Themes Archives

Politics of Food and Technology Series | When the System Says No: Digitalization and Accountability in Food Aid

By ISS Blog Bliss 29 January 2026 158 views

This blog is part of a series on ‘the Politics of Food and Technology’, in collaboration with the SOAS Food Studies Centre. All of the blogs in this series are contributions made at the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference in Istanbul-Bergen, October 2025, to the panel with a similar title. To read the rest of the blogs in this series, please click here.

Digital tools promise efficiency and impartiality in humanitarian response. In food aid, biometric systems are meant to ensure that the ‘right’ people receive assistance. But when the verification of need depends on being readable by a machine, accountability shifts. Drawing on field experience in South Sudan, Hayley Umayam explores how exclusions come to look like a system error rather than a downstream effect of human decision-making.

Needs-based programming is the organizing principle of most contemporary humanitarian action. In South Sudan, where millions require assistance each year, and resources are consistently insufficient to meet needs, organizations justify allocation choices through a ‘logic of impartiality’: aid should go to those most in need. This logic is increasingly operationalized through digital and technocratic systems designed to make suffering measurable, commensurable, quantifiable, and thus ‘governable’.

Over the past decade, humanitarian agencies have turned to digital tools like fingerprint scanners and unique digital identifiers to manage service delivery. These tools promise accuracy and efficiency, an appeal that is easy to understand in a world of shrinking aid budgets and growing demand. They offer a way to demonstrate that limited resources are used responsibly and that assistance is delivered to the “right” people, thereby reinforcing claims of impartiality. There are plenty of technological evangelists, too, highlighting the potential use of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning in ‘streamlining’ the aid process.

Within this paradigm of impartiality-through-efficiency, accountability becomes largely procedural. It risks being defined less by relationships with affected communities than by the ability to show that needs-based logic has been correctly applied. If you can demonstrate that you followed needs-based logic using the right indicators, vulnerability criteria, and verification procedures with some level of “community buy-in”, you are seen as accountable. In other words, claiming that “the most in need” were reached is a way of demonstrating impartiality, and accountability is about legitimizing hard choices in contexts where almost everyone can qualify as in need. Strangely, humanitarian hyper-prioritization may actually lead to a reduction in the number of people who can access aid.

South Sudan makes the limits of this approach especially visible. Routinely described as complex and protracted, it is a setting where identifying the “most in need” is not only contested but, in practice, impossible to do in any complete sense. Selection is less about discovering need in any comprehensive sense than about justifying exclusion in the most acceptable way under conditions of scarcity.

When I reflect on the promises and risks of digitalization in these conditions, I return to a moment early in the rollout of biometric systems at food distributions I helped monitor. This encounter may seem mundane, but shows how core ideas of need, accountability, and responsibility are shifting as humanitarian action is increasingly digitally mediated.

“Before the computer, we used to get food”

At a food distribution site in Lakes State, a woman presses her finger onto a biometric scanner. The machine beeps, and the screen shows a red X: Not matched. She wipes her hand, prays, and tries again. After several attempts, the screen finally turns green. The next woman in line is less fortunate. Her fingerprints fail repeatedly. After trying multiple machines, she is sent home without food, her distress visible.

“They have brought computers in and these useless cards that make some of us not get food,” she says. “Before, without the computer and with our previous cards, we used to get food.”

During these early months of biometric rollout, moments like this were common. Fingerprint readers often struggled with calloused, dusty, or sooty hands. People waited anxiously to undergo a process they did not fully understand. Some prayed before placing their finger on the device, others cried with relief when the screen flashed green. And when it didn’t, there was little to be done but blame the computer.

The long social and moral labor of being selected, being summoned for a distribution, queuing, and presenting oneself as deserving collapses into a single, opaque interaction between body and machine. At that moment, one’s neediness is technical, not social or relational.

“It’s the System That Decides”

Frontline staff experienced these moments of biometric failure with their own mix of frustration, sympathy, and resignation. They had been trained on the new equipment, but they could not control how the machines behaved. When the screens displayed error messages, there was often little they could do to fix the problem on the spot. They could not see inside the system or override its judgement. While they could log exclusions in hopes of a ‘catch-up’ distribution cycle, I seldom saw mention of this in upstream reporting. Concretely, a non-recognized fingerprint simply meant no food, while a distribution that adhered to its list of scannable beneficiaries checked the box of impartiality.

Biometric systems were introduced into an already tense moral terrain. Even before digitalization, frontline staff were the face of decisions that they often had no control over. Caseload numbers were set elsewhere, and it was the unenviable task of field teams to turn those inevitably constrained numbers into a verified list of the “most in need.”

In this context, some staff began to see digital tools as a buffer against the reactions of the affected-but-excluded. Instead of saying we cannot assist you, staff could say the system does not recognize you.

Who is accountable for technical errors?

Some of these early rollout issues have been partially mitigated over time. Nevertheless, the encounter at the scanner still matters because it offers a glimpse into how humanitarian need and accountability are being reconfigured, which will likely only continue with increased digital aid practices.

Exclusion appears as a technical error rather than a consequence of prioritization and human decision-making. This sustains a humanitarian fantasy of impartial needs-based programming in which defaults to technical systems and procedures. By transforming moral and political decisions into technical ones, humanitarian organizations can maintain legitimacy amid chronic shortfalls, while displacing responsibility onto machines and caseloads. This procedurally legitimizes needs-based distributions while making certain bodies invisible, producing a formal sense of impartiality even as real-world access is uneven. Meanwhile, those with unrecognizable fingerprints have limited recourse to accountability.

None of this means digital tools should be rejected outright. In many contexts, they can limit some forms of abuse and allow aid to reach people who might otherwise be excluded. But if we evaluate them only in terms of their supposed efficiency or as neutral tools of impartiality, we miss how they redistribute responsibility, normalize exclusion, and translate need into something that exists only when a system can verify it.

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

About the author:

Hayley Umayam is a PhD candidate at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on the politics of knowledge and expertise in famine and mass starvation. She holds an MA in Peace and Justice Studies from the University of San Diego.

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.

IHSA Conference Reflection: Recentering Protection for Civilians in a Fragmenting World Order

By ISS Blog Bliss 27 January 2026 230 views

On 16 October 2025 academic and practice thought leaders came together to discuss Protecting civilians in a changing world order at the IHSA conference hosted by Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkiye. This blog, written by Amra Lee is a result of the panel discussions and intends to continue critical discussions on protecting civilians, with a view to establishing a Working Group in 2026.

The geopolitical dynamics driving changes to the current world order – including the resurgence of ‘might is right’ and decreasing respect for international law – have pushed the humanitarian system including the law, norms, institutions and funding that support it to its limits. Ongoing impunity and the growing normalisation of war without limits continue to increase threats to civilians, aid workers and principled humanitarian action. The impact of these threats have been compounded by seismic changes to the humanitarian donor landscape, particularly the withdrawal of major funds and funders.

While protection for civilians in conflict has often been inconsistent and insufficient in practice, the nature and scale of the current threats and challenges require urgent action. Political and humanitarian actors, including parties to armed conflict, must acknowledge the gravity of the current moment and work to leverage a wider range of practices that can help prevent, mitigate and respond to civilian harm.

The UN Secretary-General in annual Protection of Civilian reports and briefings to the Security Council has called for moving beyond the more traditional focus on compliance and accountability to explore a wider range of “effective, legal, policy and operational responses”. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has further been working with a diverse cross-regional range of member states to reinforce respect for international humanitarian law. And at the same time, the humanitarian sector has many lessons to inform the reset – that protection is central to humanitarian action, that proactive protection requires incentivisation and investment, and that, in practice, civilians are most often agents of their own protection. 

The panellists responded to the above context and calls, examining how a humanitarian reset and the UN80 reform discussions can better centre people and their protection in practice, and explored new pathways forward. The pathways included lessons on civilian harm, theorising humanitarian diplomacy, accountability as a fifth humanitarian principle, centering civilian safety and security, and critical lessons from the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). 

Opening the Discussion

Amra Lee from the Australian National University opened the panel, providing an overview of a changing world order and what decreasing respect for international law on the resort to and use of force means for civilians and the wider humanitarian system. This includes record aid worker and journalist deaths, the increasing challenge of countering mis-disinformation and hate speech, and the imposition of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation during an imminent risk of famine, that saw 1373 Palestinians killed simply trying to access food to survive.

Reorienting Focus to Proactive Protection

Hannah Jordan from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) presented on the joint NRC-Nonviolent Peaceforce-Alliance for Peacebuilding research that developed an analytical framework to reorient civilian protection practice to proactively respond to civilian safety and security in a context of escalating harm. This includes shifting the current focus on providing services to reducing risks, interrupting violence and supporting local solutions. The framework prioritises actions that are civilian-centered, systemic, cross-sectoral, cross-temporal, influential, specific and adaptive, providing key guiding questions to support such work. 

Building on this foundation, Gemma Davies presented the timely joint HPG-ODI-Nonviolent Peaceforce research that directly responds to the risk of deprioritising protection in ongoing Humanitarian Reset discussions with ‘back to basics‘ narratives, reinforcing the need to proactively (re)prioritise and refocus protection efforts to demonstrate how they reduce civilian harm and increase investment in civilian-centred protection.

Humanitarian Diplomacy, Principles and Accountability

Clothilde Facon-Salelles from the University of Antwerp presented on theorising humanitarian diplomacy, examining the power dynamics between international humanitarian actors and semi-authoritarian states in a way that does not presuppose the hegemony of liberal humanitarianism. 

Following this, Junli Lim from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, presented on ongoing challenges and threats to principled humanitarian action, including the role of private security contractors. This included proposing accountability as a fifth humanitarian principle, and discussing the ways in which emerging mutual aid networks and practices contribute to accountability with local trust that can increase the effectiveness of protection services. Mutual aid practices offer important insights into alternative systems for implementing humanitarian assistance and governance.

Civilian Harm

Marnie Lloydd from the Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington examined national inquiries that take place following action in conflict, highlighting deficiencies in militaries’ transparency and reporting mechanisms, as well as recommendations that emerged from these inquiries including New Zealand’s Defence Force Order 35 on Civilian Harm. Marnie discussed the urgency of integrating robust proactive preventive measures, civilian harm tracking, and transparent reporting frameworks from inception, reflecting on what the UN Secretary-General’s Protection of Civilians report for 2023 characterizes as a ‘broader approach…addressing the full range of civilian harm’, to move toward more comprehensive protective measures. 

Rise and Fall of RtoP

Building on the themes of accountability and civilian-centered protection, Stefan Bakumenko concluded the panel with a discussion on the rise and fall of RtoP. Conceptualised in 2001 and formalised in 2005, the concept nominally promised communities at risk of atrocity crimes a combination of good governance, international cooperation and multilateral intervention. However, incentives to respect existing normative commitments were already fading in the face of global militarization, austerity, multipolarity, attacks on international law, and instrumentalisation of the concept, as seen in Libya, Ukraine, and Palestine. Today, protection will need to better understand and support grassroots mobilization, mutual aid, and accountability, instead of relying on the whims and shifting political interests of states.

Moving Forward

The geopolitical dynamics driving changes to the world order can be expected to continue, with far-reaching implications for civilians and principled humanitarian action. The need to refocus, adapt and expand approaches to meet the current moment is clear. While power shifts increase threats and risks for civilians, they also present an opportunity to challenge past problematic beliefs and forge new understandings on how to mobilise more effective civilian-centred and civilian-led action. The panel initiated a timely discussion on recentering protection in humanitarian action and discourse, reinforcing both the responsibilities of states at a time of existential threats to principled humanitarian action and the critical role that civilians will continue to play in their own protection. 

* The panellists intend to continue these discussions and plan to establish a dedicated working group on civilian protection within IHSA in 2026. Please reach out to Amra Lee amra.lee@anu.edu.au and Marnie Lloyd marnie.lloydd@vuw.ac.nz if you are interested to join.

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

About the author:

Amra Lee is a senior practitioner and PhD researcher whose research focuses on protecting civilians in a changing world order.

