – these are happening at the same time as the Humanitarian Reset, not as a result of it.
This blog was written with contributions from:
Humanitarian Observatory DRC
Humanitarian Observatory of Ethiopia
Humanitarian Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean
Humanitarian Observatory of Palestine
Humanitarian Observatory of the Netherlands
Humanitarian Observatory Initiative South Asia (HOISA)
Humanitarian Observatory of Namibia
Humanitarian Observatory of Kenya
Humanitarian Observatory of Central and Eastern Europe
Humanitarian Observatory for Policy and Education, South East Asia (HOPESEA)
Humanitarian Observatory of Nigeria
Humanitarian Observatory of Myanmar
Humanitarian Observatory of Somalia
Humanitarian Observatory of the Philippines
Maraka Humanitarian Observatory of Pakistan
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
The Authors:
Mihir Bhatt (AIDMI), Juan Ricardo Aparicio Cuervo (Uni. Los Andes), Eunice Atieno (ORNACO), Patrick Milabyo Kyamugusulwa (ISDR-Bukavu), Julia Goltermann (KUNO), Tom Ansell (HSC-ISS), Kaira Zoe Canete (HSC-ISS), Gabriela Anderson (HSC-ISS)
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This blog is part of the ‘Humanitarian Observatories: Building a Knowledge and Advocacy Network on Humanitarian Governance’. This project has received funding from the European Union under the Horizon European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This blog is part of a series on ‘the Politics of Food and Technology’, in collaboration with the SOAS Food Studies Centre. All of the blogs in this series are contributions made at the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference in Istanbul-Bergen, October 2025, to the panel with a similar title. To read the rest of the blogs in this series, please click here.
In this blog, Iris Lim, Susanne Jaspars, and Yasmin Houamed (SOAS) highlight a growing food crisis in the UK, alongside a ‘digital-by-default’ welfare transformation. Digitalisation has created the potential to exclude poor and politically marginalised populations because they are unable to pay for digital access, and because of the way the system has been designed. They argue that this exacerbates already existing food insecurity and that digital access is fundamental to addressing it.
Over the last decade, the UK’s deepening food crisis has unfolded alongside a ‘digital-by-default’ transformation of welfare and food support infrastructures. Over this period, food insecurity has increased to as much as 18% of the UK population (in 2022). Emergency food distribution, almost unknown a decade ago, has soared, with Trussell, one of the UK’s largest food bank networks, distributing 2.9 million emergency food parcels in 2024-25, the equivalent of one parcel every 11 seconds. Policymakers routinely justify digitalisation for reasons of efficiency and accountability, but in this blog, we show how it redistributes responsibility and burden downward onto those already experiencing deprivation and food insecurity and deepens exclusions for those that need welfare the most across England. For a wide range of population groups (for example refugees, migrants, or white working class), design and delivery choices shape who gets help and who falls through the cracks.
In the UK, the digitalisation of welfare started with Universal Credit in 2012, which combined seven different benefits (unemployment, housing, child benefit, etc) to a single monthly payment. It requires claimants to apply online, and to provide ongoing online entries and communications with work coaches. Despite concerns raised early on about exclusions due to digital poverty, this was followed by online registration and pre-paid debit cards for the ‘Healthy Start’ government food support programme (for pregnant women and those with young children) in 2022. Free school meals have also been digitalised, and several government and charitable organisations distribute digital vouchers to be redeemed in supermarkets. Supermarkets and other retailers have also developed a number of apps to supply food to organisations and to individuals. Government digitalisation strategies from 2010 were driven by austerity policies which entailed cutting welfare and public service spending,Amnesty International, in examining the UK’s welfare system, concluded that it does not comply with obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Human rights violations include the barriers imposed by digitalisation because they increase hardship.
Poverty as a digital ‘paywall’
Poverty acts as a digital ‘paywall’ to food assistance and wider welfare access. Access to digital devices, data, and skills, all contingent on affordability, has become a prerequisite for gaining welfare support. Few people living in poverty have smartphones and so rely on basic phones, or, in the case that their phones have been lost or stolen, they rely on shared numbers. For those who did have smartphones, data poverty pervaded their experience. Those unable to purchase data for internet connectivity must hop between public Wi-Fi hotspots or borrow hotspots from volunteers. Broadband social tariffs are available from some internet providers but are poorly publicised and often unaffordable or unavailable where needed. According to one assessment, 95% of eligible households miss out. In some rural and peri-urban areas, connectivity infrastructure is lacking, making access difficult. Exclusion operates through market mechanisms, requiring people to purchase access to claim public support.
Eroding infrastructure and disappearing spaces of care
As public spaces with face-to-face support have diminished, food banks and community support organisations have doubled as social infrastructure where people can still receive mediated digital access and build trust and skills, yet these remain volunteer dependent and uneven.
Myth of simple digital literacy
One persistent issue underpinning digital welfare is the assumption that digital competence and skills is straightforward – that if someone can use a smartphone, they can navigate a digital welfare system. The reality is far more complex. Digital skills vary highly by context and people adept at sending messages and photos to their friends on social media apps may struggle with formal emails, government portals, and forms. These concerns cut across generations and familiarity with technology, affecting older adults and younger people alike. Language and literacy also create key barriers, with both English as an Additional Language (EAL) and native English speakers struggling when they confront text-heavy portals and official language. To fill this gap, only ad hoc chains of help and translation through friends, children, and volunteers mediate a fragile and uneven access.
Design choices
Interface and service design itself shapes patterns of exclusion. Designers build platforms that work best on desktop computers, but most marginalised people use them on mobile phones with tiny screens and face difficulty uploading required documents. Some systems still require people to download PDFs, print them, fill them out by hand, scan them, and email them back. These complicated user journeys overwhelm even confident users, especially if they have to travel to access a printer or scanner, which introduces new costs to your attempt to access food assistance. Small missteps, such as a missed upload deadlines or dropped connection, often produce detrimental sanctions or benefits losses.
As Taylor notes in ‘Beyond the Numbers’, when systems demand proof that vulnerable people cannot provide, we risk ‘institutionalising a bias towards the visible’. In the UK, welfare design may be embedding this bias directly into interfaces and processes. Rather than streamlining access for those who need food assistance the most, digitalisation seems optimised for administrative efficiency. This creates obstacles for users who must travel far to scan forms, navigate portals instead of speaking to humans, and be digitally competent to demonstrate their need through online forms. Within the UK Welfare system as a whole, several organisations including Amnesty International have highlighted the ‘punitive regime’ of administration and complexity needs to access benefits that people are eligible for.
The psychological toll
The digital-first regimes carry heavy psychological costs, such as anxiety around sanctions for simply missing an email, humiliation at intrusive verification, and a sense of being set up to fail. People describe panic when payments stop, tears at job centre interactions, and resignation among older residents too proud or too demoralised to ask for help. The shift to digital has removed the human interactions, that at their best, allowed for discretion and dignity.
Conclusion: The politics of digital-by-default and its effect on food insecurity
In a context of cuts and rising need, the UK’s digital transformation of welfare and food assistance often deepens rather than bridges marginalisation. By layering device and data requirements and eroding in-person infrastructures, digitalisation reorganises access to food assistance, welfare, and ultimately, food security, through new forms of stratification. The UK government has developed a welfare system that makes it difficult to navigate for precisely those who need it the most.
Digitalisation has coincided with increases in food insecurity and has added to the burden on food assistance projects, and often volunteers, which now also provide support with digital access. The timing is good to bring about change. The Government is committed to reducing dependence on emergency food parcels. And initiatives like The Crisis and Resilience Fund could make digital inclusion a core part of food security policy and not just an afterthought.
More Reading: This blog post uses findings from an ERSC-funded project entitled: Digitalising food assistance: Political economy, governance and food security effects across the Global North-South divide. See: https://digitalisingfood.org/.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Iris Lim
Iris Lim is a Postdoctoral Researcher and works on the UK case study for the ESRC-funded project that analyses the effect of digitalising food assistance. Her research examines digital public service delivery, digital inclusion, citizenship and integration, and critical user-experience (UX) research.
Susanne Jaspars
Susanne Jaspars is the Principal Investigator of the same project. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the SOAS Food Studies Centre. She is also a Research Associate at CEDEJ Khartoum, and co-editor of Disasters Journal. Susanne researches the political dynamics of food in situations of conflict, food and humanitarian crisis, and has also analysed migration and asylum policies. Other interests include social approaches to nutrition and accountability for mass starvation. She has worked mostly in the Horn of Africa, often Sudan, but increasingly also in Europe.
Yasmin Houamed
Yasmin Houamed is the Research Assistant for the UK case study of the ESRC-funded Digitalising Food Assistance project. She received her MA in Anthropology of Food at SOAS, University of London, and her BA in Political Science from Stanford University. Her research has previously focused on food systems and commodification in Tunisia.
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On 16 October 2025 academic and practice thought leaders came together to discuss Protecting civilians in a changing world order at the IHSA conference hosted by Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkiye. This blog, written by Amra Lee with other panelists, is a result of the panel discussions and intends to continue critical discussions on protecting civilians, with a view to establishing a Working Group in 2026.
The geopolitical dynamics driving changes to the current world order – including the resurgence of ‘might is right’ and decreasing respect for international law – have pushed the humanitarian system including the law, norms, institutions and funding that support it to its limits. Ongoing impunity and the growing normalisation of war without limits continue to increase threats to civilians, aid workers and principled humanitarian action. The impact of these threats have been compounded by seismic changes to the humanitarian donor landscape, particularly the withdrawal of major funds and funders.
While protection for civilians in conflict has often been inconsistent and insufficient in practice, the nature and scale of the current threats and challenges require urgent action. Political and humanitarian actors, including parties to armed conflict, must acknowledge the gravity of the current moment and work to leverage a wider range of practices that can help prevent, mitigate and respond to civilian harm.
The UN Secretary-General in annual Protection of Civilian reports and briefings to the Security Council has called for moving beyond the more traditional focus on compliance and accountability to explore a wider range of “effective, legal, policy and operational responses”. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has further been working with a diverse cross-regional range of member states to reinforce respect for international humanitarian law. And at the same time, the humanitarian sector has many lessons to inform the reset – that protection is central to humanitarian action, that proactive protection requires incentivisation and investment, and that, in practice, civilians are most often agents of their own protection.
The panellists responded to the above context and calls, examining how a humanitarian reset and the UN80 reform discussions can better centre people and their protection in practice, and explored new pathways forward. The pathways included lessons on civilian harm, theorising humanitarian diplomacy, accountability as a fifth humanitarian principle, centering civilian safety and security, and critical lessons from the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP).
Opening the Discussion
Amra Lee from the Australian National University opened the panel, providing an overview of a changing world order and what decreasing respect for international law on the resort to and use of force means for civilians and the wider humanitarian system. This includes record aid worker and journalist deaths, the increasing challenge of countering mis-disinformation and hate speech, and the imposition of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation during an imminent risk of famine, that saw 1373 Palestinians killed simply trying to access food to survive.
Reorienting Focus to Proactive Protection
Hannah Jordan from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NORCAP) presented on the joint NORCAP-Nonviolent Peaceforce-Alliance for Peacebuilding research that developed an analytical framework to reorient civilian protection practice to proactively respond to civilian safety and security in a context of escalating harm. This includes shifting the current focus on providing services to reducing risks, interrupting violence and supporting local solutions. The framework prioritises actions that are civilian-centered, systemic, cross-sectoral, cross-temporal, influential, specific and adaptive, providing key guiding questions to support such work.
Building on this foundation, Gemma Davies presented the timely joint HPG-ODI-Nonviolent Peaceforce research that directly responds to the risk of deprioritising protection in ongoing Humanitarian Reset discussions with ‘back to basics‘ narratives, reinforcing the need to proactively (re)prioritise and refocus protection efforts to demonstrate how they reduce civilian harm and increase investment in civilian-centred protection.
Humanitarian Diplomacy, Principles and Accountability
Clothilde Facon-Salelles from the University of Antwerp presented on theorising humanitarian diplomacy, examining the power dynamics between international humanitarian actors and semi-authoritarian states in a way that does not presuppose the hegemony of liberal humanitarianism.
Following this, Junli Lim from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, presented on ongoing challenges and threats to principled humanitarian action, including the role of private security contractors. This included proposing accountability as a fifth humanitarian principle, and discussing the ways in which emerging mutual aid networks and practices contribute to accountability with local trust that can increase the effectiveness of protection services. Mutual aid practices offer important insights into alternative systems for implementing humanitarian assistance and governance.
Civilian Harm
Marnie Lloydd from the Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington examined national inquiries that take place following action in conflict, highlighting deficiencies in militaries’ transparency and reporting mechanisms, as well as recommendations that emerged from these inquiries including New Zealand’s Defence Force Order 35 on Civilian Harm. Marnie discussed the urgency of integrating robust proactive preventive measures, civilian harm tracking, and transparent reporting frameworks from inception, reflecting on what the UN Secretary-General’s Protection of Civilians report for 2023 characterizes as a ‘broader approach…addressing the full range of civilian harm’, to move toward more comprehensive protective measures.
Rise and Fall of RtoP
Building on the themes of accountability and civilian-centered protection, Stefan Bakumenko concluded the panel with a discussion on the rise and fall of RtoP. Conceptualised in 2001 and formalised in 2005, the concept nominally promised communities at risk of atrocity crimes a combination of good governance, international cooperation and multilateral intervention. However, incentives to respect existing normative commitments were already fading in the face of global militarization, austerity, multipolarity, attacks on international law, and instrumentalisation of the concept, as seen in Libya, Ukraine, and Palestine. Today, protection will need to better understand and support grassroots mobilization, mutual aid, and accountability, instead of relying on the whims and shifting political interests of states.
Moving Forward
The geopolitical dynamics driving changes to the world order can be expected to continue, with far-reaching implications for civilians and principled humanitarian action. The need to refocus, adapt and expand approaches to meet the current moment is clear. While power shifts increase threats and risks for civilians, they also present an opportunity to challenge past problematic beliefs and forge new understandings on how to mobilise more effective civilian-centred and civilian-led action. The panel initiated a timely discussion on recentering protection in humanitarian action and discourse, reinforcing both the responsibilities of states at a time of existential threats to principled humanitarian action and the critical role that civilians will continue to play in their own protection.
* The panellists intend to continue these discussions and plan to establish a dedicated working group on civilian protection within IHSA in 2026. Please reach out to Amra Lee amra.lee@anu.edu.au and Marnie Lloyd marnie.lloydd@vuw.ac.nzif you are interested to join.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
Amra Lee is a senior practitioner and PhD researcher whose research focuses on protecting civilians in a changing world order.
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The Dutch have voted. Migration was once again front and centre. Campaigns warned of crises, headlines framed Europe as divided. Open borders versus closed minds, compassion versus control. It all sounds like Europe has taken sides.
But has it?
New research from the PACES project, led by Anne-Marie Jeannet, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Science, University of Milan, suggests a quieter, more nuanced reality.
Most Europeans are not at the extremes. They sit somewhere in the middle. Ambivalent, thoughtful, and conflicted, they recognise that migration can be both necessary and challenging. They want rules and fairness, but, they also care about protecting people in need. Europeans Want Balance and Fairness.
The findings show that Europeans tend to support strong border control and structured return policies, conditional welfare benefits, and targeted regularisation schemes. For example, this could include returning rejected asylum seekers, limiting benefits to those who meet certain conditions, and allowing some undocumented migrants to stay legally.
Immigration policies that included returning migrants with criminal convictions were over 10 percent more likely to be supported than those that did not. By contrast, policies proposing to contain asylum seekers in third-country camps were 4 percent more likely to be rejected, as were policies offering residential or tax-based incentives to attract migrants (3 percent more likely). Overall, the study shows that the public favours policies that are lawful and orderly, but not excessively restrictive.
The silent middle often resolves tensions between competing values using mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Citizens distinguish between authorised and unauthorised migrants and between law-abiding and criminal individuals when forming policy opinions. When rules are transparent and fair, trust grows. Yet migration policies are often viewed as unclear, which can fuel fear.
