“Neither climate impacts nor conflict just ‘happen’”: Insights from an Environmental Peacebuilding Workshop

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In this blog, Juliane Schillinger (Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and Board Member at the Environmental Peacebuilding Association) and Tom Ansell (The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre) discuss the outcomes of a workshop held in May 2026 at  ISS to explore commonalities and differences in the use of key concepts at the intersection of environment, climate, conflict, and peace. The workshop was convened as part of the launch of the new on Essential Concepts of Environmental Peacebuilding by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, which contains more than 150 entries related to environmental conflict and peacebuilding, the workshop sought to find answers to a simple question: Are we all speaking the same language?

The intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace attracts an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders, ranging from traditional security actors to environmental activists, humanitarians and development organisations, and from global policy conversations to local action. Researchers have been engaging in conversations around these themes from a variety of disciplinary and conceptual perspectives as well. The workshop attracted participants from each of these sectors, bringing diverse perspectives on environmental peacebuilding and climate security from their own sectors. Given this diversity, it is natural that such plastic terms as ‘security’ and ‘justice’ would be interpreted in various ways within the group. Do they mean the same to a traditional security expert, an environmental activist, or a humanitarian? Predictably, no!

A word cloud generated from key terms used by workshop participants across different discussions

Bringing all these perspectives together, though, can significantly enrich conversations and programmes designed to address the compound risks of environmental degradation, climate change and conflict. But they can also bring challenges, when diverging perspectives lead to miscommunication and misunderstandings when not everyone seems to be speaking the same language.

Why are we here?

To kick off the session, participants self-identified as being part of a stakeholder group (research, humanitarian/development, civil society, security) and freely responded to the prompt: “Why are you engaging at the intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace? What are you hoping to achieve?” Five clusters of motivations emerged, often across sectors:

1) for advocacy purposes and to raise awareness of challenges and approaches at the intersection of climate and conflict

2) based on the strong presence of people working in civil society and social movements on the issue, and with the aim to show solidarity with affected communities and fellow activists

3) focusing on the resilience of and accountability towards affected populations, particularly in the context of disaster risk management and humanitarian practice in fragile and conflict-affected areas

4) to strengthen systems approaches that consider the intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace holistically, and can create spaces for collaboration across sectors

5) motivated by the opportunities inherent to integrated approaches and how policy and technology could try to approach environment, climate, conflict, and peace together.

Next to humanitarian and development practitioners, many researchers were motivated by resilience strengthening and humanitarian concerns, with one summarizing their motivation as “[I want to] help people with ‘little’ agency to increase their adaptive capacity [to disasters]”. Overall, though, the group felt that the link between humanitarian action, climate, conflict, and the environment should still be made more explicitly in their day-to-day working lives.

The need for integrated and system-based approaches was the most common motivation among workshop participants, reflecting the desire to “avoid silo thinking”, and to work more holistically in contexts that are both fragile and climate-sensitive. One attendee expressly linked a causality between conflict and climate justice: “I work on climate justice. Conflict undermines it. The climate and energy transition can also generate conflict”.

Across all of the groupings, there was a general understanding that by interacting with climate and environmental concerns, they or their organisations could also contribute to longer-term and sustainable peacebuilding, and support advocacy on other environmental issues such as clean water. Some directly highlighted the role of environmental problems in dispute resolution in their work projects, and the wish to work closely with colleagues from other disciplines and sectors.

Perhaps indicative of the The Hague’s ecosystem, a couple of attendees expressed that they would like to try and ‘reclaim’ climate and environmental concerns from the military and security spheres. Others were more interested in building across sectors: “[I want to] link military and other security actors in cooperation / knowledge [sharing] with civil society and government actors, humanitarian, peace, energy transition, etcetera.”

 

For the analysts or for the campaigners?

Over the course of the workshop, participants took part in various interactive exercises to help the facilitators understand their (dis-)comfort in using terms and phrases related to the environment, climate, conflict and peace, such as “climate change causes conflict”, “security” in the context of the environment and climate, “environmental/climate justice”, and “decolonisation”. These discussions revealed that whilst most people in the room were ‘speaking the same language’ inasmuch as they broadly agreed on the meaning of the phrases, participants were quite divided on how and where the phrases should be used. Discussion around the statement “climate change causes conflict” ranged from calls for more nuance and differentiated assessments of causality to participants engaged in advocacy work highlighting that “it’s not a linear process, but the phrase is useful for justifying action and our work”, and “I work with activists, and simpler messages travel better”. One participant even noted that “the phrase is useful for proposals!”.

The discussion also provided the opportunity for disagreements to surface on the securitisation of climate and the environment and the role of security actors in this space. A number of NGO and civil society representatives vigorously expressed that they would like to see fewer military and security voices in discussions around the link between climate and conflict. “Security implies safeguarding the status quo, not transforming systems to climate justice”, was one clear expression of this. Meanwhile, another participant highlighted that using the security language within a Dutch context was quite useful to motivative people and local actors to take precautions at a personal or local level.

Several participants preferred to speak of “environmental justice” or “climate justice” instead of security, because it provides a frame of reference that can speak to other forms of vulnerability, inequality, or injustice. This is not necessarily incompatible with using simplified language to motivate larger groups: “our [humanitarian] line is that those affected the most are often the least responsible”.

“Decolonisation”, meanwhile, was found to be useful to motivate action and show the ingrained power relations within subjects often held to be ‘power neutral’, such as materiality and technology. Nonetheless, some attendees found it a still-uncomfortable term to use within their work. Participants were, however, united by the idea that “decolonisation” can be used to shine a light on practices that still bring about environmental destruction, and also subjectivise people: “imperial and colonised pasts have effects that last centuries, especially when talking about geographies and natural resources”. Similarly, a majority of attendees liked using terms that highlight the human factor in global phenomena, whether climate or conflict related. Relying on technical or neutral language can neutralise responsibility – or shift focus onto personal choices rather than systemic trends or policies.

As for the initial question of whether we are all speaking the same language on environment, climate and security, the primary reflection from the discussions for environmental peacebuilding scholars and practitioners would seem to be whether it is actually useful for everyone to speak the same language, or if it is more useful for multiple languages to be developed: that can appeal to a range of uses from more nuanced research and policy discussions to more direct public advocacy.

For more information about the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, check out their website.

Opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Environmental Peacebuilding Organisation, nor the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

About the authors:

Juliane Schillinger is a transdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of the environment and conflict. As a Technical Adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, her work focuses on climate action and disaster risk reduction in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and on humanitarian engagement with climate security and environmental peacebuilding. She is a member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association’s Board of Directors and a The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre fellow.

Tom Ansell is Coordinator & Researcher at The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre. His work revolves around a ‘Societies in Crisis’ – led understanding of humanitarianism, with specific foci on humanitarian advocacy, Disaster Risk Reduction, and critical Vulnerability. He also Coordinates the International Humanitarian Studies Association. 

The shifting geopolitics of deep-sea mining in the Pacific Islands region: An industry poised to merge?

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As global competition for critical minerals intensifies, the world’s oceans are emerging as a new frontier in the race for strategic resources. Originally published by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes’ (EADI) blog, Debating Development Research, ISS PhD alumnus Ben Radley and Imogen Eagles explore how deep-sea mining is becoming a focal point of geopolitical rivalry in the Pacific Islands, highlighting the tensions between resource security, environmental protection and the competing interests of states, industry and local communities.

Photo by GEOMAR on Wikimedia

The ocean’s seabed contains vast deposits of minerals deemed critical for green transition technologies, military defence systems and AI hardware, among other uses. According to some estimates, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone – an approximately 4.5 million square kilometre abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean – holds more copper, nickel and cobalt than all land-based deposits combined. With China’s recent tightening of export controls on several critical minerals creating global price shocks and disrupting Western supply chains, geopolitical contestation to access and exploit seabed minerals is heating up.

Governance of the seabed is divided between national and international waters. Countries retain full sovereignty over the right to explore and exploit natural resources in their Exclusive Economic Zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles offshore. Beyond national jurisdiction, the seabed, ocean floor and subsoil – commonly referred to as ‘the Area’ – are governed by the UN International Seabed Authority (ISA). Established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the ISA has yet to introduce a mining code to allow commercial exploitation of seabed minerals in the Area.