Europe’s Silent Middle: Why Migration Isn’t the Polarised Fight You Think It Is

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 December 202529 January 2026 577 views

The Dutch have voted. Migration was once again front and centre. Campaigns warned of crises, headlines framed Europe as divided. Open borders versus closed minds, compassion versus control. It all sounds like Europe has taken sides.

But has it?

New research from the PACES project, led by Anne-Marie Jeannet, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Science, University of Milan, suggests a quieter, more nuanced reality.

Most Europeans are not at the extremes. They sit somewhere in the middle. Ambivalent, thoughtful, and conflicted, they recognise that migration can be both necessary and challenging. They want rules and fairness, but, they also care about protecting people in need. Europeans Want Balance and Fairness.

The findings show that Europeans tend to support strong border control and structured return policies, conditional welfare benefits, and targeted regularisation schemes. For example, this could include returning rejected asylum seekers, limiting benefits to those who meet certain conditions, and allowing some undocumented migrants to stay legally.

Immigration policies that included returning migrants with criminal convictions were over 10 percent more likely to be supported than those that did not. By contrast, policies proposing to contain asylum seekers in third-country camps were 4 percent more likely to be rejected, as were policies offering residential or tax-based incentives to attract migrants (3 percent more likely). Overall, the study shows that the public favours policies that are lawful and orderly, but not excessively restrictive.

The silent middle often resolves tensions between competing values using mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Citizens distinguish between authorised and unauthorised migrants and between law-abiding and criminal individuals when forming policy opinions. When rules are transparent and fair, trust grows. Yet migration policies are often viewed as unclear, which can fuel fear.

The Middle Is Large, But Quiet

This middle majority is easily overlooked. Loud, extreme voices dominate headlines, giving the impression that Europeans are either for or against migration. In reality, most people hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, values: humanitarian concern, fairness, and a desire for order. They recognise that migration is not simply good or bad — it is a normal part of social life that can bring benefits, challenges, and everything in between. Rather than choosing sides, they weigh trade-offs, evaluate policies conditionally, and respond to evidence.

As World Migrants Day approaches on the 18th of December, perhaps it is time to move beyond framing people as simply for or against migration. These debates often make me wonder why so many of us feel torn about it. Many people say they want to help refugees while also wanting borders to be managed, or that they support integration but worry about pressure on housing or jobs. That mix of concerns is not a contradiction. It reflects the complexity of real life.

It also raises further questions: why is it so difficult for the silent middle to express their moderate views? Is it a lack of knowledge, a lack of interest, or simply the noise of polarised debate? And what would it take to bring these more balanced voices into the conversation?

Migration is more than a policy debate. It is a mirror reflecting our values, fears, and hopes. Acknowledging the silent middle, the thoughtful but often conflicted majority, opens the door to conversations and policies that reflect reality rather than rhetoric. And the next time you read that Europe has turned against migration, it is worth remembering that while extreme voices are loud, a much larger, quieter middle is watching.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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

About the authors:

Anne-Marie Jeannet is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan and affiliated with Bocconi University’s Dondena Centre. Her research examines how social changes such as deindustrialization and immigration reshape political life and public perceptions. She leads the ERC-funded project Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences (DESPO) and has published widely in leading journals.

Marcela G. Rubio is an Economist in the Migration Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Bocconi University in 2022 and studies how migration dynamics affect crime, human capital, and development outcomes. Her work spans Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, with prior experience in academia, NGOs, and international organizations.

Lois Mobach is a Communications Advisor at Erasmus University, where she supports major research initiatives. She works on projects including PACES, helping translate complex findings into accessible communication. As co-author, she brings expertise in research dissemination and public engagement.

16 Days of Activism Against GBV Blog Series| Holding Both Ends of the Line in the fight Against Digital Violence

By ISS Blog Bliss 11 December 202520 December 2025 382 views

Prevailing responses to digital violence against women and girls are largely reactive— demanding justice after a case of revenge-porn, doxxing or cyber-bullying has already destroyed a life, livelihood or a sense of safety. This crisis has become an emergency: globally,16-58% of women have experienced a form of online violence, and in Nigeria 45% of women self-report experiencing digital violence. Yet we continue to treat symptoms while the architecture that enables digital violence remains unchallenged.

We are holding only one end of the line.

In this blog, Emaediong Akpan argues for a dual approach that addresses both the structural and the cultural dimensions of this crisis. First, we must hold tech platforms and legal systems accountable for the technological architectures that enable abuse. Second, we must transform how we prepare and support the next generation, beginning with digital literacy from childhood. This strategy is not about making users responsible for their own safety but about building communal resilience against the weaponized shame that is digital abuse’s core tactic. By treating survivors with unwavering belief and care, we challenge the culture of silence and place shame where it belongs—with the abusers and the systems that grant them anonymity and virality.

Beyond Reactions

Nearly half of the world’s women and girls, have no legal protection from digital violence. The uncomfortable truth in our fight for digital safety is that we are often act after the fact. There is an overwhelming number of safety nets—legal, social, psychological, to ‘protect’ women and girls after they have experienced harm in digital spaces. However, according to Amnesty International, 76% of women report altering their online behavior due to abuse. This statistic reveals the limitation of our reactionary approach. We are treating the consequences of digital violence but failing to confront the architecture that exposes women and girls to harm.

Our reactionary approach, though vital, is a partial victory at best — it means holding one end of the line. My call is to extend our hands and hold both ends.

The reactionary approach operates after the fact, after the harm has been done. It fails to confront the underlying issue: a digital ecosystem that is engineered through its architecture, business model and algorithms to facilitate and profit from such harm. To address digital violence against women and girls, we must adopt a dual-approach. This approach requires us to hold the line of platform accountability on one hand while engaging in foundational prevention rooted in early digital literacy and communal care on the other.

Understanding the Impact of Digital Violence on Women’s Participation in Public Life

Globally, 16-58% of women have experience online violence. In Nigeria, 45% of women self-report experiencing digital violence, with girls aged 12-17 and young women up to 35 being targeted. 85% of women globally have witnessed digital violence such as cyberbullying, false and misleading smear campaigns, doxxing, image and text-based threats and more. Although the forms of digital violence vary, the motive remains the same: to shame, silence, and exclude women and girls from public life. Below I explain the impact of two particularly insidious forms.

Cyber-Stalking: Research indicates that an estimated 7.5 million people have experienced cyberstalking, demonstrating that anyone with a smartphone, social-media or GPS-enabled device is vulnerable. Data from domestic violence programs in multiple countries indicates that 71-85% of domestic violence perpetrators use technology from smartphones and GPS to spyware—to stalk, monitor and threaten survivors. The intimate violence of the physical world now follows women into every digital space, collapsing any boundary between public and private life.

Gendered Disinformation: Amongst the most surreptitious forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence is gendered disinformation, which can be defined as the “false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives [deployed] against women, often with some degree of coordination and aimed at deterring women from participating in the public sphere”. Women in public life, particularly politicians and journalists, are disproportionately targeted. A 2021 UNESCO/ICFJ survey found 73% of women journalists had experienced online violence, with 20% reporting subsequent offline attacks. The impact is a chilling effect on civic participation. More broadly, 76% of women who have experience digital violence think twice before posting, and 32% stop commenting on certain issues altogether. This is not a side effect; it is the core function of this violence—to enforce patriarchal order by policing digital spaces.

What Do We Mean by ‘Digital Violence’?

Without a universal conceptualization, this phenomenon operates under a cluster of terms, each highlighting a different aspect of this menace.

Online Gender-Based Violence (OGBV): Emphasizes the space where the abuse happens as well as the and the gendered nature of the abuse.
Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV): Highlights the enabling role of information communication tools, which can amplify scale, anonymity, and permanence of harm
Cyber Violence: A broader term sometimes used in legal and policy contexts to emphazize the use of computer systems to cause facilitate or threaten violence
Digital Violence: An umbrella term to describe the use of technology and or social media to intimidate, harass, or threaten.

I use “digital violence” throughout this piece because it is conceptually encompassing. It captures not only the act of violence (harassment, doxing) but also the structural nature of the harm. It points to a violent digital environment shaped by the algorithmic amplification of harm and the prioritization of engagement/virality over safety. Digital violence as a concept draws attention to the platform not as a neutral mirror of gender-based violence offline but as an active, participant in these acts of violence.

Holding Platforms and Systems Accountable

Our response ought to begin with the platforms whose digital architectures are designed to maximize ‘engagement’ irrespective of whether these engagements are driven by joy, outrage or hatred. The algorithms reward inflammatory contents with increased visibility, providing a fertile ground for digital violence to thrive. In adopting this approach, we must move beyond reactive content moderation to safety-by-design principles that places the responsibility on these platforms to mitigate systemic risks, including gender-based violence.

Our laws should specifically criminalize forms of digital violence including but not limited to cyber-stalking, disinformation, revenge porn, and doxxing. Although the Nigerian Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act 2015 is a good starting point, its effective application to address digital violence requires both amendment and judicial activism. The Act currently lacks explicit provisions for image-based sexual abuse, cyber-stalking, and platform liability. Courts must be willing to interpret existing provisions broadly while legislators work to close these gaps. We need legal frameworks that recognize the unique harms of digital violence—its permanence, its viral spread, its capacity to follow victims across every platform and into every space.

Digital Literacy as a Complimentary Strategy

Preventive approaches have been critiqued —often rightly—for placing the responsibility on potential victims while absolving platforms of responsibility. My suggested approach does not absolve platforms of their responsibility. Rather, I argue that building communal resilience is not a parallel response but a complimentary strategy in this fight against digital violence. Even in a utopia with perfectly regulated platforms, harm can exist. The goal is to change the social and psychological terrain on which these attacks land.

Fostering a child’s critical consciousness does not excuse a platforms toxic design; it can help mitigate the effect of that design. This is the inoculation I speak of—not against infection, but against the shame that digital violence weaponizes. Where young girls and women have the nonjudgmental support of their community, it becomes harder to manipulate them into feeling shame and equips them to identify, and resist abusive dynamics.

Building Communal Resilience from the Cradle

Today’s children are digital natives in a profound sense. Globally, one in three internet users is a child. In high-income countries, 60% of children use the internet by age five. In Africa, with the world’s youngest population and smartphone adoption surpassing 50%, children are primary users of family devices, entering complex digital publics with little to no guidance. This strategy ought to begin with digital literacy.

Critical consciousness from early childhood: Teaching children to question what they see online, who benefits from this content? Who might be harmed? Why is this being shown to me? This is media literacy adapted for an algorithmic age.

Bodily autonomy and consent: Children need to understand they have the right to set boundaries online, to say no to requests for images or information, and that consent given under pressure is not consent at all. These conversations must happen before children encounter coercion, not after.

Trusted adult networks: Every child should be able to identify at least two adults they can turn to if something online makes them uncomfortable or afraid. This requires adults who respond without panic, judgment, or punishment—a significant cultural shift in many contexts.

Community response models: When digital violence occurs, the community’s response matters as much as the legal one. Schools, religious institutions, and community organizations must be prepared to support survivors with unwavering belief rather than interrogation, with resources rather than blame. In Nigeria, organizations like the International Federation of Women Lawyers, Feminist Coalition, and StandToEndRape have pioneered such models, but they need to become the norm, not the exception.

The evidence supports this approach. In Finland, where comprehensive digital literacy has been integrated into education since 2014, young people report higher confidence in identifying misinformation and manipulation online. In South Korea, where digital citizenship education is mandatory, rates of cyber-bullying have declined even as internet usage has increased. Nigeria has the capacity to develop contextually grounded approaches that respond to our specific realities of digital violence.

Conclusion: Holding Both Ends of the Line

The fight against digital violence is a struggle for the future of public space, discourse, and democracy itself. A singular focus on post-harm justice, while morally imperative, is strategically incomplete. It addresses the symptoms but does not prepare the next-generation for these realities. We must confront digital violence by contesting the exploitative architectures of platforms and by building a critically conscious population from the cradle. This dual-approach is critical in this moment.

We must confront digital violence by contesting the exploitative architectures of platforms while simultaneously building a critically conscious population from the cradle. We must demand that platforms redesign their systems for safety while teaching young people to navigate these systems with critical awareness. We must prosecute abusers while building communities that refuse to shame survivors.