The Middle Is Large, But Quiet
This middle majority is easily overlooked. Loud, extreme voices dominate headlines, giving the impression that Europeans are either for or against migration. In reality, most people hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, values: humanitarian concern, fairness, and a desire for order. They recognise that migration is not simply good or bad — it is a normal part of social life that can bring benefits, challenges, and everything in between. Rather than choosing sides, they weigh trade-offs, evaluate policies conditionally, and respond to evidence.
As World Migrants Day approaches on the 18th of December, perhaps it is time to move beyond framing people as simply for or against migration. These debates often make me wonder why so many of us feel torn about it. Many people say they want to help refugees while also wanting borders to be managed, or that they support integration but worry about pressure on housing or jobs. That mix of concerns is not a contradiction. It reflects the complexity of real life.
It also raises further questions: why is it so difficult for the silent middle to express their moderate views? Is it a lack of knowledge, a lack of interest, or simply the noise of polarised debate? And what would it take to bring these more balanced voices into the conversation?
Migration is more than a policy debate. It is a mirror reflecting our values, fears, and hopes. Acknowledging the silent middle, the thoughtful but often conflicted majority, opens the door to conversations and policies that reflect reality rather than rhetoric. And the next time you read that Europe has turned against migration, it is worth remembering that while extreme voices are loud, a much larger, quieter middle is watching.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Anne-Marie Jeannet
Anne-Marie Jeannet is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan and affiliated with Bocconi University’s Dondena Centre. Her research examines how social changes such as deindustrialization and immigration reshape political life and public perceptions. She leads the ERC-funded project Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences (DESPO) and has published widely in leading journals.
Marcela Rubio
Marcela G. Rubio is an Economist in the Migration Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Bocconi University in 2022 and studies how migration dynamics affect crime, human capital, and development outcomes. Her work spans Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, with prior experience in academia, NGOs, and international organizations.
Lois Mobach
Lois Mobach is a Communications Advisor at Erasmus University, where she supports major research initiatives. She works on projects including PACES, helping translate complex findings into accessible communication. As co-author, she brings expertise in research dissemination and public engagement.
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This blog is part of a series on ‘the Politics of Food and Technology’, in collaboration with the SOAS Food Studies Centre. All of the blogs in this series are contributions made at the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference in Istanbul-Bergen, October 2025, to the panel with a similar title. To read the rest of the blogs in this series, please click here
This blog is the second in a series entitledIn this blog, Eiman Mohamed looks at the role of digital systems in Sudan, including the effects of digital colonialism, and foreign ownership of key digital infrastructure.
Over the past decade, digital sovereignty has become an increasingly central concept in global policy debates. It refers to a state’s ability to govern its digital infrastructure, data, and cyberspace in alignment with national interests. While the term has gained traction in Western discourse as a means of protecting citizens and national data from foreign influence, its manifestation in the Global South (particularly across Africa) has followed a different trajectory.
Across the continent, internet shutdowns have emerged as a recurring expression of digital sovereignty. Governments justify them as measures to ensure national security, prevent misinformation, or maintain social order. Yet, these acts of disconnection often function as political instruments, used to consolidate power, suppress dissent, and control access to information.
Using Sudan as a case study, this blog article explores how internet shutdowns have become mechanisms for asserting digital sovereignty and examines their wider implications for state power, economic dependency, and individual autonomy.
State Autonomy or Authoritarian Control?
In theory, digital sovereignty implies the capacity of states to manage and secure their digital ecosystems responsibly and transparently. It reflects a form of autonomy aligned with self-determination and public accountability. However, within authoritarian contexts, digital sovereignty often becomes a tool of repression rather than empowerment.
In Sudan, the history of internet shutdowns illustrates this distortion. Following the 2013 protests, telecommunications companies that resisted shutdown directives were restructured to include loyal government actors, effectively granting the regime direct oversight of national connectivity. Regulatory entities in the country were frequently sidelined, while the military invoked ambiguous national security clauses to justify recurring blackouts.
These shutdowns were not isolated responses to unrest but institutionalized mechanisms of control. By disabling communication channels during protests, the state curtailed citizens’ ability to coordinate, mobilize, and document violations. Over time, digital autarky came to signify not collective governance, but exclusive authority enforced through infrastructural power; a manifestation of digital authoritarianism under the guise of sovereignty.
Economic Autonomy and the Persistence of Digital Colonialism
Digital sovereignty also encompasses the ability to shape and sustain a national digital economy free from external domination. Yet, across much of Africa, this autonomy remains constrained by digital colonialism; a structural dependence on foreign-owned technologies, platforms, and infrastructures.
In Sudan, the 2024 internet shutdowns exposed the fragility of this economic autonomy. When connectivity was severed, online mobile banking platforms, relied upon by millions for remittances and daily transactions, became inoperable. The resulting liquidity crisis crippled household economies and informal markets, as people lost access to cash, wages, and essential goods.
In the absence of state-provided connectivity, citizens turned to Starlink, a satellite service operating beyond national control and one that is open to profit-bearing and other political influences. Access was mediated through militarized networks, where civilians paid inflated prices to armed groups for limited connectivity. This dynamic generated profits for militias, bypassed regulation, and deprived the state of revenue.
Rather than restoring sovereignty, the shutdown fragmented Sudan’s digital economy into competing domains of authority: foreign, military, and informal. What was presented as a gesture of independence in fact deepened dependency, illustrating how disconnection reproduces digital colonialism in new and exploitative forms.
Individual Autonomy, Dignity, and Food Security
The human dimension of digital sovereignty extends beyond the state and economy to the individual. In the contemporary world, digital access underpins not only communication but also livelihoods, humanitarian assistance, and access to food.
In Sudan, the 2024 shutdown directly undermined this autonomy. The blackout halted digital payment systems, severing millions from remittances and cash transfers essential for food and medicine. Humanitarian organizations that relied on digital platforms for coordination were unable to deliver aid efficiently. Community networks that tracked safe routes for bread and flour deliveries were silenced.
As connectivity vanished, digital exclusion translated into material deprivation. In Khartoum and other cities, communal kitchens shut down after losing access to mobile money platforms, leaving low-income families without affordable meals. Those able to afford satellite connections often paid exorbitant fees at military checkpoints, while marginalized groups were left completely disconnected.
In these conditions, internet shutdowns became a form of infrastructural violence, determining who could access basic resources and who could not. Connectivity itself became a marker of privilege, linking digital exclusion to hunger, insecurity, and indignity.
Rethinking Digital Sovereignty in the Global South
Sudan’s experience underscores the need to reconceptualize digital sovereignty in the Global South. It is not merely about who owns data or infrastructure, but about how power is exercised through connectivity and disconnection.
When state autonomy transforms into authoritarianism, digital sovereignty ceases to serve the public. When shutdowns fracture local economies, economic independence gives way to new forms of dependency. And when digital access becomes contingent on wealth or political loyalty, individual dignity and survival are compromised.
Ultimately, digital sovereignty must be understood as a struggle for justice, autonomy, and existence. In many parts of Africa, internet shutdowns are not simply acts of censorship; they determine who speaks, who eats, and who survives.
Reframing digital sovereignty through the lenses of autonomy and justice reveals that the politics of digital control in Africa are inseparable from the politics of life itself.
BLISS will be publishing various blogs from this series over the next few months. For more information about the project ‘Digitalising Food Assistance: Political economy, governance and food security effects across the Global North-South divide’, check out the project website, or overview on the website of SOAS, University of London.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author:
Eiman Mohamed
Eiman Mohamed is a cybersecurity expert and digital development practitioner with more than seven years of experience driving digital transformation and implementing ICT projects across both private and non-profit sectors. Her expertise lies in cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), as well as digital development project design and implementation particularly in fragile and conflict-affected contexts mainly in Sudan, Africa.
She holds a Master of Science in Digital Development from the University of Manchester (2024). Her research interests include digital political economy, digital justice, and digital finance.
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Whether we embrace it or not, digital technologies and AI are here to stay, and they are fundamentally changing the human world of labour. As new technologies revolutionize the healthcare landscape, these changes are reshaping the lives and work of care workers. In this blog, Sreerekha Sathi shares insights from her research, which explores important questions about how digital technologies are reshaping care work in the Netherlands specifically: how these innovations are affecting care workers and how care homes are adapting to digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics. What specific forms of AI-assisted robotics are currently being utilized in Dutch care homes and how can we evaluate the benefits, challenges and risks associated with their implementation?
Source: Unsplash
Digitalization, robotization and the care worker
The Dutch healthcare sector faces increasing inequality in access to care, staff shortages, increasing workloads and a high percentage of aging populations. Around two thousand government-funded care homes serve the elderly, those with dementia, disabilities and other care needs.
Like other countries in Europe, the Netherlands has been experimenting with digitization and robotization in health care. Over the past two decades, AI-assisted digital tools and Socially Assistive Robots (SARS) have become more common in surgeries, patient monitoring, consultations, diagnostics, rehabilitation, telemedicine, cognitive and emotional care, especially in the post-pandemic period (Getson, C., & Nejat, G. 2021, Kang et al. 2023). Beyond Europe, countries like China and Japan lead these developments, with Sweden and the Netherlands close behind.
The use of digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics have moved beyond the experimental phase into early adoption. Current discussion focuses on opportunities for collaboration between private companies, academic institutions and healthcare providers. This pilot study involved conversations with few care workers in the care homes, innovation managers, company officials and academic scholars in the Netherlands.
Conversations with care workers show that most technologies in use are still relatively simple – medication dispensers, sensor systems and communication tablets – selected for their affordability and ease. Once prescribed, digital care tools like Compaan, Freestyle Libre, MelioTherm, Medido, Sansara or Mono Medical are introduced to clients by neighbourhood digital teams, usually via smartphone apps connected through WIFI as part of online digital care.
The introduction of robots is slowly gaining ground. Many universities, including Erasmus University, are collaborating with private companies on new projects in robotization and digitalization in health care. Some of the robots which are popular in use currently in Europe include TinyBots (Tessa), Zorabots (NAO), Pepper, Paro and other robotic pets, and SARA, which supports dementia patients. Some care workers believe that the robots promote social contact and enhance patients’ independence, while others appreciate that robots taking over peripheral tasks can make their own work easier.
Care workers are required to learn and engage with new technologies, which directly affect their everyday lives. Although they are relatively well paid by normal standards, their workload and stress often exceed what their pay reflects. Larger, well-funded care homes have support staff who assist care workers for indirect or non-medical support at lower pay. When new technologies are introduced without sufficient involvement and inputs from the workers, they can lead to more burden on workers in terms of time and labour costs. For them, new technologies are often ‘thrown over the fence’, with insufficient training or involvement of care workers in design or decision-making, leading to frustration, resistance and underuse even when the tools are effective. They argue, ‘we don’t need fancy tools – just the right tools used in the right way.’
Many workers feel that if a robot can take on physical tasks, the workers can give clients more time and attention. When the purpose of a tool is clearly explained, and workers remain present in critical moments, clients and families are more accepting of new technology.
Gender and labour in new technologies
Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) has long shown how technologies carry gendered biases. Feminist histories of computing have highlighted women’s contribution to the invention and introduction of computers and software (Browne, Stephen & McInerney, 2023). A relevant question to explore today is would new technologies using AI assisted robotics replicate the same biases. Although new technologies are often presented as objective, they are built upon datasets and assumptions that can reproduce biases and stereotypes, based on the foundations of the feeds and accesses in-built into it (1). Robots, for instance, often reflect the idealized gendered traits. Nurse robots are designed with feminine or childlike features – extroverted and friendly – versus ‘techno-police’ styled introvert security robots as stoic and masculine.
Care work remains a heavily gendered profession, though more men are joining the field. While some men care workers face occasional client push back, they are increasingly welcomed amid shortages. Many care workers worry about being replaced by robots, yet most agree that emotional presence of caregivers – especially in elderly and dementia care – remains essential and robots may support but cannot substitute the human connection that defines good care work.
Further, workers also stress that technology must be context-sensitive: its success depends on the socio-economic profile of the area, staff availability and the lived preferences of the people receiving care. They advocate for flexible, context-based implementation rather than top-down standardization of new machines. Core to the debates on digitalization and robotization in care are ethical issues often narrowly framed as privacy concerns but extending to autonomy, emotional dignity and growing surveillance and inequality.
Insights into the future
The study observe that many attempts to introduce digital technologies or robotics in care homes stall in the pilot phase, often disliked or abandoned by care professionals or clients. Care workers need time and training to trust these devices, especially regarding the risks and uncertainties involved. They emphasize early involvement through co-design as essential for building trust, transparency and accountability. For sustainable implementation, the focus should shift from what is ‘new’ to what is ‘useful’.
Future debates will likely centre around prioritizing digitization in health care versus SARs in physical care. Persistent challenges include time constraints to software failures (Huisman & Kort 2019). As efforts to create ‘smart homes’ and support independent living continue (Allaban, Wang & Padir 2020), environmental sustainability and climate resilience must become priorities.
Another important step for exploration is to critically analyze the growing corporatization and monopolization in digitization and robotization (Zuboff, 2019; Hao, 2025). Rather than leaving healthcare innovations to monopolies or private capital, public or community-based state welfare support must retain agency in how digital and robotic tools are implemented. Finally, pushing back from military robotics towards socially beneficial technologies – such as health care or waste management – needs to be prioritized.
As a work in progress, this research is significant for understanding the social impacts of digitalization and robotization. In the next step of this study, these conversations will further bring together care workers, academics and innovative managers between the global south and the global north to foster dialogue about how these changes are reshaping the healthcare economy, care homes and the future of care workers.
End Note:
A focus on changing forms of labour, along with the concerns around gender stereotypes and gendered knowledges attributed to social robots, is important for further exploration in the fields of AI-assisted occupations. The introduction of new machines involves the invisible human labour behind them, which is mostly the ‘ghost workers’ from the global south, whether with data work, coding or mining. What is inherent to existing social contexts, including gender, class, and racial stereotypes, are already heavily compromising the digital world.
Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a small grant from Erasmus Trustfonds for 2024-2025, I embarked on this short study to explore these questions. Although the grant period concluded in June 2025, the research continues. I would like to thank Ms. Julia van Stenis for her invaluable support in making this study possible.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question
About the author:
Sreerekha Sathi
Sreerekha Sathiworks on issues of gender, political economy, and critical development studies. Her current research explores the intersections of gender, care, and labour with digitalization, AI, and the future of work, and engages with critical debates in decolonial thought. She is a member of the editorial board ofDevelopment and Change.
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In this blog, Eyob Balcha Gebremariam offers a deeply personal yet widely resonant reflection on the invisible boundaries that shape knowledge production in global academia. Drawing from his lived experience, he unpacks how the quest for epistemic relevance often clashes with Western-centric validation systems, how the dominance of English marginalises local languages and worldviews, and how the politics of passports continues to gatekeep academic mobility and belonging.
I write this reflection piece to use my personal experiences as a UK-based academic with an Ethiopian passport as a lens to comment on the structural power asymmetries of the academic landscape. I believe I’m not the only one facing these challenges. However, there is hardly sufficient attention, recognition, and space to discuss them. I have no intention of reducing the importance of other challenges by focusing on these three topics. I focused on the three hurdles because I experience them in everyday scholarly work and am determined to engage in critical discussions and reflections.
I often engage with the notion of coloniality when I comment on power asymmetries in academic knowledge production. Coloniality is too abstract for some people, whereas it has become a buzzword for others. However, for people like me, coloniality captures the challenges and obstacles of everyday life encounters. For many of us, it is a daily lived experience. In this piece, I aim to offer a personal reflexive account of coloniality based on the multiple positionalities I occupy.
Epistemic (Ir)relevance
In my academic career, I’m constantly conversing with myself about how relevant my work is to my community in Ethiopia. I was born and raised in Ethiopia. I always want to measure the relevance of my academic career with a potentially positive contribution to policy ideas and practices at least in the Ethiopian context. This means I must develop a strategy to help me reach more Ethiopian audiences. However, the challenge is enormous, and I always need a thoughtful approach to overcome it.
