Humanitarian Observatories series | Conflict-related risks of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies among adolescents, the case of Bukavu

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In deprived families in less urbanized zones on the outskirts of Bukavu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 2 out of 5 adolescents have become pregnant, have been forced into marriage, or have suffered from Sexual Transmitted Diseases (STDs), according to new research from the Humanitarian Observatory of DRC. The situation is alarming, and is particularly evident in households with neither employment nor income, related to the intensification of conflict in Eastern DRC since February 2025.

Photo 1: discussion with adolescents on sexual exploitation and abuse in Bukavu, eastern DRC, 20 August 2025

Alarming news for less urbanized zones

At least at 1.3 million inhabitants live in Bukavu city, the capital city of the South-Kivu province, amongst whom almost two third reside in less urbanized zones. Each girl in Bukavu has the right to a bright future, full of joy and harmony and with aspirations to contribute to the future of the community in which she lives, as well as to the development of her country.  An enormous barrier to overcome that prevents many young girls from achieving this is sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), the results of which include unwanted pregnancies, sexual slavery, forced marriage and Sexual Transmitted Diseases (STDs). UNFPA Democratic Republic of Congo | Adolescents and youth

A particularly egregious case of SEA appeared in the family of John, a resident of Hewa Street in the periphery of Bukavu, a state agent who lost his job when the Congolese Government lost the control of the city in February 2025. Not just, John became unable to find bread for his family, he lost any means to support his two adolescent daughters, who were still at secondary school and became in six months both pregnant and forced to marry. His wife also became pregnant in February 2025, and was unable to fulfil her usual small-scale business activities.

Adolescents discussing the issue

Talking to the Social Science Centre for African Development-KUTAFITI’s senior and junior staff, and members of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory on the issue, we report some following observations based on various discussions with adolescents:

(i) Adolescents are exposed to a range of sexual and exploitation abuse (SEA), which is exacerbated by the context of resource scarcity when parents became unemployed and without any economic activities which are slow to resume.

(ii) The phenomenon operates in such a way that female adolescents that are looking for food and other survival means find themselves offered sexual relations in exchange of favour and answer to their needs. When they hesitate by looking back to their families, the reality of lack of resources dominates the context; as a result, they fall on the trap with all possible consequences.

(iii) Adolescents mentioned the effects and consequences of digital platforms containing sexual videos and pornography. During the recent conflict, especially in February 2025,  when military violence closed schools , and thus teenagers were spending more time at home and mostly with their telephones or friend’s telephones, leaving them vulnerable to being influenced by porn or porn-adjacent content.

(iv) An additional factor is the lack of sufficient information or awareness raising on how to cope with in the situation. The lack of appropriate knowledge and information in terms of sexual education among young adolescents and their parents also played a key role. This observation relates to the informal settlements where peers, parents and other community members are known to have pressured teens to engage in sexual activities for some gain or benefits such as dowry, gifts.

(v) These and other similar situations place girls in the context of vulnerability of sexual and transmitted diseases, sexual slavery and forced marriage in some cases.

What needs to be done? Some lessons learnt from the context

There are some lessons that are worth to mention following the context of peripheral neighbourhood of Bukavu during the time of conflict; they include among others:

  1. Integrating Community Watch programmes

In schooling activities or not, it would be better to integrate community watch-dog programmes such as ‘Creating Community Safety Groups’ that can try to ensure some form of security with no police presence. This would prevent any sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by uncontrolled bandits, where the deployment of the police is only in most urban areas, therefore no sufficient security guarantee. At the same time, take education initiatives that young women inform their parents and family members about their daily plans route and destinations.

  1. Being aware of the dangers of remote paths and being alone at night

Shortcut roads and remote paths, particularly in the early morning and late evenings, where there are few users of footpaths can be dangerous and expose women to the risk of SEA. We found that avoiding those roads in those times and avoiding walking alone could contribute enormously to mitigating such risk.

  1. Educate young women to the dangers of unidentified men

In the context of conflict, avoiding men that are not identifiable or known to women. Some of them can be armed, and might expose girls and young women to SEA.

  1. Get to near health centre

In case of sexual assault or/and any form of sexual violence, it is better to reach quickly the nearest health facility or centre for appropriate health care. Sexual Transmitted Diseases and Infections including HIV and unwanted pregnancies are preventable, and treatable.

Recommendations follow three areas

  1. Youth, young men, girls and young women need to mobilize themselves in carrying out these messages in their networks and should consider speaking up to prevent the phenomenon.More information raising to disseminate among parents and adolescents so to bring consciousness to those directly concerned about risks and damages of SEA. This includes raising awareness about Sexual and Reproductive Health among male and female adolescents through “Teens workshops” and “Church and School visits and discussions on the topic”.
  2. Provision of youth services on Sexual and Reproductive Health.Provide access to Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) information and counselling through mobile phone services, free of charge and available for youth both male and female adolescents, reachable at non-profit organisation such as KUTAFITI or Panzi foundation. This includes sensitization and awareness raising among parents, especially mothers, community leaders, and adults living in the community as they form the centre of education to their children.
  3. Encouraging Village Saving and Loan Association (VSLA) for mothers and teenagers.

Though the context of conflict, Village Saving and Loan Associations (VSLA) have the potential to create small-scale business activities for teenagers, young women and their mothers not just to enable them to have cash, but also to allow to resist to any temptation that would endanger their future. Where they exist, to strengthen them by bringing into more safeguard measures for its sustainability and to create, strengthen it where it does not exist.

[1] We recognize the active participation of adolescents in the discussion held by the Social Centre for African Development-KUTAFITI, member of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory of 20 August 2025 from which we wrote the current blog.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the authors of the post in question.

 

About the authors:

Myriam Wanga Milabyo is a Master in Public Health Student at Kenyatta University in Kenya, member of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory and member of the Social Science Centre for African Development-KUTAFITI.

Patrick Milabyo Kyamusugulwa is Professor at the Bukavu High Institute of Medical Techniques, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is 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 member of the DRC Humanitarian Observatory and is working on humanitarian governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

 

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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

The politics of land: Introducing an important new collection

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Land lies at the heart of contemporary politics. As a site of contestation and negotiation, land is central to struggles that affect us all. The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics , edited by ISS Professor Jun Borras and Jennifer Franco, brings together contributions from leading scholars in critical agrarian studies, offering an invaluable guide to these debates. In this blog, Ian Scoones reflects on the book and its timely contributions.

Land is central to contemporary debates about politics. Land sustains the livelihoods of millions through farming, livestock keeping, hunting and collecting. Such livelihoods are intimately bound up with nature, and the complex and diverse ecosystems that thrive on land. Land creates a sense of identity refracted through gender, race, class and other axes of difference.  Through diverse institutions and forms of authority, land connects citizens and states, corporations and capital, and is the locus of accumulation, extraction and control. Access to land is thus contested, negotiated and claimed through multiple, competing actors, linked to a myriad of struggles. Land, in other words, connects us all through its politics. This is why the newly-published Oxford Handbook of Land Politics is so important. Across 38 chapters (880 pages), written by a veritable who’s who of the broad field of critical agrarian studies, the book offers an invaluable guide to these debates, with a stellar overview and introduction. from its editors, Jun Borras and Jenny Franco. What follows are some reflections taken from the Foreword that I wrote.

At the end of the Foreword, I ask, what are the new axes of debate, transforming our understandings of agrarian change and politics of land offered in the pages of the Handbook? There are many, but I highlight just four.

  • First is the move from seeing land as only a site of production and so accumulation, but also social reproduction, and the locus of highly gendered social and cultural relations. This suggests a much more diverse land politics going beyond class to gender, race, identity and so on. It in turn suggests a renewed focus on labour, with complex livelihoods generated from multiple sources beyond the fixed plot of land, through migration, trade and so on. The classic categories of land-based classes centred only on production are thus unsettled as new forms of livelihood are created. As a result, the dynamics of differentiation and accumulation shifts, with land politics changing as a wider appreciation emerges of Henry Bernstein’s classic questions of agrarian political economy – who owns what, who does what, who gets what and what they do with it?
  • Second, the centring of nature, environment and climate in relation to land is a theme that resonates across many chapters. Humans and nature (and so land) are inseparable yet have often become disconnected by the forces of capitalist modernity. The importance of reconnecting is central, requiring a new political ecology/economy of land. This has deep implications for how we see land; again not just as a demarcated plot, but as part of a wider living landscape and territory, within a broader planetary system. This in turn highlights the crucial connection between land and the climate crisis. Changing land use, whether through deforestation, intensive agriculture and extraction of water or minerals is a major contributor to climate change. As the regimes of extraction evolve under new frontiers of capitalism, land is central. Such regimes of food, water and energy are constituted through a contested politics and, as the imperative to switch from fossil fuel dependence and intensive, polluting systems of agriculture accelerates, new challenges emerge. In the rush to ‘net zero’, for example, alternative energy, climate adaptation and nature-based ‘solutions’ are offered, yet all these have implications for who controls the land, with land grabs increasingly justified in the name of green and climate ‘transitions’, which in turn create new land-based politics across the world.
  • Third, many chapters argue for going beyond a narrow, individualised approach to land rights, tenure security and land governance. This managerial, administrative and technocratic frame dominates policy thinking but is incompatible with the realities on the ground. As the introduction points out, such efforts to provide ‘security’ for women, Indigenous peoples and others can paradoxically lead to opportunities for dispossession, as speculation, appropriation and extraction increase in areas where ‘regularisation’ has generated legibility through demarcation and delimitation. Instead, there is a need to think about land as constituted through hybrid, mosaic forms of property relation, with property-making as a continuous, contested and negotiated process. Land is always embedded in power relations and so thinking about how authority over land is generated – through interactions between citizens, states, corporations and other actors – can help us elaborate more appropriate democratic institutions for land control and a more innovative, grounded approach to ‘land governance’.
  • Finally, the Handbook points to the importance of understanding land as a ‘regime’, situated in a wider historical political economy context. As the introduction highlights, a land regime – just as a food regime – is stabilised, perhaps only tentatively and temporarily, by a set of political-economic forces that operate within a particular phase of capitalism. But regimes change due to the intersection of local struggles and wider political forces and interests. Today these are influenced by new frontiers of extraction and accumulation, linked to globalised economic relations, changing food systems and heightening climate-environment imperatives. Meanwhile, authoritarian, populist regimes define the nation in terms of the relationship between ‘the people’ and their mother/fatherland, always in ways that act to exclude some, while incorporating others in a populist politics of land and belonging. Until we understand this wider historically situated, structural context, the attempts to address the pressing challenges of land and its use at more local levels – whether through moves to agroecology or food sovereignty, for example – will remain elusive.

The Handbook is a rich, diverse and deeply informed collection, mixing theoretical perspectives and grounded reflections. By going beyond a narrow Marxist canon to encompass a wide array of perspectives, no particular line is taken. The introduction encourages readers to find their own way, to read across conceptual framings and reflect on different dimensions – in other words to generate a critical sensibility to agrarian studies and land politics.

For any student of land, or indeed politics more generally, as well as activists and practitioners grappling with the challenges of land politics, this Handbook is an enormously valuable and vital resource.

 

Note: There are two publication dates mentioned on the website of the Handbook: 2022 was the year when the Handbook project formally got started; 2025 was when the Handbook was actually completed and published as a whole.