This dual approach is not a compromise, it is recognition that structural change and cultural transformation must advance together. One end of the line without the other leaves us perpetually playing catch-up, counting casualties, offering comfort after the fact.

It is time to hold both ends of the line. Our daughters are counting on it.

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

About the author:

Emaediong Akpan is a legal practitioner and an alumna of the International Institute of Social Studies. With extensive experience in the development sector, her 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 digital environments. Read her blogs here: 1, 2, 3, 4,5

16 Days Activism Against GBV Series| The Unseen Infrastructure of Care: Vicarious Trauma and the Systemic Failure in Sexual Violence Response

By ISS Blog Bliss 9 December 2025 368 views

Sexual violence response systems rely on a workforce of caregivers who bear witness to trauma daily. Yet, the vicarious trauma eroding these responders’ wellbeing is dangerously overlooked. Drawing on her personal frontline experience, Emaediong Akpan argues that caring for survivors is impossible without caring for those who serve them.

Bearing Witness in a Broken System

Drawing on my professional experience in sexual violence response, I have encountered two parallel realities. The first is the survivor’s journey marked by courage, fragmented by institutional demands, and too often complicated secondary victimization—the trauma inflicted by the very systems meant to provide justice. The second, less visible reality is that of the responders: the advocates, nurses, law enforcement officers, and counselors who absorb these narratives daily.

Across different roles, a common experience is a deep sense of professional and personal isolation. Many legal professionals, for instance, describe a deep conflict between the rigid demands of procedure and the human impulse to offer comfort, leaving them feeling like instruments of a process rather than agents of care. This profound alienation is not a personal failing; it is a structural byproduct of work that demands profound empathy while offering inadequate structural support.

During the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, our discourse rightly centers survivor voices and systemic accountability. However, I argue that this discourse remains critically incomplete if it does not also address the vicarious trauma permeating the response workforce. This is not about shifting focus from survivors, but about recognizing a fundamental truth: a system that consumes its caregivers is a system destined to fail those it seeks to serve. Neglecting the responder’s wellbeing is a direct, measurable detriment to survivor care, addressing it becomes a non-negotiable pillar of gender justice.

Beyond Burnout, Toward Transformation

To understand the true nature of this crisis, we must move beyond everyday words like “stress” or “burnout.” The core psychological hazard for trauma workers is vicarious trauma (VT). Grounded in seminal work by McCann and Pearlman, VT is understood as a cumulative and transformative process. It is not simply about feeling tired or sad. Rather, it is the profound, often permanent, change in a helper’s own inner world, their beliefs, memories, and sense of self, that results from repeatedly and empathetically engaging with the traumatic material of those they serve.

The key mechanism is the disruption of what psychologists call cognitive schemas. These are our most basic psychological frameworks, our deep-seated beliefs about safety, trust, esteem, intimacy, and control. Vicarious trauma forces these frameworks to change. Repeated exposure to traumatic stories creates a confrontation that our existing worldview can’t absorb. To cope, the mind is forced to rebuild its understanding of reality, leading to a profound shift: the helper’s worldview itself can become more pessimistic, fearful, and fragile.

This is what makes VT different. It’s not the same as compassion fatigue (which is the wearing down of your empathy) or burnout (which is general exhaustion from work stress). While those conditions are about depletion, VT is about alteration. It does not just tire you out; it can fundamentally and lastingly change how you see the world and your place in it.

Crucially, and central to my professional observation, is that personal trauma history is not a prerequisite. While a personal history can intensify effects, VT is an occupational hazard for all trauma workers. The empathetic bond and, critically, shared demographic or social identities (gender, race, class) can serve as a powerful conduit for this trauma, a point underscored by research with female counselors working specifically with sexual violence survivors.

The Perfect Storm: How Sexual Violence Work Fuels Vicarious Trauma

The nature of sexual violence response doesn’t just risk vicarious trauma, it actively creates the ideal conditions for it to take root and thrive. It is defined by a double exposure that sets it apart.

First, there is the chronic, cumulative exposure to traumatic material. Survivors are often caught in a relentless “testimonial spiral,” required to narrate their assault repeatedly, to police, medical examiners, prosecutors, and multiple counselors. Each time they narrate their experiences even though procedurally necessary, it is psychologically costly, forcing the responder to bear witness to graphic, intimate details of violence not once, but over and over again.

Second, and just as negatively impactful, is the exposure to systemic and procedural betrayal. We are not just witnesses to the original trauma. We become firsthand observers of how institutions can fail survivors: through skeptical questioning informed by rape myths, invasive forensic exams with little psychosocial support, and the devastating attrition of cases through plea bargains or dismissal. This generates more than empathy; it creates moral injury, the profound distress that comes from witnessing actions that violate our core sense of justice and ethics. The helper is thus traumatized by both the client’s story and the system’s failure.

This ‘perfect storm’ is intensified by the composition of the workforce. The victim services sector is predominantly female, reflecting the broader gendered landscape of care work. Furthermore, it includes a significant number of survivors who enter the field through a validated ‘survivor-to-survivor’ model of advocacy,a testament to the movement’s grassroots origins that value lived experience as expertise. While this brings profound empathy and insight, scholars note it also layers personal vulnerability onto professional exposure, a combination that is too rarely met with the robust structural safeguards it demands.

The Architecture of Neglect: Systemic Drivers of Vicarious Trauma

It is important to note that VT is not an accidental outcome; it is manufactured by systemic failures across multiple levels.

a. The Political Economy of Care Work

Victim services are notoriously underfunded, relying on precarious grants and charitable funding. This translates into low salaries, high caseloads, and chronic understaffing, conditions directly correlated with VT severity. Workers, often women, are asked to perform emotionally extreme labour with economic precarity, a classic example of the gendered devaluation of care.

b. Institutional Illiteracy

Many criminal justice and healthcare institutions lack trauma-informed organizational practices. Supervision is often administrative, not clinical or reflective. There are rarely protocols for routine psychological debriefing, caseload management to prevent saturation, or mandated “cool-down” periods between intense cases. New, younger advocates, those most vulnerable to secondary traumatic stress, are frequently thrown into the deep end without adequate mentorship (as highlighted in my own training materials).

c. Cultural Stigma and the “Strong Helper”

Especially within masculinized domains like law enforcement, a culture of stoicism prevails. Help-seeking is stigmatized as weakness, with legitimate fears about confidentiality breaches and career repercussions. Studies indicate that a majority of first responders are reluctant to seek support due to perceived professional risks. The culture of stoicism, particularly in criminal justice roles, stigmatizes help-seeking. People fear being seen as weak or unfit, forcing distress underground and often leading to maladaptive coping mechanisms like substance use.

d. Professional Isolation and Erasure

Those in roles like victim advocacy, often situated uneasily between community and court, can experience “trauma hierarchy,” where their exposure is minimized compared to “first responders.” This lack of validation exacerbates feelings of isolation and invisibility, stripping away a protective sense of shared purpose.

e. The Inevitable Consequence: Compromised Survivor Care

My argument is that the systemic production of VT is not merely an occupational health issue. It actively degrades the quality and ethics of survivor services.

Attrition of Expertise: Vicarious trauma is a primary driver of high turnover. When a skilled, trauma-informed advocate burns out and leaves, survivors lose continuity, a relationship of trust is severed, and institutional memory evaporates. This constant churn keeps organizations in a state of novice crisis, unable to develop deep expertise.
The Erosion of Empathetic Capacity: Compassion fatigue, a precursor or companion to VT, manifests as detachment, cynicism, and emotional numbing. A responder struggling with these symptoms cannot provide the authentic, patient, and validating presence that trauma recovery requires. Interactions become transactional, potentially replicating the impersonal harm of secondary victimization.
Impaired Judgment and Ethical Risk: VT’s cognitive disruptions, hypervigilance, pervasive pessimism, disrupted boundaries, can lead to clinical errors, inappropriate self-disclosure, or burnout-driven shortcuts in care. Pearlman & Saakvitne (1995) warn that unaddressed VT can lead to boundary violations, where the helper’s own unmet needs distort the therapeutic relationship.
The Silencing of Advocacy: A responder drowning in unprocessed trauma loses the energy for systemic advocacy. The fight to change oppressive policies, challenge rape myths in court, or secure better resources requires a reserve of righteous anger and hope. VT depletes that reserve, creating a workforce that is too exhausted to challenge the very systems that harm both them and their clients.

In summary, a workforce without proper support becomes a fragile system designed to carry immense weight but lacks the reinforcement to do so safely or indefinitely. Because it cannot sustainably hold the weight of survivor trauma, and it will inevitably fracture, with survivors bearing the consequences of the collapse.

Toward a New Paradigm: From Individual Self-Care to Structural Accountability

The common prescription of “self-care” places the burden of resilience on the individual, obscuring the systemic origins of the harm. We must demand a shift toward “system-care” and structural accountability.

Mandate and Fund Psychological Infrastructure: This must be a budget line, not a perk. Agencies need embedded, confidential mental health services specializing in trauma-exposed professions. Funding bodies must tie grants to the existence of realistic caseload limits, competitive salaries, and wellness protocols.

Implement Trauma-Informed Supervision: Replace purely administrative oversight with reflective, clinically-informed supervision that normalizes discussion of VT, provides strategies for cognitive integration, and safeguards boundaries. Models like that proposed by Harrison & Westwood (2009) have shown efficacy in reducing VT.
Dismantle Stigma Through Leadership: Institutional leaders must model vulnerability and help-seeking. Peer support programs, with rigorous confidentiality safeguards, can create culturally-competent spaces for processing within the workforce itself.
Integrate Resilience into Training: Education for responders must begin before first contact with survivors. Training should include psychoeducation on VT, grounding techniques, boundary-setting skills, and clear pathways to support, framing resilience as a core professional competency.
Center Equity in Solutions: Interventions must recognize the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of the work. Support must be culturally competent and address the unique stressors faced by advocates of colour working within systems they may rightly distrust.

Conclusion: My Call for an Unbreakable Chain of Justice

As we concluded the 16 Days of Activism , we must commit to a more holistic vision of justice. The fight against gender-based violence is fought on multiple fronts: in the courtroom, the hospital, the therapist’s office, and the advocate’s office desk. These fronts are connected by people. If the people on the front lines of care are being psychologically depleted by the very structure of that care, we have designed a self-defeating system.

Caring for survivors and ensuring the wellbeing of those who care for them are inseparable goals.They represent two halves of a single ethical imperative. We cannot build a survivor-centered response on the broken well-being of the workforce. Investing in the resilience of responders, through funding, institutional change, and cultural shift, is not a diversion from survivor justice. It is the most pragmatic investment we can make in its sustainability and quality.

The witness who is heard, the advocate who can stay present, the nurse who maintains compassion, the officer who conducts a trauma-informed interview, these are not just individuals doing a job. They are the living, breathing infrastructure of a just response. It is time we built that infrastructure to last.

This blog is dedicated to the women of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, whose tireless advocacy I have witnessed firsthand while working alongside them. Their courage is the quiet engine of justice.

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

About the author:

Emaediong Akpan is a legal practitioner and an alumna of 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 digital environments. Read her blogs here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

16 Days Activism Against GBV Series| The Future of Transgender Liberation is International Law

By ISS Blog Bliss 4 December 2025 338 views

International law has an incredible potential to be the vehicle through which global transgender liberation is realized. In this reflective blog, Paxton McCausland argues that international law is already being used to improve the quality of life for transgender peoples across the world. Sadly however, this dream will never be fully accomplished with the continuation of horrific impunity.

As an American grassroots organizer for transgender liberation, I never envisioned myself becoming interested in or even inspired by law. During my undergraduate education, in which I studied Political Science, I took a Constitutional Law class and was deflated, disappointed and bored. American constitutional law has very few safeguards for transgender individuals and the Supreme Court, in its present composition at least, is generally hopeless. Having completed several unpaid internships with politicians who used my work without crediting me, I began to understand that American politics were not for me. My despondent view of the law changed when I began to learn about international law in graduate school.