In my field of studies and Development Studies in general, the higher I go in my academic career, the more incentives I have to remain disconnected and alienated from the community I want to serve. I will be more rewarded if I continue to produce academic outputs that target an audience completely distant from most Ethiopians. Even members of the Ethiopian community who may access my work, if interested at all, have minimal access to academic publications. I’m glad most of my outputs so far are open access. However, the fact that the academic outputs are not initially produced to be consumed by the community about whom the research is talking remains a significant challenge. Making academic outputs available free of charge on the Internet is one viable solution. However, this can also have its own layers of challenges, such as the difficulty of accessing academic English for the general public.
One strategy I’ve adopted is to write Amharic newspaper articles that help me translate some of the expertise I acquired in my studies into a relevant analysis of the present-day political economy in Ethiopia. I am unsure to what extent my effort in writing Amharic commentaries can help me be more relevant to my community. These seemingly simple steps of translation can be valuable. But epistemic (ir)relevance is broader than language translation.
Using language as a medium of communication is one aspect. However, language is also a repository of a society’s deep conceptual, theoretical and philosophical orientations. The epistemic irrelevance of my academic work is more manifested in my limitations in adequately and systematically using my mother tongue to explain key issues of development that could be relevant to my community and beyond.
Most of the conceptual and theoretical insights that inform my academic works on Ethiopian political, economic, and social dynamics are alien to the local context. On the other hand, throughout my educational training, I have not been adequately exposed to Ethiopia or Africa-centred knowledge frameworks and academic conceptual and theoretical orientations. Whenever this happened, they were not systematically integrated or implicitly considered less relevant than Eurocentric epistemic insights. I needed to put extra effort into reading widely to educate myself beyond the formal channels and processes of education. However, the impact remains immense. The more I continued to advance in my academic career, the more I gravitated away from Ethiopia-centred epistemic orientations. Hence, most of my academic insight remains less informed by these perspectives.
I want to emphasise that my concern is primarily about the systemic hierarchy of knowledge frameworks and the casual normalisation of marginalising endogenous and potentially alternative epistemic orientations. No knowledge can evolve without interaction with other knowledge systems. However, we can’t ignore that the interaction between knowledge systems is power-mediated. The power asymmetries between knowledge systems do not stop at the abstract level. They also translate into the institutional arrangements of knowledge production, the producers and primary audiences of the knowledge produced.
[Academic] knowledge is power! But not every [academic] knowledge can be a source of power. Most of the time, academic knowledge becomes a source of power if it is produced by the dominant members of society and for the use of the dominant members.
Language
Amharic is my mother tongue. Several languages in Ethiopia have well-advanced grammar, literature, and folklore. Like other places, these languages are sources of wisdom and knowledge for society. However, none are adequately recognised as good enough in the organisation of the “modern” education system, especially in higher education. After primary school, I studied every subject in English. Amharic remained only as one subject. When I joined Addis Ababa University, Amharic became non-existent in my academic training. Only students who studied the Amharic language and literature used this language as their medium of instruction. All other degree programmes were in English. This might be less concerning if a language is not advanced enough to develop fields of studies and disciplinary knowledge with abstract conceptions and ideas. However, I believe the Amharic language can serve as a medium of instruction for most fields of study, especially in the social sciences.
Studies show that the Amharic language evolved over 1,000 years and became a lingua franca of medieval northern and central highland kingdoms in present-day Ethiopia around the 12th century. The earliest literary tradition dates back to the 14th century, including religious texts, historical notes, and literature. (Image: Gee’z Alphbet @Haile Maryam Tadese of Lalibela)
The relationship between epistemic (ir)relevance and language is profound. To be more relevant to my community, I need to communicate in an accessible language and use language as a source of intellectual insights. This could be the most fulfilling academic endeavour. However, to remain a credible member of the academic community of my field, I must produce more in English, and the target audience should not necessarily be my home country community. To remain relevant to my home community, I need to adopt a different set of epistemic orientations, personal convictions and beliefs, and, sometimes, career and financial sacrifices. The additional burden and financial sacrifice are more prominent because it is doubtful that the current academic excellence and achievement framework in the UK or internationally will recognise academic output produced in non-European languages. I’m glad to learn more if there is anything I’m unaware of.
Passport positionality
My idea of passport positionality evolved through my experiences of travelling for academic purposes both across Europe and Africa. My definition of passport positionality is how academics at any level, primarily those with a “Global South” passport, must navigate various ideological, legal, administrative, financial, and psychological barriers to attend academic events or conduct research in countries other than their own. Understanding the interplay between legal and academic citizenship can help us reflect on the implicit and explicit barriers to belonging, exclusion, recognition, and representation. The legacies and current manifestations of colonialism create some forms of exclusion, favouring mainly Global North passport holders. The exclusion of academic researchers from various platforms and spaces of academic deliberations and decision-making processes just because of the barriers imposed on their legal citizenship is a serious structural problem.
At a personal level, I’ve heard several stories of racial profiling, especially in cases where the global south passport overlaps with brown and black skin colour, humiliating interrogation, and unjustified and unreasonable excuses of mistreatment. I share two personal experiences of how passport positionality shapes my travel experiences by creating tension between my academic and legal citizenship.
The first experience happened when I was contracted to facilitate a decolonial research methodologies workshop for an institute in a European country. The agreement was for the research institute to reimburse my travel expenses and to pay me a professional fee. As an Ethiopian passport holder, getting a Schengen visa to travel from the UK at a minimum includes travelling to privately run visa application centres and paying admin and visa application fees. This is on top of preparing a visa application document, where I’m expected to submit at least a three-month bank statement showing a minimum of £600 in my current bank account.
The most infuriating experience was finding the right appointment date and time because the private company only offers regular appointment options at certain hours. Otherwise, applicants are directly or indirectly forced to pay for more expensive premium appointment options. The company runs the visa appointment service to make a profit, so it has all the incentives to capitalise on potential customers’ demands. If seen from the position of potential travellers like me, it is unfair because the company is making money not by facilitating the visa application process but by making it less convenient and difficult.
I managed to get the visa and run a successful and enriching workshop. However, when I submitted my receipts for reimbursement, the institute refused to reimburse all the costs related to my visa application.
I was told that according to the country’s “travel expenses act, they [the visa related cost] are not costs that can be covered.” Honestly speaking, the visa-related expenses were higher than the travel expenses. I believe there are reasonable grounds for the mentioned policy. However, it is also clear that the policy has a significant blind spot. It does not recognise the challenges that people like me face, jumping multiple hurdles to do their work. Perhaps the people who drafted the policy could not imagine that a visa-paying national would travel to their country to provide a professional service. Hence, no mechanism of reimbursement was set. I used the email exchange with my contacts to highlight the system’s unfairness. Finally, I got reimbursed, and it was a good learning experience.
The second experience I want to share is related to my encounters with border officials at South African airports. Because of my work, I travelled to South Africa seven times over the past three years. Out of these seven travels, I was held at the airport five times for at least one hour or more by border officials who wanted to check the genuineness of my visa. A uniformed officer usually escorts me. When I leave the plane, I will be told they have been waiting for me and will check my documents’ credibility. Often, as I’m told, they’ll take a picture of the visa sticker on my passport and send it to their colleagues in London via WhatsApp to verify whether it is genuine. In the meantime, I will be asked several questions about the reason for my travel, what I do, how I received my visa in London, while I’m an Ethiopian, etc. Some valid and ordinary questions, but some unreasonable questions as well. None of this has happened to me in my travels to other countries.
After some time, I got used to it and plan accordingly. But it never stops being a significant inconvenience to be singled out just because of my passport. On one of these trips, I was travelling with my fellow UK-based Ethiopian academic, and I bet with him that we’d be escorted to a room and interrogated on our arrival. I won the bet. The border official even showed us the screen shot he was sent with our names, two Ethiopian passport holders, who needed to be cross-examined before being allowed to enter the country.
I share these experiences to encourage my academic colleagues to be conscious of their passport positionality and how it helped or constrained them to exercise their academic citizenship. The interplay between legal and academic citizenship needs more reflexive discussions.
Conclusion
I hope sharing these three hurdles of lived experiences can trigger questions, responses, and conversations. There are no simple answers and responses. However, I think it is essential to be aware that some of the buzzwords and abstract ideas we exchange in our academic conversations can lead to experiences far from abstract notions. Hopefully, my moments of internal struggles of questioning relevance, feelings of alienation, efforts of learning and unlearning, and the actual experiences of exclusion, especially when travelling, can contribute to having more grounded conversations when we talk about decolonising academic knowledge production in Development Studies.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author:
Eyob Balcha Gebremariam
Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is an alumus of the International Institute of Social Studies. He is a Research Associate at the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC), the University of Bristol and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a Member of Council at the Development Studies Association (DSA) of the UK and of EADI’s task group on decolonising knowledge in Development Studies.
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In this blog to mark the International Day of Disaster Risk Reduction (October 13), HSC Coordinator Tom Ansell dives into the role of ‘Early Warning’ systems and policies as part of Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives. They fit within greater DRR programming to make sure that people are warning in advance and can take precautions, or other measures, to prepare for an upcoming shock or hazard. The 2004 Asian Tsunami highlighted the need for more early warning systems for countries with Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts – these systems were triggered earlier this year after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia.
Managing the risks to people’s lives and livelihoods before, during and after a disaster (whatever the cause) requires looking beyond just ‘responding to a disaster’. Since the 1990’s, and the UN’s ‘International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction’, attitudes towards the disaster cycle have matured and within many emergency management agencies there is some reference to several ‘phases’ of a disaster in a ‘cycle’. For example, the Australian Emergency Management Agency refers to the ‘prevention, preparedness, response, recovery’ phases (now considered a bit old fashioned!). The ‘risk management approach’ is currently the most modern frame for disaster preparation for and responding to a disaster, which focuses on risks rather than timelines: “establish contexts, identify risks, analyse risks, assess risks, treat risks” – and repeat!
Risks are themselves a mixture of hazards/shocks (something that might cause a disaster), vulnerability (socioeconomic conditions that might exacerbate the hazard), exposure (how close people, livelihoods, etc, are to the hazard), and coping capacity (the resources and protocols in place to manage risk).
To make a risk assessment, practitioners consider the severity of a risk, and the likelihood of it occurring, to make a compound ‘score’. Disaster Risk Management involves activities, policies, procedures and so on to mitigate risks (DRR), often by reducing vulnerabilities or exposure, or by increasing coping capacity.
So a systematic approach to DRR will approach all of these various components. It’s easy to see why knowing about a hazard early might make it easier to protect people and livelihoods. Or, in technical language: Early Warning increases coping capacity, by giving more time to prepare for a hazardous situation (by taking anticipatory action), thereby decreasing exposure! Within the humanitarian sector, programmes and interventions around this are usually referred to as Early Warning, Early Action (EWEA). Ideally, these activities should be contextual, appropriate, ‘people-centred’, community-based and/or managed, and inclusive.
What do Early Warning systems look like?
What an early warning system looks like is completely dependent on the context and hazard in question. The logic behind most early warning systems, though, is monitoring a hazard (say, a river level) and then triggering information sharing and next steps once a certain level of immediacy has been reached.
For example, the Syria Civil Defence (the White Helmets) co-developed an app-based early warning system for airstrikes, military activities, and knock-on emergencies during the Syrian civil war. A central command room processes incoming reports of, say, jets taking off from an air base, and then sends a warning via app and SMS to mobile phones in the region, with instructions to take cover. Prior to this system, early warnings of air strikes were spotted by people in watch-towers, and communicated by word of mouth and a walkie-talkie radio network, which led to delays in warning people about incoming danger. This app-based system could be used to warn of other incoming hazards, for example a particularly violent winter storm, upstream flooding, or seismic activity. The Netherlands utilizes a similar system for all manner of hazards, NL-Alert.
But whilst tech-enabled Early Warning systems have grown in the last 15 years, there are plenty of contexts where word-of-mouth, radio broadcasting, or an emergency network (the ‘telephone tree’ method) is the most effective way of getting information to people in time to evacuate, take precautions, or otherwise prepare. For example, if there is a river close to a community that periodically floods, people ‘upstream’ can monitor river levels, and spread the words to communities ‘downstream’ if there is particularly high water. This is also the case for knowledge passed down through the generations: if a particular species of animal usually leaves just before a violent storm, for example, this can serve as the ‘trigger’ to warn people.
Early Warning systems are equally useful for slow-onset disasters. An example here is part of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, which is designed to reduce the risk of famine during poor harvests by offering cash-for-work and cash transfers for people that mainly rely on local agriculture for income and to maintain access to food. The programme is ‘activated’ when drought has been detected for a certain number of months, depending on the region.
Early Warning for Tsunami since 2004
On 26 December 2004, a large underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia triggered 50-metre high waves that killed over 220,000 people, as well as leaving more than 2 million people homeless in 15 countries. At the time, Indonesia was not considered an especially high-risk country for tsunami, meaning that the at the time there was little monitoring of underwater seismic activity, or sea level surface. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre was only able to find out about the impending disaster through internet news stories about devastation in Thailand (itself also unprepared for underwater earthquakes or tsunami at the time), and so couldn’t warn countries with Indian Ocean costs in time.
Following the destruction of the 2004 tsunami, national governments, UN agencies, and NGOs all put renewed efforts into reducing exposure to tsunami and oceanic hazards. At an intergovernmental level, the tsunami sped up development and adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Risk Reduction (now surpassed by the Sendai Framework). At a national level, Thailand created a multi-hazard oceanic early warning system, with tsunami detection buoys and information sharing with Indonesian, Australian, and Indian detection buoys. These signals are sent to a national coordination centre, whereupon various operating procedures are activated. A warning is then broadcast in five languages by fax, SMS, through ‘warning box’ speakers, radio relay towers, public tannoys, social media and through radio and TV warnings. The system will be developed further to give direct to mobile phone warnings in the coming decades.
Indonesia, meanwhile, has developed a network of 553 seismographs, as well as using oceanographic modelling and local hazard mapping for low-lying coastal areas. Once this network detects seismographic activity, procedures include public announcements, vertical evacuation routes, and evacuation signage.
Outside of the Pacific region, the destruction of the 2004 tsunami impelled Caribbean governments to put together the Tsunami and other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean Sea and Adjacent Regions (ICG/CARIBE EWS), a multi-hazard coastal early warning system, and since 2011 have integrated the CARIBE WAVE exercise, which simulates a tsunami or underwater earthquake evacuation. In 2024, over 700,000 people were ‘evacuated’ during the exercise.
Unfortunately, well-functioning early warning systems are not enough to completely mitigate the risk of a large disaster, as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami demonstrates. More than 20,000 people died during the quake and 39-metre tsunami wave, with knock-on effects including the Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident, despite Japan having a well-developed tsunami early warning system. The worth of all of this preparation work was evident this July, though. An 8.8 magnitude offshore earthquake occurred off the coast of Russian Kamchatka, triggering early warning systems and causing precautionary policies in several countries (including Japan, Indonesia, Russia, and China), including evacuations. The earthquake did cause tsunami-like waves, though did not have the same destructive force as the 2004 tsunami.
Conclusion – early warning as part of a multi-level DRR framework
Early warning systems, then, are a key part of reducing disaster risk, especially to climactic and environmental hazards. But we shouldn’t equate that with completely eradicating risks, or indeed think that early warning is the only part of risk management and reduction that should be concentrated on. Early warning systems work best as part of a full multi-level DRR framework, with training and education on detecting hazards, well-developed protocols for early action, evacuation, or other mitigation measures; and a general policy to reduce societal vulnerability through equitable policies, reducing socio-economic inequalities, and strong governance structures.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the Author
Tom Ansell
Tom Ansell is the coordinator and programme manager of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre, and the Coordinator of the International Humanitarian Studies Association. He has a study background in religion and conflict transformation, as well as an interest in disaster risk reduction, and science communication and societal impact of (applied) research.
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In his 1975–76 lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault famously declared, ‘Society must be defended’. While framed within the context of biopolitics and the genealogy of state violence, this provocation has found renewed relevance in the 21st century as new forms of warfare emerge. Today, the greatest threats to societies are not only kinetic or territorial but epistemic and cognitive. Cognitive warfare – an increasingly salient form of conflict – operates by targeting perception, social cohesion and identity, often exploiting the fault lines of gender, race, and class, to undermine collective resilience.