This is due, alongside Global South concerns about how any economic benefit would be distributed among nations, to the extensive and potentially irreversible environmental and ecological damage the industry is widely expected to cause. Fragile seafloor habitats and the mineral substrates that underpin them would be physically destroyed, sediment plumes and toxic wastewater discharges would cause long-term biodiversity loss including possible extinctions, and key earth-system processes such as the carbon cycle would be disrupted. And there remains so little we know about the deep-sea. Just last week, scientists accidentally uncovered a deep-sea coral system the size of Vatican City, including 28 species they suspect are new to science. Responding to these concerns, at the time of writing, 43 countries have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

The US, however, is not among them. As a non-party to UNCLOS, the US is instead seeking to accelerate a pathway towards deep sea mining both domestically and in the Area. In April 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14285, Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources. The Order declared that seabed minerals “are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers”, and called on government agencies to expedite the process to establish a deep sea mining industry as an urgent matter of national security.

As of mid-2026, several companies were pursuing US authorisation to explore and potentially extract minerals from international waters. Among these, Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC) was furthest ahead, with its application for an exploitation license deemed in full compliance and the permitting process expected to conclude in early 2027. China, meanwhile, holds the largest number of deep sea mining exploration contracts granted by the ISA, is a major financial contributor to the ISA, and reportedly operates the world’s largest oceanographic research fleet.

The Pacific Islands region, comprising a diverse set of states and territories – several of which are US-owned – lies at the centre of growing geopolitical contestation over deep-sea mineral deposits. Roughly three-quarters of the exploration licenses granted by the ISA are located in the Pacific. Most of these are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, including those held by companies currently seeking US approval, where the quantity and quality of seabed minerals are widely recognised as unmatched globally. In addition, many Pacific Island Countries host significant deposits in their sovereign waters. The Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority, for instance, estimates its Exclusive Economic Zones to contain 6.7 billion wet tonnes of mineral-rich nodules.

Figure 1. Pacific Islands Region showing the Exclusive Economic Zones of several Pacific Islands Countries and the main locations of nodule deposits

*Source: Petterson, M.G. and A. Tawake (2019) The Cook Islands (South Pacific) experience in governance of seabed manganese nodule mining, Ocean and Coastal Management 167 (271-287))

Alongside the Cook Islands, Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati have been among the strongest Pacific Islands Countries proponents of deep sea mining, seeing it as an opportunity for development and economic diversification. The Cook Islands has granted four exploration contracts to three companies in its Exclusive Economic Zones (two with US interests and one Belgian joint venture) and is the sponsoring state behind an exploration licence with the ISA in international waters.

Tonga and Nauru, meanwhile, are working with TMC through two ISA exploration licenses in the CCZ, where Tonga and TMC share a subsidiary in Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd and the Nauru government sponsors the TMC subsidiary, Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. A recent investor presentation provided by US firm American Ocean Minerals, which holds ownership interests in the Cook Islands’ Exclusive Economic Zones, details how it plans to process deep-sea minerals mined in the Pacific on the US Gulf Coast via a transhipment port in American Samoa (Figure 2 below).

Figure 2. American Ocean Mineral’s DSM supply chain

Presentation of American Ocean Minerals investors
(Source: American Ocean Minerals investor presentation, 2026. Accessed 18 June 2026)

Most Pacific Island Countries, however, are resistant. The ocean is central to cultural identity in the region and plays an important economic role through the tourism and fishing industries. As one public figure leading community resistance to DSM in Papua New Guinea put it, “the ocean is a part of the earth, what we call graun, and we are part of graun”. Consequently, most of the region’s countries and territories have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on DSM, with Vanuatu, Palau and Fiji some of the industry’s staunchest opponents.

At a Pacific Small Island Developing States Regional workshop held in Fiji in May 2026, with representation from across the region, Pacific civil society groups called for transparency and inclusion to ensure all voices are heard. This would include those promoting a precautionary approach or a full moratorium. The US’s own Pacific Island territories are among these; the leaders of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are pushing for a moratorium, and American Samoa is deeply concerned about the US’ fast-tracking of DSM in their waters.

Yet there is a concern held by civil society observers in the region that moratorium positions represent more of a ‘wait and see’ attitude from regional governments, as opposed to a firm stance against the industry. While academics and commentators have long foretold the onset of deep sea mining globally and in the Pacific Islands region, there is a growing sense that intensifying US-China geopolitics combined with industry promotion by some Pacific Islands Countries might drive deep sea mining exploration to commercial exploitation before the decade is out.

About the authors:

Ben Radley is a Reader in International Development at the University of Bath. His research centres on the political economy of mining, energy and labour in the context of green transitions, with a regional focus on Central Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Imogen Eagles is studying for a BSc in International Development with Economics at the University of Bath. On her placement year as a research assistant in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, she has supported work on deep-sea mining, Syrian refugees and women’s career experiences in the UK.

Beyond the money transfer: How do diaspora communities mobilise in times of crisis?

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A close-up shot of two people exchanging currency in an outdoor market setting

When a crisis occurs, diaspora communities do far more than send money home. From emotional solidarity to political advocacy, their forms of engagement challenge dominant narratives about what it means to help from afar. In this blog, researchers Haya Alfarra, Dr Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo and Dr Zeynep Kaşlı reflect on discussions from a community gathering in Rotterdam to explore how diaspora communities understand crises, experience them across borders and mobilise in response.

A close-up shot of two people exchanging currency in an outdoor market setting
Photo by Swastik Arora

When we talk about diaspora contributions to crisis responses, the conversation almost always gravitates toward remittances, meaning the billions of dollars migrants transfer annually to their countries of origin. Yet a community gathering held in Rotterdam on 7 June 2026 revealed something that traditional analyses miss: namely, the rich, plural and deeply human ways in which diaspora communities mobilise when crisis hits, aspects that are commonly discussed in migration studies (Gardner, 2018) but less so in the humanitarian realm (Brun & Horst, 2023; Gamlen and Chakma, 2025; Rejón, R. et al., 2025).

The gathering highlighted the diversity within diaspora communities, which include long-standing migrants, new arrivals, exiled groups and refugees, who, despite their differences and tensions, share a strong sense of duty and connection to their ancestral homeland that drives them to respond in times of crisis, not only through economic remittances but also through social remittances (Levitt, 1998).

The event brought together diaspora members (connected to Türkiye, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan) to collectively reflect on their understandings and lived experiences of crisis and solidarity. What emerged was a layered conversation that complicates both romantic notions of transnational community and reductive portrayals of diaspora as little more than a remittance pipeline.

Rethinking what constitutes a crisis

Before the question of how communities respond, participants grappled with a more fundamental one: what counts as a crisis in the first place and who has the authority to define it?

Participants drew careful distinctions among a challenge, a problem and a crisis, with the latter understood as something that fundamentally reorganizes life and is felt not only logistically but also existentially. Crises were understood to be political, personal, environmental, social or a combination of these. These different notions of crises impact people differently; they can be unifying or divisive.

Crucially, the group identified a dual nature to many crises. For example, a disaster is one crisis, but the state’s failure to respond adequately is another. This framing refuses to treat earthquakes or landslides as purely natural phenomena. Instead, it asks whose neighbourhoods collapse, whose losses go uncompensated and which communities are left to fend for themselves. Pre-existing inequality, participants argued, not only shapes the impact of crises but is itself a form of ongoing crisis. The temporality of crisis was considered: what if a crisis occurs repeatedly, becomes chronic and systemic? Does it remain a crisis? There was also productive tension over language. Some preferred ‘emergency’ for its urgency and lack of stigma; others pushed back, arguing that softening the vocabulary risks obscuring structural failures and diminishing accountability for those in power. These discussions illustrated that understandings of crises are political.

The emotional labour of distance

For diaspora members, crises in countries of origin carry a particular weight. Participants described the mental load of constant vigilance: following the news continuously, making anxious calls, worrying about people they cannot reach and about situations they cannot control. Living safely in the Netherlands while family members face conflict, disaster or political repression creates a distinct emotional tension (even guilt) that can feel isolating precisely because those around them in the host country may not share or fully understand the stakes.

This is where community building becomes crucial. Participants described turning first to people who ‘get it’, meaning fellow diaspora members who share similar anxieties, background knowledge and grief. At the same time, solidarity within diaspora communities should not be taken for granted. For some, finding like-minded people within their own community was challenging because their lived experiences in their home countries differed from those of the older generations, who tend to be more conservative and hold different political views.

These generational and political differences often influence who you trust, work and collaborate with. Nevertheless, the common thread between diaspora communities is their connection to the ancestral homeland that brings people together. Community spaces, whether physical or digital, serve as sites for emotional processing as much as for practical coordination. The first response to a crisis, it turns out, is rarely a bank transfer. It is a phone call, a gathering or a shared meal.