It turns out that international law has incredible potential to realize and spread transgender liberation. While there are several forms of international law, all with their own guidelines, concepts and modalities, in this blog post I will use a broad definition, meaning that the points I make do not align with one specific form of international law. Additionally, I must establish that I am not an international lawyer, but rather merely a liberation nerd, endlessly excited by the potential of international law. That being said, international law not only contains an actual definition of gender, it also contains radical promotion of self-determination, a concept I had never heard of within the domestic law of my own nation. Both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, major tenants within the international human rights law, begin with the phrase ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination’. Self-determination as transgender liberation, as I have understood it in my background as a trans organizer, advocates for an individual to understand and decide for themselves who they are and what is best for them. In theory, the ultimate expression of transgender liberation is the truest expression of self-determination. This incredible tool for international trans liberation, however, cannot reach its full potential while blatant impunity against war crimes and continuous double standards for the worst and most powerful offenders continues. In a very obvious example, the United States has been protecting Israel from punishment, as well as allowing the country’s many war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as the blatant encouragement of illegal Israeli settlements, to continue with impunity for decades via the UNSC veto power and other such methods. The longer this impunity continues, the weaker international law becomes. I would even go so far as to say that the future of international transgender liberation rests on the protection and sanctity of international law, and therefore the end of such impunity.

International law has already begun to benefit and protect transgender, gender-non-conforming, nonbinary and Indigenous third gender peoples throughout the world. Despite a somewhat problematic definition of gender within the Rome Statute, which confuses sex and gender, the International Criminal Court established the understanding that gender is socially constructed as an international law standard through the Office of the Prosecutor’s Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution. For more information on the debate regarding the definition of gender in international law, I encourage readers to engage with Alexandra Lily Kather and Juliana Santos de Carvalho’s brilliant article on the subject. As mentioned above, international law’s standard of the concept and promotion of self-determination is extremely helpful in establishing transgender people’s right to gender-affirming care and ability to self-identify. Many scholars, such as B. Camminga, advocate for trans folk’s right to legal gender recognition (LGR), or accurate depiction of an individual’s gender identity on legal documents, on the basis of self-determination alone. In arguing for LGR on this basis, requirements for trans people to ‘prove’ their gender identity (refer to the Camminga article linked above), through costly, cumbersome, invasive and harmful medical diagnosis or bottom surgery, a form of reproductive violence and forced sterilization, are rendered unnecessary. In the unfortunate situation in which a trans person has a well-founded fear of persecution based on their membership to a particular social group – the trans community – international law grants them, via the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugee status and allows them to apply for asylum. The international law principle of non-refoulement states that it is prohibited for these individuals to be sent back to their countries of origin if their return would most likely result in a serious threat to their life or freedom. These are a few of the ways international law is already working toward transgender liberation.

Given these standards of international law and the enormous potential of this type of law to realize transgender liberation, it is imperative that all roadblocks to its success be eliminated. We cannot tackle the toughest battles until the means by which the battles can be fought are working as they were intended to. Liberation builds on itself – at a macro and micro level, we are all fighting the same battle for liberation. As such, protecting international law not only ensures the protection and safety of trans and gender-non-conforming individuals, today and tomorrow, but it additionally ensures protections of rights for everyone. By battling impunity, we are allowing trans people, Palestinians, Sudanese, Royhinga, Yadzidi and everyone to live full and dignified lives everywhere.

They say the future of international law is domestic law. Given this adage, it is my greatest hope that one day I can see the laws in my own country reflect those that protect my people through international law. At that point, with my ultimate life and career goal being international transgender liberation, I will be able to die happy. Protect international law. Protect the International Criminal Court. The liberation of transgender peoples and of all peoples depends on it.

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

About the author:

Paxton McCausland (he/they) is an organizer and academic who began working toward gender justice as a grassroots organizer for transgender liberation. They were recently appointed as a board member for the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice and received a Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs. Paxton currently resides in Pennsylvania.

16 Days Activism Against GBV Series| Beyond Convictions: Rethinking gender justice through survivors’ lived experiences

By ISS Blog Bliss 2 December 2025 316 views

International criminal law has made remarkable progress in recognizing gender-based crimes, yet conviction rates alone cannot capture the meaning of justice for survivors. In this blog, Abubakar Muhammad Jibril draws on the Gender Justice in International Criminal Law Conference to argue that genuine gender justice must be reimagined through survivors’ lived experiences—centering healing, dignity, and accountability beyond the courtroom.

The limits of legal victories

Over the past two decades, international criminal law (ICL) has evolved to acknowledge sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as crimes of the gravest concern. From the landmark Akayesu judgment of the ICTR, which recognized rape as an act of genocide, to the Rome Statute’s explicit listing of sexual slavery, enforced pregnancy and other forms of sexual violence, progress has been undeniable. Yet despite these achievements, the lived experiences of many survivors reveal a different reality. During the Gender Justice in International Criminal Law Conference, several participants echoed a powerful truth: a conviction does not automatically equate to justice. Survivors often remain unseen, unheard and unsupported in the aftermath of trials. Many return to communities where stigma and silence persist, where reparations are delayed and where their suffering is reduced to a footnote in legal history. This paradox between legal recognition and lived reality lies at the heart of why gender justice remains incomplete.

The epistemic gap in International Criminal Law

ICL, by design, privileges evidence, procedure and precedent. It asks: What can be proved? Who can be held responsible? Yet for survivors of gender-based crimes, justice often depends on questions the law cannot fully answer: How can I heal? Who believes me? Will my story change anything? This epistemic gap between legal knowledge and experiential truth reflects a deeper structural limitation. The courtroom, though vital, cannot capture the emotional, social and cultural dimensions of gendered harm. The narratives of survivors are frequently filtered through lawyers, investigators and judges, transformed into ‘admissible evidence’ rather than lived testimonies of pain and resilience. As feminist scholars like Catharine MacKinnon and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin have argued, law can recognize sexual violence without truly listening to survivors. This dissonance risks turning gender justice into a symbolic victory rather than a transformative one.

From criminalization to transformation

At the conference, one speaker remarked that international tribunals have been more successful in criminalizing gender-based crimes than in transforming the conditions that enable them. This distinction is crucial. Criminalization ensures accountability for perpetrators, but transformation demands more: it requires dismantling the patriarchal, cultural and institutional structures that make such crimes possible in the first place. Survivors do not merely seek punishment; they seek recognition, healing and inclusion in rebuilding their societies. For instance, the Trust Fund for Victims under the International Criminal Court (ICC) has provided symbolic reparations, but survivors repeatedly stress the need for collective and community-based remedies, access to education, psychological care, economic empowerment and public acknowledgment. These are not mere add-ons to justice; they are justice itself.

Centring survivors’ voices: towards participatory justice

Reimagining gender justice means shifting from a courtroom-centred model to a survivor-centred one. Survivors must not only testify; they must shape the process. Participatory justice approaches already piloted in certain post-conflict societies offer valuable lessons. In Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Uganda, survivor networks have played pivotal roles in truth-telling and community reconciliation. Their initiatives illustrate that justice becomes meaningful when survivors help define their goals and outcomes. As discussed in several conference panels, integrating psychosocial support, trauma-informed procedures and culturally sensitive reparations into ICL processes could bridge the gap between law and lived experience.

The politics of recognition

Gender justice cannot be disentangled from global hierarchies of power. Many survivors come from the Global South, yet international criminal processes are dominated by Northern institutions and perspectives. This imbalance shapes not only whose stories are heard but also how justice is defined. To move beyond symbolic inclusion, international mechanisms must decolonize their approaches, valuing local knowledges, community healing practices and indigenous forms of accountability. Justice cannot be exported; it must be co-created with those who have suffered most. A decolonial feminist approach to ICL thus requires more than reforming procedure; it demands rethinking the very epistemology of justice from punishment-centred to person-centred, from institutional legitimacy to human dignity.

Reclaiming the meaning of justice

The conference’s closing sessions were marked by a shared realization: while legal frameworks are essential, they are not sufficient. The future of gender justice lies not only in how courts punish crimes but in how societies restore humanity after harm. For survivors, justice is not measured in verdicts but in voices being heard, believed and healed. It is in communities that refuse to silence them, in policies that empower them and in histories that finally honour their truths. International criminal law must therefore evolve from a reactive to a restorative paradigm, one that integrates legal accountability with social repair, trauma healing and long-term prevention. Only then can justice be both legal and lived.

Conclusion

As scholars, practitioners and advocates, we must move beyond celebrating convictions to asking harder questions: Whose justice? For whom? At what cost? The survivors who continue to rebuild their lives after unimaginable violence remind us that justice is not a verdict; it is a process of human restoration. The future of gender justice in international criminal law depends on whether we can truly listen to the people for whom justice was meant to serve.

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

About the author:

Abubakar Muhammad Jibril is a legal researcher and LLM candidate specializing in human rights law, with a focus on women’s and children’s rights, gender-based violence and international human rights frameworks. His work integrates comparative legal analysis across diverse jurisdictions, exploring the intersections of law, culture and religion, particularly within Islamic legal traditions. Abubakar’s research aims to promote equitable legal reforms and deepen the scholarly understanding of justice, dignity and protection for vulnerable groups worldwide.

16 Days Activism Against GBV Series | Effective Gender Justice as a Pathway to Peace

By ISS Blog Bliss 25 November 2025 518 views

This blog post is based on the keynote speech delivered by Michelle Jarvis at the Gender Justice in International Criminal Law Conference, held on 29–30 September 2025 in The Hague, the Netherlands. The event was organized in partnership with the Gender Justice Practitioner Hub, Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, Legal Action Worldwide, the Legal Mobilization Platform and the International Institute of Social Studies.

In this blog, Jarvis emphasizes that achieving true gender justice in international criminal law requires transforming not only the outcomes of justice processes but also the deep gender structures that operate both within societies and within the institutions responsible for delivering justice. The views expressed are Jarvis’ personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IIIM-Syria or the United Nations.

Between 2023 and 2024, I followed the scoping phase for the Gender Justice Practitioner (GJP) Hub – funded by the Australian Government and implemented by Legal Action Worldwide. It was an unprecedented opportunity to consult practitioners around the world working on accountability for international crimes. Over 18 months, nine regional roundtables and dozens of expert interviews, we reached more than 800 practitioners. We asked some pressing questions about the blockages they face, what would help them the most and how we, as a field of practice, can strengthen overall gender justice outcomes.

One thing was seared on my mind from the discussions: the hunger across our field of practice for connection, solidarity and support – within and across, the national, regional and international levels.

As a practitioner working on accountability mandates over the past 25 years, I knew from my own experience the sense of disconnection inside our individual institutions, due in part to the ad hoc nature of this work. But I was stunned by the depth of the sentiment expressed about the emotional toll on practitioners and our collective alarm over hard-fought gains being eroded in a heartbeat.

Now we find ourselves here, in September 2025, in a world riddled with escalating attacks on the very principle of gender equality, unabashed efforts to dominate people and populations and unprecedented pressure on our ever-more fragile institutions. Still, we have to be honest about the historical shortcomings embedded in our institutions – from a gender perspective and from many other perspectives as well. But, after-all, the cracks are where the light gets in. We can choose to see this as a time of opportunity.

Three key considerations may guide us to move in this direction. The first thing is getting clarity on the vision of the world we want to see. Daring to speak it out loud – if we can do so safely. And when that is not possible, finding other ways to direct our energy to it. Creating a collective narrative that can help us shape our reality. We need a new imagining of humanity, to counter the mounting and alarmingly effective narratives of domination, separation, division and greed.

And perhaps we need to go back to basics. The vision of the world that I would like to see can be very simply stated: peaceful, flourishing communities, living within planetary environmental boundaries. Surely that is at least a starting point we can all agree on?

But how do we move in that direction? For me, one urgent piece of the puzzle is repairing and rebuilding communities torn apart by conflict-related atrocities. I have spent most of my career grappling with the role that justice plays in this process.

Of course, if we achieve this vision of peaceful, flourishing communities, there will be no more atrocities and no need for justice processes to address them. Perhaps we should dare to set a bold target as part of our vision – ‘in 20 years’ time, justice processes for atrocity crimes will be obsolete’.