Photo Credit: United Nations
This blog post explores how NATO’s instrumental engagement with the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda intersects with these new threat environments. Despite normative commitments to inclusion, NATO’s implementation of WPS remains structurally tethered to operational efficiency and military effectiveness, rather than transformative gender justice. The rise of cognitive warfare, which thrives on polarization and symbolic manipulation, underscores the urgent need to reassess what it means to defend society. Rethinking defence in the cognitive age requires not merely stronger militaries but stronger democracies – and this is only possible by fully integrating marginalized voices, particularly women, into the foundations of security thinking and practice.
Cognitive Warfare: Targeting the social fabric
Cognitive warfare is a strategic practice that seeks to influence, destabilize and control the minds and behaviours of target populations through information manipulation, disinformation, psychological operations and narrative disruption. Unlike traditional warfare, its objective is not the destruction of infrastructure but the corrosion of shared meaning and societal coherence. In this form of conflict, the ‘battlespace’ is everyday life: news media, education systems, social media platforms and interpersonal trust.
Actors – both state and non-state – engage in cognitive warfare to reshape identities, manipulate emotions and undermine public consensus. These operations often capitalize on gender, ethnic and ideological divisions to deepen internal discord. For example, campaigns may weaponize narratives about gender roles, women’s rights, or ‘wokeness’ to generate backlash, recruit supporters or delegitimize institutions. Importantly, cognitive warfare targets not just what people believe, but their capacity to believe ‘together’, fragmenting the cognitive unity that underpins democratic societies.
The challenge cognitive warfare presents to traditional security paradigms is profound. Institutions such as NATO, built on hierarchical, masculinized models of defence, remain structurally oriented toward external threats, kinetic action and deterrence. However, when societies themselves become the battleground – through misinformation, distrust and symbolic violence – conventional tools fall short. A broader, more inclusive understanding of what constitutes security and who is responsible for producing it becomes indispensable.
The WPS Agenda and NATO: Between inclusion and instrumentalization
Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda has sought to mainstream gender perspectives within security and peacebuilding processes. NATO, as one of the earliest international actors to adopt a WPS action plan, has made formal commitments to increasing women’s participation, integrating gender-sensitive policies and addressing conflict-related sexual violence. However, feminist critiques have consistently argued that NATO’s engagement with the WPS Agenda has remained instrumental rather than transformative.
Rather than challenging militarized logics or hegemonic masculinity, NATO has largely used gender inclusion as a means of enhancing operational efficiency. Gender advisors, female engagement teams and gender training have been deployed to bolster mission success – particularly visible during operations in Afghanistan – without addressing the broader patriarchal structures of the alliance itself. Gender becomes a force multiplier, not a site of political transformation.
This approach not only limits the potential of the WPS Agenda but also creates vulnerabilities within the alliance. In an age of cognitive warfare, where legitimacy and perception are key, superficial inclusion can be co-opted or weaponized. Anti-gender movements, emboldened by populist and nationalist currents, have already begun to frame gender-sensitive policies as distractions from ‘real’ military priorities. Recent statements by US officials, such as Pete Hegseth’s denunciation of the WPS programme as ‘woke’, reflect a broader backlash against gender equality within defence institutions.
Such politicization renders NATO’s fragile engagement with WPS even more precarious. It also highlights a core contradiction: an institution that seeks to defend democratic societies cannot afford to marginalize the very constituencies that embody those democratic values. In failing to fully embrace gender justice, NATO not only undermines its own legitimacy but also cedes ideological ground to actors who seek to destabilize democratic cohesion through cognitive means.
The intersection of cognitive warfare and WPS reveals the limitations of a security architecture premised on traditional threat-response frameworks. Defence, in this context, cannot merely be about protecting borders or building military capacity. It must involve cultivating epistemic resilience, narrative sovereignty and social inclusion.
Women’s participation is not just normatively important – it is strategically essential. Excluding or tokenizing women undermines collective intelligence and leaves societies vulnerable to the very divisions cognitive warfare exploits. Conversely, including women in meaningful, leadership-level roles across security institutions expands the range of perspectives, narratives and strategies available to resist cognitive incursions.
Moreover, feminist security thinking – rooted in care, relationality and structural critique – offers tools for reimagining defence beyond violence. It prompts us to ask: What are we defending? Whose society is being protected? And how do we define threat in the first place? These are not ancillary questions but central ones in an age when the terrain of conflict is symbolic, social and affective.
To truly defend society, institutions must undergo epistemic transformation – not just integrate more women, but reconfigure how knowledge is produced, valued and operationalized. This involves dismantling the false binary between hard and soft security, and recognizing that resilience against cognitive warfare begins with inclusion, trust and equity.
Rethinking defence: Defending democracy from within
In light of these dynamics, it is time to revisit Foucault’s challenge: ‘Society must be defended’ – but how? The answer lies not in a return to fortress mentalities or reactive militarism, but in a proactive commitment to inclusive, democratic resilience. In the face of cognitive warfare, defending society means defending its pluralism, its capacity for critical thought and its inclusive institutions. It means moving beyond tokenistic gender inclusion toward structural empowerment.
NATO and other security actors must rethink what constitutes strength. In the long run, it is not military hardware but social cohesion, narrative legitimacy and institutional trust that will determine whether societies withstand the assaults of cognitive conflict. Women are not auxiliary to this project – they are central to it. As the global security landscape evolves, so too must our understanding of defence. In an age where societies themselves are the battlefield, the imperative is not only to defend, but to transform. And that transformation begins by taking seriously the voices, knowledges and futures that have long been sidelined.
This blog post is based on the authors’ presentations delivered at the Pre-NATO Summit event at De Haagse Hogeschool / The Hague University of Applied Sciences on 5h June 2025.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors
Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits
Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits is an Associate Professor in Conflict and Peace Studies at ISS/Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a transdisciplinary researcher specializing in Political Science, with expertise in International Relations and Critical Peace and Conflict Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of governance, development, armed conflict, post-war transitions, and peacebuilding.
Bilge Sahin
Bilge Sahin is an Assistant Professor of Conflict and Peace Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her teaching and research explore the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, war, and security.
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Despite claims of evidence-based policymaking, migration research is often sidelined – except when it serves political goals. In this blog, Riccardo Biggi explores how governments at national and local levels selectively use expert knowledge, depending on the policy area at stake.
Photo Credit: PACES Project
On 10 September 2024, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that Haitian migrants were “eating dogs” as he ramped up the anti-immigration rhetoric during his election campaign. As absurd and dehumanising as that statement was, it reflects a broader political trend: migration politics are shaped not by facts, but by fear, myths, and political opportunism. The EU is no exception. From asylum laws to criminalisation of irregular entry, many European policies are built on dehumanising and patronising ideas about migrants, as well as discredited ideas about why people move, how they take decisions, and what works to manage migration.
As part of the PACES project, the research conducted at Leiden University by Katharina Natter, Niels Ike, Merel van Assem and myself shows that despite governments’ commitments to evidence-driven policymaking, expert knowledge is often ignored or distorted. Simplistic assumptions about migrants’ motivations dominate policymaking, disregarding up-do-date knowledge and evidence resulting from research. In some cases, knowledge is taken into account selectively, as it is primarily used in policies concerning migrant groups admitted to EU countries – such as essential workers and resettled refugees – highlighting the opportunistic nature of knowledge use in migration policy.
Common but flawed assumptions
Our study examined 180 policy documents – including laws, evaluations, and legislative debates – spanning from 1998 to 2024 in Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands, across three key policy areas: counter-smuggling, protection of refugees abroad, and attraction of essential workers. This was complemented by 35 interviews with Italian policymakers, NGOs and researchers. Our analysis found that despite different migration histories and political cultures, all three countries showed similar patterns in how they use (or don’t use) research. The degree of issue politicisation, as well as the institutional actors involved, crucially shape the extent to which policymakers draw on expert knowledge.
We identified a dozen of these recurring assumptions that continue to dominate in migration policymaking, for example, that smugglers are extensive, international criminal networks; that increased border controls are effective in reducing smuggling; that migrants are unaware of the dangers associated with irregular migration; that refugees will easily integrate in the region of reception outside Europe, contributing as an economic resource if well managed; that transit countries are willing to host refugees and migrants; that development in regions of origin can reduce onward migrant flows; and that migrants’ decision making is influenced by small-scale adjustments to entry criteria and the efficiency of regularisation procedures for foreign workers policies.
Counter-smuggling policies, as well as policies for the protection of refugees outside the EU, are particularly prone to disregard or misuse research. Take the following examples of Dutch migration policymaking, which displays dynamics also visible in Austria and Italy. In 2016, the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security commissioned a report from the Centre for Research and Documentation (WODC) that concluded that EU information campaigns to deter irregular migration were ineffective and ethically questionable, considering the limited actual possibilities to apply for asylum. The following year, the Ministry cited this same report to justify the continuation of information campaigns, arguing vaguely that ‘new campaigns will provide new insights’. This type of symbolic use of research – to substantiate decisions already made – is widespread. Christina Boswell described it as the “symbolic function” of expert knowledge, where institutions boost their credibility by citing science, without acting on its findings.
At other times, knowledge is completely disregarded. The WODC report identified several unrealistic assumptions behind information campaigns, for instance that irregular migrants are not aware of travel risks and that more information will make them decide differently. Yet seven years later these same assumptions, previously discredited by the study, were still present in a letter from the State Secretary of Justice and Security to the Parliament. The letter stated: ‘informing potential migrants about irregular migration, as well as the possible associated risks and possible alternatives enables them to make more informed choices. This may lead a potential migrant to decide to avoid irregular travel, choose a regular route, or reduce risks’ (p. 9).
When knowledge matters
In contrast, research is used in policy areas that involve categories of migrants admitted to the state, such as resettled refugees and essential workers. For instance, Italian documents related to resettled refugees consider refugees’ vulnerabilities with increased nuances, including their psychological well-being – completely disregarded by policymakers within documents regarding irregular migrants or refugees outside Europe. A pattern emerges: when dealing with migrants who have entered EU territory through formal resettlement channels, policy documents explicitly mention refugees’ needs and expectations, showing the state’s stronger interest in understanding how to adapt policy for this target group, rather than for irregular migrants.
Similarly, policies for attracting high-skilled migrant workers to the Netherlands make regular use of research to adjust the criteria and parameters to make the country attractive for international migrants. For instance, the 2009 Dutch ‘Regeling Hoogopgeleiden’ – designed to encourage foreign top talent to move to the Netherlands to bolster the Dutch knowledge economy – was adjusted two times following evaluations to enhance its transparency and effectivity in attracting more migrants.
The local and the bureaucratic level: a different story
A central finding of our research project was that local governments often use expert knowledge in a more instrumental manner than national policymakers. In one Italian town with a large foreign population, civil servants – not politicians – initiated policies using insights from collaborations with universities and NGOs. The city’s immigration office itself originated as a university research project in the 1990s.
Our research showed that city-level actors in Italy, closer to the ground and less influenced by (inter)national political interests, often seek evidence to solve real problems, especially in areas concerning work permits and refugee integration. The same attention to evidence and to efficacy is found within the bureaucratic level of national policymaking – especially within the Ministry of Work and Social Policy (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali), responsible for elaborating and implementing foreign workers’ regularization procedures. Indeed, civil servants are not as directly impacted by party politics and voter dynamics as are elected politicians, granting them more room to consider expert knowledge in their work. At the municipal administration level particularly, civil servants’ objective is to provide good services and ensure the correct functioning, improvement and problem-solving capacities of the local system. As one Italian civil servant put it, ‘At the municipality level there are experienced and motivated people, while the political level has little awareness of reality.’
Conclusions: what spaces for research in policymaking?
In 2024, 2,454 people died or went missing in the Mediterranean, lacking safe ways to travel due to restrictive EU visa policies. These deaths are not accidental – they are the tragic outcome of policies that have not succeeded in limiting mobility, despite increased funding to border control in North-Africa and elsewhere. Focused on a paradigm of border security and fighting human trafficking, EU governments in the last 30 years have been developing policies based on flawed assumptions and ignored evidence.
The result for research and expert knowledge? Gradually, and especially since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, ‘evidence-based policymaking’ has become a buzzword more than a reality. Legal professionals, researchers and even policy makers themselves often know better, but their insights are often ignored or filtered through political convenience.
Our research is not meant to just speak to academics interested in knowledge dynamics around migration – we believe our findings matter for anyone concerned with democratic governance and human rights. Understanding how, when, and why knowledge is used or ignored in migration policy helps expose the dynamics behind policy failures. Until evidence is taken seriously, Europe’s borders will remain deadly, and policies to tackle migration will continue to be dishonest.
This blog is part of the PACES project funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the Author
Riccardo Biggi
Riccardo Biggi is a Junior Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. His academic interests lie at the intersection of migration politics, border regimes, and European governance. At Leiden, he contributes to research on transnational political structures and the socio-political implications of migration control. In addition to his scholarly work, Biggi co-produces City Rights Radio, a podcast examining European border politics and migrant justice, with a focus on grassroots perspectives.
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Amsterdam marked its 750th anniversary by distributing 60,000 copies of a commemorative book, Mijn Jarige Stad (“My Birthday City”), to children across the Dutch city. But what was intended as a celebratory gift has instead sparked controversy over its casual perpetuation of racial stereotypes. In this blog, Zhiqi Xu, PhD student at the International Institute of Social Studies, reflects on how unconscious bias infiltrates children’s literature and its wide-reaching impacts.
An expanded Image of the full Board Game. Image: Het Parool
On page 31, within the book’s board-game section, young readers encounter this instruction: “Ni Hao! Chinese tourists are blocking the bike path. To avoid them, go back to square 39.”
The passage, framed as playful gameplay, exposes a more troubling reality: how racial stereotypes can be seamlessly woven into educational materials, normalizing prejudiced thinking from an early age. What publishers likely viewed as harmless humour instead demonstrates how unconscious bias infiltrates children’s literature—and how such casual stereotyping can shape young minds in ways that extend far beyond the pages of a book.
The cover of the book. Image: RedditThe problematic passage in question. Image: Reddit
The incident raises critical questions about editorial oversight in educational publishing and the responsibility institutions bear when shaping children’s understanding of diversity and inclusion. For a city celebrating nearly eight centuries of history, the oversight represents a missed opportunity to model the inclusive values Amsterdam claims to champion.
Who are Amsterdam’s Tourists?
The idea of Chinese tourists “blocking the bike path” paints a vivid, supposedly familiar image—but it’s not supported by data. According to the 2023–2024 Toerisme MRA report, visitors from Asia accounted for only 8% of hotel overnight stays in Amsterdam in 2023. In contrast, 54% came from the rest of Europe, 17% from the Americas, and 18% were Dutch.
Tourism growth between 2019 and 2023 was highest among European and American guests, not Asian ones. The visibility of Asian tourists is being exaggerated and weaponized through cognitive distortions like availability bias, where rare but vivid impressions are perceived as more common than they are.
From Bias to Dehumanization
In psychology, stereotypes are heuristics— mental shortcuts used to categorize and simplify. They reduce people to flattened, predictable group traits. Although they ease mental load, they cause real harm when used to navigate social life.
Children absorb stereotypes early. By age seven, many have already internalized group-based categories learned from books, media, and adults. When a schoolbook casts a specific ethnic group, in this case, Chinese, as a social nuisance, it builds implicit biases: automatic associations between group identity and negative traits.
But the path doesn’t end there. As Gordon Allport outlined in his “scale of prejudice,” stereotypes escalate. When repeated enough, they lead to objectification — seeing people not as individuals, but as representatives of a group. That group is then more easily dismissed, mocked, blamed, or even harmed, with less guilt.
The dehumanizing tone becomes especially stark when we read the other obstacles in the same game section:
“Een reiger heeft op je hoofd gepoept. Je moet terug naar huis (vakje 18) om je haar te wassen.” (A heron pooped on your head. Go back home to wash your hair.)
“Plons. Je probeert een mega-duif te ontwijken met je fiets, maar valt in de gracht. Je moet helemaal terugzwemmen naar start.” (Splash. You try to dodge a mega-pigeon on your bike, but fall into the canal. Swim all the way back to the start.)