This blog was first published by Transnational Institute

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Ian Scoones

Ian Scoones is a professor in the Resource Politics and Environmental Change cluster. He was co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex (2006-21) and the principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project, PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Lessons From the Margins, (2018-2023).

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Caring as a Practice of Everyday Peacemaking in the Lives of Sexual Violence Survivors in Kenya

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Earlier this year, Bilge Sahin and Phyllis Livaha, with support from Anne Biwott, organized a one-day workshop in collaboration with Grace Agenda—a Kenyan civil society organization that supports survivors of the 2007–2008 post-election violence. The workshop, held in Nairobi, focused on care and healing in the lives of survivors of sexual violence. The goal of the workshop was to shift the narrative from violence and victimhood toward one of agency—highlighting the everyday realities of survival, resilience, and the process of rebuilding life. This blog piece focuses specifically on the experiences of Jaqueline Mutere, founder and director of Grace Agenda, offering insight into the importance of healing and care. Her perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked roles women play in mitigating violence, sustaining families and communities, and fostering social cohesion during and after conflict. This blog has been put together in a specific narrative style, weaving together academic observations with the words of Jacqueline which are italicized for clarity.

“Together with other survivors that we work with, we offer care and support to others, to enable them work through their trauma” 

Photo Credit: Authors

In the field of peace and conflict studies, care is often overlooked—its significance overshadowed by the dominant focus on violence and suffering. This reflects broader biases in knowledge production and the privilege of certain narratives over others. Yet, when care is taken seriously in contexts of violence and armed conflict, it opens up space for a more nuanced understanding of how individuals and communities navigate recovery and ongoing violence. Recognizing that care and violence often coexist is essential to grasp the realities of rebuilding after conflict.

Crucially, centering care should not romanticize or erase the enduring pain and hardship survivors’ experience. Rather, care and violence often operate simultaneously. Efforts to heal and rebuild are ongoing and form a vital component of everyday peacebuilding. Understanding these care practices is essential to appreciating how resilience and recovery take shape in communities affected by conflict.

Fisher and Tronto define care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” This definition deepens in real life experiences:

“For a longtime after the birth of my baby, I struggled a lot with self-worth. Because this pregnancy was hidden and my body suffered through it, the post-natal care and recovery was no less brutal. But as soon as I realized that my children would suffer tremendous loss on so many levels, physically emotionally, economically…. It came to me that I need to recover FOR MYSELF so that I could give back to my children and give them the life they deserved, BUT…it all started with ME. So, I had to start the work internally, before reaching out to my children and doing damage control because I realized my internal turmoil had affected my personality and hence my relationships with those near and dear to me…I realized that my children would suffer at the hands of these who despised me. This realization hit me like a rock, but sparked a fire in me so deep. I started on a journey of daily self-reflection, first of all dealing with the historical bile that I felt for those around me in treating me like a pariah, and more so the perpetrator who intentionally inflicted this heinous offence of raping me.”

Building on Fisher and Tronto’s insights, we see that care is embedded in the everyday work of peacemaking. Peace is not merely the product of formal agreements or political transitions—it must be understood through the lived realities of those who have endured violence. For survivors, violence often continues to manifest in their daily lives, relationships, and bodies. Peace, then, becomes an ongoing, embodied effort—one that involves negotiating and resisting gendered, militarized, racialized, capitalist, and colonial structures. Therefore, for survivors of sexual violence, the impact of unresolved mental stress and the small acts of self-care help navigate their daily life, symbolizing ongoing healing and techniques for rebuilding peace:

“I have realized that when I have a lot of things on my mind that I have not processed and made decisions on, continue to nag me, robbing me of mental peace. This affects how I eat and sleep. Also, if my body doesn’t get enough rest, I get headaches and feel heavy the entire day. But if I get an opportunity per chance to take a power nap and calm the nerves through sleep. I realized waking up that the tautness in my body has left, I gain clarity of thought, able to process and conclude issues faster. This automatically puts me in a more positive mood. I love my house and a clean environment, I love and care for my plants, that I talk to when watering them. The green of the plants give me peace, seeing them flourish does something to my insides, and so I endeavor to maintain this equilibrium. What I wish I could do for myself is have the same energy for domestic, work that I had previously. But with age comes certain physical limitations and so with the added responsibilities of supporting others, I am not able to do as much as I would like to. What I still enjoy is cooking… for myself, for my children, for others, and making things work around me.”

A feminist understanding of peace locates its meaning not in political pronouncements but in the everyday lives of survivors—where acts of survival, care, and the pursuit of dignity become central to peacebuilding. In these everyday struggles and strategies, care—whether for oneself, for others, or received from others—emerges as foundational to life-making and community-sustaining practices.

“This process of realizing that because my children needed me, dawned on me that I was valuable to SOMEONE, my kids. This bloomed in me, awakening a flower of hope in me. With this realization I reflected on those who were not so lucky as me, who had no family, were orphaned and were going through the same trauma and journey of healing like me, those less fortunate and more vulnerable…. This flicker of fire grew to where I committed to make others better and not have to go through what a tunnel of blackness I had just overcame. This then has become my life`s work in supporting others to get back in touch with themselves after trauma of sexual violence and realize that it is not others who qualify your worth and value, But YOU!”

A feminist ethics of care resists essentialist and individualistic interpretations of survival. It recognizes that healing after sexual violence cannot rest on the shoulders of individuals alone. Instead, it requires collective efforts—relational networks of mutual support built on empathy, solidarity, and shared struggle among informal survivor networks or through grassroots organizations. Mutual support is at the center of Grace Agenda’s mission:

“Together with other survivors that we work with, we offer care and support to others, to enable them work through their trauma. Appreciating and realizing stigma (the silent derogatory ridicule) that survivors go through, we create an environment that one can be themselves and start on the journey of healing. Rape has a culture of silence, and together in solidarity we have come out to challenge the culture of silence around the violation. We came together to initiate Grace Agenda that speaks of Reparations for Sexual Violence, develop self-agency to speak for oneself your concept and perception of justice, and memorialize the journeys, to healing, championing the same for the impact of the violation like the children that have been born from rape”.

Among survivors and the civil society organizations that support them, networks often form around affection, trust, and a shared commitment to healing. These relationships address not only trauma but also the economic and social challenges that survivors face. As Browne et al. remind us: “given our interdependence and vulnerability, it is caring that sustains us and can therefore serve as a starting point for imaging a different kind of politics.”

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

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.

Phyllis Livaha

Phyllis Livaha is a senior lecturer at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam, where she teaches international law and international relations courses. Her research interests include women’s rights, human rights law and international relations. Her current work focuses on decolonization and critical (legal) analysis.

Jacqueline Mutere

Jacqueline Mutere is the founder and director of Grace Agenda in Nairobi, Kenya, which she established in 2010 to support survivors of sexual violence during Kenya’s 2007–2008 post-election crisis. Her work, which initially focused on children born of rape, has grown to champion reparations, survivor dignity, and mental health recovery. Mutere has been nationally and internationally recognized for her leadership, including nominations and awards from Kenya’s Women Human Rights Defenders and Physicians for Human Rights. She serves on regional and global networks such as the East African Women Human Rights Defenders Network, the SEMA Network, and the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies Steering Committee. She continues to mentor youth champions challenging stigma and has co-authored research on children born of sexual violence.

Anne Biwott

Anne Biwott works with grassroots organizations to challenge harmful gender norms and champion for equity and equality for all.

 

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The Ruling Elites Put Democracy under Duress in Indonesia – and the People are fighting back

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Police violence against recent protests by civil society groups and social movements marks the biggest challenge for Indonesia’s Prabowo administration and tests the Indonesian political class’ commitment to democracy. In this blog Iqra Anugrah and Rachma Lutfiny Putri explain how Oligarchic agendas of the elites have led to disastrous policy choices, triggering the protest movement. Progressive politics, despite its lack of leadership and clear ideology and platform, should maintain this momentum by defending itself from state repression and forcing elite concessions.

Photo Credit: Maria Cynthia, Wikimedia

Recent anti-oligarchic protests across Indonesia have presented the biggest political challenge to the Prabowo administration since it took power in 2024. Repressive handling of the protests by the Indonesian police, which resulted in the martyrdom of Affan Kurniawan, a motorcycle taxi driver, and nine others along with the arrest of 3,337 protesters triggered a protest movement to spread like wildfire. All of this has happened in less than a year after Prabowo’s inauguration as president.

The gruesome nature of Affan’s death significantly raised political consciousness of the movement and the general public, but the collective anger behind it has been simmering for a while. Like other authoritarian populists, Prabowo had pursued a series of questionable policies prone to elite hijacking and rent-seeking, such as the Free Nutritious Meal programme and the Danantara sovereign wealth fund. But the causes for the recent protests were something more structural and paradigmatic: increasing inequality and precariousness, shrinking ‘middle class,’ growing military role in politics, and crackdown on democratic dissent. These were exacerbated by the contempt of several members of the parliament (MPs) toward the plight of the working people and the proposal to raise their allowances amidst economic hardship.

By the time of this writing, the clashes between the state and the movements had entered a period of protracted de-escalation. With the exception of some young liberal influencers who naively entered an appeasement dialogue with a few MPs, labor unions, women’s movements, and student activist groups still continue their grassroots advocacy and popular education works, while the police continue to detain those arrested.

Concrete policy shifts after this crisis are still unclear. Aside from the cancellation of the proposed housing allowance raise for MPs, the government has yet to meet other crucial demands: ending police violence, reducing excessive allowances for MPs and high-ranking officials, and addressing labor demands concerning fair wage and employment relations.

Deepening illiberal and authoritarian practices under Prabowo presidency suggest the limits of a democratic façade to oligarchic politics. This propelled widespread response from a broad alliance of grassroots social movements supported by the public and piggybacked by liberal-leaning groups and influencers. The ruling elites made only limited concessions to popular demands, while divisions between grassroots bases and liberal networks show how fragmented the civil society remains. The future will remain uncertain and bleak, but grassroots social movements can break this impasse by exercising their leadership and mobilizational power to force further elite concessions.

By Mori505 - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=174069478
Photo Credit: Mori505 via Wikimedia

Drivers of the protests: the changing contour of oligarchic politics

The shift to a more brazen display of authoritarian politics in Indonesian democracy is not merely a product of changing elite political culture, but a logical consequence of the transformation of mechanisms of oligarchic extraction in the interests of the ruling class and the bourgeois state. At the international level, Indonesian economic and political elites try to tap into profits offered by the booming nickel industry. Domestically, these oligarchic elites have expanded their extraction targets from traditional sectors (e.g., land and coal resources) to ‘white elephant’ projects most notoriously the construction of the new capital city.

As detailed by the People’s Liberation Party, this heavy strain on the state budget is further compounded by the ambition of Prabowo, himself a top member of the oligarchic elites, to implement his flagship Free Nutritious Meal  programme, which has been poorly implemented, and increase military spending. This forced the central government to slash transfer funds for regional governments by 50 per cent in 2025. In turn, many local governments significantly raised property taxes, with some raising them by over 100 per cent.

These policies prompted various mass protests since the beginning of Prabowo’s tenure, ranging from anti-government protests in various cities to the famous anti-tax protest in Pati, Central Java, which forced the district head of Pati to resign.