If we were to take up a challenge like that for atrocity crimes, we have some deep thinking to do about what our justice processes need to deliver to truly help repair and rebuild communities. We say ‘no peace without justice’. But what kind of justice? We need justice processes that expose and condemn the structural drivers of atrocity crimes, to help us dismantle them.

We see flecks of this thinking embedded in the design of our international criminal law frameworks. Some provisions were specifically developed to expose certain discriminatory drivers of crimes, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, politics and religion. However, gendered structures have not, historically, been recognised. Although we have made some progress with the Rome Statute’s recognition of gender persecution, we have been very slow to apply this provision and, so far, the results are sparse.

Overall, we have struggled to address the structural elements of gender in international criminal law, despite their pervasive role in driving crimes; exacerbating the impact of conflict-related harms; and then silencing the voices of victims and survivors and blocking their access to justice.

Our focus has largely been confined to addressing some of the gendered consequences of conflict, particularly conflict-related sexual violence. We have not really begun to grapple with the structural underpinnings of that violence. Until we do, our justice processes will be a blunt instrument in our toolkit for repairing and rebuilding communities in the aftermath of atrocities. That link between addressing gendered structures in accountability processes and the quest for a more peaceful and flourishing world, needs much more attention. While the gendered drivers of atrocities are not homogenous and static, there are some patterns and we can do better in developing baseline methodologies to tailor for specific contexts. This is something the Hub has on its priority list.

This brings me to the second issue – the need to address the deep gender structures inside our own institutions. Based on the 25 years that I have worked inside international institutions with accountability mandates, one thing is clear: we cannot promote inclusive gender justice without institutions that have a commitment to gender equality embedded in their DNA. We should reject the idea of justice processes that serve only a fraction of the affected community and commit to addressing the imbalance as a core part of our work. To support this, we need institutions that also embody a commitment to gender equality.

This was one of the key insights coming out of the extensive review we did at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was published as Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY. However, since then, we have seen little evidence of meaningful engagement with this challenge. We have seen a flurry of policy frameworks – which is important – but few signs of sustained engagement with the ‘deep structures’ inside our institutions. As a result, we presently have a gulf between our policy frameworks, their implementation in practice and the strengthened gender justice outcomes that we are seeking.

Having worked on this challenge now for many years, I am the first to acknowledge that progress is not easy – and this challenge is not for the faint hearted!

Our institutional systems are highly complex and the deep discriminatory structures embedded in them are very good at re-asserting themselves when challenged. As I watched this process unfold in real time, it sent me scurrying for research that would help me understand the systemic factors at play. What had others experienced and written on this? Joanne Sandler and, in particular, her co-authored book Gender at Work was pivotal in helping me to recognize and articulate what I was seeing up close. The book emphasizes the importance of grappling with the ‘deep gender structures’ inside our institutions: ‘gender policies rarely take on deep structures due to their pervasiveness and the takes time to confront them’ and, I would add, the difficulty of even getting visibility on how they are operating. But we certainly feel them and sometimes hear fragments of them articulated inside our institutions through comments like: ‘We are spending too many resources on gender’; ‘By focusing on crimes experienced by women, we could be seen as biased. It is incompatible with being evidence driven’; and ‘Why does it matter if we have low figures of women as witnesses – that has no impact on the verdicts’.

We need open and honest discussions about these types of concerns. Cultures of silence are one of the most insidious forms of reinforcing biased structures. But how do we know what is a valid concern and what is the discriminatory system re-asserting itself? A good litmus test is the constructiveness with which the concerns are raised and whether the overall trend inside our institutions is to block, or gut, any progress on gender equality.

Inevitably, when entrenched biased structures are challenged, there will be backlash. If we are not experiencing backlash from the implementation of our gender policies, then we have not yet begun to fundamentally change the way that our institutions are functioning. Fiona Mackay sums it up well:

‘We should celebrate as a success cases where the status quo has to…work hard to reproduce itself and has to invest resources and energy in resisting gender change. The need for visible resistance to positive change is a success.’

Along the way, we need to create a better culture of care around the change agents inside our institutions. As we heard during the scoping phase of the Hub, it is tough out there! And in the words of Sandler et al. ‘Personal and professional attacks pile up, especially when success is achieved.’

One of our most significant strategies to date has been the short-term deployment of gender experts to work with accountability mechanisms. This has been an important development to address historical silences. However, we should not view this as a stand-alone strategy. Individuals parachuted into an organization, especially for a short period of time, cannot, alone, tackle the gendered structures that block gender justice both within the communities we serve and inside our own institutions. We also have to be realistic about the pattern of pushback that change agents are likely to experience and be well prepared to support them through the process as a standard part of our strategy.

These systemic issues are focus areas for the Hub. Encouragingly, the Hub has started to receive requests for assistance by some institutional actors now seeking to engage with the challenge, but we can get even more ambitious. It would be great to see all leaders of accountability institutions engaging with the Hub on a collaborative project to strengthen efforts on gender sensitive institution building, starting with those who have already signed up as Gender Champions.

The third issue I want to cover, is the alchemy we could release through better coordination among ourselves as gender justice actors. This aspiration has also been embedded in the vision for the Hub.

We know we need to move outside of our echo chamber. Bringing in all generations to the conversation is an important component of this and sparks genuine optimism that it is possible to achieve the systems change we seek.

Better cross-disciplinary coordination is also key, starting with the silos that currently exist between academia and practitioners. There is so much good work being done within the academic realm, but practitioners rarely have time to follow the developing literature, and often it is too theoretical to be directly translated into practice. It makes a difference when academics working on gender and International Criminal Law issues engage with practitioners and help us translate their insights into practical approaches for our work – and I’m personally grateful to scholars like Judith Gardam, Kirsten Campbell, Gorana Mlinarevic, Susana SáCouto and Lisa Davis.

To conclude, let us return for a moment to the vision I mentioned: peaceful, flourishing communities; effective gender justice to help us repair and rebuild communities torn apart by atrocities; and ultimately, rendering justice processes obsolete.

What would it look like if we threw our collective global might behind this challenge?

Definitely we have some work to do. Even if it feels overwhelming to see how comprehensive change could be achieved, perhaps we can start with focusing on some islands of change.

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

About the authors:

Michelle Jarvis has worked in the international criminal justice field for 25 years and took up the role of the Deputy Head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (Syria) (IIIM) in December 2017. Prior to that she was the Deputy to the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT). Michelle’s work has focused on bringing accountability to victims/survivors of crimes in the Balkans, Rwanda and Syria, as well as building capacity for accountability processes in many other conflict and post conflict areas. Michelle has worked extensively to promote inclusive, innovative and agile approaches to accountability for core international crimes (war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide), including bringing visibility to the experiences of marginalized groups during accountability processes and strengthening legal responses. She has co-authored two books and numerous articles on the subject of gender and armed conflict. She has initiated an innovative project, supported by the Australian Government, to establish an international Gender Justice Practitioner Hub to promote improved gender justice outcomes globally. Prior to her work in international criminal law, Michelle was a litigator in Australia, where her roles included improving women’s access to justice. Michelle holds a master’s degree in law from the University of Toronto as well as degrees in law and economics from the University of Adelaide.

Experiences and observations of Hurricane Melissa’s path through Cuba: preparations, sanctions, and citizen networks

By ISS Blog Bliss 18 November 2025 686 views

In this blog, humanitarian practitioner and researcher Carla Vitantonio reflects on the immediate experiences of people in Cuba affected by the path of Hurricane Melissa, which slowly approached the Caribbean nation in mid-October 2025. As the Hurricane approached Cuba, various (international) NGO, citizen-led, and civil defence preparations were triggered, despite issues with international sanctions and internal bureaucracy. Though regularly battered by tropical storms and hurricanes, the experiences of Cuban people and institutions with Hurricane Melissa reveal some timely developments in the country.

We began observing Melissa on October 21^st. It was a tropical storm, one step below hurricane level, according to Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. However, we knew that its slow pace did not bode well, and realized that it wasn’t a matter of predicting whether it would pass through Cuba, but simply of understanding where.

I have been working in disaster risk prevention and management for fifteen years, seven spent in Cuba. I know the protocols and am well aware of my role in a situation like this. I have studied the preparedness system developed by the EMNDC (Estado Mayor de la Defensa Civil) in Cuba, and which many around the world admire. This system has allowed this small country in the Caribbean to survive annual hurricanes and storm seasons since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.
Yet I live here and know that, beyond the official propaganda and its many detractors, Cuba is no longer what it once was.

Like many, I still sting with the memory of Hurricane Oscar, which devastated eastern Cuba a year ago. Last year, when a colleague from Brussels called me the day before Oscar made landfall in Cuba, to ask if we needed support, I responded with a bit of bravado: “Cubans brush their teeth with a Category 2.” And I was wrong. Even today, a year later, there is no clarity on the number of deaths or the damage caused by Oscar and the human errors that followed, and many believe that the historically efficient Early Warning System failed that time.

I’m not the only one who bitterly remembers October last year, the 3 (for some up to 7) days without electricity, refrigerators left open, as if gutted, while the luckiest ones tried to cook their stored food in an attempt to save at least some of it, the chaos of information and misinformation and the clear feeling, listening to the fragmented accounts of colleagues from the affected areas, that beyond the usual duel between the regime and dissident press, something really hadn’t worked in the preparation and response.

Unfortunately, we were not involved in any learning exercises after the fact: we don’t know whether the Civil Defense analyzed what happened and learned any lessons, nor can we hope to know: living in Cuba means oscillating between a scandal-mongering and delegitimizing press that is mostly funded by the diaspora and quoted by international media, and a state-controlled press, which publishes only sanitized and repackaged news, increasingly detached from what we see every day on the streets.

But let’s go back to October 21^st. Melissa’s slow approach allowed everyone to organize. The Civil Defense evacuated approximately 500,000 people. In Cuba, preventive evacuations have historically been managed along two lines: anyone who finds themselves in a situation where they need to leave their homes, first looks to family members nearby living in areas designated as safe by the Civil Defense. Only a small portion go to shelters, which are generally schools temporarily set up as shelters. Cuba’s civilian evacuation mechanism does not allow for individual objections.

Recently, a Cuban doctor that helped interrupt mother-to-child transmission of HIV told me about Cuba’s approach to HIV: “Because in Cuba, the life of every citizen is worth more than anything else. And to save it, we do everything, sometimes without caring whether someone agrees with our methods, or not. As if we had these lives at our disposal.”

I personally experienced the truth of this statement during COVID, when the state, to protect its citizens, imposed measures that would have been deemed unacceptable in many countries around the world. This was done precisely because of this duty to protect, which sometimes goes even beyond recognizing the agency of citizens. Evacuations during hurricane preparations, a painful process in which people are forced to leave behind what is most precious to them, and often even their livelihoods, work in the same way. We must save what is most precious to us: our lives. Everything else can come later.

International Reactions and Preparations

Meanwhile, mindful of the events of 2024, several European donors, including Germany, announced a couple of days before the hurricane hit that they would donate several hundred thousand euros to CERF, the United Nations emergency fund that will most likely handle the response. This is a sign of confidence in multilateralism. Unfortunately, the sixty-years long embargo (unilateral sanctions with extraterritorial effect imposed by the US), combined with the notoriously lengthy and complex internal bureaucracy in Cuba, make it virtually impossible to import any goods in less than three months—an interminable time for those who have lost their homes, and even for those wishing to provide almost immediate relief. And so, we are now witnessing creative appeals from the United Nations urging local entrepreneurs and individuals willing to respond, and who have access to products already on the local market, to come forward and join forces.
Beyond the commendable coordination effort, it is clear that the crisis the humanitarian sector has reached this country too.

Meanwhile, on October 29^th, after 24 hours of intense rain and wind, Melissa made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, hitting the provinces of Holguin, Granma, Santiago, and Guantanamo. The latter two are regions that have become extremely socially and economically impoverished in recent years, and are still struggling following the impact of Hurricane Oscar in 2024. Furthermore, these are the areas of Cuba hardest hit by the deterioration of the national electrical system and the infamous and lengthy apagones, blackouts that last for days, punctuated only by a few hours of power, which now plague the country relentlessly.