In this context, Chinese tourists are the only human obstacle, grouped alongside animal accidents and fictional giant birds. This reinforces a subconscious lesson: some people are not peers — they are problems.
A historical pattern
The casual stereotyping found in Amsterdam’s children’s book follows a well-documented historical pattern where seemingly minor representations precede more serious discrimination. The Amsterdam book incident, while seemingly minor, fits within this broader historical context of how prejudice becomes embedded in society’s foundational institutions.
In 1930s Germany, anti-Semitic imagery and language appeared in school textbooks and public messaging years before systematic persecution began. Educational materials depicted Jewish citizens through derogatory caricatures and false narratives, gradually normalizing prejudice in the public consciousness.
During the latter half of the 20th century in America, media portrayals consistently framed Black Americans through the lens of criminality and violence. These representations helped build public support for policies that would lead to mass incarceration, with communities of colour disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and judicial systems.
Following 9/11 attacks, Muslims faced increasingly negative portrayals in media and popular culture, depicted as inherently threatening or suspicious. This narrative shift preceded and justified expanded surveillance programs that specifically monitored Muslim communities and individuals.
Scholars who study the sociology of discrimination have identified this progression as a common precursor to institutional bias: stereotypical portrayals in popular culture and educational materials gradually shift public perception, creating the social conditions necessary for discriminatory policies to gain acceptance.
East Asians, especially those perceived as Chinese, have long faced similar treatment. During COVID-19, Asians across Europe were verbally harassed and physically attacked. In Tilburg, a Chinese-Dutch student at Tilburg University, Cindy, was brutally attacked in an elevator after asking a group to stop singing a racist song: Voorkomen is beter dan Chinezen (“Prevention is better than Chinese”). She suffered a concussion and knife wounds. Before leaving her unconscious, the attackers said they would “eradicate the coronavirus.”
Cindy’s story illustrates the continuum from mockery to violence, and how normalized stereotyping can desensitize people to cruelty.
And racists don’t differentiate between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. When one is mocked, all are targeted.
Systemic Roots
Equally troubling is that, according to the publisher’s own statement, the book passed through multiple levels of review and testing—city departments, school boards, and teachers, without objection. This reflects a deeper issue: normative bias, where majority-group perspectives are mistaken for neutrality.
It’s not necessarily malice. But when no one notices, it signals a system that is not built to detect or understand minority harm.
Public reactions have further exposed this divide. Dutch media figure Tina Nijkamp publicly criticized the passage and highlighted the absence of East Asian representation in Dutch TV and media. However, some online commenters called the backlash oversensitive, arguing “it’s just a joke” or “I’m Chinese and I’m not offended.”
Psychologically, this reflects pluralistic ignorance and false consensus bias: the assumption that one’s view is universal, and the failure to recognize diverse lived experiences.
But the data contradicts these dismissals. In March 2024, the Dutch government released the first national survey on discrimination against people of (South)East Asian descent. One in three reported experiencing discrimination in the past year. Minister Van Gennip responded:
“Discrimination against people of (South)East Asian descent must stop.”
Asian-Dutch community leader Hui-Hui Pan (@huihui_panonfire) posted a widely shared critique:
“Mijn stad is jarig. Maar waarom vieren we het met racisme?” (“My city is having a birthday. But why are we celebrating it with racism?”)
She called it “racism in children’s language.” The Pan Asian Collective, which she founded, launched a national campaign and is organizing the National Congress against Discrimination and Racism on 26 June 2025, where Utrecht University and Dataschool will present findings on Asian underrepresentation in 25 years of Dutch media coverage.
Their message: this isn’t about one book—it’s about a long, visible pattern of exclusion.
Entrenched Normalization
In response to public concern, various institutions linked to Mijn Jarige Stad began clarifying their roles. The Amsterdam Museum stated it was not involved in content creation, despite its name appearing in the book. Stichting Amsterdam 750 funded the project, but delegated execution to the Programmabureau Amsterdam 750, part of the city government. The publisher, Pavlov, initially issued a standard response emphasizing positive intent and broad involvement:
“The book was developed in collaboration with all primary schools through the Breed Bestuurlijk Overleg (BBO), and extensively tested with students and teachers from three different Amsterdam schools… We sincerely had no intention to insult or hurt any group.”
This response—focused on process, intention, and positive feedback—sidestepped the core issue: harm was done, and a line that dehumanizes East Asians passed through supposedly inclusive safeguards. The problem isn’t that one group failed; the problem is how normalized and institutionally invisible anti-Asian stereotypes remain, even in materials for children.
This is not a matter of blaming a single actor or demanding symbolic apologies. The book should be recalled, and what’s needed now is an honest reckoning — not just of the production process, but of how certain forms of discrimination are so implicit, so embedded in everyday thinking, that they go unnoticed by those involved and even by broader audiences who dismiss criticism as oversensitivity.
Yet this very invisibility is reinforced by the fragmentation of accountability. It highlights a deeper issue: when everyone is involved, no one is responsible. And when no one notices the harm, it reveals how profoundly such portrayals are normalized in our collective imagination.
From Learning to Living
From a behavioral science perspective, the issue extends far beyond questions of political sensitivity. Research demonstrates how cognitive shortcuts—the mental patterns children use to navigate social situations, become deeply embedded through repeated exposure to stereotypical representations.
Child development studies reveal that young minds absorb social hierarchies through seemingly innocuous content, internalizing messages about which groups hold value and which can be dismissed. These early lessons shape neural pathways that influence decision-making well into adulthood.
The potency of stereotypes lies not in their malicious intent but in their subtle persistence. They need not provoke outrage to encode prejudice, nor offend every reader to establish harmful categories of human worth. When children encounter these patterns repeatedly—whether in games, stories, or casual conversation—they learn implicit lessons about power dynamics and social belonging.
Educational content serves a dual purpose: it teaches explicit knowledge while simultaneously transmitting unspoken values about empathy, respect, and human dignity. A board game instruction becomes more than entertainment; it becomes a framework for understanding who deserves consideration and who can be overlooked.
The distribution of 60,000 books represents more than a municipal celebration. It constitutes the widespread dissemination of social scripts—subtle but powerful instructions that will influence how an entire generation of children perceives and interacts with others throughout their lives.
In this context, editorial choices carry profound responsibility, shaping not just individual attitudes but the social fabric of communities for decades to come.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the Author:
Zhiqi Xu
Zhiqi Xu is a behavioral scientist, psychologist, and development policy researcher. She investigates how people and communities respond to policy interventions and social change, uncovering the social and behavioral roots of transformation across contexts. Her work bridges disciplines to promote more inclusive and human-centered development thinking.
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Kalehe, a territory in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)located just to the north of Bukavu, has witnessed an unprecedented humanitarian crisis triggered by heavy rains in May 2023, resulting in at least 513 deaths, 5 525 people missing, 2 046 houses destroyed, many schools and health centres destroyed However, it was possible to prevent some of the worst effects of the crisis if efforts of reforestation were undertaken beforehand to reduce risks to lives and livelihoods. The DRC Humanitarian Observatory (DRC HO) calls for more attention to prevent such crises sustainably in the future in the DRC and in other similar contexts in the world.A humanitarian crisis with multiple consequences
Kalehe is one of the territories in the province of South-Kivu located in the northern side of Bukavu city (capital city of South-Kivu province). It covers the Eastern littoral of the Kivu Lake in Eastern DRC. Decades ago, there was a large tree-planting effort to protect the environment. In recent years, however, Kalehe’s population has grown rapidly due to the presence of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the territory. As a result of this, Kalehe has experienced widescale and rapid deforestation and loss of grassland in the middle and high plateaux to produce wood and charcoal without planting other trees.
In the night of 4 May 2023, heavy rains caused water levels to rise,as well as flooding in some villages of the Bushushu groupement in the Buhavu chiefdom of this territory. The Lukungula River of Bushushu, and the Kamikonzi River in Nyamukubi went beyond their limits, resulting in flooding and spreading of mixture of water, large stones, and mud in four out of seven sub villages of the locality, particularly Bushushu, Kabuchungu, Nyamukubi and Musumba. The humanitarian consequences of this were dramatic and multiform: 5525 people missing, more than 513 bodies buried, more than 2046 houses totally destroyed, more than 562 families mourning, many schools and health centres destroyed, loss of household assets including tables, chairs, and loss of documents of value such as electoral cards. The DRC HO team conducted fieldwork from 29 through 30 June 2023 in the area to know more about the crisis. WFP’s emergency response to the Kalehe floods, South Kivu – Flash Report #2 (19 May 2023) – Democratic Republic of the Congo | ReliefWebKalehe crisis: challenges of the humanitarian assistance
During the fieldwork, the team identified several challenges associated with: (i) people’s (re-)location, (ii) deforestation, (iii) insufficient aid and, (iv) deficit of accountability while delivering assistance.
Challenges of relocation: four villages were totally devastated, people lacked where to reside in terms of on which land to construct houses, infrastructures such as water points, health centres, schools, churches, markets, fields for cultivation, etc.
Challenges of reforestation: people did fell trees without control; areas became entirely less grassy because of charcoal production and/or cultivable land. There was a clear link between lack of environmental protection and mud and landslides, which cause wide scale destruction
Challenges of insufficient aid: state actors (Government, First Lady) and non-state actors (churches, associations), international actors (ACTED, OXFAM, Caritas, World Vision, MIDEFEOPS, Mercy Corps), together with United Nations agencies (OCHA, PAM, HCR, UNICEF) mobilized themselves since the start of the crisis. Even though, needs remained huge in terms of food and non-food items (shelters, clothes, kitchen items, cover, mosquito nets), water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), education, health, agriculture, psychosocial support, dignity kits for women,among others.
Challenges of accountability while delivering assistance: Some mechanisms of accountability were operational on the ground. Even though, in the vast majority of cases, there were reporting about discrimination of true beneficiaries in the selection process, which worked in favour of those who were close relatives to local leaders, often leaving out victims. In other cases, corruption took the form of bribing assistance by some humanitarian actors and selection of beneficiaries who were not victims. They delivered assistance without necessarily involving affected people and without any intention to take into account their points of viewsnor did they think reporting to them. At the same time however, actors reported more to their donors than towards affected people.
Photo 1: survival of the Kalehe crisis waiting for assistance in front of a humanitarian actor office, photo of 30 June 2023, in KaleheContextual factors
Kalehe is located at 60 kilometres from Bukavu city; most of humanitarian actors have offices at in Bukavu. Local leaders created a local crisis committee in Kalehe. According to informants, it is at this stage that there were many cases of aid misappropriation in terms of weak coordination of interventions on the ground, resulting in double cases, omissions, embezzlements, falsifications of recipient lists by some humanitarian actors in complicity with some local authorities. There was not necessarily harmony between lists of genuine victims and those who benefited aid; as a result, some received aid more than three times, while others did not receive anything. The weak involvement of affected populations in needs’ identification contributed negatively. Some actors worked just with local leaders who, often less informed of categories of peoples’ specific needs. Community leaders, supposed to represent the population, hardly fed back information shared in meetings to their constituency; creating an information vacuum.
Two recommendations
During the DRC HO event of 15 September 2023, where they shared and discussed fieldwork findings, participants formulated two main recommendations in the sense of concrete actions to set in place:
Relocate affected people close to cultivable lands
During and after the crises in DRC, displaced people tended to settle in the Kalehe territory. Kalehe is a zone heavily occupied by plantations of wealthy people, and so the task to find an appropriate site for IDPs became a major challenge. This recommendation abides by the tripartite Congolese State-land owners-affected populations paradigm to ensure that people can live in peace. At the same time, reforestation efforts should be intensified, especially in hilly and affected and non-affected areas.
Concentration of humanitarian aid in favour of affected populations by working for and with them.
To maximize chances to assist the maximum of affected people, IDPs need to be at the heart of assistance interventions. Needs’ identification, lists of distribution and their approval, certification of right victims are all examples of true willingness to involve them in the all process of assistance. Taking into account all relevant sectors namely health, education, reconstruction, habitat, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), and socio-psychological support. The improvement of social accountability during aid delivery, in particular downward accountability rather than just upward accountability. These lessons should guide every assistance coordination similar to the Kalehe context in the DRC and across the globe.
[1] We wrote this blog from the discussion of the DRC-HO event of 15 September 2023; we recognize active participation of Denise Shukuru Manegabe, Samuella Lukenge, Moise Amisi Ezdra, Kamos Bishindo, Darcin Ajuaye Kagadju and Innocent Assumani.Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the Authors:
Patrick Milabyo Kyamusugulwa is a Professor at the Bukavu High Institute of Medical Techniques, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is a member of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory and member of the Social Science Centre for African Development-KUTAFITI.
Delu Lusambya Mwenebyake is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Delu is working on humanitarian governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Community-driven, accountability, and advocacy in Humanitarian Actions.
Jules Amani Kamanyula is a member of both CERDHO of the Catholic University of Bukavu and the DRC Humanitarian Observatory.
Rachel Sifa Katembera is a member of civil society and active member of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory.
Léonie Aishe Saidi is a medical doctor, both member of Assist ASBL and the DRC Humanitarian Observatory.
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This blog is part of the Humanitarian Governance: Accountability, Advocacy, Alternatives’ project. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 884139
In this blog, Dr Maria Gabriela Palacio uses the example of The Darien Gap (a jungle crossing formerly utilised by forced migrants and refugees to travel North towards the USA) to consider the effects of recently changed and more brutal deportation policies put into place by the USA. More and more Ecuadorians are being forcefully returned to a country suffering from multiple damaging geopolitical currents, which is being asked to process large numbers of deportees whilst grappling with its patterns of out-migration.
Photo Credit: Akpan, 2024 Simulated by ChatGPT
Barely months ago, Ecuadorians were the second-largest group braving the perilous Darién Gap on their way to the United States; today, the trail is almost silent. Their abrupt disappearance is not just the outcome of a new deportation rule-set. It exposes a deeper political-economy in which mobility and immobility are governed by structures that render certain lives dispensable.
At the centre of this shift is the renewed U.S. deportation regime. Since Trump’s return to office, more than 100,000 people have been deported in just ten weeks. Over 2,000 Ecuadorians have been forcibly returned, many without hearings, detained in private facilities and flown home under armed guard. This is governance through expulsion.
Ecuadorians today are not “deciding” to stay or return. For many, the journey ends not at the border but on a deportation flight, disoriented and handcuffed, arriving with a plastic bag of belongings at Guayaquil airport. They are not returning to opportunity but to the same political and economic structures that first pushed them out.
This is not just the arithmetic of migration: it is the logic of a global regime of accumulation that produces and manages surplus populations. A critical political economy perspective reveals that migration is not just a reaction to hardship but a structural outcome wherein labour becomes mobile, governable, and dispensable due to long-established patterns of dependency, dispossession, and coercive governance. Deportation, in this light, is not a policy failure but a tool that sorts, removes, and disciplines those made surplus by design.
Others, unable to return or continue northward, remain like many other Latin American migrants trapped along the Andes–Central America–North America corridor, caught between increasingly punitive migration regimes and the uncertain protection of overstretched asylum systems. As migration routes are militarised and digital tools for asylum access are cancelled or restricted, a growing number of migrants are forced into reverse movement, undertaking costly and dangerous journeys back south. Some, like those arriving in the Colombian port town of Necoclí, spend thousands of dollars only to find themselves unable to continue or return, stranded without money, documents, or shelter. For others, the journey halts mid-route, creating new bottlenecks in Panama, Guatemala, or southern Mexico.
In these spaces of stalled mobility, migrants navigate a dense ecosystem of state and non-state actors: smugglers, private contractors, ferry operators, humanitarian organisations, and municipal authorities, forming a transnational migration industry. This industry manages not just “flows” but also immobility. It offers temporary passage, paperwork, food, or credit, often at a high cost, while blurring the line between protection and extraction. As formal protections shrink, mobility becomes commodified, mediated through precarious arrangements that feed off uncertainty and the shifting contours of migration policy.