Mobilisation beyond money

What the gathering made visible is the breadth of what diaspora mobilisation actually looks like during crises. Participants described organising protests, running advocacy campaigns, building informal support networks, fundraising and using social media to shift narratives and create political pressure. In many cases, they are the most impactful interventions available.

Advocacy emerged as a particularly significant form of engagement. Several participants stressed the importance of thinking beyond immediate humanitarian aid toward longer-term structural change. Influencing policy and challenging dominant media narratives were all viewed as integral components of meaningful crisis response.

Diaspora communities often have unique leverage to undertake this work. Their linguistic skills, cultural knowledge, transnational networks and the political standing that comes with citizenship or residence in a Global North country provide opportunities to influence public debate and connect local experiences with international audiences.

Media representation was another recurring concern. Participants noted how international crisis coverage can reduce entire countries to a single story of instability, affecting how diaspora members are perceived and how they perceive themselves. Being viewed primarily through a lens of victimhood (even when well-intentioned) can be disempowering. Countering these simplified narratives was seen as an important form of mobilisation in its own right.

Solidarity that sustains

Perhaps the most generative insight from the gathering was the case for preventive solidarity, meaning building trust and support networks before emergencies occur, so that communities have the infrastructure to respond when they do. Crisis does not create community; rather, they reveal whether community already exists.

At the same time, participants also problematised the limits of solidarity. Class differences, educational backgrounds and diverse migration histories shape who feels able to ask for help and from whom. For some, seeking support within the diaspora community carries social costs. Trust, in this case, is built and cultivated over time.

Bringing together different diaspora communities offered a collective space to share, listen, be inspired and learn from one another. The untapped potential for solidarity among communities became apparent. One of the participants reflected on the community gathering by noting:

‘As a social researcher, I found these conversations deeply insightful…Understanding how people maintain connections, mobilise support and navigate belonging across borders can help us better design initiatives that strengthen participation, inclusion, and meaningful social connections. One concept that stayed with me throughout the workshop was social capital, the networks, trust, and relationships that enable people and communities to support one another, especially in times of uncertainty.’

The gathering made clear that diaspora communities are not passive conduits for financial flows. They are active, adaptive and politically conscious actors who bring emotional support, social capital, advocacy and transnational knowledge to crisis response. Recognizing these diverse forms of mobilisation in policy, research, and public discourse offers a new horizon for how researchers, policymakers and humanitarian organisations engage with diaspora communities.

This post reflects discussions from the community gathering organised as part of the LDE-GMD Seed Fund ‘Beyond Remittances: Diasporic Aid during Times of Crisis’, held on 7 June 2026 in Rotterdam. We are deeply grateful to every participant who attended in representation of their communities and homeland. 

 

References 

Brun, C. and Horst, C. (2023) “Towards a Conceptualisation of Relational Humanitarianism,” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 5(1), pp. 62–72. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7227/JHA.103. 

Gamlen, A. and Chakma, A. (2025) “Trusted intermediaries? The role of diasporas in humanitarian assistance,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 117. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105212. 

Gardner, Katy. 2018. ‘“Our Own Poor”: Transnational charity, development gifts, and the politics of suffering in Sylhet and the UK. Modern Asian Studies 52 (1), 163–185. 

Levitt, P. (1998) “Social Remittances: Migration Driven Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion,” The International Migration Review, 32(4), pp. 926–948. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2547666. 

Rejón, R. et al. (2025) “Diaspora Humanitarians: How Diaspora Communities Respond to Humanitarian Crises,” VOLUNTAS: 

International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations : Official journal of the International Society for Third-Sector Research, 36(2), pp. 191–203. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-024-00707-x 

About the authors:

Gabriela_Villacis

Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo is an Ecuadorian researcher and lecturer with a PhD in Development Studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work examines humanitarian governance, feminist politics, and human mobility, with a focus on Latin America. She has over thirteen years of experience across academia, government, and civil society.

Haya Alfarra is pictured with a blue sweater and glasses

Haya AlFarra is a Palestinian part-time External PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University. Her research focuses on diaspora, diaspora engagement, diaspora humanitarianism, humanitarianism, medical humanitarian assistance, and Palestine.

All opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s own, and are not necessarily representative of BLISS, the International Institute of Social Studies, or Erasmus University Rotterdam. Please use generative AI tools with care.

Reflecting on a security and risk management course in humanitarian contexts: ‘there is never only one story’

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In this reflection blog, Agostino Luisetti, a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, recounts a three-day course on Safety and Security for Researchers in Humanitarian Contexts, led by the Safety & Security Research Initiative, at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and what it taught him about doing humanitarian and academic research.

Image by Juan Rojas https://www.pexels.com/@24302738/

I came to the Universidad de los Andes for a course on security and risk management for fieldwork, and what struck me first was the room itself. Around the table sat people that had worked across many parts of the world: humanitarian practitioners and academics, security experts, anthropologists, human rights lawyers, and Indigenous activists. I am a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, still early in my own fieldwork, and I had the rare luck of learning alongside people who already had so much lived experience.

I had come expecting do’s and don’ts. Yet what Dr. Rodrigo Mena, who teaches the course, offered us instead, through the Safety and Security Research Initiative (SSRi), was a space of reflection, one that interrogated some of the things we usually take for granted.

Much of what is written for researchers completing ‘fieldwork’ concentrates on getting there safely. The encounter itself, and what comes after we return, receive far less attention, and closing that gap was part of what the course set out to do. Official protocols from NGOs or institutions get us to ‘the field’, but they say little about the moment we sit face to face with someone who has survived something terrible. How do I interview a person carrying trauma without inflicting further harm? How do I know that what they tell me is “true”? As we discussed in the course, memory is not a filing cabinet. Under distress, people recall events out of sequence, anchored to a smell or a sound rather than a clean timeline; pressed to produce a linear story, they may construct one, and the tidy account I write down may be the least reliable of all. As we were reminded, there is never only one story, and in areas affected by conflict or disaster, where rumour spreads and distrust runs high, that notion should make us more cautious about the accounts we gather.

What I also learnt is that when working in conflict or disaster-stricken areas, nothing we touch is neutral. As feminist scholarship has long argued, no knowledge is ever produced from nowhere: our perspective is always situated, partial and positioned. Not the conflicts and disasters we study, and not the data we collect. We arrive under pressure from our institutions to “obtain data,” and this economy of information can itself become a source of harm, especially to communities that are already vulnerable. We tend to frame our work as a “research problem”, but to name something a problem is already to treat the people involved as something to be solved. Everyone wants to be ethical; the harder question, and the one the course kept returning to, is how we operationalise that intention without causing harm.

During our work, the term “ethical” was brought down to earth: not a box to tick before departure, but a constant iterative and reflexive practice of not creating risk or harm for others, and of accepting that even transparency is never fully within our reach. What we were reminded throughout the three days was that to enter another person’s world as a researcher is a privilege, not a right, and the ethical and security dilemmas that come with it are simply the price of that privilege.

Dr. Mena also taught us that saying “no”, for example by choosing not to go somewhere when we judge the conditions unsafe, is itself a privilege many of our interlocutors do not have. This was particularly interesting to me because of my background in journalism, where we are often quick to claim the authority of “having been there”. Yet what does it really mean to say I went, and how much should it license me to say afterwards?

As I reflect on these days, one particular sentence has stuck with me, bouncing around in my head: “it is not what we do, but what we are perceived to be doing”. My relationship, as a foreigner working in a given context only temporarily, with any person in any place can put my local colleagues at risk long after I have flown home. This is because risk is transversal: it touches drivers, translators, hosts, families. Practices around “localisation” can themselves become a form of risk transfer, where a large organisation, through its work, delegates the danger to a local partner. As international researchers we can always leave; yet what do we leave behind?

Several other things stayed with me from these three, intense days. We rehearsed with our bodies: we practised where to sit during transport and where to leave a bag if riding on a bus, so we could move quickly in an emergency, and we learnt the difference between safety and security, the first being protection from an involuntary accident, the second protection from a deliberate attack. We spoke about mental health, about aggression in its different forms, and about whether, in a high risk situation, we freeze, fight or flee. We also learnt to treat our digital footprint as part of the risk picture: working with sensitive information across borders, every click is traceable, so we were urged to think before connecting and before clicking.