This year, the Early Warning System did not fail, and everyone is already prepared: international NGOs have alerted their local partners of the need to gather information as quickly as possible, the United Nations has activated its coordination system, and above all, the Cuban Civil Defense has mobilized the complex network of military and civilian personnel (including the Red Cross) that will handle the response in the hours immediately following Melissa’s passage. Within 24 hours, the hurricane receded, leaving behind destruction and fear, but the consequences continued for days to come: rivers, swollen by the rain, began to overflow their banks on October 31^st, especially in the province of Granma, forcing the Civil Defense to launch a massive rescue operation that even included a mass transportation of people by train.

As I write this article, it seems we have emerged from the most critical phase and that we can all deal with the very delicate recovery phase.

What have we learned, as citizens and people involved in disaster preparedness and response?

Times have changed, and the Cuban government is slowly shifting to a different approach: on November 1st, an official gazette formally established that the government would pay 50% of the reconstruction costs for all citizens who need to rehabilitate their homes. We are therefore moving away from the “the state will take care of it” approach, which in recent years had sadly turned into empty rhetoric, given that the state no longer had the resources to handle everything. We are moving toward a supportive approach, where the state recognizes the citizens’ leading role while still striving to offer participation and support. The feasibility and sustainability of this offer remain to be seen.
Beyond the national and international agencies traditionally responsible for response, we need to rely on all those networks of private citizens who, from areas of Cuba less affected by the hurricane and often even from abroad, offer material support and donations. This change in trend began, I recall, with the tornado that hit Havana in 2019. Just a few months earlier, Cubans had gained access to 3G connectivity on their cell phones. Thanks to it, citizen movements rapidly mobilized to provide aid beyond and regardless of the official response.
That climate change is not an opinion, and we must think in terms of systems: for the first time we are witnessing a joint effort by agencies based in different countries (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas) to reflect on the impact of the event and combine their energies, not only for the response, but for future preparations.
That climate change is not an opinion (reprise), potentially disastrous events are intensifying in frequency, becoming more unpredictable in nature and, therefore becoming difficult to prepare according to the “business as usual” model.

In short, it would be interesting, beyond the usual ideological controversies that inevitably emerge when discussing Cuba, to look at this recent event as a source of learning, a pilot, something that can point us in the right direction for the future of preventing and responding to disasters.

Originally published in Italian on Left.

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

About the author:

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.

From Hands-On to High-Tech: How Dutch Care Workers Navigate Digitalization and Robotization

By ISS Blog Bliss 4 November 2025 742 views

Whether we embrace it or not, digital technologies and AI are here to stay, and they are fundamentally changing the human world of labour. As new technologies revolutionize the healthcare landscape, these changes are reshaping the lives and work of care workers. In this blog, Sreerekha Sathi shares insights from her research, which explores important questions about how digital technologies are reshaping care work in the Netherlands specifically: how these innovations are affecting care workers and how care homes are adapting to digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics. What specific forms of AI-assisted robotics are currently being utilized in Dutch care homes and how can we evaluate the benefits, challenges and risks associated with their implementation?

Digitalization, robotization and the care worker

The Dutch healthcare sector faces increasing inequality in access to care, staff shortages, increasing workloads and a high percentage of aging populations. Around two thousand government-funded care homes serve the elderly, those with dementia, disabilities and other care needs.

Like other countries in Europe, the Netherlands has been experimenting with digitization and robotization in health care. Over the past two decades, AI-assisted digital tools and Socially Assistive Robots (SARS) have become more common in surgeries, patient monitoring, consultations, diagnostics, rehabilitation, telemedicine, cognitive and emotional care, especially in the post-pandemic period (Getson, C., & Nejat, G. 2021, Kang et al. 2023). Beyond Europe, countries like China and Japan lead these developments, with Sweden and the Netherlands close behind.

The use of digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics have moved beyond the experimental phase into early adoption. Current discussion focuses on opportunities for collaboration between private companies, academic institutions and healthcare providers. This pilot study involved conversations with few care workers in the care homes, innovation managers, company officials and academic scholars in the Netherlands.

Conversations with care workers show that most technologies in use are still relatively simple – medication dispensers, sensor systems and communication tablets – selected for their affordability and ease. Once prescribed, digital care tools like Compaan, Freestyle Libre, MelioTherm, Medido, Sansara or Mono Medical are introduced to clients by neighbourhood digital teams, usually via smartphone apps connected through WIFI as part of online digital care.

The introduction of robots is slowly gaining ground. Many universities, including Erasmus University, are collaborating with private companies on new projects in robotization and digitalization in health care. Some of the robots which are popular in use currently in Europe include TinyBots (Tessa), Zorabots (NAO), Pepper, Paro and other robotic pets, and SARA, which supports dementia patients. Some care workers believe that the robots promote social contact and enhance patients’ independence, while others appreciate that robots taking over peripheral tasks can make their own work easier.

Care workers are required to learn and engage with new technologies, which directly affect their everyday lives. Although they are relatively well paid by normal standards, their workload and stress often exceed what their pay reflects. Larger, well-funded care homes have support staff who assist care workers for indirect or non-medical support at lower pay. When new technologies are introduced without sufficient involvement and inputs from the workers, they can lead to more burden on workers in terms of time and labour costs. For them, new technologies are often ‘thrown over the fence’, with insufficient training or involvement of care workers in design or decision-making, leading to frustration, resistance and underuse even when the tools are effective. They argue, ‘we don’t need fancy tools – just the right tools used in the right way.’

Many workers feel that if a robot can take on physical tasks, the workers can give clients more time and attention. When the purpose of a tool is clearly explained, and workers remain present in critical moments, clients and families are more accepting of new technology.

Gender and labour in new technologies

Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) has long shown how technologies carry gendered biases. Feminist histories of computing have highlighted women’s contribution to the invention and introduction of computers and software (Browne, Stephen & McInerney, 2023). A relevant question to explore today is would new technologies using AI assisted robotics replicate the same biases. Although new technologies are often presented as objective, they are built upon datasets and assumptions that can reproduce biases and stereotypes, based on the foundations of the feeds and accesses in-built into it (1). Robots, for instance, often reflect the idealized gendered traits. Nurse robots are designed with feminine or childlike features – extroverted and friendly – versus ‘techno-police’ styled introvert security robots as stoic and masculine.

Care work remains a heavily gendered profession, though more men are joining the field. While some men care workers face occasional client push back, they are increasingly welcomed amid shortages. Many care workers worry about being replaced by robots, yet most agree that emotional presence of caregivers – especially in elderly and dementia care – remains essential and robots may support but cannot substitute the human connection that defines good care work.

Further, workers also stress that technology must be context-sensitive: its success depends on the socio-economic profile of the area, staff availability and the lived preferences of the people receiving care. They advocate for flexible, context-based implementation rather than top-down standardization of new machines. Core to the debates on digitalization and robotization in care are ethical issues often narrowly framed as privacy concerns but extending to autonomy, emotional dignity and growing surveillance and inequality.

Insights into the future

The study observe that many attempts to introduce digital technologies or robotics in care homes stall in the pilot phase, often disliked or abandoned by care professionals or clients. Care workers need time and training to trust these devices, especially regarding the risks and uncertainties involved. They emphasize early involvement through co-design as essential for building trust, transparency and accountability. For sustainable implementation, the focus should shift from what is ‘new’ to what is ‘useful’.

Future debates will likely centre around prioritizing digitization in health care versus SARs in physical care. Persistent challenges include time constraints to software failures (Huisman & Kort 2019). As efforts to create ‘smart homes’ and support independent living continue (Allaban, Wang & Padir 2020), environmental sustainability and climate resilience must become priorities.

Another important step for exploration is to critically analyze the growing corporatization and monopolization in digitization and robotization (Zuboff, 2019; Hao, 2025). Rather than leaving healthcare innovations to monopolies or private capital, public or community-based state welfare support must retain agency in how digital and robotic tools are implemented. Finally, pushing back from military robotics towards socially beneficial technologies – such as health care or waste management – needs to be prioritized.

As a work in progress, this research is significant for understanding the social impacts of digitalization and robotization. In the next step of this study, these conversations will further bring together care workers, academics and innovative managers between the global south and the global north to foster dialogue about how these changes are reshaping the healthcare economy, care homes and the future of care workers.

End Note:

A focus on changing forms of labour, along with the concerns around gender stereotypes and gendered knowledges attributed to social robots, is important for further exploration in the fields of AI-assisted occupations. The introduction of new machines involves the invisible human labour behind them, which is mostly the ‘ghost workers’ from the global south, whether with data work, coding or mining. What is inherent to existing social contexts, including gender, class, and racial stereotypes, are already heavily compromising the digital world.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a small grant from Erasmus Trustfonds for 2024-2025, I embarked on this short study to explore these questions. Although the grant period concluded in June 2025, the research continues. I would like to thank Ms. Julia van Stenis for her invaluable support in making this study possible.

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

About the author:

Sreerekha Sathi works on issues of gender, political economy, and critical development studies. Her current research explores the intersections of gender, care, and labour with digitalization, AI, and the future of work, and engages with critical debates in decolonial thought. She is a member of the editorial board of Development and Change.

Epistemic (Ir)relevance, Language & Passport Positionality The three hurdles I’m navigating as a UK-based Ethiopian academic

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 October 2025 508 views

In this blog, Eyob Balcha Gebremariam offers a deeply personal yet widely resonant reflection on the invisible boundaries that shape knowledge production in global academia. Drawing from his lived experience, he unpacks how the quest for epistemic relevance often clashes with Western-centric validation systems, how the dominance of English marginalises local languages and worldviews, and how the politics of passports continues to gatekeep academic mobility and belonging.

**Ethiopian – Leaf from Gunda Gunde Gospels from Walters Arts Museum on Wikimedia**

I write this reflection piece to use my personal experiences as a UK-based academic with an Ethiopian passport as a lens to comment on the structural power asymmetries of the academic landscape. I believe I’m not the only one facing these challenges. However, there is hardly sufficient attention, recognition, and space to discuss them. I have no intention of reducing the importance of other challenges by focusing on these three topics. I focused on the three hurdles because I experience them in everyday scholarly work and am determined to engage in critical discussions and reflections.

I often engage with the notion of coloniality when I comment on power asymmetries in academic knowledge production. Coloniality is too abstract for some people, whereas it has become a buzzword for others. However, for people like me, coloniality captures the challenges and obstacles of everyday life encounters. For many of us, it is a daily lived experience. In this piece, I aim to offer a personal reflexive account of coloniality based on the multiple positionalities I occupy.

Epistemic (Ir)relevance

In my academic career, I’m constantly conversing with myself about how relevant my work is to my community in Ethiopia. I was born and raised in Ethiopia. I always want to measure the relevance of my academic career with a potentially positive contribution to policy ideas and practices at least in the Ethiopian context. This means I must develop a strategy to help me reach more Ethiopian audiences. However, the challenge is enormous, and I always need a thoughtful approach to overcome it.

In my field of studies and Development Studies in general, the higher I go in my academic career, the more incentives I have to remain disconnected and alienated from the community I want to serve. I will be more rewarded if I continue to produce academic outputs that target an audience completely distant from most Ethiopians. Even members of the Ethiopian community who may access my work, if interested at all, have minimal access to academic publications. I’m glad most of my outputs so far are open access. However, the fact that the academic outputs are not initially produced to be consumed by the community about whom the research is talking remains a significant challenge. Making academic outputs available free of charge on the Internet is one viable solution. However, this can also have its own layers of challenges, such as the difficulty of accessing academic English for the general public.

One strategy I’ve adopted is to write Amharic newspaper articles that help me translate some of the expertise I acquired in my studies into a relevant analysis of the present-day political economy in Ethiopia. I am unsure to what extent my effort in writing Amharic commentaries can help me be more relevant to my community. These seemingly simple steps of translation can be valuable. But epistemic (ir)relevance is broader than language translation.