Unsurprisingly, it becomes imperative for the ruling elites to further constrain democratic spaces to defend their interests. The tragic death of Affan, the excessive use of state violence, and the political elites’ lukewarm response to this crisis are clear signs of this development.

 

The nature of the protest coalition: Fragmentation amidst rising political consciousness

Responding to this elite assault, a series of protests started in late August. Of particular interest were the protests in Jakarta on August 28, the day Affan was martyred. They shared the same anti-government sentiment but differed in their policy demands and compositions of protest coalitions. Four participating groups can be identified:

1) labor unions, whose demands centered around wage increase and job security,

2) broad people’s coalition for climate justice consisting of farmers, fishers, grassroots women’s movements, and urban poor organizations,

3) student activists who rejected the proposed housing and other allowances raise for the MPs, and

4) motorcycle taxi drivers, whose mobilization intensified after the police’s armored vehicle ran over Affan.

These four groups, in varying degrees, continued their protests after Affan’s tragic death and intensifying police violence.

Afterwards, the coalitions and support for the protesters gained broad public support. Public jubilation and awe when witnessing the looting of the houses of problematic MPs, most notoriously the suspended MP Ahmad Sahroni, indicated the culmination of their collective anger.

But this brief period of political joy was punctuated by arson cases targeting public infrastructure in Jakarta such as bus stops and an optical server box, a pattern that spread to other cities. While there is a strong possibility that factions of the competing elites were behind these provocations, one should keep in mind that the youth participating in these urban riots saw their act as one of defiance and, we would add, protest against the sanctification of wealth and private properties of the elites.

These chaotic events, followed by increasing repression and control by the police and armed forces, led to the reappearance of a familiar trope in Indonesian politics: the dichotomy between peaceful and ‘anarchistic’ protesters. While we remain cognizant of elite manipulation behind these events and the excesses of street protests, we reject such dichotomy. Such as a false dichotomy, in our view, is cynically deployed by the ruling elites and the state to tame people’s militancy and divide the public. Further, as the case of violent attacks against student protesters resting at safe zones at Bandung Islamic University and Pasundan University showed, the police and armed forces have a long record of using the false dichotomy as a pretext to curb freedom of assembly and speech of dissident and marginalized groups.

As this chaos subsided, the latter phase of the protests witnessed the emergence of liberal influencers as accidental torchbearers of the movement. Political scientist Edward Aspinall argued that the proponents of this not-so-new counterculture of protest are student executive councils, unions and NGOs. His comprehensive analysis misses one new actor: liberal influencers with links to consultancy and ‘hip’ online media industries. Deliberately intervening into the ongoing dynamics, they summarized organic programmatic demands from various working-class and popular organizations into a laundry list of demands called the ‘17+8’ demands (a catchy reference to the Indonesian date of independence, 17 August).

While we recognize the value of such campaigns and their impact on raising political awareness among the urban middle class, we doubt their claims about actual campaign reach and policy impacts. We also criticize the inherent class bias and celebrity culture in their methods of activism which unfortunately sideline the role and agendas of actual working-class bases and organizations — groups whose agency played a key role in advancing the political aims of the protests and yet remains nameless and unseen. This attitude is emblematic of the cultural and political outlooks of the liberal/critical sections of the professional managerial class in Indonesia.

Our informal conversation with working-class activists involved in the protests and grassroots collectives reveal their anger and criticism toward the liberals. The main problem with liberal activism, in their view, is the lack of stronger labor and class demands and the dominance of liberal aesthetics and voice at the expense of aspirations and experiences of the most marginalized. From our conversation with them, we learned that the sacrifice of working-class activists at the frontline of the protests, including a dozen of ordinary labor and rural activists from our own personal networks detained or charged as provocateurs by the police, features mostly as statistics in mainstream media rather than stories of pro-democracy heroism.

Like their previous predecessors, liberal influencers are ‘floating’, divorced from the lived experience and consciousness of the masses. This detachment reveals a long-standing fault line in Indonesian civil society: between liberal and progressive–radical activism.

 

Take-away points

It is still too early to assess the impact and legacy of the 2025 protests, but we would like to highlight three important take-away points.

First, both ‘spontaneity’ and ‘leadership’ in mass movements are not opposites, but rather essential parts in a process to consolidate democratic leadership and institutionalization of social movements. As Rosa Luxemburg once reminded us, social reforms and spontaneity mobilized the oppressed, but revolutionary collectivity is mandatory to make their gains last.

Second, reflecting on the severity of state repression in recent protests, we reaffirm the right of the protesters to defend themselves against state violence through peaceful, and, under severe circumstances, disruptive methods. Our argument is not a provocation of violence but rather a view backed by research. A rigorous study has shown that disruptive actions by nonelites drive democratic deepening. Street protests and their dynamics are indeed the bloodlines of democracy.

Lastly, given the lack of success of the liberal influencers’ lobbying effort with the parliament, it is high time for grassroots working-class organizations to mobilize again. Only their leadership and political power can break this impasse.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

Disclaimer and acknowledgement: We maintain an active engagement with Indonesian social movements and our works since 2015 can be verified with various organizations, communities, and individuals that we have been working with. Currently we are conducting field research in Indonesia as Visiting Researchers at Agrarian Resource Center (ARC). In particular, we would like to thank our comrades at Progressive Islam Forum (FIP) and Kolektif SULU for insightful discussions on recent developments with them.

About the authors:

Iqra Anugrah

Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. He holds affiliate positions at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES) in Jakarta. His current project examines multi-strand conservatism in Indonesia.

 

Rachma Lutfiny Putri

Rachma Lutfiny Putri is a Wenner-Gren Wadsworth International Fellow and a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Visiting Fellow at Populi Center. Her interests include urban anthropology, value chain, informal work, and development studies.

 

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From the Brahmaputra to the Rhine: Tracing the Currents of Climate Mobility

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In this blog, Ranon Jahan, a researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD, Dhaka, Bangladesh) brings together his thoughts following the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network conference held in Bonn, Germany, in July of this year. Through the comparative case studies of two rivers, he considers the interlocking issues of risk, climate mobility, and disaster governance.

Photo Credit: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

“Millions of them must move”: a warning first voiced by William Vogt in 1948. Seventy-six years later, we are still counting millions of displaced people each year, with the numbers only growing. On 10th July 2025, as a young researcher from Bangladesh, I shared how it occurs in my home country at the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network (ECMN 25) Conference held in Bonn, Germany. The conference draws collective understanding on climate mobility which brought together 180 participants from across the world includes 128 presentations and 6 workshops. The whole conference was the platform for the researchers, practitioners and policy makers to share their findings, methods and recommendation. It explores both challenges and possibilities of governing climate mobility. These diverse perspectives reshaped how I see my work in global platform. This blog is my reflection on those connection where global narratives align with local realities, where they miss and why accountability in climate mobility governance matters now more than ever.

Two Rivers, One Story

I began my Bonn journey standing by the Rhine River, thousands of miles away from the Brahmaputra’s eroding banks in Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra is one of the largest rivers in the world, known for its powerful current and seasonal flood in Bangladesh. During monsoon, it becomes furious, with a shifting course. It can swallow homes, schools, agricultural land and entire villages, leaving families nowhere to go. When I was standing by the Rhine and looking into the its flowing water, I felt the same pulse of uncertainty that my fieldwork has shown me back home. Back by the Brahmaputra, my conversations with local communities were filled with stories of distress and uncertainty. Standing by the Rhine during the conference, listening to others speak of their own hardships and governance challenges, I realized those conversations were not so different after all. Presenting my findings there was more than a research, it was a way of placing a local story in a global current.

The conference quickly revealed that the issues I work on are not limited to one region. Listening to different research from around the world, I realized that the struggles of climate mobility transcend borders. In the same panel where one researcher presented statistics on Assam, India, estimating the staggering yearly costs of disasters, another shared how a single flood in Germany caused damages far exceeding those figures, despite advanced structural measures. The scale may differ, but the vulnerabilities and governance challenges are interconnected.

 

Photo Credit: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

Beyond Climate: The Messy Web of Governance

Over three days, it became clear to me that climate mobility is not shaped by climate change alone. Geopolitics, global conflicts, and migration governance are constantly reshaping displacement narratives and dynamics. Much of the discussion revolved around finding better governance systems for this deeply complex issue. Yet, we also confronted a harder question: as researchers, are we clarifying or complicating the concept by layering on new terminologies?

The conference was a meeting ground of questions and stories of thriving, struggling, and striving migrants from across the globe, including my own presentation on displacement risk along the Brahmaputra. But when the conversation shifted from problems to solutions, the overwhelming complexity of governance took center stage. Speeches and presentations often concluded that governance needs to be both localized and global. Yet, the connection between the two is far more tangled than it sounds, echoing what some scholars describe through the lens of glocalisation—the uneven and sometimes contradictory ways global agendas are interpreted and reworked in local contexts.

My own presentation centered on multi-actor responsibility, leadership, and power-sharing as a way to reduce vulnerability to displacement at sub-national level. Yet, in reality, both Bangladesh and elsewhere, the governance remains limited, underperforming and far from adequately accountable. But after three days of attending different sessions, the questions left unclear to me is “who is accountable, how and to what extent?” In practice, accountability often moves through layers, what governments promise on paper, how institutions interpret it, and what actually reaches people on the ground. Yet true accountability should not end with legal or policy frameworks; it must be felt in practice through transparent decisions, meaningful participation, and clear limit on what those in power. And yet, I remain unclear about how this should ultimately be realized.

Photo Credit: Douwe van Schie

From Local Currents to Global Tides

One reality struck me that policy processes, reviews, advocacy, and negotiations move far slower than the pace of displacement. By the time governance systems are being negotiated, the communities we talk about have already been uprooted. Amidst all of these thoughts, my time in Bonn was overwhelming and filled with concerns and contested ideas around climate mobility. By the end, I couldn’t point to a single, immediate global action that would secure the rights and quality of life for millions at risk.

Yet, the conference was an eye-opener, giving me a macro lens to view my work. My story from the Brahmaputra may seem small in the grand scale of global climate mobility, but it resonated alongside every other study shared in those rooms. Each case added a knot to the tangled net of mobility challenges, showing the urgent need to both untangle these knots and zooming into those knots closely.

It left me with a powerful reminder that  local stories are never just local, they are threads in the global fabric of climate mobility, and understanding them is key to creating governance that is both just and effective.

Acknowledgement

The author’s participation in the conference was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 884139).

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the author:

Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon is a Research Officer at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). With a degree in Forestry, he has developed his expertise at the intersection of natural resource management and social research on climate change. His work focuses on forest management, displacement, locally led adaptation, and accountability. He continues to study how governance and adaptation affect the lives of vulnerable communities in Bangladesh.

Society Must Be Defended! Rethinking Defence and Security in the age of Cognitive Warfare and the WPS Agenda

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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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To address recurring crises, we must attempt global development policy reforms

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Global Governance and Policy Analyst Chimwemwe Salie Hara looks into the road towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 in this blog, arguing that reform of financing and governance must be made in the face of significant geopolitical tensions if we are to achieve better outcomes for countries across the world that ‘leaves no one behind’.  