We closed with a final exercise that I won’t give away, both because it deserves to be met without warning and because that is part of its lesson. What I can say is that the only way through it was to communicate, to stay present, attentive, human, caring. When it ended, my colleagues applauded, and after days spent on such sensitive subjects I felt something I had not expected: joy, and a real sense of community. It became my metaphor for the whole course, the moment a blindfold lifts and the room fills with light. Though I came in as the least experienced person in the room, I left certain that this was the work I wanted to do.

In a world driven by extraction and disregard for the other, too often rewarded by those in power, this course reminded me that there are still many who want to do humanitarian and academic work diligently and with care. The security precautions we take are the least we can offer. In exchange, we are trusted with the greatest gift of all: other people’s stories and experiences. It is up to us to put ourselves in the best position to do no harm, to ourselves and, most importantly, to those who make our work possible.

 

About the author

Agostino Luisetti is a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with a background in journalism. His research focuses on international NGOs construct and negotiate their authority across different governance contexts, with a particular interest in the North/South dynamics of the global aid sector.

Imaginary Mexico and the illusion of the digital nomad

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Man sits on cliff and looks out at ocean as he types on his laptop

As digital nomads become increasingly visible in cities around the world, they are often cast as the face of gentrification and rising housing costs. Yet focusing on the individual may obscure the broader forces reshaping urban life. In this blog, ISS PhD candidate Alberto Estrada Mares draws on fieldwork in Mexico City to examine how competing visions of the city shape experiences of belonging, exclusion and urban transformation. 

Man sits on cliff and looks out at ocean as he types on his laptop
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

‘Gringo, go home!’ was the chant that echoed through the streets of Mexico City during the 2025 protests against skyrocketing rents, casting digital nomads as the villains behind gentrification. But are they really the architects of this phenomenon, or are they, rather, symptoms of a failed and deeply unequal vision of the city? 

This conflict can be understood as a modern clash between what the Mexican ethnographer Guillermo Bonfil termed México Imaginario (Imaginary Mexico) – a Eurocentric, racialized and capitalist modernization project imposed by the elites – and México Profundo (Deep Mexico), which unites communities, local knowledge and economies beyond ethnicity that form the social fabric and historicity of urban space.  

A city divided between imagination and reality 

My fieldwork in Roma and Condesa reveals that this dichotomy has taken on a clear spatial form: a city divided between the periphery (the deep) and center (the imaginary), where central neighbourhoods have been subjected to extreme commodification and reconfigured into hubs of ‘creative tourism’ designed to attract global capital and a transnational creative class. The result is a carefully curated landscape of minimalist cafés, boutique hotels and short-term rental platforms.  

In this environment, the traditional taco stand or neighbourhood market does not simply coexist with this transformation. It is also forced to ‘refine’ its offerings – from adjusting the spiciness of its sauces to aestheticizing its products to meet the demands of a new transnational consumer of the space. Viewed through this lens, the local does not disappear by chance, but rather transforms to fit into the ecosystem that the imagined Mexico tailors for the transnational consumer, now embodied in the digital nomad.  

The paradox of the digital nomad 

For the digital nomad, the México Imaginario initially appears attractive. In my conversations with them, the narratives recur: they describe Mexico City as a ‘vibrant’ and ‘affordable’ place, a destination that offers a higher quality of life than other cities in the Global South. Tourist status   allows them temporary stays of up to stay for six months, often renewable on a routine basis.  

Yet, the same forces that make the city attractive also expose the limits of their position. Rooted in the commodification and aestheticization of spaces and services, México Imaginario ultimately confronts digital nomads with rising costs and increasing competition for housing. Paradoxically, a sense of displacement emerges in these conversations. Many report that securing a fixed accommodation in central neighbourhoods for their temporary stay has become nearly impossible due to recent price hikes that were accerlerated by the pandemic. As a result, they are forced to constantly move between Airbnbs and, in most cases, to the outskirts of Roma and Condesa.  

This raises a counterintuitive question that is even strange to ask: is it possible for the gentrifier to feel gentrified?  

Answering this question requires dismantling the conception of the digital nomad as a subject of absolute privilege. Rather, they can be understood as a middle-class worker from the Global North whose privilege is relative. Their ability to inhabit the city is subject to the same market volatility that they themselves help to fuel. Their position of privilege is, above all, relational. 

When belonging becomes a privilege 

Within this urban reconfiguration, tensions emerge within the local population. While some groups align themselves with the narrative of the México Imaginario, validating these transformations as a ‘natural’ evolution toward a global city, the  México Profundo perceives them as an exclusionary frontier. For those who have historically lived in these neighbourhoods or commute from the outskirts to keep them running, gentrification does not symbolize progress but rather a slow expulsion.  

A service infrastructure has emerged that functions as a sociomaterial boundary. Local residents are allowed to move about and work within them, but denied the right to live there. When even a cup of coffee costs a significant share of the minimum wage – let alone the cost of housing – consumption ceases to be a choice and becomes a mechanism of social and spatial segregation.  

This logic alters the social function of the neighbourhood. Public space, once a place of gathering and memory, is replaced and mediated by nodes of private consumption. Under this dynamic, access to centrality becomes a restricted privilege, with purchasing power determining who has the right to belong. Thus, the local worker is turned into a stranger in their own neighbourhood, stripped not only of their home but also of the networks and knowledge that gave their presence meaning. 

Who is the city really for? 

An inevitable question arises. Although it may seem tautological, it must be asked: if México Imaginario ultimately makes it unsustainable for those it seeks to attract to remain, while simultaneously displacing those who make the city function, then for whom is this city really being built?  

Perhaps the question does not seek a novel answer but points to the obvious. This model was not designed to be lived in but to be capitalized on. Its benefits do not lie in the well-being of its inhabitants – neither the local nor the nomad – but in the profitability of the urban space itself. The figure of the villain fades away. The digital nomad is merely a symptom of a city that has ceased to be inhabited and has become a financial asset. 

About the author:

Alberto Estrada is a PhD researcher originally from Guadalajara, Mexico. He is part of the Migration, Im/mobilities and Place research group, working at the intersection of urban development, migration, and socio-spatial inequalities. His research focuses on the politics of migration and urban development, examining their effects on place-making and mobility opportunities, with a primary emphasis on Latin American contexts.

All opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s own, and are not necessarily representative of BLISS, the International Institute of Social Studies, or Erasmus University Rotterdam. Please use generative AI tools with care.

The Silent Exhaustion of the Global Talent Race in CEE Nations

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In the global competition for innovation, the ‘attraction of high-skilled labor’ in countries like Slovakia might still be dictated by the friction of administrative inertia. By recounting his own experience as a South American researcher navigating a postdoctoral offer in Bratislava, Dr Jorge Mantilla’s PACES Perspectives blog illustrates how analog bureaucracy – from ‘wet ink’ requirements to linguistic gaps – remains an important and often invisible barrier to attracting certain groups of high-skilled migrants.

The promise of highly-skilled migration

The way some academic theories frame the attraction of high-skilled labor can be metaphorically compared to a magnet pulling steel filings across a map. For a nation like Slovakia, the narrative is seductive: by importing specialized minds, the country can fast-track its evolution into a global hub for innovation. But in practice, the magnet of policy often hits the lead wall of administration. I should know. I was the kind of ‘talent’ the rhetoric seeks to attract, only to find that the distance between a signed contract and a postdoctoral position in Bratislava isn’t measured in kilometers, but in grams of paper.

When talent meets bureaucracy

I am a researcher from South America. Not long ago, I was offered a position at a prestigious institution in Bratislava. When the contract arrived, we agreed on a start date six months away – certainly enough time to navigate the visa process, or so I thought. In hindsight, it might have been a conclusion born out of naive optimism.

I’ve never been convinced that a PhD is a reliable proxy for intelligence; if anything, it is a measure of one’s stamina for specialized minutiae. Yet, even with a career built on navigating complex social systems, I found myself profoundly underqualified to decode the mechanics of obtaining a Slovak work permit and visa. There is a specific kind of intellectual humility that comes from realizing that a research degree offers no protection against a process that is complex and emotionally taxing.

A maze of paperwork

Consider, for instance, the criminal record requirement. It sounds simple for someone who has never so much as received a parking ticket. However, in an era where I can authorize a bank transfer with a thumbprint, I instead entered a circular odyssey of ‘wet ink’ requirements. The formula was a bureaucratic triathlon: obtain the physical record, secure an Apostille, locate one of the few certified Slovak translators in the region and coordinate a DHL delivery across a continent.

This cycle can take weeks, even a month. A dangerous timeline, considering these documents have an expiration date. Between translation errors and expiration dates, I found myself repeating this process three times, watching the calendar bleed out.