What happens when a country simultaneously expels and receives its people, when labour is demanded abroad yet unprotected, and its return is funnelled into informal survival? These trajectories are not individual mishaps; they are produced by a regime that displaces populations through extraction, polices them through securitised borders, and repatriates them under the veneer of humanitarian policy.
In Ecuador, that regime is palpable: rolling blackouts stall hospitals and markets, armed violence reaches classrooms, and Indigenous territories are carved up by legal and paralegal extractive fronts. None of this is accidental. It stems from the dismantling of public infrastructure and the transfer of land and power to corporate actors, all within a global order that treats impoverished, racialised populations as surplus problems to be contained, displaced or discarded.
The question, then, is not only why Ecuadorians are returning but what kind of world is making this return inevitable.
The empty Darién trail is not the end of a journey but proof that a border system built on expulsion works as intended. It shifts responsibility from the global North to Latin American states and turns human mobility into a profitable detention, surveillance and return market. Deportation, in this context, is not an exception.
We must begin by asking different questions. Not only how to make migration safer or more “orderly,” but how to dismantle the global structures that produce dispensability in the first place. Migration regimes do not simply fail; they succeed in what they are designed to do: sort, discipline, and displace surplus populations created by extractive capitalism and securitised governance. In this view, deportation is not an aberration; it is the tangible expression of a world order that governs through expulsion. It legitimises neglect, turns mobility into criminality, and transforms human lives into data points in a market of detention, surveillance, and return.
The return of Ecuadorians is not the end of a journey; it is proof that a border regime built on expulsion works exactly as designed.
Notes:
For readers who want to trace the argument from Ecuador’s current return-migration crisis back to its structural roots, start with Jara, Mideros and Palacio (eds.) 2024, Política social, pobreza y desigualdad en el Ecuador, 1980-2021 my co-edited volume that charts four decades of welfare retrenchment, labour precarity and territorial inequalities. Then situate those findings within the broader political economy canon: W. Arthur Lewis’s (1954) seminal essay on surplus labour, Celso Furtado’s (1966) classic dependency analysis, Saskia Sassen’s (2014) study of “systemic expulsions” under global capitalism, and Tania Murray Li’s (2010) account of how neoliberal governance renders populations surplus.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author
María Gabriela Palacio
Maria Gabriela Palacio is an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Institute for History, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University. Her research asks how political-economic forces, social policy and migration regimes shape poverty, inequality and (in)security in Latin America. Trained as an economist, she holds a PhD and MA in Development Studies (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam), an MSc in NGO Management and Social Economy (Universitat de València) and a BA in Economics (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador).
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Colombian President Gustavo Petro signs a Pact for Land and Life; Revolution for Life, committing to carry out land redistribution, restitution, and recognition to enable rural working people to pursue economically and ecologically regenerative livelihoods. In this blog, Prof. Jun Borras and Itayosara Herrera discuss the implications of this pact.
Photo Credit: Ministry of Agriculture, Colombia
In February 2025, in Chicoral, Tolima, Colombia, 5,000 campesinos, Afrodescendants, Indigenous and government officials gathered for two days, and made a pact: Pacto fpr la Tierra y la Vida – Pact for Land and Life; Revolution for Life. The 12-point agreement signed by President Gustavo Petro and representatives of grassroots social movements revolved around the commitment to carry out land redistribution, restitution, and recognition to enable rural working people to pursue economically and ecologically regenerative livelihoods, with meaningful representation. The Chicoral event tries to undo a past in Colombia, and confronts a difficult challenge in the present world.
Undoing the past
In 1972 in Chicoral, landed elites and traditional political parties conspired to dismantle the 1960s redistributive land reform. They pushed to relax the criteria for defining unproductive land and inadequate land use to effectively avoid expropriation. This agreement became known infamously as the Pacto de Chicoral. It marked the definitive burial of Colombia’s redistributive land reform. It was, in essence, a pact of death—the death of land reform in Colombia—whose consequences continue to shape society today. Instead of redistribution, Colombia experienced more than half a century of counter-land reform, which led to increased violence in rural areas and the unprecedented expansion of the agricultural frontier with internal colonization in lieu of redistribution. This would also contribute to the rise of coca cultivation under the control of narco syndicates. Ultimately, it fed into the divide-and-rule strategy of the elites toward campesinos, Indigenous, and Afrodescendants.
Chicoral2025 is historic as it flips Chicoral1972: from the death of land reform to a commitment to redistributive land policies. It is ground-breaking as it is a pledge for a common front of struggles for land among campesinos, Afrodescendants and the Indigenous, aspiring to put an end to the divide-and-rule tactic employed by counter-reformists.
Confronting current challenges
The contemporary climate of land politics is extremely hostile to redistributive land policies, reflected in the continuing global land grabs. The condition is marked a global consensus among reactionary forces celebrating land grabbing, while maligning redistributive land reforms, as exemplified in Trump’s plan for the Gaza land grab while rejecting a modest liberal land reform in South Africa that land reform advocates in that country are not even happy about.
This current condition did not emerge from nowhere. It is a direct offshoot of decades of neoliberalization of land policies. The neoliberal consensus has deployed coordinated tactics.
First, rolling back gains in redistributive land policies, largely through market-based economic policies hostile to small-scale farmers.
Second, containing the extent of implementation of existing redistributive land policies where these exist.
Third, blocking any initiative to pass new redistributive land policies in societies where these are needed.
Fourth, reinterpreting existing laws and narratives away from their social justice moorings and towards free market dogmas; thus, land tenure security means security for the owners of big estates and capital.
Finally, all four are being done in order to promote market-based, neoliberal land policies: justification and promotion of market-based land policies, formalization of land claims without prior or accompanying redistribution which simply ratifies what exists.
Minister of Agriculture Martha Carvajalino, Chicoral, February 2025 Photo Credit: Jun Borras
When neoliberalism gained ground in the 1980s, among the first casualties was redistributive land policies. The heart and soul of classical land reform were:
(a) land size ceiling, a cap to how much land one can accumulate and
(b) the right to a minimum access to an economically viable land size, or land for those who work it.
Today, land size ceiling is a taboo. Thus, programmes for providing minimum access to land to build-scale farms have difficulty finding land to redistribute.
During the past four decades, there have been only a handful of countries that managed to pursue redistributive land reforms: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe. Significant programs have provided collective land titles for the Indigenous such as the one in Colombia, although many of these lands are in isolated, marginal geographic spaces.
The more common accomplishments are a variety of petty reforms. Small reforms are not inherently good or bad, and they are good especially when they provide immediate relief to ordinary working people. They constitute ‘petty reformism’, a negative term, when small reforms were done in lieu of systemic deep reforms. Thus, limited land titling, formalization of land claims, and individualization and privatization of the commons – often labeled under a misleadingly vague banner: land tenure security, which is often about the security of the owners of big estates and capital.
Globalizing Chirocal2025
The need for land redistribution, restitution and recognition remains urgent and necessary, for Colombia and the world. This is even more so in the current era when dominant classes other than agrarian elites aggressively grab land from peasants and Indigenous: profiteers behind market-based climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, corporate actors in renewable energy sector, global food system giants and financial capital. The forces against reforms have multiplied. But so as the potential forces in favour of reforms. The main alliance for redistributive land policies today is no longer limited to agrarian classes and state reformists; rather, it has to necessarily include social forces in food, environmental and climate justice, as well as labour justice, movements and struggles.
In 1979, FAO convened in Rome the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD) hoping to bring new energy to global land reformism. The following year turned out to be beginning of the end of classic land reforms as neoliberalism kicked in and put an end to state-driven redistributive land policies. In March 2006, FAO convened a follow-up to WCARRD, the International Conference Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with the goal of reviving efforts at democratizing land politics. The following year, the global land rush exploded that led to the dispossession of millions of peasants and Indigenous worldwide. In February 2026, twenty years after Porto Alegre, ICARRD+20 will be convened by the Colombian government. It is a very timely international initiative. Chicoral2025 signals what kind of agenda the Colombian government wants to emerge at ICARRD+20: a deep commitment to democratic land politics for regenerative renewal of life.
Several researchers from the ISS-based ERC Advanced Grant project RRUSHES-5 and the Democratizing Knowledge Politics Initiative under the Erasmus Professors program for positive societal impact of Erasmus University Rotterdam are engaged in the Pact for Land and Life process.
About the Authors:
Saturnino (‘Jun’) M. Borras Jr.
Saturnino (‘Jun’) M. Borras Jr. is a Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years until 2023 and is part of the Erasmus Professor Program for Societal Impact at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He holds an ERC Advanced Grant for research on global land and commodity rushes and their impact on food, climate, labour, citizenship, and geopolitics. He is also a Distinguished Professor at China Agricultural University and an associate of the Transnational Institute. Previously, he was Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University (2007–2010).
Itayosara Rojas Herrera
Itayosara Rojas is a PhD Researcher at International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is member of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant awarded project “Commodity & Land Rushes and Regimes: Reshaping Five Spheres of Global Social Life (RRUSHES-5)” led by Professor Jun Borras. As part of this project, Itayosara examines how the contemporary global commodity/land rushes (re)shape the politics of climate change, labour, and state-citizenship relations in the Colombian Amazon.
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What happened to the scholar that didn’t embrace new media? They ran out of cassette tapes! Awful jokes aside, it’s more and more important for scientists, and particularly social scientists, to be plugged in to society to better interact with it. A recent Economist article highlighted that academic research papers in the humanities and social sciences are getting harder to read, more convoluted and stuffed full of jargon and incomprehensible sentences. There is a perception in the ‘outside world’ (perhaps pushed by populist political currents!) that academics are starting to talk more just to other academics rather than to society at large, which is at the very least not conducive to a high level of public discourse. In some cases, it has led to the removal of experts from the policymaking process. At the same time, and partially thanks to the growing legions of science communications officers and the phenomenon of ‘cool geeks’, there are more opportunities than ever for (social) scientists to spread their ideas and research in accessible, bite-sized and socially engaged ways. Even the Lowlands Festival has a science pavilion to show off the latest research on everything from the psychology of perceptions of equality, quantum physics, the creative possibilities of generative AI and much more besides.
Tom Ansell, Sarah Njoroge (MSc) and Gabriela Anderson intend this blog as a call to academics to think along, repackage their work into fun and digestible gobbets and make use of the science communications talent available to help boost our collective ‘impact’… whatever ‘impact’ means!
This image was taken at Research InSightS LIVE #4 Conflict Compounded: Implications of the war in Ukraine on global development challenges
Social science is best when it’s in conversation with society
Aside from the self-fulfilment element, and the satisfaction of personal curiosity, social scientific research has a function of providing evidence-based approaches to societal questions that can inform various stakeholders in how they act. That could be the government, organizations, businesses or people themselves. Like many forms of scientific enquiry, it serves to further human knowledge, and so (indirectly and ideally) improve people’s lives or the society that they live in. The link between the academic and the society in which they function should be one of constant conversation, where ideas are presented to people, and then validated or reconsidered through their experiences and their interaction with the everyday (this is also expressed by Anthony Giddens as the ‘double hermeneutic’). Of course, this sentence may spark flashing lights in the minds of many academics reading this, but in short – social science is rooted in society and so should seek to be in conversation with ‘real’ people all the time. A social scientist that hides away in a university is an isolated one! This means that researchers must have a way of being in conversation with people. At least part of that conversation must be a clear transmission of social science theories in a compelling and clear way, and knowledge sharing in a form that is digestible, interesting and (hopefully) means that people in the ‘real world’ can see their own lives and questions in cutting-edge research.
This is especially true in the last few years , where a significant portion of the world’s institutions face ‘alternative facts’ and the rise of public discourse strongly influenced by a ‘post-truth’ world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the need to provide accurate and evidence-based advice to the general public was literally a matter of life and death. Knowledge of the mechanisms of how an mRNA vaccine worked (the Moderna one) helped ensure that enough people went and received the jab to reach the critical mass of vaccinated people. Now imagine if the various biologists had remained hidden behind a wall of jargon and specific terminology, and all the while remained in their labs and refused to speak to the public in understandable language. Naturally, the immediate risks aren’t quite the same in social science research uptake, but the need for public trust and mandate is the same. Where the influence of rigorous social scientific research would help, however, is in government policymaking. Imagine how the new Dutch international aid policy would look had various members of ISS’ work been consulted in its drafting. We can’t make policymakers listen to good research, but we can make it as easy as possible for them to find, digest and be interested by it.
Avoiding extractivism and ‘closing the loop’
Considering the other side of the conversation between research and the public, we need to move beyond the effort of making sure our writing reflects our values as researchers to be ethical and non-extractive only during the research process. Research even in these most critical and conscious of times still teeters on the lines of opinion-mining, often masquerading through notions such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-creation’. Jamie Gorman expresses this quite well in the quote (almost jokingly): ‘What does a social researcher have in common with an oil rig operator? The answer is that both can be miners engaged in the extraction of a precious resource’. For social science researchers, that precious resource is knowledge. A key part of making sure that research is non-extractive is ‘closing the loop’ and making sure that the people that have contributed to the research are both involved and can get something out of it (something called participatory research).
The potential impact of research does not stop before and during the research process, it needs to extend into the dissemination and communication of said research. By looking beyond the production of a research to how it can be shared to an audience outside of the academic community, we allow for a greater reach through inclusivity, accessibility and even opening up for future potentials in participation and, most importantly, allowing research to be useable (from theory to practice and vice versa). How is this done? By sharing research in different mediums and through different mediums and media. Examples include translated versions, both in terms of language and even the softening of academic and ‘waffle’ jargon, different (relevant) and contextual forms of outputs, such as radio broadcasts (in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo), video abstracts, infographics, posters, dialogue cafes, podcasts, etc. In doing so, we reach people at their different levels in all their differences of backgrounds, making room for a greater impact from our research.
Moving from inaccessible papers to socially engaged media
So, how do we actually move from rigorous, well-researched ideas to public discourse and policy that reflect them? The best science communication doesn’t just ‘simplify’ research, it translates, distils, demystifies and engages. It meets people where they are, using formats that are accessible without compromising complexity, and applies sky high thinking to everyday life.
Take podcasts, for instance. The Good Humanitarianbridges the gap between academic research and humanitarianism and the real-world challenges practitioners face. MOOCS, or open access-learning, allows people – whether they have an educational background in social sciences or not – to engage with contemporary debates. Written and visual storytelling, from in-depth interviews, infographics and posters to interactive web experiences, has made complex and socio-political topics more digestible for a general audience. Live shows, such as Research InSightS LIVE or dialogue cafes invite people to listen and engage on topics in enjoyable, yet succinct formats. In addition, social media is increasingly becoming more important for visibility, and as a way to link research that proposes an alternate world to the people that can achieve it. Even platforms like TikTok have been effectively used to debunk misinformation and explain key social science concepts in under a minute, but all face potential challenges of course.
At the same time, researchers must be empowered to engage in these spaces. Not everyone who can run a hefty statistical model or analyse complex patterns can seamlessly translate these insights for public consumption. This is precisely where science communicators come in – not to dilute these ideas but to ensure that big ideas are clarified and shared widely. Closing the loop isn’t just an ethical responsibility in participatory research – it’s a vital step toward ensuring that knowledge serves people by feeding back into their livelihoods.
Science communicators do more than just support researchers. They can be catalysts for expanding the reach and impact of academic work at its inception. Research can often benefit from creativity and audience awareness that can make it resonate beyond academia. In other words, researchers and science communicators can make an excellent team – if they truly collaborate. That means not just seeing communicators as an ‘add-on’, but valuing their input, trusting their instincts and recognizing their ability to turn rigorous research into compelling narratives that engage policymakers, practitioners and the public alike, also extending their inclusion to before and during the research process, not only after.
If universities and research institutes truly want to make an impact, they need to rethink the way they communicate knowledge. The challenge isn’t just about writing readable research papers. It’s about shaping public discourse, informing policy and making social science a living, breathing conversation. After all, what good is knowledge if it’s locked away in academic journals?
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Tom Ansell
Tom Ansell is the coordinator and programme manager of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre, and the Coordinator of the International Humanitarian Studies Association. He has a study background in religion and conflict transformation, as well as an interest in disaster risk reduction, and science communication and societal impact of (applied) research.