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

The world is experiencing an escalation of geopolitical tensions that have impacted development trends in various regions. These tensions have led to uncertainties as various shocks require responses from global development policies that are coordinated and cooperative between the countries in the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’. Currently, the global value chain has been disrupted and high inflation rates have led to increased poverty for many people in both developed and developing countries. In addition, challenges such as wars, climate change which has exacerbated inequalities and immigration, and the rise of populism have made global cooperation more difficult as actors from the Global North and South have failed to tackle these important issues together. At a time when global governance institutions such as the United Nations are focused on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, ongoing conflicts in regions such as Africa, Europe and Middle East are jeopardizing SDG 16, which emphasises the promotion of peace and SDG 17 of promoting partnerships to achieve all goals.

Nationalist turns in the ‘Global North’ hit development financing

The challenge of financing these global goals is exacerbated by a shift in priorities in relation to multiple armed conflicts. Much of the effort and attention is now focused on buying arms rather than investing in development cooperation programs that could help people affected by geopolitical crises, many of whom are currently living in dire poverty. Unfortunately, as a result of these geopolitical upheavals, some regions, particularly in Europe and America, have changed their development policies and prioritised security over global development cooperation. Recently, the ‘Dutch government’ announced to cut development cooperation and the British Prime Minister also announced to cut development aid and allocate more funds to defence security. And the USAID was disbanded with President Trump’s second term. This shows that most countries that had pledged 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) to the United Nations are reducing their spending on official development assistance (ODA)/development cooperation. This puts progress towards achieving some of the SDGs at risk around the world, particularly on poverty, hunger, education and health.

This shift can largely be attributed to the rise of nationalist governments and populism, reminiscent of the situation in the United Kingdom (UK) during Brexit. Although, there are some efforts at engagement, such as the European Union’s (EU) Global Gateway Initiative (launched in 2021), which aims to strengthen relations with African countries, significant changes in their approach are still needed.

The focus should not only be on humanitarian aid, but also on investments in the energy sector development and trade that focuses on improving the value chain and governance as these remain major challenges for most African governments. For example, Malawi has an energy sector problem and poor road infrastructure development that affects industrialisation and trade for economic transformation. With allies like the EU through the Global Gateway Initiative, the country could improve its socio-economic development indicators. This approach would help achieve some development initiatives despite the geopolitical challenges.

Global governance has struggled with difficulties in development cooperation, especially in climate finance, even after the heads of state and government endorsed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. The situation worsened when the United States withdrew from the climate agreement during Donald Trump’s first term, and then again now in his second term as part of an inward-looking development policy and significant funding cuts under the nationalist slogans of ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’. This highlights the challenges facing global cooperation, leading to a decline in development efforts rather than strengthening solutions to tackle climate change. This call for radical reforms to international financial planning draws some lessons from the Bridgetown Initiative, which campaigned and advocating for reforming global financing in 2023 Paris Summit, France.

Reducing geopolitical tensions is key for better outcomes for all

With only five years left until the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), significant efforts must be made, especially by global leadership with negotiating experience, to reach common agreements that reduce geopolitical tensions. This focus is critical to advancing global development cooperation, especially in times of crisis. The geopolitical tensions on trade between China and the United States must be resolved amicably as no country can sustain itself in a globalized world with its own resources. This requires the intervention of institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to protect global trade partnerships. Therefore, considerable efforts should be made to review trade agreements between the two countries on the basis of rules, not power. If these tensions escalate, they will disproportionately affect countries in the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and others, as President Trump has already announced tariffs around the world, even on poor countries like Malawi.

Once geopolitical tensions subside, world leaders must find common ground to address the major challenges by organizing global development cooperation in a way that takes into account the interests of all stakeholders from the Global North and the Global South. Efforts should also be made to develop mechanisms that support long-term global sustainability goals. A global governance institution such as the United Nations should lead the reform process and ensure that global development cooperation adapts to current realities rather than relying on the development models of the 1940’s when most institutions were established. It is important to remember that the world is currently facing several geopolitical crises. Financing should also be a priority, as financial challenges are hampering achieving global goals. There is an urgent need to develop clear standards that apply more equitable and inclusive methodologies. This will help define future collective, complementary, and cooperative activities and responses.

The world needs a leader that can influence and set an example in this regard. The countries of the Global South, especially sub-Saharan Africa, should advocate innovative investment approaches such as the exchange of technical knowledge and value creation capacities with a liable partner. This would promote trade within the framework of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) established in 2018. In the long term, the continent will move away from dependence on the global economic system by promoting economic trade for socio-economic development instead of relying solely on aid. Financing opportunities for domestic revenue mobilization in the Global South should be promoted through the development of a strategy aligned with the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA). This approach can help finance the Sustainable Development Goals and close some of the gaps created by donor fatigue

In this way, voices from the Global South would have much to say about their development pathways, strategies, and tactics to combat poverty, food insecurity and cross-border challenges through collaborative and coordinated global development policies. In that way, SDGs ‘Leave no one behind’ by 2030 will be achieved.  Currently, the system is still dictated by the countries of the Global North, be it in trade or in the financing of global goals thus why radical reforms are needed.

Therefore, to effectively address today’s polycrisis and global social issues, changing global development policy will require a consensus that prioritizes fairness, economic stability for all, and collaboration.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author:

Chimwemwe Salie Hara

Chimwemwe Salie Hara is a Global Governance and Policy Analyst and Programmes Adviser for Sustainable Livelihood Development at Opdracht (Mission) in Africa (AiO), The Netherlands. He holds an MSc in International Public Administration from Erasmus University Rotterdam, with a focus on governance, management, and policy. His work centers on globalisation, development cooperation, public policy, social protection, and humanitarian governance.

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Truth on demand: The politics of using and dismissing migration research (PACES Blog Series)

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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.

All these assumptions have long been debunked by detailed academic research on the counter-productive effects of sanctions and securitisation, on the difficulties of reception in the region, on the effects of development aid, and on the nuanced realities of migrant decision making.

Disregard of knowledge in politicized areas

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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A clash of peace(s)? Feminist-decolonial reckoning with extractive disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes in Africa

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Conventional Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) frameworks in Africa remain limited by masculinist and colonial legacies that marginalise the knowledge of African women’s and their lived realities. In this blog, visiting International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) researcher, Esther Beckley advances a feminist-decolonial intervention that centres women’s knowledge as indispensable to reimagining peacebuilding beyond militarised and exclusionary paradigms. This shift is essential for achieving effective peace processes.

Photo by Alessandro Armignacco on Unsplash

“We are not firing guns, but we are not at peace”. This sentiment, echoed by one of the women I encountered in Liberia during my PhD field research in 2022, encapsulates a critical challenge in “post-conflict” Africa. More than two decades have passed since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), which prioritised women’s protection and participation in conflict and its aftermath. Hailed as a landmark in recognising women’s experiences of war and contributions to peace, the resolution laid the groundwork for gender-sensitive peacebuilding frameworks worldwide, including Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes.

Yet, in Africa, where histories of conflict and resistance continue to shape present realities, these frameworks remain largely extractive, technical, and blind to African women’s lived realities.   They are extractive because they use women’s stories to fit donor agendas without truly listening to their needs. They are technical, relying on rigid checklists that ignore the complex ways women build peace daily. They are blind to the plural forms of African women’s peacebuilding that do not fit Western stereotypes. This creates a gap between peacebuilding frameworks and the real lives of the women they aim to support. This way, women’s agency is not only marginalised but actively erased through peacebuilding paradigms that are masculinist in design and colonial in logic.

In this article, I offer a feminist-decolonial reckoning with DDR in Africa – one that challenges the colonial roots and gender biases of these processes, and centres the voices and realities of African women so often ignored. Drawing on examples from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I reflect on how DDR processes continue to operate through narrow definitions of combatant identity, exclusionary disarmament criteria, and a persistent inability to value women’s plural and communal approaches to peace. Beyond the question of inclusion, I ask: Which kinds of peace are being imagined? Whose security is being prioritised? And what violence is rendered invisible in the process? Doing so allows for a deeper understanding of how African women’s experiences can reshape peacebuilding into a more just and grounded practice.

 

Beyond the rhetoric of inclusion: The limits of gender mainstreaming

Women in Africa have never been absent from conflict. In Sierra Leone, figures like “Adama cut hand” and “Krio Mammy” embodied a complex warrior identity, challenging the stereotype of women as passive victims of war. In northeastern Nigeria, the widespread use of girls as suicide bombers by Boko Haram reveals a calculated militarisation of girlhood. Likewise, in Goma, DRC, some of the women I encountered in 2022 spoke of occupying roles as commanders, platoon leaders, logistics coordinators, and so forth. Yet, DDR programmes across Africa have persistently treated women’s participation in conflict as anomalous or secondary.

The problem is not just one of oversight; it is structural. DDR programmes are designed around a narrow, militarised conception of combatant status – one that centres gun ownership, formal enlistment, and the ability to surrender arms as prerequisites for recognition. In this framework, women who served as spies, cooks, caregivers, sex slaves, or who fought using traditional weapons such as machetes or “juju” (voodoo) are not seen as legitimate ex-combatants. As a result, they are excluded from reintegration benefits and left to “self-reintegrate” without psychological, social, or economic support.

This exclusion is not incidental. It reflects the coloniality of peacebuilding, a system that privileges Western top-down models and masculinist understandings of war, while delegitimising the complex and fluid roles women occupy during and after conflict. In Sierra Leone, female fighters within the Kamajor Civil Defence Forces were left out of DDR processes because they did not fit the predefined mould of the disarmed soldier. In Nigeria, women affected by the Niger Delta insurgency and the counterinsurgency war in the Northeast were similarly marginalised by state-led peace initiatives such as the Presidential Amnesty Programme and Operation Safe Corridor. These programmes, despite being framed within WPS language, failed to acknowledge the socio-political and gendered dynamics that shape women’s experiences of conflict and recovery.

“Informal” peacebuilding as epistemic resistance

In the face of structural exclusion from formal peace processes, African women have long practised peacebuilding on their own terms, drawing from cultural knowledge(s), spiritual resilience, and communal solidarity. These practices, often unseen by dominant DDR frameworks, constitute powerful forms of epistemic resistance – challenging dominant knowledge systems and asserting their own ways of knowing and being. In this context, it represents women’s active resistance to the narrow definitions of peace and peacebuilding embedded in DDR programmes. They offer plural ways of knowing and doing peace, rooted in collective healing, intergenerational memory, and care.

Consider Liberia, where women’s movements, notably Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), mobilised mass actions combining Christian and Muslim prayer circles, sit-ins, song, and silent protest. Their methods, born out of necessity and resilience, may not have resembled conventional conflict resolution, but their impact was undeniable. Through everyday activism, they created political pressure that eventually helped end the war and paved the way for the election of Africa’s first female head of state. These practices disrupt the distinction made between victim and agent, public and private, formal and informal, reclaiming peace as a communal, ongoing process rather than a set of steps to be completed.

These forms of peacebuilding are not simply add-ons to liberal peace processes; they expose how the “peace” envisioned in DDR and WPS agendas often neglects the violences women continue to endure in “post-conflict” contexts: domestic violence, land dispossession, political exclusion, illiteracy, and trauma. As one of the women in Liberia told me, “The war is over, but our struggle is not”. Their activism around issues like drug abuse, domestic violence, and declining female political representation, though not always labelled “peacebuilding”, is deeply political and rooted in relational justice and survival.