Distance, language and friction

Then came the geographical and linguistic hurdles. For a researcher in my country, the nearest Slovak embassy is in Brasilia, a mere 4,000 kilometers away. Usually, this requires two separate trips: one for the interview and another to retrieve the passport. Yet, distance was less of a hurdle than the prose.

When I sought clarification on the process, the embassy’s replies arrived as a bewildering linguistic chimera. There is a profound irony in the fact that I, a native Spanish speaker, had to resort to ChatGPT to decipher some words that were, in theory, written in my own tongue. It turned out the language was a confusing hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese.

As our correspondence continued, the tone shifted from cryptic to curt, then from curt to rough. Eventually, the friction was so high that I asked my host institution to intervene through Euraxess – a European researcher mobility network – to act as a buffer. This might underscore a central theme in academic research: Migration decisions are not made in a vacuum of logic; they are made in a crucible of stress. When the bureaucratic apparatus appears hostile before you even arrive, the ‘attraction’ in talent attraction begins to evaporate.

When opportunity collapses

The final blow wasn’t a ‘No’ but a ‘Not now’. With my documents finally secured and flights booked, I requested the final interview. I had been told previously that these were scheduled within a week. This time, however, the response was a shuttered window: the embassy staff was on a mission. The wait for a date would be months. The clock didn’t just run out; it stopped. As the psychological and financial toll mounted, I realized the opportunity had lost its luster. In the end, I chose the only logical path left: I didn’t go.

I don’t believe my story is a mere tale of bad luck; it is mainly about public policy implementation. When high-skilled migration is treated as an endurance test, the host nation rarely wins the race. One can only hope that, in the future, the administrative reality in Slovakia will rise to match the global ambitions of its prestigious universities and research centers.

The PACES project is 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

Dr Jorge Mantilla is an anthropologist and researcher specializing in migration, social trust and intercultural dynamics, with extensive experience in ethnographic and mixed-methods research across Latin America and Europe. His work connects academic research with policy through collaborations with international and development organizations.

Bridging climate change and disaster scholarship

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A long-standing debate has emphasised the need to move beyond explanations of disasters that focus on hazards and instead to focus on vulnerability in order to show how hazards become disasters. Climate discourse is reintroducing an emphasis on hazards, much to the frustration of disaster scholars. However, Hyeonggeun Ji (PhD researcher at the ISS) and Douwe van Schie (PhD researcher at the University of Bonn) argue that a divide between the hazard and vulnerability paradigms exists in both fields, and that bringing together critical vulnerability scholars from disaster and climate studies is essential for understanding and addressing contemporary climate-related disasters.

Against the hazard paradigm

In 1942, the geographer Gilbert White wrote that ‘floods are “acts of God”, but flood losses are largely acts of man’. Even then, when disaster studies had only just begun to emerge as an organised discipline, scholars understood that disasters were embedded in social structures rather than simply natural events. Yet in the decades that followed, the idea that disasters are unexpected natural shocks that occur outside of society became dominant. In response, disaster scholars argued for an alternative paradigm that framed disasters in broader structural terms.

 

A significant contribution to this shift was the 1983 edited volume Interpretations of Calamity: from the viewpoint of human ecology. In its first chapter, Kenneth Hewitt critiques the dominant view’s “invented geographical vision” that ignores the deep social roots of disasters. He argues that this perspective, which is “unashamedly indifferent to history”, serves the interests of powerful institutions by absolving them from responsibility. From a political-economy angle, other contributors further show how historical processes within a capitalist system create disaster vulnerability. This vulnerability focus was further strengthened by the 1994 book At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, which introduced the “Pressure and Release Model”. Central to the models is a “progression of vulnerability”. It shows how root causes of vulnerability are deeply embedded in societal forces, such as neoliberalism and (neo)colonialism. These forces translate into dynamic pressures, which are more immediate manifestations that end up creating unsafe conditions: more direct expressions of population’s vulnerability. A disaster only occurs when these unsafe conditions meet a hazard. With the help of this influential model, At Risk firmly established vulnerability as central to understanding disasters.

A return of the hazard paradigm

Over time, vulnerability has become a convoluted concept, used differently by different institutions. The concept has also found a new life within climate discourse, especially that of climate change adaptation and, more recently, loss and damage. Yet in the 2022 edited volume Why Vulnerability Still Matters, several scholars who made fundamental contributions to the early vulnerability-centred perspective argue that climate discourse has shifted attention away from vulnerability. They voice a wider frustration that major climate institutions, such as the United Framework Convention on Climate Change and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, promote a hazard-centred perspective similar to the dominant view that disaster scholars worked hard to counter. Indeed, when re-examining the Pressure and Release model in light of climate change, the hazard side is changing considerably, influencing the temporality and intensity of disasters.

The vulnerability perspective does not deny these changes. Rather, vulnerability scholars challenge the uncritical interpretation that regards shifts in the patterns of hazards through climate change as equivalent to shifts in the patterns of disasters. Such a climate reductionist view diverts the attention of researchers, practitioners and policymakers away from vulnerability, promoting the language like ‘climate-induced’ rather than ‘climate-related’ disasters. Such framings lead back to asocial explanations that absolve institutions of responsibility and encourage technocratic fixes that fail to address root causes of (climate-related) disasters.

Vulnerability across divides

The gap between disaster studies and climate change research in understanding climate-related disasters can be seen as a step backward, driven by limited engagement between the two fields. This lack of engagement risks reinventing the wheel instead of building on decades of advancements within disaster studies. The frustration from disaster scholars of climate change discourse in failing to deeply engage with the concept of vulnerability is then completely understandable. However, placing disaster research neatly in the vulnerability paradigm and climate research in the hazard paradigm would be too simplistic. Neither epistemic system is homogeneous. Disaster risk reduction often still overlooks vulnerability and global disaster governance still leans toward technocratic hazard-focused solutions. Indeed, the hazard-focussed paradigm has never completely disappeared. At the same time, some climate scholarship — including works like as The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation and Misreading the Bengal Delta — build on and further the critical perspectives that inspired the early critical disaster scholarship. Indeed, while disaster scholars have sought to advance socially and politically informed disaster analysis, some climate change scholars have likewise endeavoured to unpack the structural and epistemic dimensions of vulnerability that influence climate impacts, paying specific attention to the new challenges introduced by climate change.

 

Therefore, the biggest epistemic rift is not between the two discourses — that of disasters and climate change — but between the hazard and vulnerability paradigms that splits both. In both fields, scholars are challenging the persistently dominant paradigm of hazards. Their efforts deepen the social and political dimensions of climate change beyond a reductionist emphasis on hazards. To foster this approach against simplistic views, researchers engaged in both climate change and disaster studies must collaborate on the basis of in-depth knowledge of vulnerability that bridges their respective analytical traditions. To some extent, this is already happening. Disaster researchers have advanced conceptual clarity on the role of climate change in disaster risk reduction by theorising climate change as a driver of both hazards and vulnerabilities. Likewise, climate change researchers have produced empirical evidence on the politics of climate change through the lens of vulnerability. See, for instance, this manuscript examining the weaponizing vulnerability call for policy attention on that climate change interventions can reinforce the security of already advantaged groups while deepening the precarity of marginalised ones.

Building bridges

Although these examples have demonstrated that vulnerability theory advances our sociological understanding of (climate-related) disasters and show that vulnerability cannot be analytically separated from the study of climate change, the integration of socio-political understandings of disasters into climate change research remains limited. All too often, scholars are still working within parallel research trajectories. As a result, climate policy — which is crucial in ensuring just futures — is not effectively informed. Instead, climate researchers should enhance their social and political understandings of disasters by engaging with fundamental works such as Interpretations and At Risk. This evokes several questions: Why does the vulnerability perspective remain scant within current climate change policy and practice? (How) have disaster and climate change researchers collaborated to engage more closely with climate policy discourse? What forms of collaboration are required to reclaim vulnerability within the discussions of researchers, decision-makers and practitioners in the climate change sector? Because, as international disaster risk policy has advanced through the accumulation of knowledge on vulnerability, the formulation of critical climate policy likewise requires a socially and politically informed understanding of climate change.