Sarah Njoroge
Sarah Njoroge (MSc) is a multi-skilled communications professional who tells stories on societal issues through videos, articles, podcasts and more. She has extensive experience writing, designing and co-producing content on international development. Sarah is currently a Digital Content Manager at RNW Media and formerly worked as a Communications Officer at ISS.
Gabriela Anderson
Gabriela Anderson is the community manager of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre and coordinates the Humanitarian Observatories Network. Graduating with a Master’s from the International Institue of Social Studies in 2022 with a focus on the Governance of Migration and Diversity, her research focuses on notions of (self-)representation, placemaking and the importance of inclusive communication in its various forms and through its different mediums, especially in areas of Conflict & Peace with both academic and practitioner related organizations.
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Nepali brides in South Korea are often portrayed as victims of violence, abuse, exploitation, slavery, and trafficking. But are these the only realities of Nepali brides? Nilima Rai in this article, challenges the dominant monolithic narrative of victimhood and sheds light on the other realities of these women – many of whom navigate such matrimonies with resilience, academic and professional achievements, and significant socioeconomic and cultural contributions in Korea and Nepal. Through patchwork ethnography, this article reveals Nepali brides’ overlooked agency, aspirations, achievements, and contributions beyond their image as victims.
‘They call us Bhote ko budi,1 someone with Pothi Visa,2 who didn’t find a suitable man to marry, the victims of domestic violence and abuse, and someone who is miserably sitting in a corner and crying over their ill fate,’ one of the Nepali brides said. This illustrates the racist, sexist, and negative remarks the Nepali brides encounter in their day-to-day lives. This article discusses how the dominant narrative of victimhood further reinforces stigmas and prejudices of Nepali brides.
Transnational marriage in South Korea: Nepali brides
Transnational marriage between Nepali brides and Korean men began in the early 1990s when Nepali migrant workers entered Korea through the Industrial Trainee System.3These brides, mainly belonging to socio-economically marginalised Tibeto-Burmese ethnic groups, are preferred4 due to their physical similarity to Korean people.
Nepali women participate in transnational marriage as an opportunity created by globalisation but with an expectation to fill the bride shortage vis-à-vis the ongoing crisis of social reproduction in South Korea. Like other foreign brides,5 Nepali brides make compromised choice of marrying foreign men and settling outside their country to escape poverty, attain upward mobility, or find access to labour markets that are otherwise denied to them.6 Conversely, Korean men7 rejected in the local marriage market due to their low socio-economic status and societal expectations of women seeking brides outside their racial/ethnic pool in countries such as China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Nepal to name a few.
In Nepal, such marriages occur through commercial marriage brokers, mutual friends and relatives living and working in Korea. Since the early 2000s, Nepali women have entered transnational marriage through the marriage agencies/bureaus in Korea and Nepal.
The media’s victim narrative and its impact on Nepali brides
With the active involvement of the marriage brokers as matchmakers and the negative implications of such commercialised marriages, Nepali brides are often disparagingly depicted as ‘victims’ – the victims of trafficking, slavery, domestic violence, abuse, and deception. For more than a decade and even today, domestic and international news media have been replete with the sufferings of Nepali brides in Korea, portraying them as pitiful, bleak, wretched, sold, trafficked, and enslaved in Korean households. A rapid increase of unregulated marriage agencies in Nepal and Korea has resulted in increased numbers of fraudulent marriages engendering domestic violence and abuse of some of the Nepali brides. News media have widely reported cases of violence against Nepali brides along with their testimonies. Such efforts have highlighted the grave concerns of violence against those Nepali brides who experienced domestic violence and abuse. However, the paucity of research on the overall experiences of these brides, and the overwhelming representation of these women in media not only created their image as ‘women in peril’ and labelled them as ‘victims’ but also reinforced the already existing stigmas and prejudices against these women within the Nepali diaspora community in Korea.
These brides are subjected to gender-oppressive slurs by the Nepali diaspora community which sees them as ‘promiscuous’, ‘leftovers’, or someone who has a problem or is behaving strangely, thus ineligible to marry a man from their vicinity. The media’s tendency to depict Nepali brides merely as victims, the lack of research as well as the condescending attitudes of the Nepali diaspora community and the potential threat of oppressive slurs has often resulted in the silencing of Nepali brides.
‘Other Nepali brides in our community scolded me for allowing them to take my video and giving an interview to one of the media people,’ said one of the Nepali brides. This illustrates the negative implications of such narratives of Nepali brides fostering distrust and discontentment not only towards the media but also within the Nepali diaspora community. Some expressed their resentment through words, while others demonstrated it through their act of refusal, hesitation and constant need for reassurance that those approaching them were not affiliated with the media.
The realities of other Nepali brides
Narrating these women’s stories only through victimhood perspectives obscures the other realities of brides who claim to be empowered through economic gain, freedom of mobility and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. These are the Nepali brides whose lived realities differ from those who suffer from violence and abuse.
‘Do we look like the victims of domestic violence or unhappy in our marital life, like how these journalists often portray us? Rather, I think I made the right decision getting married and coming here as I have more freedom to work, earn and live my life on my own terms,’ one of the Nepali brides said.
Similarly, another Nepali bride expressed her frustration, saying, ‘I am sick and tired of how these Nepali media represent us. A few years back, one of the journalists asked for our (her husband and her) photo, saying they wanted to cover the stories of Nepali brides. Still, in the end, they published our photo under the awful title and story that talked about how pitiful Nepali brides are. I am more than happy with my husband, who speaks fluent Nepali and actively contributes to Korean and Nepali literature and society. We both are hotel entrepreneurs. So, do you think my story fits into one of those stories published in the newspaper?’
Nepali bride with her husband tending their kitchen garden at Jeju-do, South Korea
The Nepali brides who were not victims of violence – and whose stories did not fit in with the articles published in news media – claimed to have made adjustments early on in their marriage, particularly in terms of language, food, and culture. They are now content with their familial relationships, have successfully established their professional careers, and are able to support their left-behind/natal families in Nepal.
These brides wish to be recognised as successful entrepreneurs, educators, nurses, police officers, poets, counsellors, interpreters, and promoters of Nepali culture, food, and language across the Nepali border. Instead of questioning their intentions in choosing a foreign spouse and vilifying them as ‘gold diggers’ – those who marry old Korean men for ‘card’/citizenship – and helpless victims of violence – who are beaten, battered, and abused by their husbands and in-laws – they want their achievements and contributions in both Korea and Nepal to be valued and acknowledged.
Furthermore, these women are often fluent in the Korean language and are pursuing/pursued further academic and professional endeavours in Korea; things they believe they could not have achieved in Nepal. Based on my research, Nepali migrant workers and students rely heavily on these brides to book public venues and bargain in local shops. They also rely on them for critical services such as translating/interpreting sensitive court cases and counselling in medical and mental health cases. Furthermore, these brides provide constant support and services as teachers and educators in schools, institutes, and migrant worker centres; provide health and safety orientations in factories and industries; act as counsellors to facilitate immigration procedures; work as nurses in hospitals, as police officers, established women’s shelters for migrant workers and provide all the necessary support in the rescue and repatriation of undocumented migrant workers.
Highlighting these women’s stories as achievers and contributors is not to trivialize the gravity of the issues related to violence against Nepali women/brides at all levels in and outside the country. The main aim of this article was to discuss the consequences of one-way narratives of victimhood that have negative implications on the lives of other Nepali brides who are happy with the positive outcome of their struggles in a foreign land. There is a need for in-depth research into the broader experiences of these women and for a multi-stakeholder dialogue and deliberation with state and non-state actors such as news media.
Endnotes
1. ‘Bhote’ is “a derogatory term for ethnically Tibetan people from northern Nepal (Gurung 2022, 1746). This kind of racial slur has been used against Nepali brides in Korea due to the resemblance or the similar physical features of Korean men with these ethnically Tibetan people.
Gurung, Phurwa.2023. ‘Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making, territorialization and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal’ EPE: Nature and Space 6, No.3: 1745-1766.
2. In Nepal, the word ‘poth’” or ‘hen’ is a derogatory colloquial term often used as an oppressional slur that evinces male dominance or superiority over women (Lama and Buchy 2002).
Lama, Anupama and Marlene Buchy. 2002. ‘Gender, Class, Caste and Participation: The Case of Community Forestry in Nepal’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies 9, No.1: 27-41.
3. Before the Employment Permit System (2004), Korea systematised the inflow of migrant workers by introducing the Industrial Trainee System in 1991. Nepali migrant workers entered Korea through this trainee system. In 1990, 43,017 Nepali migrant workers were recorded in Korea.
Rai, Nilima, Arjun Kharel, and Sudeshna Thapa.2019. Labour Migration from Nepal-Factsheet: South Korea, Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility and Foreign Employment Board, Nepal. https://archive.ceslam.org/fact-sheets/factsheet-south-korea
Based on my research findings, some Nepali brides were found to enter Korea through the trainee system in the early 1990s and later married Korean men.
4. Kim, Kyunghak, and Miranda De Dios. 2017. ‘Transnational Care for Left-Behind Family in Nepal with Particular Reference to Nepalese Married Migrant Women in Korea’ Global Diaspora and the Transnational Community: Migration and Culture.
5. Kim, Minjeong.2018. Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and ‘Multiculturalism’ in Rural South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
6. Based on the findings of the study.
7. Kim, Hansung, Sun Young Lee, and In Hee Choi. 2014. ‘Employment and Poverty Status of Female Marriage Immigrants in South Korea’ Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 23, No.2: 129-154.
This blog post is based on the empirical evidence collected from field research in South Korea and Nepal (2023-24) for my doctoral study.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author
Nilima Rai is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research explores the lived realities of Nepali brides in South Korea. She holds master’s degrees in Development Studies from Erasmus University, the Netherlands, and in Conflict, Peace, and Development Studies from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka. Her interests include migration, marriage and labor mobility, social justice, women’s rights, and the intersections of conflict, disaster, and gender.
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Gender Studies worldwide confront the double whammy of the academic field’s persistent urgency amidst heightened risk for its scholars and students. As a result, there is a pressing need for collaboration and solidarity among scholars working in Gender Studies to safeguard academic freedom for high-quality research and education and strengthen advocacy efforts in the face of growing challenges. Four Gender Studies hubs in Pakistan, Turkey, and the Netherlands have started creating and using digital spaces for knowledge creation, exchange, and mutual support.
Persistent urgency of Gender Studies to further a gender equality agenda
Rooted in feminist activism of the late 1960s, Gender Studies uniquely integrates theory, vision, and action to examine the role of gender in society and resulting inequalities and power differences. The discipline remains highly relevant. Despite global policy commitments to gender equality – from the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – gender-based violence and human rights violations as well as gender gaps in the economy and in decision-making positions persist.
In Pakistan, consistently ranked among the lowest in gender equality, the situation is dire. Gender-based violence, including abductions, (gang)rape, and domestic violence experienced by women, increased in 2023 compared to 2022. Transphobia has intensified, exemplified by the Federal Shariat Court’s declaring sections of the historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 in violation of Islamic law, even as transgender persons face ongoing violence and discrimination. State repression, including obstruction of annual Aurat [women’s] marches on International Women’s Day, further undermines efforts for gender justice.
To tap the potential of Gender Studies to counter such gender-based discriminations and gaps, the discipline’s Northern bias poses a formidable obstacle. Gender Studies curricula are still dominated by theories grounded in the global North, despite the discipline’s emphasis on intersections with local contexts and histories that produce specific forms of gendered structures and inequalities in society. For students in global South contexts like Pakistan, this creates the impression of an academic discipline that is antagonistic to students’ culture, dismissive of their lived realities and struggles, making engagement difficult. Therefore, to implement gender equality agendas effectively, indigenous gender perspectives are crucial.
The Netherlands, known for its strong gender equality commitments, is not immune to the rise of anti-gender rights politics. As part of a major overhaul of the Dutch policy for development cooperation that significantly reduces support for international partners and orients it more towards Dutch interests, the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Aid recently announced to end international funding for women’s rights and gender equality, threatening to halt progress in its commitment to pursuing a feminist foreign policy.
Countering anti-gender rights backlash through transnational digital collaboration in Gender Studies
Against the backdrop of persistent gender inequalities, Northern-centric theorising of gender and backlash against Gender Studies, we have started experimenting with transnational digital collaboration between the institutions in which we are based in Pakistan, Turkey, and the Netherlands. This approach offers an effective way to address these intertwined challenges to gender equality through context-sensitive engagement.
We believe that this initiative has the potential to transfer context-sensitive Gender Studies knowledge to a broader audience while modernising higher education institutes and enhancing curricular relevance. It also fosters transnational solidarity among scholars, providing a safe space to share work, address concerns, and collaboratively navigate challenges to gender equality in academia and beyond.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Karin Astrid Siegmann works as an Associate Professor of Gender and Labour Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS).
Saad Ali Khan is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Excellence in Gender Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad (CEGS) and a Visiting Fellow at the ISS.
Rabbia Aslam is an Assistant Professor at the CEGS. Her doctoral research investigated Gender Studies as an academic field in Pakistan.
Bilge Sahin works as an Assistant Professor in Conflict and Peace Studies at ISS where she incorporates gender perspectives into her teaching and research.
Alia Amirali is an Assistant Professor at the CEGS as well as a feminist organizer.
Selin Akyüz is an Associate Professor at TED University Ankara, specializing in gender studies, political masculinities, and feminist methodologies.
Aurangzaib Alizai holds the position of an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Development Studies Department at the University of Balochistan Quetta.
Tuğçe Çetinkaya is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University Ankara where her doctoral research explores the gender and class dynamics of local environmental struggles.
Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz is Professor and heads the Center for Gender Studies as well as the Political Science and International Relations Department at TED University in Ankara.
Muhib Kakar is an academic and researcher specialised in Gender Studies.
Amna Hafeez Mobeen is a lecturer and researcher at CEGS. She recently completed her doctoral dissertation at Pakistan’s National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS).
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The recent USAID funding freeze has left critical international development programmes in limbo, with devastating consequences for women and girls. The freeze is undoing decades of progress in gender-sensitive development work, putting at risk thousands of aid programmes that support women and thereby limiting the ability of frontline workers to serve their communities. The global development sector is now scrambling to find alternative funding and policy solutions to keep gender-focused initiatives alive.
In this interview, Plan International’s Director of Business Development Allison Shannon, and Vannette Tolbert, Senior Communications Manager, discussed the immediate and far-reaching impacts of this policy decision with Emaediong Akpan and Eno-Obong Etetim, recent MA graduates in Women and Gender Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies, both of whom were also impacted by the USAID stop work order. From disrupted education to increased vulnerability to child marriage, the freeze threatens essential services that protect and empower girls. Drawing on reflections from the interview, the authors explore the ongoing impact of the freeze and highlight the necessity for urgent action.
The recent USAID funding freeze has left critical international development programmes in limbo, with devastating consequences for women and girls. In this article, we explore the ongoing impact of the freeze while reflecting on our conversation with Plan International’s Director of Business Development, Allison Shannon, and Senior Communications Manager, Vannette Tolbert. As recent MA graduates in Women and Gender Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies. we examine how this freeze is undoing decades of progress in gender-sensitive development work, putting at risk thousands of aid programmes that support women and limiting the ability of frontline workers to serve their communities. We discuss how the freeze is disrupting education, increasing vulnerability to child marriage and threatening essential services that protect and empower girls while highlighting the urgent need for immediate action.
Pause, when do we ‘press play’?
‘Until we are all equal’ is the guiding ethos behind Plan International’s work across the globe. Yet, like many other organizations, this mission is currently threatened due to the recent USAID funding freeze. The suspension of funds has halted 13 programmes across 12 countries, disrupting essential services that support girls’ education, child protection and economic empowerment. These countries include Nepal, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Philippines, Malawi, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico and Honduras. Notably, immediate consequences of this decision include the discontinuation of maternal healthcare services, leaving women without access to essential prenatal and reproductive health services; the interruption of educational opportunities for girls, increasing their vulnerability to early marriage and long-term economic hardship; and the disruption of gender-based violence prevention programmes, putting millions of women and girls at greater risk of violence. The impact is particularly severe for marginalized communities which have relied on USAID-funded initiatives as a crucial lifeline. Senior Communications Manager Vannette Tolbert says, ‘The freeze is not just pausing development efforts; it is actively dismantling critical support systems for women and girls worldwide.’