By ignoring these practices, DDR programmes perpetuate epistemic injustice. They continue to treat peacebuilding as a domain of expertise held by international actors and armed men, rather than a relational, lived process in which women are already engaged. Feminist-decolonial approaches compel us to ask: Which forms of knowledge are recognised as legitimate? Who is authorised to speak, and whose voices remain unheard?

Towards feminist-decolonial peacebuilding

For DDR in Africa to be truly meaningful, it must abandon its masculinist, militarised, and top-down foundations. A feminist-decolonial approach demands a radical reimagining beyond the standard three-step process. Disarmament must extend beyond weapons to acknowledge women’s unique experiences of war, while demobilisation must ensure safety and inclusion for female ex-combatants. Reintegration requires holistic healing that is psychological, spiritual, and relational, not just economic support. Crucially, we must ask what peace and reintegration mean for women whose bodies were sites for warfare and survival or who bore the burdens of conflict without wielding arms.

Central to this transformation is recognising African women’s knowledges such as prayer, storytelling, rituals, and care as vital peacebuilding practices that challenge the liberal peace framework. Tokenistic gender mainstreaming falls short because DDR must confront colonial legacies that marginalise women’s political labour and exclude them from decision-making. Feminist-decolonial peacebuilding calls for fundamentally reimagining peace as justice, dignity, and relational repair, emerging from communities rather than institutions. This is not a tweak but a reckoning and a shift toward liberation grounded in voices too often forgotten.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the Author

Esther Beckley

Esther Beckley is a visiting research fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Her PhD research centered the peacebuilding practices of indigenous women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Liberia, learning how they navigate and reshape complex ‘postconflict’ environments within their communities. Grounded in a feminist-decolonial approach, her work challenges dominant colonial narratives that have long silenced these women’s voices, foregrounding the significance of their spiritual, relational, and communal methods of building peace. This research provides critical insights into the limitations of conventional Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes and emphasises the need for more transformative and contextually grounded peace processes.

 

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Amsterdam’s Troubling Children’s Book

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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: Reddit
The 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.

This blog was first published by the Contrapuntal

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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Humanitarian Observatories Series | preventing crisis through reforestation: the case of Kalehe in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

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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 | ReliefWeb   Kalehe 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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. 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 Kalehe
Contextual 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:
  1. 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.
  1. 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.   Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

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

Silencing Minds, Starving Bodies: Authoritarian Epistemicide in Ethiopia  

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In this blog, Siyum Adugna Mamo and Ayehu Bacha Teso look at political developments within Ethiopia in the last decade, and their effects on freedom of academic work and thought as well as on material conditions within the country. They find that by deliberately weakening intellectuals both morally and economically, forcing them into dire living conditions, and suppressing dissenting voices, the authoritarian regime in Ethiopia has engaged in epistemicide. This has demoralized intellectuals, stifled knowledge production, and eroded the coming generation’s hope for learning.

Flag of Ethiopia: Source WikiCommons

The regime that came to power in Ethiopia in 2018, led by the Prosperity Party of Prime Minister (PM) Abiy Ahmed, didn’t take long before it turned authoritarian. Persecuting dissenting views, jailing journalists, members of parliament, and intellectuals critical of the regime quickly became the new normal in Ethiopia. Whilst civil servants in the country have also faced unprecedented challenges following the transition to the current government, this paper focuses on the challenges faced by intellectuals — academic and research staff, in public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Using the concept of  epistemicide to refer to violence against knowledge and the intellectuals that produce it in the context of Ethiopia, this blog considers  how the Ethiopian government has engaged in ‘epistemicide’. By deliberately subjecting the country’s intellectuals to  dire living conditions to weaken them both morally and economically, the regime has not only heavily damaged current intellectual conditions within the country, but also eroded the hope for the pursuit of knowledge among  future generations.

 

From thought leaders to outcasts: the marginalization of intellectuals

Since 2018, the Ethiopian government has expressed hostility toward intellectuals and has deliberately distanced them from the political arena. The aim is seemingly to weaken the opposition base by weakening the intellectuals morally and economically in the country. Several government policies have driven intellectuals into dire living conditions with meagre monthly salaries that barely cover their basic needs, the regime has successfully weakened them economically. It has also worked to demoralize intellectuals by alienating them from the nation and framing them as instigators of violent incidents and crises in the country. This deliberate effort aims to render intellectuals powerless and unrecognized by society at large. This has been carried out in tandem with silencing dissenting voices—including imprisoning academics, journalists, political activists, members of parliament, and opposition political party members critical of its policies.

 

From Lecture Halls to Breadlines: Ethiopian academics now earn less than casual workers 

Intellectuals are being forced into dire living conditions where they cannot cover their basic needs with their monthly wage. A full professor earns a gross monthly salary of $ 158, an associate professor earns $ 146, an assistant professor receives $ 134, and a lecturer receives $ 94 in gross monthly salary (see the graph below). This amount is significantly lower than the income of casual and low-skilled workers, for example a shoeshine who polishes shoes on the streets of Addis Ababa. The monthly salaries of academic staff in HEIs are almost negligible in a country where the cost of living is soaring, and inflation is skyrocketing.

Professors, who spend years and years reaching the highest level of the intellectual ladder, earns a salary that cannot even cover their basic monthly expenses. Such unfair treatment is demoralizing for intellectuals, making it difficult not only to feed themselves but also to support their families. It also discourages them from maintaining motivation for their work, ultimately stifling innovation and knowledge production. This is reflected in the regime’s deliberate efforts to impoverish the educated elites in the country. This economic suffocation of intellectuals is a calculated move. When brilliant minds are forced to focus on mere survival—scrambling to put food on the table or looking for other options—they cannot contribute to the nation’s intellectual or political development.

 

Graph 1. gross monthly salary of the academic staffs in HEIs in Ethiopia (based on google conversion rate, May 23, 2025). The net monthly salary will be a 35% reduction of the figure due to wage taxes.

At the same time as academic staff at traditional HEI’s in Ethiopia suffer there is a growing trend of plagiarism and acquiring illegitimate degrees largely by the cadres of the regime. This extends from low level administrators  who easily buy certificates to the PM who has been heavily criticized for plagiarizing a significant portion his PhD dissertation.

Eroding the hopes of the coming generation

With such a system that actively works to weaken the intellectuals both morally and economically, the coming generation are likely to grow up hopeless about learning and knowledge. Witnessing the struggle of intellectuals who are unable to cover their basic needs, it is likely that a career as an academic will become less and less attractive to young people and graduates: even senior Professors are now unable to feed themselves, support their families, or pay for their children’s school fees. How can young people develop a commitment to learning when their teachers, many with advanced degrees,  are starving, unable to change their clothes, and unable to pay rent and sleeping in their offices? Schools and universities, once seen as gateways to opportunity, are now viewed with skepticism and despair. The regime is undermining innovation and the drive to produce knowledge not only among its current intellectuals but also within future generations eroding their hope for learning. This has severe implications for the country’s socio-economic and political development.

A picture showing a Wollo University staff, who is also a PhD candidate at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, begging on the street of Addis Ababa.

Conclusion

The fight against epistemicide and anti-intellectualism in Ethiopia is not just a fight for intellectuals; it is a fight for the soul of the nation. It is a fight to reclaim the hope of future generations, to restore the value of knowledge, and to ensure that critical thinking and innovation can flourish once again. The regime in Ethiopia has engaged in deliberate epistemicide, weakening intellectuals both morally and economically, and placing them in dire living conditions. This reality underscores the importance of advocating for change by pushing the regime to value knowledge, restore the livelihoods of intellectuals, and rekindle hope for future generations. Both intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are not only crucial for the country’s development but also essential in shaping the future of upcoming generations. A movement is therefore necessary to compel the regime to grant intellectuals and their knowledge a proper social standing. Both intellectuals and the knowledge they produce are not only crucial for the country’s development but also essential in shaping the future of the coming generations.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Authors

Siyum Adugna Mamo

Siyum Adugna Mamo is a PhD fellow joining the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University in Belgium, and an academic staff at Jimma University, Ethiopia. He has a master’s degree in Development Studies (specializing in Conflict and Peace Studies) from the ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands; and another master’s in Philosophy from Addis Ababa University.

Ayehu Bacha Teso

Ayehu Bacha Teso is a PhD fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, affiliated with the Conflict Research Group. His research focuses on urbanization and ethnic contestations in Ethiopia. He is an academic staff member at Jimma University, Ethiopia, and holds a master’s degree in cultural studies.

 

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International Day of Biological Diversity: Embracing Javanese Local Wisdom as Pathways to a Sustainable Future

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Can local wisdom offer solutions to current environmental crises? As the world commemorates the International Day of Biological Diversity, we are reminded that the solutions to today’s ecological crises often lie in the knowledge systems of the past. In this blog, Irma Nugrahanti suggests how Javanese traditions like Gotong Royong and Memayu Hayuning Bawana offer guidance for pathways to sustainable development in Indonesia. Ancestral traditions can inspire an approach that is more harmonious with nature, which could inspire more just and inclusive climate strategies.

Banyuwangi, East Java Photo Credit : Author 2025

Indonesia is significantly vulnerable to various climate hazards and the effects of climate change. The 2023 INFORM Risk Index ranks Indonesia in the top third of nations most vulnerable to climate disasters, placing it 48th out of 191, encompassing risks like as flooding, droughts, and heatwaves. In addressing these issues, traditional Javanese local wisdom offers insightful pathways toward sustainable development and harmonious coexistence with nature. The ethical elements embedded in Javanese local wisdom, expressed through religious and cultural practices, offer important local knowledge for successful preservation strategies, facilitating the attainment of sustainable development goals by promoting a collective awareness of responsible conservation. As the largest ethnic group in Indonesia, the Javanese people have historically fostered a strong connection with their natural environment, conducting practices that prioritize resource conservation, waste reduction, and ecological balance. Bringing these cultural practices together within a feminist political ecology framework, particularly through kinship theories that emphasize interconnectedness and care ethics, demonstrates the potential of traditional knowledge in developing inclusive and sustainable policies.

Understanding Javanese Local Wisdom

Javanese local wisdom consists of beliefs and practices intricately woven into traditional norms, focusing on balance and interconnectedness. The Javanese principle of “Memayu Hayuning Bawana,” meaning “living harmoniously with nature and maintaining its balance”, embodies the concepts of ecological sustainability. These practices corresponds with kinship theory in political ecology where land, water, and trees are perceived as kins rather than commodities. It also highlights the interconnectedness of environment and humans through relational ethics, which emphasize mutual care and shared responsibility.

Another long-standing Javanese practice is “Gotong Royong”, gotong means “work” and royong means “together”; a deeply ingrained cultural expression of collaboration and solidarity. This concept signifies a commitment in which community members offer their labor, resources, and knowledge to address common needs and difficulties. This approach can be powerful for mobilizing grassroots opposition to environmental injustices, enabling communities to champion equitable and locally-based environmental policy. From political ecology perspective, it is important to look at environmental issues from political structures and power dynamics angles, for instance the allocation, access, and management of natural resources. Practices such as Gotong Royong illustrate an alternative ethic of interdependence and collective responsibility, proposing a grassroots framework for communal decision-making that challenges hierarchical approaches to resource management. Additionally, political ecology values indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. This aligns with Gotong Royong practice that values community knowledge in managing environment. Currently, Gotong Royong is firmly ingrained across diverse Indonesian cultures. This has emerged as a significant characteristic of Indonesia’s values.