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

About the authors:

Douwe van Schie currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on social inequality and Loss and damage within Suriname and global climate negotiations.
Hyeonggeun Ji is currently pursuing his PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). His research focuses on humanitarian governance for climate-related displacement in Bangladesh.
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Unlearning Colonial Analytics: Rethinking Women in ‘Conservatism’

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In this blog, ISS Alumna, Tia Isti’anah invites us to rethink beyond the binary label of conservatism vs progressive. Drawing from decolonial feminist thinkers, it challenges the secular-liberal feminist moral world and invites readers to centre love as an act of unlearned colonial biases.

 

Image from Harmonia Pictura from Pixabay

In 2020, I was doing research with Yayasan Rumah Kita Bersama in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia. I remember that I perceived women who joined the Islamic teaching in ‘conservative’ mosques as victims of religious doctrine. I had some categories for what I call ‘conservative’ mosques; the ones that called themselves ‘salafi’ or ‘manhanji’ and the ones whose women used the big veil which covers their shoulders and chest.

In one of these mosques, I talked to women who refused to work after getting married because they were worried about the ‘ikhtilat’. Ikhtilat refers to the gathering, mixing and intermingling of men and women in one place. I whispered to myself about how this kind of tafsir (explanation or exegesis) limits women from doing what they want. One woman I met even refused to use online booking services for transportation because it could result in her being alone with a man, although the public transportation in that area (Cikarang, Bekasi) was difficult to find. When I also joined the Islamic studies for this research in one of the mosques in Bekasi, I saw that women could only ask questions on paper by writing it down and giving it to the committee, while men could raise their hand and speak directly to the speaker in front of the audience.

As a woman who grew up in a traditional Islamic family and school, I often experienced the Islamic tafsir that justifies patriarchy and I remember feeling angry and confused listening to it. That experience made me feel the urge to save women who follow ‘conservative’ Islamic teaching which I thought of as patriarchal. This is also the reason why I am actively involved in the Islamic feminist movement in Indonesia.

Later, I found out that my analysis of putting women who accepted ‘conservatism’ teaching as merely a victim of religious doctrine is a colonial and binary approach. Chandra Talpade Mohanty called this kind of analysis a commodification and appropriation of knowledge about women in third-world countries, where we pack them as one category: oppressed, dependent and powerless, without allowing them to speak for themselves. This objectification or analysis, however, has been used by many Western and middle-class African or Asian scholars for their rural and working-class sisters. Sabaa Mahmood book’s Politics of Piety, which is the result of her anthropological research in Egypt with pious women, can be used as an entry point to unlearn this colonial analytical category and challenge secular-liberal feminist analysis. She invites us to see religious practices in their own terms, not through the eyes of other moral values.

Unlearning colonial categorization

Mahmood’s work is important because it challenges the secular-liberal feminist approach, which is obsessed with individual freedom or free will. This obsession with the norm of individual freedom stems from a secular-liberal feminist approach, which is rooted in Western history. Individual freedom, however, is inadequate for understanding the reality of pious women in Egypt, the women with whom Mahmood conducted her research. Pious women in Egypt are living in communities with significantly different norms than women in Western countries. Mahmood saw that their life goal was not individual freedom or free will, but striving for piety by following the Prophet Muhammad’s example.

I reflected on this during my own research in Bekasi. I assumed that women following ‘conservative’ teaching are backwards and in need of being saved. I thought that the ‘conservative’ Islamic doctrine, such as ‘ikhtilat’ limits their freedom.  I also considered women having to ask questions in writing in Islamic teaching as a sign of subordination, especially when the same rules do not bind men. In fact, my analysis mirrored what Maria Lazreg calls reductionism, where religion is assumed to be the main reason for gender inequality or patriarchy. By assuming this in my analysis, as Saba Mahmood mentioned in her book, I denied other realities and factors of patriarchy. This also made me reject another reality about women in Islamic teaching –  the reality that what they strive for is not about individual freedom but about striving to embody piety modelled after the Prophet Muhammad.

Mahmood’s work generated criticism, for example that the celebration of pious agency, if taken too far, could risk romanticizing the power of domination and denying the structure that is often imposed by those in power. However, her argument allows us to pause before putting other women (who, borrowing from Mohanty, are actually our sisters in struggle) in the oppressed, dependent, powerless and backward category box.

Decolonial Calling

Maria Lugones, a decolonial feminist, argued that even the gender system itself is colonial, as is the very definition of gender-oppressive. Moreover, she deepened this conversation by inviting us to practice playful ‘world‘ travelling by moving to each other’s ‘world’ with a loving rather than an arrogant eye. A world, as I understand from Lugones, is characterized as being inhabited by flesh and blood people, where meaning, ideas, construction and relationships are organized in particular ways. Loving here means that we see with their eyes, that we go to their world, see how both of us are constructed in their world, and witness their own sense of selves from their world. Only by travelling to their world can we see them as subjects and identify with them because we are not excluded and separate from them.

This made it clear to me that I have failed to love women who joined the ‘conservative’ Islamic teaching. Instead, I looked at them arrogantly, seeing them as victims and as oppressed women, while at the same time seeing myself as an educated woman who has become enlightened. I failed to understand how women in ‘conservative’ teaching see themselves within their values and their world. I failed to meet women where they are, not where I assumed they should be. I failed to see their own ways of making meaning, but rather saw them through the lens of me, who was already brainwashed by the idea of individual freedom as the only valid goal in life. By travelling to other women’s worlds, we are not necessarily endorsing what they believe, but rather learning to see their world.

Looking back, I realize that Lugones’s framework has helped me embrace contradictions and differences, to live with a loving way of being. I might not always agree with what people believe but I now try to love them. I think of a friend in Iran who is forced to wear a hijab. Because of that, she hates how religion is used as a tool to discriminate against those who are different. Her story is real and painful. Yet, by travelling to the other women’s world, I also find women who find their meaning and purpose in life from the same moral universe my friend rejects: ‘conservative’ Islam. Decolonial feminists remind us to see the plurality of women’s worlds; worlds that cannot be looked at through one single lens, especially not the lens of Western domination and power.  The journey has humbled me, enabled me to unlearn what I thought I knew ,and relearn seriously from the wisdom of other women’s worlds who are different from mine – how they seek meaning, resilience, and dignity.

 

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

About the author:

Tia Isti’anah

Tia Isti’anah is a freelance writer/researcher. She is an alumna of International Institute of Social Studies. Some of her writings can be found here: https://linktr.ee/tia.istianah (mostly in Indonesia language). Connect professionally here: www.linkedin.com/in/tia-istianah

 

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Reset how? A commentary on ‘The Humanitarian Reset’ by members of the Humanitarian Observatories Network

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‘The Humanitarian Reset’ is an initiative launched in March 2025 by the (at the time) new UNOCHA Emergency Relief Coordinator, former British diplomat Tom Fletcher. According to the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee, it is a ‘collective effort to deliver for people in crisis today while building a system fit for tomorrow. The Humanitarian Reset is about making our system faster, lighter, more accountable, and more impactful.’ The initiative combines several sub-projects, including trying to stimulate localization, creating “sharpened” country plans, finding “efficiencies”, and advocacy.

But is this really a true ‘reset’? And for whom is the system being ‘reset’? Similar promises were made following the World Humanitarian Summit and associated ‘Grand Bargain’ in 2016, but  these initiatives were characterized as top-down, and in some cases quite removed from the daily lived realities of people affected by crisis, and the people and organizations that respond to crisis.

Photo Credit:  Baset Alhasan

This blog follows a discussion held by members of the Humanitarian Observatory movement: a network of 16 grounded, self-governing, and multi-actor spaces that aim to foster humanitarian knowledge sharing, research, advocacy, coordination, and dialogue. During the Observatory Network meeting in October 2025, held in Istanbul in the lead-up to the IHSA Conference, more than 25 people representing 16 Observatories discussed the ‘Humanitarian Reset’ (split into groups), critically analysing its relevance in the real world and imagining a more relevant a poignant reset. This meditation on the Reset joins several others, including a statement by NEAR Network, ICVA, and even a recently-released think piece by the CHA thinktank in Berlin heralding the ‘fading’ of the Reset.

This blog is based on those discussions, with three main themes having emerged:

Theme 1: A Humanitarian Reset focusing only on better responses is partial

Across multiple groups, Network members discussed a perceived focus only on making humanitarian response better within the Humanitarian Reset. Multiple groups highlighted the need for a more holistic and long-term approach to humanitarian action if the Reset was to be made more relevant. This approach should be cognizant of and try to combat past historical injustices that have affected how people in various contexts are able to ‘deal with’ humanitarian crisis: “we should focus on the structural and historical issues, including everyday threats to people’s lives”, and “a lot of crises are structural and based in power and historical structures.” It was felt across various groups that formal humanitarianism focusing only on responding to disasters is missing quite a lot of ingrained and historically-related precarity that affects people’s day-to-day lives more than technical disaster response improvement does.