Plan International relies significantly on funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which accounts for one-third of its overall budget. USAID has provided over US$54 million to support Plan’s programmes, funding essential initiatives that promote gender equality, prevent child marriage and ensure access to education for girls around the globe. The rationale behind the freeze centres on a reassessment of US foreign aid spending, yet its immediate impact is felt by the world’s most vulnerable populations. To put this in perspective, Tolbert states that US$38 million in grant funding across 13 contracts in 12 countries has been affected, while US$19.5 million in unspent funds remains frozen.
The ripple effects: How the freeze endangers girls and women
1. Education interrupted: The risk of reversing gains: In Nepal, for instance, Plan International’s remedial classeshave become critical in providing vital academic support to young girls like Ganga, an ambitious eighth-grader with dreams of becoming a teacher. These classes not only help reinforce her academic skills but also boost her confidence in a society where education for girls often takes a backseat. Without this essential assistance, hundreds of girls like Ganga face the grim possibility of failing their exams, which could lead to early marriage – a common reality for many girls from economically strained households in Nepal where educational opportunities are limited.
Beyond Nepal, in Nigeria’s conflict-affected regions, Plan International-supported non-formal learning centres serve as a haven for children displaced by violence. These centres create nurturing environments where children can access not only literacy and numeracy training but also crucial psychosocial support to help them cope with conflict-induced trauma. With the funding freeze now in effect, these vital safe spaces have shut down, leaving thousands of children, especially girls, without viable options for continued education and emotional well-being.
In Kenya, Plan International’s community-driven approach has been essential in improving education for girls. Through their GirlEngage project, Plan listens to the specific needs of girls and their communities, ensuring that solutions are both relevant and sustainable. When high absenteeism rates were reported in schools, Plan engaged with communities and identified the need for menstrual products and safe hygiene spaces. In response, they constructed washrooms and latrines to address this gap. As a result, absenteeism rates dropped significantly and graduation rates skyrocketed. However, with the recent funding freeze, these vital initiatives are now at risk and threaten to reverse years of progress in education and gender equality, leaving long-lasting consequences for the affected communities
Increase in child marriage
In numerous communities, girls are seen as ‘economic assets’, and financial hardship often leads to early marriages. As Tolbert notes, ‘…families can’t afford to support many children, so the girls are sent off at very young ages, often as a financial transaction’. Community-driven initiatives, supported by organizations like Plan International, have been crucial in delaying child marriages by educating families and fostering behavioural change. ‘These programmes not only fund services – they reshape mindsets, empower allies and drive lasting social change’. However, the funding freeze risks reversing this progress, as many families may turn back to traditional survival strategies, including marrying off their daughters to ease financial strain. Without timely intervention, the significant gains made in preventing child marriage could be undone.
This is evident in the case of community leaders, key opinion leaders and allies who were beginning to challenge harmful traditions but will now face reduced support, slowing progress toward gender equality. For instance, the role of fathers in challenging gender norms and advocating for their daughters’ well-being could experience significant setbacks. Many fathers, often referred to as Girl Dads, have been actively engaged in initiatives promoting girls’ education and ending child marriage. The case of Yusuf in Indonesia, who re-evaluated his decision to marry off his daughter after participating in a Plan International anti-child marriage and girls’ education awareness session, exemplifies the tangible influence of such efforts. With one in nine Indonesian girls still married before the age of 18, the withdrawal of funding may lead to a reduction in interventions and an increase in child marriages.
Similarly, in Uganda, where Plan International collaborates with activists like Peter, who combats child marriage in a context where 34% of girls marry before reaching adulthood, the potential loss of USAID funding could impede progress in altering detrimental cultural norms. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that USAID represents Uganda’s largest single donor for health aid. The funding freeze jeopardizes essential health services, including maternal care and HIV/AIDS treatment, which are vital to the well-being of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans.
Economic disempowerment and vulnerability
Economic empowerment programmes, particularly for women and girls, are another casualty of the funding freeze. Plan International has supported childcare centres at industrial parks in Ethiopia. The centres allow women to access to childcare at the site of their work, enabling them to gain income and skills through working while supporting Ethiopia’s industrial development. These initiatives have been instrumental in equipping women to make informed decisions about their futures. Now, with funding paused, the sustainability of these programmes is uncertain, leaving women without critical support systems and increasing their economic vulnerability.
4. Humanitarian assistance: From bad to worse
Perishable food and medical supplies for over 100,000 displaced families are stranded in warehouses, putting lives at risk. Plan International’s US$7.8 million Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance project in Ethiopia supports 58,000 displaced people with healthcare and 56,000 with food aid. The freeze has stranded supplies, endangering lives and preventing critical aid delivery.
Hana, a single mother working in an Ethiopian industrial park relied on USAID-funded childcare and mental health support to maintain employment. The freeze now leaves her struggling to find affordable childcare and manage work, threatening her family’s financial stability.
Mulu, a 28-year-old single mother working at Hawassa Industrial Park, relied on the USAID-funded Early Childhood Care and Development Centre for childcare while she worked. The sudden closure of the centre due to funding cuts left her struggling to keep her job while caring for her daughter. Missing work days to find alternative childcare has put her employment at risk, threatening her family’s financial stability and future.
This withdrawal has left communities, local partners and even governments questioning the reliability of international aid commitments, while organizations like Plan International, which have spent years cultivating relationships and fostering development through a bottom-up approach, now face the daunting task of re-establishing credibility.
Beyond the freeze: The big picture
As USAID funding stalls, other global players are stepping in to fill the gap, leading to significant geopolitical shifts. This shift is not just about financial assistance, it signifies a broader change in global influence and the loss of USAID’s presence in these communities. As authors, we are inclined to question the impact of US soft power in these communities. While it has been seen as a tool for fostering influence and cooperation, it also prompts us to reconsider whether this form of aid truly benefits the communities it targets or whether it perpetuates dependency. The resulting shift in the international development landscape could have lasting effects, altering the dynamics of both aid distribution and global power structures.
In response to the crisis, organizations are seeking diversified funding sources. Corporate partnerships, such as Plan International’s collaboration with private partnerships to support menstrual hygiene education, upskill young people and amplify the voices of women, present potential alternatives. However, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are not a monolith, and many smaller NGOs lack the resources to pivot swiftly. Without immediate policy intervention, these organizations face closure, leaving gaps that private donors alone cannot fill.
Reflections on the aid freeze: Colonial legacies, Global South reactivity
As women from the Global South with extensive expertise in implementing USAID-funded initiatives in Nigeria, we have been actively engaged in research, policy advocacy and programme implementation focused on addressing gender inequality and systemic exclusion. Our work has encompassed gender-responsive legislative advocacy, stakeholder engagement and the design of intersectional health interventions alongside violence-prevention strategies. Through these initiatives, we have gained insights into how international development funding influences opportunities for women and girls in fragile contexts.
Our perspective is shaped by a critical lens that highlights the structural dependencies inherent in international aid systems. While USAID funding has historically facilitated advancements in health, education access, economic empowerment, and protective services, the recent abrupt suspension of these funds exposes the vulnerability of relying on external financing for sustainable gender justice initiatives. This new reality necessitates not only an analysis of the immediate ramifications but also a comprehensive reflection on the inherent drawbacks of donor-dependent funding models.
Our collaborations with local organizations and policymakers in Nigeria have illuminated the disproportionate impact of funding disruptions on grassroots movements, many of which lack alternative resources to sustain their advocacy efforts. The freeze not only impedes service delivery, it also undermines the authority of local actors, who navigate intricate socio-political landscapes to foster gender-transformative change. This erosion of trust in partnerships raises critical ethical considerations regarding the long-term viability of externally funded programmes and the need for decolonial approaches to global development.
As researchers and practitioners, we perceive the USAID funding freeze as a crisis that highlights the dissonance between global aid policies and localized strategies for achieving gender justice. Addressing this situation requires a shift from immediate funding appeals to a thorough interrogation of power dynamics within development frameworks, prioritizing the voices of marginalized communities in shaping funding agendas, and ensuring that gender-focused interventions are genuinely community-led and resilient to geopolitical shifts. However, we acknowledge that moving away from aid dependency and reframing funding mechanisms for aid-dependent countries is a complex process that must consider the enduring effects of colonization in these regions.
As policymakers deliberate, the stakes for women and girls in vulnerable communities hang in the balance. Consequently, urgent advocacy is needed to push for resolutions that prioritize continuity in development efforts while rethinking our approaches to these initiatives. For those with decision-making influence, the message is unequivocal: restore funding, rebuild trust and reaffirm commitments to gender equality and global development. The costs of inaction are simply too significant to ignore.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Emaediong Akpan
Emaediong Akpan is a legal practitioner. She recently graduated from the Master’s in Development Studies program at the International Institute of Social Studies. With extensive experience in the development sector, Emaediong Akpan’s work spans gender equity, social inclusion, and policy advocacy. She is also interested in exploring the intersections of law, technology, and feminist policy interventions to promote safer online environments. Read her blogs here.
Eno-obong Etetim
Eno-Obong Etetim is a researcher and recent graduate of the Master’s in Development Studies program at the International Institute of Social Studies. She has several years of experience working on projects focused on gender, health equity, sexual and reproductive rights, and social norms. Her research interests also extend to sustainability and policy interventions that promote social justice.
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Travelling with children is more complex than travelling alone. It is also more expensive. Yet the impact of children on migration decision-making – and the dilemmas faced by parents and caregivers on the world’s major migration routes – are poorly understood.
In this blog, Chloe Sydney draws upon recent survey data to share initial insights into how parents and caregivers make decisions about migration when children are accompanying them on their journey.
Photo Credit: PACES
Surveying migrant decision-making
Between March and October 2024, the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) surveyed 1,557 people on the move in Italy, Niger, and Tunisia for PACES, a 40-month Horizon Europe project that aims to understand migration decision-making and thereby also inform migration policymaking (1). Among people surveyed, 11.5% were travelling with children(2).
A gendered and geographical distribution
Women surveyed were nearly four times more likely than men to travel with children, with 24% of women travelling with children compared to just 6.5% of men – and their migration decision-making accordingly constrained.
Geographically, the percentage of respondents travelling with children drops progressively along the route: 16% in Niger, 10% in Tunisia, and just 8% in Italy(3). As can be observed on MMC’s 4Mi Interactive, a similar trend emerges when broadening the scope beyond PACES to all data collected in the three countries. This may be because parents and caregivers are wary of exposing children to the significant risks found in the Sahara, Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea.
How the risks inform the route
Recommendations and past experiences of family or friends were the most common factor informing choice of route for all respondents. For those travelling with children, safety and familiarity also played an important role in informing decision-making: as illustrated below, those travelling with children were somewhat more likely than others to prioritize safety (30% compared to 26%) and to choose routes they knew best (36% compared to 27%).
However, cost matters too, especially since travelling with children makes things more expensive. ‘My journey here with my children has not been easy at all, I had to spend a lot of money between Benin and Niger’, shared a Togolese father. In the face of limited resources, 35% of those travelling with children chose their route at least partly because it was the cheapest option, compared to 26% of other respondents. Conversely, parents and caregivers travelling with children were less likely to prioritize the fastest route, possibly because faster routes tend to be more expensive.
If the cheapest route involves greater risks, parents and caregivers face a difficult dilemma. Should you expose your children to danger in the hope of finding safety? In the words of British poet Warsan Shire,
you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land […]
Keeping safe en route
In the absence of safe alternatives, parents and caregivers take steps to mitigate the risks. As shown below, to protect themselves from crime and abuse, people travelling with children were more likely to travel in a group (58%), stop in places with trusted contacts (42%), and use safer methods of transport (36%). These precautions aim to reduce risks related to crime and abuse, but may also increase the cost of travel.
Despite efforts to protect children from harm, over two-thirds (68%) of respondents travelling with children felt children had been highly or very highly exposed to serious risks such as physical violence, sexual violence, kidnapping or death during the journey.
‘I cannot encourage anyone to take this route, because I lost my daughter during the journey, and I miscarried as a result of the pressure’, shared a Nigerian woman in Tunisia. ‘If you want to go, you should leave your children at home’, warned a father who saw his daughter being raped on their journey from Chad to Tunisia.
Where to go and whether to stay
Just as travelling with children can influence the route taken and the means of travel, it also influences decision-making with regards to choice of destination.
Reflecting parents’ and caregivers’ safety concerns, among those who specified a destination, over half (54%) of respondents travelling with children said they chose it at least partly because it was the safest option(4). This was the case for just 44% of those not travelling with children.
Perhaps to provide for their families, people travelling with children were more likely to mention their choice of destination was influenced by economic opportunities, at 80%. They were also more likely to mention the social welfare system, at 41%. Access to better education mattered somewhat more to them as well, as shown in the figure below.
Finally, travelling with children impacts whether and why people might one day return to their countries of origin. Those travelling with children were more likely to say they would return only if they believed it was safe (26% compared to 18% for other respondents). ‘The security situation is much better here than in our country of origin’, explained a man from northeast Nigeria, surveyed in Niger.
What we’ve learned
Among the people we interviewed, the presence of children impacts migration decision-making. Those travelling with children more often prioritise safety when selecting a destination, deciding whether to return, or to a certain extent when choosing a route. However, as travel becomes more expensive, costs also play a more important role in decision-making, potentially forcing some families to forsake safer, costlier routes in favour of more affordable, perilous journeys.
Our data also highlights the risks faced by children on the move, and their resulting need for specialised protection services. ‘My daughter has suffered many injustices on this route, she will be forever traumatised’, said a mother from Tigray in Ethiopia. ‘She has seen things beyond her years.’ Those who embark on dangerous journeys with their children, however, often have few alternatives: opportunities for safe, regular migration from Tigray, for example, are limited, even though the region is beset by high levels of food insecurity, limited access to essential services including education, and continued political instability.
Endnotes:
1. Since we rely on non-probability sampling, our findings cannot be generalized to all people on the move. Our baseline data collection will be complemented by two rounds of longitudinal data collection, enabling us to examine decisions to stay and migrate over the course of a year and a half.
2. One respondent refused to say whether they were travelling with children.
3. The proportion of women surveyed remains relatively stable across the three countries, so this does not explain the drop in respondents travelling with children.
4. 177 respondents travelling with children and 1,344 of other respondents had specified a destination.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author
Chloe Sydney
Chloe Sydney is the Mixed Migration Centre’s Global 4Mi and Data Coordinator. She has nearly a decade of research experience, with a particular focus on forced migration. Chloe has a PhD on refugee decision-making with regards to return, and a master’s degree in International Migration and Public Policy.
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By 
A humanitarian crisis with multiple consequences
Kalehe is one of the territories in the province of South-Kivu located in the northern side of Bukavu city (capital city of South-Kivu province). It covers the Eastern littoral of the Kivu Lake in Eastern DRC. Decades ago, there was a large tree-planting effort to protect the environment. In recent years, however, Kalehe’s population has grown rapidly due to the presence of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the territory. As a result of this, Kalehe has experienced widescale and rapid deforestation and loss of grassland in the middle and high plateaux to produce wood and charcoal without planting other trees.
In the night of 4 May 2023, heavy rains caused water levels to rise,as well as flooding in some villages of the Bushushu groupement in the Buhavu chiefdom of this territory. The Lukungula River of Bushushu, and the Kamikonzi River in Nyamukubi went beyond their limits, resulting in flooding and spreading of mixture of water, large stones, and mud in four out of seven sub villages of the locality, particularly Bushushu, Kabuchungu, Nyamukubi and Musumba. The humanitarian consequences of this were dramatic and multiform: 5525 people missing, more than 513 bodies buried, more than 2046 houses totally destroyed, more than 562 families mourning, many schools and health centres destroyed, loss of household assets including tables, chairs, and loss of documents of value such as electoral cards. The DRC HO team conducted fieldwork from 29 through 30 June 2023 in the area to know more about the crisis. 