Nyadran, a tradition prevalent among Javanese communities, serves as both a spiritual ritual and a reflection of the harmonious relationship between humans and nature. In practice, Nyadran involves  environmental cleaning, preservation of sacred natural sites, and caring for each other. By doing so, communities enhance their socio-ecological connection and strengthen their responsibility over the environment. Similarly, the Samin indigenous community in Central Java adheres to the “Sedulur Sikep” ideology, which underscores the importance of caring. Sedulur Sikep has three main principles: the principles of ngajeni (respecting), ngopeni (caring for), and demunung (against exploitation of nature) in natural resource management, which are reflected in organic farming practices, forest conservation, and water resource protection. This belief is rooted in how they see nature as “mother” which represents care, nurturance, and provider of life, hence it must be treated with utmost respect. Therefore, the Samin avoid nature exploitation and only take what they need to survive. This ethic of sufficiency and respect for the environment, strongly in line with feminist political ecology’s focus on kinship, care, and criticism of extractive systems.

Integrating Traditional Wisdom into Policy Making

Integrating traditional wisdom into policy requires practical measures. Despite these positive examples, there are challenges in acknowledging and integrating traditional wisdom into Indonesian policy frameworks. For instance, valuable insights from local and indigenous voices, particularly women, are frequently excluded. Feminist political ecology confronts these exclusions, arguing for inclusive decision-making procedures that recognize marginalized knowledge systems and advance environmental justice. Governments should implement inclusive governance models that ensure involvement from local populations, particularly women, recognizing their contributions to environmental management.

Additionally, when traditional knowledge is not institutionalized through formal curriculums, it is vulnerable to erosion, particularly due to modernization. In order to facilitate the intergenerational transfer of sustainable practices and local knowledge, it is suggested that traditional ecological knowledge should be valued as important as current modern knowledge. Allocating targeted financial planning such as budgeting for traditional wisdom-based sustainable programs, can improve their efficacy and scalability. Therefore, budgeting is essential for promoting the use and maintenance of local wisdom, especially in marginalized communities. Studies indicate that Indigenous and rural communities often have place-based knowledge systems essential for sustainable resource management and climate adaptation. A similar example from other regions, such as New Zealand, illustrates the significance of integrating Māori indigenous values, knowledge, and perspectives throughout the whole ecosystem’s services framework.

Historically, Javanese communities engaged in sustainable agriculture, land management, and resource conservation way before modern sustainability discourse. Through reflection, we can rediscover and invigorate these values, acknowledging that the key to sustainability is already in our cultural heritage and local traditions. Embracing and supporting them, including systematically integrating them into national and local climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, offers meaningful pathways toward culturally relevant and sustainable solutions to Indonesia’s current environmental concerns.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Irma Nugrahanti 

Irma Nugrahanti is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), focusing on the intersection of gender, climate change, and public finance management. Her research highlights the importance of integrating a gender lens into climate budgeting policies and practices, particularly at the national and regional levels of public expenditure management. With a background in the non-profit sector, Irma has extensive experience in finance, program management, and policy advocacy, striving to bridge the gap between research and practice to create inclusive and sustainable climate policies.

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Polycrisis and reasons for hope at the Humanitarian Leadership Conference: a practitioners’ perspective

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In this blog, Carla Vitantonio (and host of the ‘Living Decoloniality’ podcast), takes stock of the views of humanitarian practitioners and researchers at the recent Humanitarian Leadership Conference, held in Doha, Qatar. Throughout the conference, Carla interviewed various humanitarian practitioners and researchers for a special podcast series. She posed two questions, about challenges for humanitarians in a time of polycrisis, and about hope for the future. To listen to the podcast, check out the CHL website.

On April 6th, roughly 70 days after the cancellation of USAID and the earthquake that shook the humanitarian and development sector, about 200 people from 85 different countries met in Doha for the Humanitarian Leadership Conference. Roughly 200 more joined online.
The organization of the event had been uncertain until the very end, as organizers themselves have been deeply affected by the cuts and so had most of the participants. But at the end, thanks to the firm willingness and hard work of the organizers, all pieces fell together and people arrived from all over the world, with some of them crossing through zones affected by conflict and disasters, to attend the two days of conference and one extra day organized by the Pledge for Change, a movement that seeks to decolonize the sector. The title of the conference, “transformative leadership in times of polycrisis”, which only few months before had seemed to many a simple exercise of anticipation, proved to capture perfectly the feelings of many participants, who arrived in Doha looking for answers and solutions to an unprecedently complex web of problems.

The challenges faced by the humanitarian sector are both personal and professional

I am a humanitarian living and working in Cuba, one of the most unseen crisis in the world (some participants to the conference openly admitted that they did not know that since 2022 Cuba has been affected by 3 devastating hurricanes, a strong earthquake and a growing socioeconomic crisis that keeps every day the country in the darkness for several hours, and has brought more than one million people – one tenth of the total population – to flee). I had to travel almost 3 days to reach Qatar, and I found myself overwhelmed by the intensity, variety, depth of the content shared through the conference.

As I often do, I decided to use storytelling to create threads and a sort of order among this huge volume of information, and I invited 6 of the people who had impressed me the most to share their own story, guided by two questions:

  1. In times of polycrisis, what is one challenge and one opportunity for you and your organization?
  2. What is one thing from this conference that makes you hopeful for the future?

I had to arrange interviews in very different times of each day. Some speakers could make it very early in the morning, had to skip breakfast and so their voice was still a bit rusty. Others gave me their time after a long day of conference. Their voices sound tired. Some had to speak the day after. Their voices betray anxiety. Some were happy with the outcome of their session. Their voices sound hopeful.

They were all honest, generous, gentle to me, and their perspective helped me in finding my way through the conference.

The result is a short podcast series, which includes a bonus track recorded with Lars Peter Nissen, author of Trumanitarian.

One month after the conference, I feel I can draw some reflections:

  • Local leadership is now. As a coach told me once, a “beautiful, unique party is happening now”. Organizations need to decide if they are ready to join, or if they prefer to just keep discussing The transformation we have been talking about for long is already taking place. In the Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) in Sudan, through the courageous appeals of the Myanmar civil society, the actions of the White Helmets and of the many others that decided to take action and not to wait for those in power to give them permission.
  • Finally, the discourse on the coloniality entrenched in the system is gaining voice and space. The abstract need to “decolonize the sector” is slowly being transformed into a series of creative, profound attempts to analyse all our practices, to identify the coloniality that shapes them, and to transform them into something else. We need to work for change to happen at all levels. Advocacy and alliance at global level is paramount. Bringing philanthropy onboard and contributing to its own change is also very important, but we also need to look critically at the principles that move humanitarian assistance, and at our processes. Coloniality needs to be disentangled one piece after the other.
  • INGOs are struggling to follow the rhythm of this change. Some that signed the Pledge for Change in 2022 today face difficulties inchanging a system built on inequalities. But besides those initial 12 signatories of the Pledge for Change, and a few notable others the debate on the decolonization of practices and processes is virtually absent from the agenda of many, while others engage in aesthetic debates on the use of correct vocabulary.

In summary, the humanitarian leadership conference 2025 left many questions on how to leverage transformative leadership to bring about a new humanitarian sector.
However, something emerged clearly: the change we have been talking of happening before our eyes. Are we being this change, or are we rather standing aside? Each one will make their own choice. Meanwhile, enjoy the listening.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author 

Carla Vitantonio

Carla Vitantonio is a humanitarian practitioner and researcher who has worked across a number of contexts and organisations, including CARE (as country Director for Cuba), and Handicap International (including as country Director for North Korea). She contributes to academic research initiatives at institutes including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the European University Institute, and ODI. Carla hosts the podcast ‘Living Decoloniality’, and also serves on the Board of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, as well as regularly contributing blogs, think pieces and papers – in English, Spanish, and Italian.

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Governing through expulsion: rise in U.S. deportations quiets the Darién Gap, shifting burdens south

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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.

Ecuador sits at the crossroads of this regional machinery. Dollarised and locked into extractive exports, the country relies heavily on remittances, yet now faces budget cuts and austerity at home. It has long sent populations abroad, but it has also become where multiple flows collide or return. Venezuelans, Haitians, and others caught in overlapping crises have passed through or been stranded within Ecuador’s borders. The state is now expected to absorb not just returnees but the violence of the very system that expelled them.

That violence is reflected in the routes themselves, which have begun to bend and shatter. Some Ecuadorians now fly to El Salvador to bypass Darién. Others remain in limbo in Mexican shelters. A growing number of people apply for asylum in Spain. But more and more are returning, voluntarily or not. The International Organization for Migration reports a record spike in Ecuadorians requesting return assistance. We are witnessing less of a voluntary reverse migration but a form of forced and adverse absorption into a country already under immense strain, where access to secure jobs, welfare, and infrastructure is deeply uneven.

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 politicaleconomy 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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A revolution for land and life in Colombia – and the world

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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.

  1. First, rolling back gains in redistributive land policies, largely through market-based economic policies hostile to small-scale farmers.
  2. Second, containing the extent of implementation of existing redistributive land policies where these exist.
  3. Third, blocking any initiative to pass new redistributive land policies in societies where these are needed.
  4. 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.
  5. 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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Home(s) in the In-Between: Trauma, Memory, Identity and Belonging in Home Game by Lidija Zelović

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In this blog, Drs. Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits and Bilge Sahin reflect on Home Game, a documentary that unfolds not simply as a story of survival but as a profound meditation on the human condition—on displacement, memory, and the perpetual search for identity and belonging. Based on their contributions as panelists alongside the filmmaker—moderated by Gabriela Anderson of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre—this piece revisits key themes discussed during the special screening at the 2025 Movies that Matter Festival at the Filmhuis in The Hague.

Photo Credit: Barbara Raatgever

Set against the backdrop of the breakup of Yugoslavia and its aftermath, Home Game resists conventional narratives of linear healing or neat resolution. Instead, it invites viewers into the fractured, nonlinear experiences of its protagonists, weaving together personal memory and political critique in ways that linger long after the screen fades to black.

The film follows the life path of Lidija Zelovic, opening in Sarajevo during the turbulent 1990s. Lidija’s grandmother offers a haunting reflection: “There is peace until the shot is fired. But once the shot is fired, one realizes that the war started much earlier. Only then it is too late.” This single line unsettles common understandings of war and peace, refusing to treat them as discrete events. Rather, it exposes how the seeds of violence are often sown long before bullets fly—embedded in social, political, and economic structures.

This insight resonates strongly with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence. Structural violence refers to the harm caused by systems of inequality—patriarchy, racism, capitalism—that may not be overtly violent but are nonetheless profoundly injurious. These latent forms of harm, often normalized or rendered invisible, create the very conditions that make war possible. Thus, as Home Game suggests, the temporal boundary between war and peace is not a clean break but a blurry continuum.