Using language as a medium of communication is one aspect. However, language is also a repository of a society’s deep conceptual, theoretical and philosophical orientations. The epistemic irrelevance of my academic work is more manifested in my limitations in adequately and systematically using my mother tongue to explain key issues of development that could be relevant to my community and beyond.

Most of the conceptual and theoretical insights that inform my academic works on Ethiopian political, economic, and social dynamics are alien to the local context. On the other hand, throughout my educational training, I have not been adequately exposed to Ethiopia or Africa-centred knowledge frameworks and academic conceptual and theoretical orientations. Whenever this happened, they were not systematically integrated or implicitly considered less relevant than Eurocentric epistemic insights. I needed to put extra effort into reading widely to educate myself beyond the formal channels and processes of education. However, the impact remains immense. The more I continued to advance in my academic career, the more I gravitated away from Ethiopia-centred epistemic orientations. Hence, most of my academic insight remains less informed by these perspectives.

I want to emphasise that my concern is primarily about the systemic hierarchy of knowledge frameworks and the casual normalisation of marginalising endogenous and potentially alternative epistemic orientations. No knowledge can evolve without interaction with other knowledge systems. However, we can’t ignore that the interaction between knowledge systems is power-mediated. The power asymmetries between knowledge systems do not stop at the abstract level. They also translate into the institutional arrangements of knowledge production, the producers and primary audiences of the knowledge produced.

[Academic] knowledge is power! But not every [academic] knowledge can be a source of power. Most of the time, academic knowledge becomes a source of power if it is produced by the dominant members of society and for the use of the dominant members.

Language

Amharic is my mother tongue. Several languages in Ethiopia have well-advanced grammar, literature, and folklore. Like other places, these languages are sources of wisdom and knowledge for society. However, none are adequately recognised as good enough in the organisation of the “modern” education system, especially in higher education. After primary school, I studied every subject in English. Amharic remained only as one subject. When I joined Addis Ababa University, Amharic became non-existent in my academic training. Only students who studied the Amharic language and literature used this language as their medium of instruction. All other degree programmes were in English. This might be less concerning if a language is not advanced enough to develop fields of studies and disciplinary knowledge with abstract conceptions and ideas. However, I believe the Amharic language can serve as a medium of instruction for most fields of study, especially in the social sciences.

Studies show that the Amharic language evolved over 1,000 years and became a lingua franca of medieval northern and central highland kingdoms in present-day Ethiopia around the 12th century. The earliest literary tradition dates back to the 14th century, including religious texts, historical notes, and literature. (Image: Gee’z Alphbet @Haile Maryam Tadese of Lalibela)

Despite this, the modernist Ethiopian elites that designed the “modern” Ethiopian education system could not envision reaching the promised land of Westernisation without fully embracing English, in some cases French, and systematically disregarding their rich local languages.

The relationship between epistemic (ir)relevance and language is profound. To be more relevant to my community, I need to communicate in an accessible language and use language as a source of intellectual insights. This could be the most fulfilling academic endeavour. However, to remain a credible member of the academic community of my field, I must produce more in English, and the target audience should not necessarily be my home country community. To remain relevant to my home community, I need to adopt a different set of epistemic orientations, personal convictions and beliefs, and, sometimes, career and financial sacrifices. The additional burden and financial sacrifice are more prominent because it is doubtful that the current academic excellence and achievement framework in the UK or internationally will recognise academic output produced in non-European languages. I’m glad to learn more if there is anything I’m unaware of.

Passport positionality

My idea of passport positionality evolved through my experiences of travelling for academic purposes both across Europe and Africa. My definition of passport positionality is how academics at any level, primarily those with a “Global South” passport, must navigate various ideological, legal, administrative, financial, and psychological barriers to attend academic events or conduct research in countries other than their own. Understanding the interplay between legal and academic citizenship can help us reflect on the implicit and explicit barriers to belonging, exclusion, recognition, and representation. The legacies and current manifestations of colonialism create some forms of exclusion, favouring mainly Global North passport holders. The exclusion of academic researchers from various platforms and spaces of academic deliberations and decision-making processes just because of the barriers imposed on their legal citizenship is a serious structural problem.

At a personal level, I’ve heard several stories of racial profiling, especially in cases where the global south passport overlaps with brown and black skin colour, humiliating interrogation, and unjustified and unreasonable excuses of mistreatment. I share two personal experiences of how passport positionality shapes my travel experiences by creating tension between my academic and legal citizenship.

The first experience happened when I was contracted to facilitate a decolonial research methodologies workshop for an institute in a European country. The agreement was for the research institute to reimburse my travel expenses and to pay me a professional fee. As an Ethiopian passport holder, getting a Schengen visa to travel from the UK at a minimum includes travelling to privately run visa application centres and paying admin and visa application fees. This is on top of preparing a visa application document, where I’m expected to submit at least a three-month bank statement showing a minimum of £600 in my current bank account.

The most infuriating experience was finding the right appointment date and time because the private company only offers regular appointment options at certain hours. Otherwise, applicants are directly or indirectly forced to pay for more expensive premium appointment options. The company runs the visa appointment service to make a profit, so it has all the incentives to capitalise on potential customers’ demands. If seen from the position of potential travellers like me, it is unfair because the company is making money not by facilitating the visa application process but by making it less convenient and difficult.

I managed to get the visa and run a successful and enriching workshop. However, when I submitted my receipts for reimbursement, the institute refused to reimburse all the costs related to my visa application.

I was told that according to the country’s “travel expenses act, they [the visa related cost] are not costs that can be covered.” Honestly speaking, the visa-related expenses were higher than the travel expenses. I believe there are reasonable grounds for the mentioned policy. However, it is also clear that the policy has a significant blind spot. It does not recognise the challenges that people like me face, jumping multiple hurdles to do their work. Perhaps the people who drafted the policy could not imagine that a visa-paying national would travel to their country to provide a professional service. Hence, no mechanism of reimbursement was set. I used the email exchange with my contacts to highlight the system’s unfairness. Finally, I got reimbursed, and it was a good learning experience.

The second experience I want to share is related to my encounters with border officials at South African airports. Because of my work, I travelled to South Africa seven times over the past three years. Out of these seven travels, I was held at the airport five times for at least one hour or more by border officials who wanted to check the genuineness of my visa. A uniformed officer usually escorts me. When I leave the plane, I will be told they have been waiting for me and will check my documents’ credibility. Often, as I’m told, they’ll take a picture of the visa sticker on my passport and send it to their colleagues in London via WhatsApp to verify whether it is genuine. In the meantime, I will be asked several questions about the reason for my travel, what I do, how I received my visa in London, while I’m an Ethiopian, etc. Some valid and ordinary questions, but some unreasonable questions as well. None of this has happened to me in my travels to other countries.

After some time, I got used to it and plan accordingly. But it never stops being a significant inconvenience to be singled out just because of my passport. On one of these trips, I was travelling with my fellow UK-based Ethiopian academic, and I bet with him that we’d be escorted to a room and interrogated on our arrival. I won the bet. The border official even showed us the screen shot he was sent with our names, two Ethiopian passport holders, who needed to be cross-examined before being allowed to enter the country.

I share these experiences to encourage my academic colleagues to be conscious of their passport positionality and how it helped or constrained them to exercise their academic citizenship. The interplay between legal and academic citizenship needs more reflexive discussions.

Conclusion

I hope sharing these three hurdles of lived experiences can trigger questions, responses, and conversations. There are no simple answers and responses. However, I think it is essential to be aware that some of the buzzwords and abstract ideas we exchange in our academic conversations can lead to experiences far from abstract notions. Hopefully, my moments of internal struggles of questioning relevance, feelings of alienation, efforts of learning and unlearning, and the actual experiences of exclusion, especially when travelling, can contribute to having more grounded conversations when we talk about decolonising academic knowledge production in Development Studies.

This blog was first published by the European Assosciation of Development Research and Training Institute

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

About the author:

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is an alumus of the International Institute of Social Studies. He is a Research Associate at the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC), the University of Bristol and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a Member of Council at the Development Studies Association (DSA) of the UK and of EADI’s task group on decolonising knowledge in Development Studies.

Early Warning is one of the most important components of Disaster Risk Reduction – and one of the most successful!

By ISS Blog Bliss 13 October 202512 October 2025 666 views

In this blog to mark the International Day of Disaster Risk Reduction (October 13), HSC Coordinator Tom Ansell dives into the role of ‘Early Warning’ systems and policies as part of Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives. They fit within greater DRR programming to make sure that people are warning in advance and can take precautions, or other measures, to prepare for an upcoming shock or hazard. The 2004 Asian Tsunami highlighted the need for more early warning systems for countries with Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts – these systems were triggered earlier this year after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia.

Introduction – DRR on multiple levels

Managing the risks to people’s lives and livelihoods before, during and after a disaster (whatever the cause) requires looking beyond just ‘responding to a disaster’. Since the 1990’s, and the UN’s ‘International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction’, attitudes towards the disaster cycle have matured and within many emergency management agencies there is some reference to several ‘phases’ of a disaster in a ‘cycle’. For example, the Australian Emergency Management Agency refers to the ‘prevention, preparedness, response, recovery’ phases (now considered a bit old fashioned!). The ‘risk management approach’ is currently the most modern frame for disaster preparation for and responding to a disaster, which focuses on risks rather than timelines: “establish contexts, identify risks, analyse risks, assess risks, treat risks” – and repeat!

Risks are themselves a mixture of hazards/shocks (something that might cause a disaster), vulnerability (socioeconomic conditions that might exacerbate the hazard), exposure (how close people, livelihoods, etc, are to the hazard), and coping capacity (the resources and protocols in place to manage risk).

It’s all put together as the following formula:

Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability x Exposure
Coping capacity

To make a risk assessment, practitioners consider the severity of a risk, and the likelihood of it occurring, to make a compound ‘score’. Disaster Risk Management involves activities, policies, procedures and so on to mitigate risks (DRR), often by reducing vulnerabilities or exposure, or by increasing coping capacity.

So a systematic approach to DRR will approach all of these various components. It’s easy to see why knowing about a hazard early might make it easier to protect people and livelihoods. Or, in technical language: Early Warning increases coping capacity, by giving more time to prepare for a hazardous situation (by taking anticipatory action), thereby decreasing exposure! Within the humanitarian sector, programmes and interventions around this are usually referred to as Early Warning, Early Action (EWEA). Ideally, these activities should be contextual, appropriate, ‘people-centred’, community-based and/or managed, and inclusive.

What do Early Warning systems look like?

What an early warning system looks like is completely dependent on the context and hazard in question. The logic behind most early warning systems, though, is monitoring a hazard (say, a river level) and then triggering information sharing and next steps once a certain level of immediacy has been reached.

For example, the Syria Civil Defence (the White Helmets) co-developed an app-based early warning system for airstrikes, military activities, and knock-on emergencies during the Syrian civil war. A central command room processes incoming reports of, say, jets taking off from an air base, and then sends a warning via app and SMS to mobile phones in the region, with instructions to take cover. Prior to this system, early warnings of air strikes were spotted by people in watch-towers, and communicated by word of mouth and a walkie-talkie radio network, which led to delays in warning people about incoming danger. This app-based system could be used to warn of other incoming hazards, for example a particularly violent winter storm, upstream flooding, or seismic activity. The Netherlands utilizes a similar system for all manner of hazards, NL-Alert.

But whilst tech-enabled Early Warning systems have grown in the last 15 years, there are plenty of contexts where word-of-mouth, radio broadcasting, or an emergency network (the ‘telephone tree’ method) is the most effective way of getting information to people in time to evacuate, take precautions, or otherwise prepare. For example, if there is a river close to a community that periodically floods, people ‘upstream’ can monitor river levels, and spread the words to communities ‘downstream’ if there is particularly high water. This is also the case for knowledge passed down through the generations: if a particular species of animal usually leaves just before a violent storm, for example, this can serve as the ‘trigger’ to warn people.