Meanwhile, multiple groups also highlighted that with the ever-growing effects of climate change leading to a “permanent state of emergency”, the nature of humanitarianism is changing and thus the Reset should consider taking a different and more cyclical approach: “Why is the current system not working? It is designed for quick fixes and emergency management”. In general, the groups saw a lack of attention in the Reset documents and discourse around Disaster Risk Reduction, Anticipatory Action, and other longer-term projects and initiatives that try to reduce people and societies’ vulnerabilities. One contributor quipped that the Reset seems to be trying to make the formal humanitarian system more resilient to funding cuts, rather than making societies more resilient to disasters; especially due to its call for ‘hyper prioritisation’.

Theme 2: The Humanitarian Reset should pay attention to a wider range of actors as being part of the ‘humanitarian system’

Across all discussions, Observatory Network members highlighted that the Humanitarian Reset seems to spend too much time focusing on the work of the ‘formal’ humanitarian system; for example iNGOs, UN Agencies, and some national organisations (depending on the context). This leads to a partial definition of ‘who’ and ‘what’ needs to be ‘reset’, and also reduces the transferability of its proposed changes. The focus on the international organisations leading local also led to discussions on the Reset as a form of neo-coloniality.

For example, several groups highlighted that the Reset up until this point has not particularly engaged with state actors, which are becoming ever-more pertinent humanitarian actors (or: actors with humanitarian aid roles), and especially with reference to slower-moving crises caused by climate change, such as extreme heat. The axing of most USAID programmes in early 2025 underlined this experience in Namibia: “it was a wake up call to the government, to work on its own and sustain its own people. This is something of a positive, it has helped push the government to provide for its communities… there is a new youth empowerment programme, whether the government is giving funding for young people to start up projects.” Meanwhile in  South Asia, colleagues found that following USAID cuts they could pivot to work with affected people to define their own recovery from disaster (in this instance, extreme heat).

HO Network members brought attention to the point that most of the actors addressed by the Humanitarian Reset’s priorities are part of the established or ‘formal’ humanitarian system: “I haven’t really seen any region where the reset is happening or being driven by people on the ground. It is very top down”, and “most of the humanitarian [work] is coming from the North to the South, and this is part of the problem.” One group brought up the continuing presence of UN Agencies as being the main funding channels as an example that the approach taken in the Reset is unnecessarily narrow. The impression for many members of the Network is that the reset is a Global North-led initiative, that hasn’t really begun to approach shifting the centre of humanitarian work from its historic headquarters. In Kenya, for example, despite its ambitions, Reset-led initiatives it have not yet demonstrated a meaningful shift toward locally led decision-making or recognising the leadership of actors responding to climate-related crises, especially in the Kenyan arid/semi-arid regions. This theme also raised questions about accountability: you cannot genuinely reset a system if governments (and the donors supporting that system) do not feel accountable for causing the conflict or crisis (e.g. in Palestine and Sudan).

However, many of the groups did note that the number of people and organisations doing humanitarian work is broadening as a response to their context. Trends highlighted include several donors (for example, Gulf Donors) preferring to channel their funds directly to local or national actors.

Theme 3: A Humanitarian Reset cannot be ‘one size fits all’, and should be contextual

“We need to break down the universalism of the humanitarian system, as there are multiple humanitarian systems in place”. Many members of the Observatory Network observed that assumptions of universal applicability of many humanitarian reform initiatives hamper actual, real-world reform. Several people also highlighted that the language of humanitarianism used in many of the Reset documentation is not an accurate reflection of most people’s lived realities, and drew parallels to HDP Nexus initiatives: “it is now becoming detached from reality, and is becoming only useful for donors.” It is also important to highlight that a universal attempt to reform the humanitarian system minimises the differences in how change happens in diverse contexts. For example, in DRC, Network members noted that change will require bringing together national Civil Society organisations, not just (i)NGOs. “In our experience, changes are not linear. It is like a farmer; you plant seeds and wait. Something is happening [under the surface], but it is hard to see each step.” Meanwhile, the more diverse and plural the reset, the more effective it is likely to be in South Asia. Standardization is useful, and as a start, to lead to many local blooming of reset that is harmonized, localized, and contextualised.

Other takeaways

Within the group, several people noted that the Humanitarian Reset documents and statements mention further collaboration with the Private Sector as a way to increase efficiencies, funding, and broaden service provision. Whilst participants generally mentioned the potential possibilities of (further) Private Sector inclusion in humanitarian aid provision, for example by allowing displaced people living in Thailand to work in the private sector, obtain a wage, and live with more dignity, many sounded cautionary notes:

In India there is a discussion that there is a huge focus on corporate organisations taking humanitarian action. A lot of privatisation is taking place. A lot of monetisation is taking place in the name of cash transfers. The victims are not seen as victims, but as a potential workforce. HOISA finds that Reset must move from this ahead to make each victim an agent of new, safe, and less at risk community and nation with the help of the authorities and corporations as soon as possible.

In Kenya, meanwhile, there are discussions within the observatory network that increasing private sector involvement in drought response and climate services, while useful in some cases, is also creating concerns. In several contexts, essential services risk becoming commercialised, with vulnerable households treated more as customers than rights-holders. Hence, the need for safeguards to ensure that private sector engagement supports resilience rather than deepening existing inequalities.

In general participants also called attention to issues with “hyper prioritization”, which may lead to humanitarians having to make choices between contexts undergoing moderate severity crisis versus high severity crisis, with one participant saying that the approach might lead to “not providing food aid to the hungry, to allow provision to the starving”.

Conclusion – Reset how?

The Humanitarian Reset has the same potential as other reform initiatives led by the UN (as one participant highlighted: “this isn’t a new initiative”) including the Grand Bargain, but it might be better for the UN to take a more introspective look and propose reform, for example via the UN80 initiative. Within the Reset, there is a lot of talking happening, but this risks of becoming performative, rather then genuine transformation and meaningful action. Unfortunately, the Reset’s narrow focus in several ways means that it is likely to be a tool for funders and institutions that consider themselves part of the ‘formal’ humanitarian system. Indeed, several people highlighted that the slashing of USAID funding and programming caused bigger on the ground shifts due to necessity. Whilst there are new developments in multiple humanitarian contexts, including bigger roles for local/national organisations, inclusion of networks and citizens’ groupings in programming, and new forms of funding – these are happening at the same time as the Humanitarian Reset, not as a result of it.

This blog was written with contributions from:

  • Humanitarian Observatory DRC
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Ethiopia
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Palestine
  • Humanitarian Observatory of the Netherlands
  • Humanitarian Observatory Initiative South Asia (HOISA)
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Namibia
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Kenya
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Central and Eastern Europe
  • Humanitarian Observatory for Policy and Education, South East Asia (HOPESEA)
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Nigeria
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Myanmar
  • Humanitarian Observatory of Somalia
  • Humanitarian Observatory of the Philippines
  • Maraka Humanitarian Observatory of Pakistan

 

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

The Authors:

Mihir Bhatt (AIDMI), Juan Ricardo Aparicio Cuervo (Uni. Los Andes), Eunice Atieno (ORNACO), Patrick Milabyo Kyamugusulwa (ISDR-Bukavu), Julia Goltermann (KUNO), Tom Ansell (HSC-ISS), Kaira Zoe Canete (HSC-ISS), Gabriela Anderson (HSC-ISS) 

 

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This blog is part of the ‘Humanitarian Observatories: Building a Knowledge and Advocacy Network on Humanitarian Governance’. This project has received funding from the European Union under the Horizon European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Politics of Food and Technology Series | Food crisis in the UK and the digitalisation of welfare: Bridging gaps or deepening marginalisation?

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

In this blog, Iris Lim, Susanne Jaspars, and Yasmin Houamed (SOAS) highlight  a growing food crisis in the UK, alongside a ‘digital-by-default’ welfare transformation. Digitalisation has created the potential to exclude poor and politically marginalised populations because they are unable to pay for digital access, and because of the way the system has been designed. They argue that this exacerbates already existing food insecurity and that digital access is fundamental to addressing it.  