This continuum is further explored when Lidija and her family relocate to the Netherlands as refugees. On the surface, they escape war. But the film astutely reveals how violence endures in less visible forms: through xenophobic political rhetoric, subtle exclusions, and the cultural dissonance of living between worlds. In the so-called “peaceful” West, the trauma of war does not dissipate—it mutates. Later in the documentary, as Lidija’s mother watches Dutch television from Bosnia, where the family are holidaying, she remarks, “They know how to live.” It is a moment filled with longing and alienation, proximity and distance. A good life appears within reach, yet remains stubbornly inaccessible.

In this way, Home Game challenges simplistic portrayals of migration as a journey from danger to safety, from trauma to recovery. The film instead treats home-making as a fractured and continuous process. Displacement produces a liminal existence—where the self is suspended between multiple geographies, languages, and temporalities. Home is no longer a stable place; it becomes both here and there, both past and present, and never fully one or the other.

Lidija’s now-teenage son, born and raised in the Netherlands, is a powerful example of this, feeling torn between his Bosnian heritage and his Dutch citizenship. His manner of untangling his various identities is contrasted with that of Lidija’s father, who dismisses the idea of being buried in the Netherlands after his death. His eventual interring in a grave in Zaandam marks a ‘full circle’ moment in the film, with Lidija noting that her son now feels Dutch as the screen darkens on an image of the family paying their respects.

One of the most powerful moments in the film occurs when Lidija returns to her childhood home in Sarajevo. Looking out at the familiar cityscape, she says, “I like it because it is mine.” But when her son asks, “Is the view of your country different?” she replies, “I am different; I don’t know about the view.” Her words capture the estrangement that displacement brings—not just from place, but from oneself. The trauma of war ruptures more than just space; it breaks the continuity of self, severing the past from the present in painful and irreversible ways.

Yet, Home Game is not a film of despair. It is honest about the wounds of war—many of which may never fully heal—but it is equally attentive to the quiet resilience of those who carry on. There is joy in the mundane: in a shared meal, a laugh, a football match. These moments are not trivial; they are the fragile threads from which new forms of life are woven.

Here, trauma studies provide an important lens. Scholars increasingly recognize that trauma is not solely destructive. It can also generate what is known as post-traumatic growth: a redefinition of identity, deeper empathy, new affiliations. Home Game captures this duality beautifully. Its protagonists, though fractured, are not broken. They carry layered identities—shaped by loss, survival, and hope—that continue to evolve through everyday acts of connection.

This interplay of trauma and transformation also has a political dimension. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “space of appearance,” the film becomes more than a personal story—it is a political act. Arendt reminds us of that action and speech among others in shared space is what constitutes the political. Home Game creates such a space, where pain, joy, and memory coexist. Through its portrayal of fractured identities and evolving relationships, it reclaims the political from the margins—from the survivors, the refugees, the displaced. Ernesto Laclau’s idea of the “internal antagonistic frontier” further enriches this reading. For Laclau, all social formations contain unresolved tensions—conflicts that can’t be eliminated, only negotiated. Home Game refuses to resolve these tensions. Instead, it makes them visible. Whether it’s the feeling of not fully belonging in the Netherlands or the ambivalence of returning to Sarajevo, the film insists on the legitimacy of contradiction. The documentary becomes a site of dissensus—a space where complex truths can coexist without being forced into a single narrative.

In refusing closure, Home Game speaks a deeper truth. Will there ever be full healing? A return to what was lost? The film suggests perhaps not. And perhaps that’s okay. Home Game is a reminder that home is not merely a place. It is a practice, process, and feeling that may flicker but never fully disappear. Home as well as life is not a tidy arc from trauma to triumph. It is recursive, messy, filled with beginnings that masquerade as endings and endings that open new questions. What matters, the film suggests, is not arriving at a final destination, but learning how to carry our stories—with complexity, dignity, and grace.

This special screening of ‘Home Game’ was put together by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Governance of Migration and Diversity (LDE GMD) together with Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Global. The other two organizers are the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS-EUR) and the Humanitarian Studies Centre. Photo credits from the event go to Barbara Raatgever. ‘Home Game’ is screening across the Netherlands throughout 2025.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors

Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits

Dr. 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

Dr. 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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The need for ‘Impact’: whatever ‘Impact’ means

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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 Humanitarian bridges 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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Humanitarian Observatories Series | USAID suspension is a wake-up call to address fragility of Humanitarian Actions in Ethiopia

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On the first day in office of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing the USAID for 90 days, reportedly to assess the programme’s ‘effectiveness and alignment with US foreign policy’. On 10 March 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended the world’s most vulnerable communities’ slight hope by announcing the permanent suspension of the USAID’s 83% programme. This aggressive measure is the harshest blow to the organization’s operation since its establishment in 1961. The UK and Netherlands are also making similar moves, significantly diminishing their overseas development and humanitarian funding. The measure has a significant adverse impact in Ethiopia, where humanitarian aid is the only thread of hope, at least currently, for many affected communities, including millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs). In this blog, Alemayehu B. Hordofa and Marga F. Angerasa contend that humanitarian actors and donors have not achieved the necessary strengthening of local capacities to respond to the ongoing crisis in Ethiopia, and that they should redouble their efforts to take targeted normative and practical measures to enhance local resilience to counterbalance, in the long-term, the adverse impacts of policy changes in donor countries.
This photo was taken in April 2024 by the first author in Seba Care Internally Displaced Persons camp. Volunteers are giving medical support to IDPs as a part of the BilalAid health outreach programme in Seba Care IDP shelter in Mekele, Ethiopia. BilalAid was established in 2024 by local youths who were previously volunteering informally in their communities to respond to humanitarian causes.
Humanitarian funding in Ethiopia Ethiopia is one of the biggest recipients of humanitarian aid in Africa. According to the 2024 Ethiopian Humanitarian Response Plan, over 21.4 million people in Ethiopia needed humanitarian assistance due to complex humanitarian crises such as climate change-induced disasters, armed conflicts, political violence, epidemic outbreaks and landslides. The conflict in Northern Ethiopia (2020-2022), the ongoing armed conflict in the Oromia and Amhara regions and climate change-induced food insecurity in south and south-west parts of the country displaced millions of individuals from their homes and have made them dependent on humanitarian aid. In some parts of the country, conflict(s) have coincided with drought, exacerbating the crisis and worsening the vulnerability of the affected communities. In 2024, the humanitarian community in Ethiopia appealed for 3.24  billion USD to reach 15.5 million people. This appeal raised only 1.79 billion USD, with the US government contributing 405.3 million USD. Beyond responding to the crisis as the primary duty-bearer, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) also contributed 264.5 million USD to the 2024 Ethiopian Humanitarian Fund (EHF). This year, the EHF has anticipated a requirement of 2 billion USD to respond to multiple crises in various parts of the country. Given the need for humanitarian support, the humanitarian fund in the country is visibly inadequate, and various humanitarian interventions in Ethiopia are being challenged by, among other things, inadequate funding and unfulfilled promises of localization. The USAID suspension is another recent significant blow to the country’s dwindling and inadequate humanitarian funding. The USAID aid suspension has placed the lives of vulnerable communities at risk The USAID funding cut has placed the lives of millions of people in need of humanitarian assistance in peril. The aid was stopped without any back-up, thus exposing vulnerable communities to exceptionally dangerous risks. Beyond the impact on people receiving aid, the decision has resulted in many aid workers being made unemployed. The Ethiopian Ministry of Health terminated 5000 employment contracts due to the USAID aid suspension. These health workers were supporting clinics on HIV-related programmes in various parts of the country. Likewise, even though a significant portion of Ethiopia’s development aid funding now comes from international development banks (World Bank, AfDB, IMF), which come with both punitive interest rates and market reforms, the suspension of USAID affects the country’s foreign currency reserve and flow – further minimizing the agency of Ethiopian policymakers and local organizations. In addition, the suspension of aid affects accountability relations in the humanitarian sector and beyond. Following the announcement of the funding suspension, over 85 percent of Civil Society Organizations suspended their programmes in Ethiopia. These CSOs were implementing programmes ranging from ensuring the right to access justice for displaced communities, advocating for accountability in the humanitarian sector and durable solutions and socio-economic recovery for conflict-affected peoples. The suspension decapitated CSOs operating in complex operational spaces and exacerbated the murky Ethiopian civil society environment. According to one humanitarian worker that we interviewed in Addis Ababa, ‘the suspension suppresses independent voices and shrinks the civic space as it inhibits vibrant CSOs from implementing programmes’. The CSOs that advance diverse perspectives are affected by the USAID suspension and only those that are supported by government will continue to operate in the country. This perspective was also shared by other participants during the interviews conducted by the first author for his PhD research on humanitarian governance in Ethiopia. The devastating impact that the USAID aid cut caused in the first few weeks of the announcement unveiled the fragmentation and fragility of Ethiopian formal humanitarian governance, its excessive reliance on foreign aid and its under-investment in supporting local humanitarian initiatives. Conversely, it allowed the government and the humanitarian actors to revisit and critically reflect on their practices around accountability and localization, as well as build the resilience of local actors to make humanitarian actors more predictable, effective and accountable. The role of local actors in responding to crises Ethiopia’s humanitarian action is noted for its plurality of actors. There are diverse humanitarian actors with their own practices and policies. However, the actors’ interventions vary in mandate, capacity and ability to respond to and cope with emergencies. They possess completely unequal power, leverage and authority, which are dependent on several factors including location, association and who they represent. Beyond targeted and institutionalized humanitarian interventions, humanitarianism by the ordinary citizenry, or vernacular humanitarianism, is a defining feature of Ethiopia’s humanitarian action. Millions of internally displaced persons are living with and supported by the host communities with no meaningful support from international or national formal humanitarian organizations. Ordinary citizens often organize themselves around social media such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram and were able to mobilize millions in support of victims of disasters. For example, ordinary Ethiopians informally organized on social media and did commendable work in averting the devastating consequences of drought in Borena in 2023, supported IDPs displaced from their homes due to political violence around Oromia-Somali borders in 2018 and supported millions of IDPs in Horro Guduru and East Wallagga zones while the institutionalized humanitarians were unable to intervene (during the first phase of the crisis) due to access difficulties. Ethiopian diasporas and business communities also participate in humanitarian action in the country. Apart from these few examples, ordinary Ethiopians are the backbone of the country’s humanitarian efforts and first responders to crises. However, the contributions of local actors remain invisible, are not nurtured and there has been inadequate effort to genuinely strengthen their capacity. The dominant discourse has wrongly portrayed humanitarianism in Ethiopia as a monopoly field of international humanitarian actors belittling the local community’s effort to address their problems. The visibility of localized humanitarianism in Ethiopia has been overshadowed by the increased visibility of the ‘international humanitarian community’s’ response to crises. Likewise, despite the global movement and advocacy for accountability to affected communities, humanitarian practitioners we spoke to in Addis Ababa largely believed that the promises of localization have largely remained unfulfilled. The interviews that we conducted with humanitarian workers and independent observers revealed that humanitarian organizations were primarily preoccupied with service delivery rather than strengthening local capacity to transition to recovery and reconstruction. Thus, to make humanitarian efforts more predictable and effective, humanitarian actors should prioritize local initiatives to make the sector sustainable and least affected by external decisions. The recent policy changes in donor countries, spearheaded by the USAID suspension of foreign assistance, are a wake-up call for the country to strengthen its local humanitarian initiatives and advance and implement the humanitarian reform agenda in national and local contexts. Mobilizing local actors and domestic resources Mobilizing domestic resources can reduce the dependency on foreign countries overseas development and humanitarian aid policies. Local actors play a crucial role in filling the gaps created due to changes in the priorities and policies of donor countries. However, as local initiatives still lack targeted support, external donors finance a significant portion of formal humanitarian action, USAID being the major partner. Yet Ethiopia has recently started some venerable initiatives that could contribute to the country’s self-reliance in the long run. The country started a food sovereignty endeavour, dubbed by the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) as a ‘decisive path toward food self-sufficiency’. The initiative prioritizes investing in local innovations in agriculture and technology. The government planned to address food insecurity through funding by state-owned enterprises and large-scale farming coordinated by its national disaster risk management office, the Ministry of Agriculture and relevant regional offices. The country has also been implementing the Green Legacy Initiative to avert the negative impact of climate change. Similarly, the government has commenced other national initiatives, such as the Bounty of the Basket, which have a significant potential to strengthen local resilience and preparedness. The transitional justice and national dialogue mechanisms have also the potential to end or significantly reduce the humanitarian needs emanating from the devastating impacts of conflict or political violence. However, even though these initiatives have the potential, if appropriately implemented and subjected to rigorous accountability mechanisms, to minimize the impacts of climate change and end the need caused by conflict, they may not counterbalance the adverse impacts of the policy change in donor countries in the short term. Conclusion and the way forward Given the high level of need, it is tremendously challenging to respond to the current humanitarian crisis without support from the international community in general and USAID in particular. The theoretical rhetoric that regarded local actors as genuine partners with a meaningful role in leading and funding humanitarian responses has not yet been translated into practice. Affected communities are still considered passive recipients of aid by the majority of international humanitarian actors working in Ethiopia. The current initiatives by the GoE to satisfy humanitarian needs with local capacity are commendable and can change this narrative in the long run. Such initiatives need to show tangible progress on the ground. Ending conflicts with agreements and finding durable solutions for millions of IDPs currently stranded in various IDP shelters are some of the immediate measures that the government can take to relieve the pressure on humanitarian action in the country. Ensuring government efficiency and addressing rampant corruption that divert critical resources from the public are other measures that the government may immediately take to avert further crisis. Furthermore, local CSOs need to reassess their excessive reliance on international funding and devise innovative means to mobilize domestic resources, strengthen local giving and prioritize local innovations. The promises of localization remained unfulfilled. Donors and the INGOs currently operating in the country need to revisit their commitments to localization and hold themselves accountable for failing to honour the grand bargain’s promises. Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Authors:

Alemayehu B. Hordofa
Alemayehu B. Hordofa is a Ph.D. researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He obtained his LLM in International Human Rights Law from the Irish Center for Human Rights (ICHR), University of Galway, Ireland. He is currently working on humanitarian governance in Ethiopia focusing on the role of Civil Society Organizations and Crisis-affected People to shape humanitarian governance ‘from below’. His research interests lie in forced displacement, accountability in humanitarian context, localization of humanitarian aid, transitional justice, and the development of CSOs in Ethiopia.
Marga Fekadu Angerasa
Marga Fekadu Angerasa is a law lecturer at Wolkite University (Wolkite, Ethiopia) with research interest and specialty on human rights, forced displacement and transitional justice. He has an LLM in human rights law from Addis Ababa University (2021). Marga is a member of Ethiopia Humanitarian Observatory and advocates for the advancement of human rights and works with CSOs on human rights issues.    Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

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

Mobilizing against patriarchy and caste on Twitter: How women in India use digital spaces to speak up against gender-based violence

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Digital spaces can amplify marginalized voices, but for many women, especially Dalit women in India, they often become sites of abuse. Navigating the intersection of gender, caste, and religion, Dalit women face systemic exclusion and violence, reinforced by both offline and online structures. While technology does not oppress all women equally, movements like #MeToo have helped Dalit women spotlight caste-based and patriarchal violence. In this blog, recent ISS MA graduates, Sri Lakshmi, and Emaediong Akpan explore how digital platforms both challenge and reinforce structural inequalities, revealing that technology is never neutral.

Image Credit: DALL-E

Dalit women in India

The Indian Hindu religious caste system (more than 3000 years old) has stratified Indian society into castes based on bloodline, occupation, and economic resources. The Brahman caste and other ‘upper’ castes have capitalized on their social position to exercise superiority and control over the ‘lower castes’ and therefore sustains an exploitative system. At the other end of the scale, the Dalit caste is deemed to have been rejected by God and is therefore ‘outside’ the caste system. While India has made progress in several social aspects, the sturdy caste system continues to prevail based on religious authorization. The Brahman caste has subjugated women from their own caste as well as ‘lower’ castes to maintain ‘caste purity’. This modus operandi is manifested in intense oppression and gender-based violence towards the Dalit women. ‘In every sphere of life, they (Dalit women) are in a pitiable position, worse off than the upper caste women’ due to the triple oppression exerted by men from their own caste and ‘upper castes’. The triple oppression here refers to casteism, patriarchy,and economic injustices that are manifested as gender-based violence, caste-based discrimination, and being limited to low-grade jobs that are poorly paid.

The Janus-faced nature of digital spaces in India: Reflections on the non-neutral nature of digital spaces

Digital technology has expanded communication, breaking traditional media barriers and enabling collective action. Today,people are leveraging digital spaces like Twitter (now X),and FaceBook to organize, draw attention to their struggles, and demand change.

In India, the dawn of digital spaces transformed social interactions, providing avenues for citizens to engage politically, communicate their demands. These spaces are considered revolutionary tools that promote global inclusion and equality. 

These spaces also act as a window into the broader Indian society, where norms and power interact to control individual actions. In navigating societal norms, digital spaces have been useful in helping Dalit women find community and access resources for mobilization. For example, Pallical, a Dalit rights activist, noted that ‘online space is refreshing and a space we never had earlier. There used to be limited regional media spaces, but we are now visible, and much of our anti-caste conversations are now happening on social media platforms’. For example, stories of how Dalit women were flogged and assaulted in public in the small city of Una led to government intervention only after it went viral on Twitter.

In this example, Twitter (and other digital spaces) served as a powerful public space for minorities and marginalized voices to circumvent traditional media; online, these actors could express opinions and opposition in a succinct format, as well as unite and organize swiftly in their capacity as ‘new social movements’. However, this is not the full picture. In these spaces, these marginalized groups are still unable to escape society and have been re-victimized in the spaces that also hold a ‘liberating’ potential’. This inability to ‘escape’ reality is why Wacjman states that technologies are not neutral; they do not exist outside of society but are a part of society. Within digital spaces, interactions are understood as performing gender roles that are deeply ingrained in society.

Digital spaces are a replication of gendered societal values and norms. One such replication is the backlash that followed the posting of an image showing a poster held by Jack Dorsey (former Twitter CEO) and Dalit Activists that read ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’.

Image
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Activists holding a Poster: Source Nalina

This sparked controversy and threats of boycotts on Twitter, ultimately emboldening casteism by forcing an apology for the poster and image. Despite knowing the impact of the caste system, Twitter conformed to the social norms in Indian society by stating that the poster ‘did not represent Twitter’s official position’. Twitter also apologized for speaking out against marginalization and social injustice in order to avert the risk of losing the Indian market which boasts about 8 million Twitter users. This singular act amongst many others reflects how technology is both a source and consequence of marginalization; first because of how it relates with society and second as a consequence of marginalization by reinforcing it through ‘mindless apologies’.

Twitter’s Denial of Siding with Dalits; Source: Bapuji and Chrispa

Gendered access and use of technology in India: The #MeToo case study in India

The #MeToo movement was a viral online movement of raising voices against the sexual harassment of women. Many women came forward to share their experiences using the hashtag #MeToo on Twitter and other digital spaces.

The Indian #MeToo movement leaves the original ‘Me’ behind

The Indian #MeToo movement was started in 2017 by Raya Sarkar, a woman from the Dalit caste. She used the digital space of Facebook to expose sexual harassment as a form of gender-based violence by male professors in Indian universities by curating a List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA). Sarkar was berated for posting such a ‘name and shame list’ in an attempt to re-enact the historical silencing and disregard for the testimonies of sexual violence against Dalit women in India. After this, the movement was taken over by mainstream activists, especially on Twitter and this diffused any remnant attention on the marginalization of women from the Dalit caste. While there were several personal testimonies on Twitter in which Indian women shared their experiences of sexual harassment, the testimonies of Dalit women were absent and scarcely featured in the debates that ensued. Hence, Twitter became a tool used to exclude the voices of the most oppressed who suffer on account of their class, race, and gender. In this way, Twitter reinforced the marginalization of Dalit women.

Technology as a source and consequence of gendered relations: Exclusion and discrediting of marginalized voices

As stated earlier, digital spaces have been instrumental in helping marginalized groups draw attention to social injustices. However, platforms like Twitter are generally unsupportive and even hostile toward women from the Dalit caste. Their marginalization on Twitter reflects these women’s reality by mirroring the existing caste network. It is unsettling to witness the casual and rarely-questioned oppression on Twitter faced by Dalit women. The oppression includes casteist slurs, disparaging comments on darker skin tones, and implicit insults on how women who are academically, professionally, and financially successful, or who have a fairer skin tone, are told that they don’t ‘look’ Dalit. Twitter has also provided the space for misogynists to target Dalit women without any consequences. This shows how technology (digital spaces) embolden and exacerbate existing gender inequalities and caste-based marginalization’ . Gender- and caste-based social dynamics and technology therefore connive to leave women from the Dalit caste behind on Twitter.

Conclusion

While there are numerous accounts of the benefits of social movements that have been organized in digital spaces, the realities are not the same for all, especially for marginalized groups. This lends credence to Whelan’s position that technology does not oppress all in the same way, nor does it necessarily oppress all women. In India, Dalit women, despite having gained access to digital spaces to draw attention to the injustice they face, are often faced with violence based on their gender and caste. Thus, although Twitter helped to break the culture of silence around sexual violence and draw attention to the injustices faced by Dalit women, it did not influence social relations to address the root causes. Rather, it emboldened these root causes and became a space where Dalit women continue to experience violence. People who wield more power (upper caste and those with more access) decide and shape technology by deciding what information is important or true.

Digital spaces are double-edged – they expose women and marginalized groups to harm, yet remain vital for organizing social movements. Recognizing the lack of neutrality of these spaces remains crucial, as offline systems of oppression are often mirrored and reinforced online. While legal frameworks can play a role in addressing digital harms, they alone cannot dismantle deeply entrenched caste and gender hierarchies. Instead, the focus must shift to challenging the power structures that shape technology itself. The experiences of Dalit women show that technology can be both a tool of oppression and resistance. Ensuring that digital platforms do not further marginalize vulnerable communities requires holding innovators and policymakers to higher ethical standards while amplifying the voices of those fighting for justice.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Sri Lakshmi

Sri Lakshmi is a recent graduate of the Master’s in Development Studies program at the International Institute of Social Studies. With nine years of experience working with students, caregivers, educators, disability inclusion organizations, and government officials. Sri is passionate about fostering inclusive spaces, bridging the gap between education and social impact.

Emaediong Akpan

Emaediong Akpan is a recent graduate of 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 1,2, 3

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