Early Warning systems are equally useful for slow-onset disasters. An example here is part of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, which is designed to reduce the risk of famine during poor harvests by offering cash-for-work and cash transfers for people that mainly rely on local agriculture for income and to maintain access to food. The programme is ‘activated’ when drought has been detected for a certain number of months, depending on the region.

Early Warning for Tsunami since 2004

On 26 December 2004, a large underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia triggered 50-metre high waves that killed over 220,000 people, as well as leaving more than 2 million people homeless in 15 countries. At the time, Indonesia was not considered an especially high-risk country for tsunami, meaning that the at the time there was little monitoring of underwater seismic activity, or sea level surface. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre was only able to find out about the impending disaster through internet news stories about devastation in Thailand (itself also unprepared for underwater earthquakes or tsunami at the time), and so couldn’t warn countries with Indian Ocean costs in time.

Following the destruction of the 2004 tsunami, national governments, UN agencies, and NGOs all put renewed efforts into reducing exposure to tsunami and oceanic hazards. At an intergovernmental level, the tsunami sped up development and adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Risk Reduction (now surpassed by the Sendai Framework). At a national level, Thailand created a multi-hazard oceanic early warning system, with tsunami detection buoys and information sharing with Indonesian, Australian, and Indian detection buoys. These signals are sent to a national coordination centre, whereupon various operating procedures are activated. A warning is then broadcast in five languages by fax, SMS, through ‘warning box’ speakers, radio relay towers, public tannoys, social media and through radio and TV warnings. The system will be developed further to give direct to mobile phone warnings in the coming decades.

Indonesia, meanwhile, has developed a network of 553 seismographs, as well as using oceanographic modelling and local hazard mapping for low-lying coastal areas. Once this network detects seismographic activity, procedures include public announcements, vertical evacuation routes, and evacuation signage.

Outside of the Pacific region, the destruction of the 2004 tsunami impelled Caribbean governments to put together the Tsunami and other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean Sea and Adjacent Regions (ICG/CARIBE EWS), a multi-hazard coastal early warning system, and since 2011 have integrated the CARIBE WAVE exercise, which simulates a tsunami or underwater earthquake evacuation. In 2024, over 700,000 people were ‘evacuated’ during the exercise.

Unfortunately, well-functioning early warning systems are not enough to completely mitigate the risk of a large disaster, as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami demonstrates. More than 20,000 people died during the quake and 39-metre tsunami wave, with knock-on effects including the Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident, despite Japan having a well-developed tsunami early warning system. The worth of all of this preparation work was evident this July, though. An 8.8 magnitude offshore earthquake occurred off the coast of Russian Kamchatka, triggering early warning systems and causing precautionary policies in several countries (including Japan, Indonesia, Russia, and China), including evacuations. The earthquake did cause tsunami-like waves, though did not have the same destructive force as the 2004 tsunami.

Conclusion – early warning as part of a multi-level DRR framework

Early warning systems, then, are a key part of reducing disaster risk, especially to climactic and environmental hazards. But we shouldn’t equate that with completely eradicating risks, or indeed think that early warning is the only part of risk management and reduction that should be concentrated on. Early warning systems work best as part of a full multi-level DRR framework, with training and education on detecting hazards, well-developed protocols for early action, evacuation, or other mitigation measures; and a general policy to reduce societal vulnerability through equitable policies, reducing socio-economic inequalities, and strong governance structures.

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

About the Author

Tom Ansell 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.

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 30 September 20251 October 2025 1016 views

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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”.
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.
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.

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 25 September 2025 551 views

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 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).

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 23 September 2025 779 views

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”

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

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 September 2025 1834 views

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 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.

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 26 August 2025 1075 views

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.

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 5^h 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 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.

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 8 July 20259 July 2025 1978 views

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 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.

What can (Western) philosophers of science and innovation scholarship learn from Buddhist philosophy?

By ISS Blog Bliss 1 July 202530 June 2025 1791 views

Technological progress is at the core of the modern (Western) philosophy of science and innovation scholarship, as it promises to end human suffering. However, ignoring the ‘inner capacities’ necessary to guide technology design and its interaction with human mind for too long is causing human suffering. In this blog, Birendra Singh explores how Buddhist philosophy, emphasizing simplicity, experiential knowledge, self-reliance, and the middle path, can inspire new approaches to science, technology, and innovation in creating more human-centric and sustainable futures.

**Photo by Lahiru Supunchandra on Unsplash**

The world we live in is becoming increasingly uncertain, unequal, and unsustainable. The technology and innovation that was initially developed to improve living conditions is now also causing suffering. It is clear that the current development model driven by technological progress has created ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in society. Because of this worrying development, philosophers, scholars, and religious teachers are revisiting philosophical underpinnings of the progress we have achieved thus far. Emphasis on inner self development and presenting moral framework to guide design and use of technology have been the essential part of this revisit (1). This philosophical revisit is necessary to search for alternative pathways to existing development models, which have failed to deliver the promised quality of life and equity for most of the world population by accelerating the concentration of wealth for a few.

Embracing frugality in (re)conceptualizing the field of Science, Technology, and Innovation (2) and focusing on ‘inner’ development to better respond to the sustainability challenges are suggested as possible alternative pathways (3). In this article, I will show that Buddhism is a philosophical outlook with valuable lessons that can be applied to this field. I will look at four aspects of the Buddhist philosophy and combine them with my lived experience in India, where I conducted my doctoral research on embracing experiential knowledge to practice frugality in addressing sustainability challenges (4). The aim of this piece is not to make a case for Buddhism but to take inspiration from its ‘pragmatic’ philosophical outlook in going ‘back to the basics’ and learning about different ways of embracing frugality, which has been an essential part of the Buddhist way of living. This exercise may be useful in searching for alternative futures, as historically and philosophically there is no direct relation between directionality and innovation or progress (5). In fact, chasing the direction of progress and centrality of materiality in development and innovation processes always carries a risk of leading to over-engineering and over-consumption.

No frills please — keep the story simple

The first thing we can learn from Buddhism is to keep the story simple in order to reach more people. Buddhism is no small religion; it covers a vast range of philosophical discussions, and millions of people practice it. Buddhism mainly has three traditions: the Pali, the Chinese, and the Tibetan. The Pāḷi tradition comprises the Sutta Piṭaka (discourses of the Buddha), Vinaya Piṭaka (monastic rules), and Abhidhamma Piṭaka (philosophical analyses). These three texts are written in Pāḷi, often considered as a mix of vernacular languages of the north India in Buddha’s time (i.e. Prakrit) and Sanskirt. All three Piṭakas try to avoids an endless discussion on supernatural powers, instead creatively engaging with ‘practical’ questions regarding everyday human life, such as code of conduct, practicing eight fold path to end suffering, and interaction between mind and its environment to make a sense of reality. The discourses of Buddha (Sutta Piṭaka ) present the discussions (often in the form of questions and answers) between the Buddha and his followers by means of storytelling. At present, with scholars facing enormous challenges in communicating complex research processes findings to communities and there is an increased pressure on them to ‘engage’ with society, embracing simple language and using storytelling methods could be helpful in helping bridge the gap between science and society.

Reality is multifold — experience it through body and mind

The next lesson that we can learn by looking at Buddhism is better recognizing experiential knowledge in making sense of a phenomenon. Interestingly, both the philosophy of science and Buddhism value sensory investigation and direct experiencing in searching truth. However, in contrast to the philosophy of science, the Buddhist philosophy does not stop at one type of truth. In contrast to modern (Western) Philosophy, Buddhism recognizes that there are at least two types of truth: relative and absolute (6). A relative truth can be experienced by an individual or group at a particular time or in a particular space. Experiencing this truth is an ordinary phenomenon which we all go through in our own realities. However, to experience the absolute truth, it is necessary to follow the eightfold path. One should be attentive or mindful to experience this truth. In practice, there is a direct relationship between mindfulness and experiencing the truth in Buddhism. In essence, the Buddhist philosophy accepts that reality is multifold and complex and suggests that it makes more sense to one if they experience it within the framework of body and mind. In a rapidly evolving and complex world, recognizing and emphasizing relationality and plurality in experiencing emerging through the interaction of the mind and its environment will be helpful for science philosophers and innovation scholars to contextualize technological solutions better while serving local needs.

Don’t complain — inculcate problem-solving behaviour

The Buddhist philosophical outlook also preaches self-reliance and resilience. I grew up listening to one of the most powerful and popular quotes of Buddha, Appa Beepo Bhava (‘be your own light’). Some believe that these were the last words of Buddha to his disciple Annada just before he passed away. This teaching emphasizes self-reliance and the importance of learning from lived experiences rather than depending on external truth claims. Embracing mindfulness practices like vipassana meditation and following the eightfold path are tools people could use to develop their inner self while engaging with structural problems like sustainability challenges (3). Promoting problem-solving behavior and focusing on internal capacities, including practicing attention (7) and embracing frugality as ‘doing more with less’ mindset, could help shape a possible alternative pathway to sustainable futures, as it equips a person with knowledge and skills to navigate structural challenges more ‘smartly’ through adaptive thinking (8).

Be flexible — follow the middle path

Lastly, Buddhism shows us that moderation is desirable. Two other religions, Jainism and Charvaka, were contemporaries of Buddhism and philosophically competed with it. Jainism often advocates for self-denial for the betterment of others, while Charvaka preaches hedonism, where sensory pleasure is the supreme goal of the human existence. Buddhist philosophy disapproves of both these positions. The Buddha grew up as a prince and then spent several years rigorously practicing asceticism. Based on his lived experience, he suggested that extremism is not conducive to truth. Through his storytelling style of preaching, Buddha motivated his disciples to find a right ‘balance’ in philosophy, religion, and practice. His teaching often advocates in favour of finding a ‘middle path’ that often emerges from experiencing realities by following eight fold path. Following a middle path is particularly important in current social and political climate, where science and society are moving even further apart. Taking middle path is also crucial in moving beyond often superficial and delusionary dichotomies in understanding complex relationship between science and society.

Conclusion

Rising inequalities, consumerism, and the extraction of natural resources are some of the side effects of human progress. Some cultures practice frugality to mitigate these side effects either at philosophical or material level (9, 10). Thus, philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders have been revisiting philosophical underpinnings of current human progress to seek other ways of attaining societal goals without doing as much harm. Embracing simplistic, frugal, and human-centric principles contained of Buddhist philosophy offers a unique opportunity to rethink progress, especially in the field of science, technology, and innovation, and to search for alternative pathways to existing development models.

References

Allen, D. (2018). Gandhi after 9/11: creative nonviolence and sustainability. Oxford University Press.
Leliveld, A., & Knorringa, P. (2018). Frugal innovation and development research. The European Journal of Development Research, 30, 1-16.
Frank, P., Sundermann, A., & Fischer, D. (2019). How mindfulness training cultivates introspection and competence development for sustainable consumption. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 20(6), 1002-1021.
Singh, B. (2023). In search of grassroots frugality: Everyday learning and experiential knowledge to navigate water uncertainties in the Bundelkhand region, India. [Doctoral Thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam, ISS PhD].
Sluiter, I. (2017). Anchoring innovation: A classical research agenda. European Review, 25(1), 20-38.
https://buddhismnow.com/2018/02/16/tittha-sutta-buddhist-parable-of-the-blind-men-and-the-elephant/
Bombaerts, G., Anderson, J., Dennis, M., Gerola, A., Frank, L., Hannes, T., … & Spahn, A. (2023). Attention as practice: Buddhist ethics responses to persuasive technologies. Global Philosophy, 33(2), 25.
Wright, R. (2017). Why Buddhism is true: The science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment. Simon and Schuster.
Oudenampsen, M., & Mellink, B. (2022). The roots of Dutch frugality: the role of public choice theory in Dutch budgetary policy. Journal of european public policy, 29(8), 1206-1224.
https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/in-japan-less-is-more-1502505355.html#google_vignette

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

About the Author:

Birendra is a trained genetic engineer and STS Researcher with a PhD degree in Development Studies. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation Chair group of Wageningen University and currently affiliated to the LDE-International Center for Frugal Innovation hosted by ISS/EUR).

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

By ISS Blog Bliss 24 June 202529 January 2026 1334 views

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.

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 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.