 

Over the last decade, the UK’s deepening food crisis has unfolded alongside a ‘digital-by-default’ transformation of welfare and food support infrastructures.  Over this period, food insecurity has increased to as much as 18% of the UK population (in 2022). Emergency food distribution, almost unknown a decade ago, has soared, with Trussell, one of the UK’s largest food bank networks, distributing 2.9 million emergency food parcels in 2024-25, the equivalent of one parcel every 11 seconds. Policymakers routinely justify digitalisation for reasons of efficiency and accountability, but in this blog, we show how it redistributes responsibility and burden downward onto those already experiencing deprivation and food insecurity and deepens exclusions for those that need welfare the most across England. For a wide range of population groups (for example refugees, migrants, or white working class), design and delivery choices shape who gets help and who falls through the cracks. 

In the UK, the digitalisation of welfare started with Universal Credit in 2012, which combined seven different benefits (unemployment, housing, child benefit, etc) to a single monthly payment. It requires claimants to apply online, and to provide ongoing online entries and communications with work coaches.  Despite concerns raised early on about exclusions due to digital poverty, this was followed by online registration and pre-paid debit cards for the ‘Healthy Start’ government food support programme (for pregnant women and those with young children) in 2022.  Free school meals have also been digitalised, and several government and charitable organisations distribute digital vouchers to be redeemed in supermarkets. Supermarkets and other retailers have also developed a number of apps to supply food to organisations and to individuals. Government digitalisation strategies from 2010 were driven by austerity policies which entailed cutting welfare and public service spending,  Amnesty International, in examining the UK’s welfare system, concluded that it does not comply with obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.  Human rights violations include the barriers imposed by digitalisation because they increase hardship. 

Poverty as a digital ‘paywall’ 

Poverty acts as a digital ‘paywall’ to food assistance and wider welfare access. Access to digital devices, data, and skills, all contingent on affordability, has become a prerequisite for gaining welfare support.  Few people living in poverty have smartphones and so rely on basic phones, or, in the case that their phones have been lost or stolen, they rely on shared numbers. For those who did have smartphones, data poverty pervaded their experience.  Those unable to purchase data for internet connectivity must hop between public Wi-Fi hotspots or borrow hotspots from volunteers. Broadband social tariffs are available from some internet providers but are poorly publicised and often unaffordable or unavailable where needed.  According to one assessment, 95% of eligible households miss out.  In some rural and peri-urban areas, connectivity infrastructure is lacking, making access difficult. Exclusion operates through market mechanisms, requiring people to purchase access to claim public support.  

Eroding infrastructure and disappearing spaces of care 

The shift to digital has coincided with the systemic erosions of physical spaces where people could previously get face-to-face help. Austerity policies since 2010 have driven library closures, reduced hours of available community support and cut staff across England. Even where physical spaces of support persist, limited opening days, travel costs, and absent staff constrain access. People fill these gaps by paying to print from private internet cafes or taking longer bus journeys seeking help where they can.   

As public spaces with face-to-face support have diminished, food banks and community support organisations have doubled as social infrastructure where people can still receive mediated digital access and build trust and skills, yet these remain volunteer dependent and uneven. 

 

Myth of simple digital literacy 

One persistent issue underpinning digital welfare is the assumption that digital competence and skills is straightforward – that if someone can use a smartphone, they can navigate a digital welfare system. The reality is far more complex. Digital skills vary highly by context and people adept at sending messages and photos to their friends on social media apps may struggle with formal emails, government portals, and forms. These concerns cut across generations and familiarity with technology, affecting older adults and younger people alike. Language and literacy also create key barriers, with both English as an Additional Language (EAL) and native English speakers struggling when they confront text-heavy portals and official language. To fill this gap, only ad hoc chains of help and translation through friends, children, and volunteers mediate a fragile and uneven access.  

Design choices  

Interface and service design itself shapes patterns of exclusion. Designers build platforms that work best on desktop computers, but most marginalised people use them on mobile phones with tiny screens and face difficulty uploading required documents. Some systems still require people to download PDFs, print them, fill them out by hand, scan them, and email them back. These complicated user journeys overwhelm even confident users, especially if they have to travel to access a printer or scanner, which introduces new costs to your attempt to access food assistance. Small missteps, such as a missed upload deadlines or dropped connection, often produce detrimental sanctions or benefits losses.  

As Taylor notes in ‘Beyond the Numbers’, when systems demand proof that vulnerable people cannot provide, we risk ‘institutionalising a bias towards the visible’. In the UK, welfare design may be embedding this bias directly into interfaces and processes. Rather than streamlining access for those who need food assistance the most, digitalisation seems optimised for administrative efficiency. This creates obstacles for users who must travel far to scan forms, navigate portals instead of speaking to humans, and be digitally competent to demonstrate their need through online forms. Within the UK Welfare system as a whole, several organisations including Amnesty International have highlighted the ‘punitive regime’ of administration and complexity needs to access benefits that people are eligible for. 

The psychological toll  

The digital-first regimes carry heavy psychological costs, such as anxiety around sanctions for simply missing an email, humiliation at intrusive verification, and a sense of being set up to fail. People describe panic when payments stop, tears at job centre interactions, and resignation among older residents too proud or too demoralised to ask for help. The shift to digital has removed the human interactions, that at their best, allowed for discretion and dignity.  

Conclusion: The politics of digital-by-default and its effect on food insecurity 

In a context of cuts and rising need, the UK’s digital transformation of welfare and food assistance often deepens rather than bridges marginalisation. By layering device and data requirements and eroding in-person infrastructures, digitalisation reorganises access to food assistance, welfare, and ultimately, food security, through new forms of stratification.  The UK government has developed a welfare system that makes it difficult to navigate for precisely those who need it the most.   

Digitalisation has coincided with increases in food insecurity and has added to the burden on food assistance projects, and often volunteers, which now also provide support with digital access.  The timing is good to bring about change. The Government is committed to reducing dependence on emergency food parcels. And initiatives like The Crisis and Resilience Fund could make digital inclusion a core part of food security policy and not just an afterthought.   

  

More Reading: This blog post uses findings from an ERSC-funded project entitled: Digitalising food assistance: Political economy, governance and food security effects across the Global North-South divide.  See: https://digitalisingfood.org/.   

 

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

About the authors:

Dr Iris Lim | SOAS
Iris Lim

Iris Lim is a Postdoctoral Researcher and works on the UK case study for the ESRC-funded project that analyses the effect of digitalising food assistance. Her research examines digital public service delivery, digital inclusion, citizenship and integration, and critical user-experience (UX) research.

 

Susanne Jaspars

Susanne Jaspars is the Principal Investigator of the same project.  She is a Senior Research Fellow at the SOAS Food Studies Centre.  She is also a Research Associate at CEDEJ Khartoum, and co-editor of Disasters Journal.  Susanne researches the political dynamics of food in situations of conflict, food and humanitarian crisis, and has also analysed migration and asylum policies. Other interests include social approaches to nutrition and accountability for mass starvation.  She has worked mostly in the Horn of Africa, often Sudan, but increasingly also in Europe.

 

Yasmin Houamed

Yasmin Houamed is the Research Assistant for the UK case study of the ESRC-funded Digitalising Food Assistance project. She received her MA in Anthropology of Food at SOAS, University of London, and her BA in Political Science from Stanford University. Her research has previously focused on food systems and commodification in Tunisia.

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Paving the Way for Authoritarianism: The Prabowo regime and Indonesia’s colonial continuities 

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This blog captures the current political situation in Indonesia under Prabowo’s regime. This regime utilizes all possible resources to bring back an authoritarian government; from eliminating opposition and restructuring national budgets, to other structural intervention and subtle measures such as controlling the way people acquire knowledge by controlling media and using a buzzer or ‘thought leader’ who promotes opinions and perspectives sympathetic to the regime with the aim of making them seem common. Fatimatuz Zahra considers the regime to be employing colonial logic, in which the state treats its own population, particularly marginalized groups, as objects to be disciplined and extracted from rather than as respectable subjects. 

Adapted from: Guy Goodwill

How this regime got elected and how it’s doing  

From the very beginning, Prabowo Subianto and his vice president Gibran Rakabuming (37 y.o at that time) took advantage of an opaque political system in Indonesia. Gibran, who is the son of former president Joko Widodo (Jokowi), fulfilled the administrative requirement to run in the 2024 election for vice president after the constitutional court approved a lawsuit lowering the minimum age requirement for a presidential and vice presidential candidate. Following this decision, the chief justice of the court , who is Gibran’s uncle, was removed from his post due to an ethical violation. Jokowi’s endorsement of Gibran’s candidacy was also allegedly done through what used to be known as ‘pork barrel politics’ which can be defined as using state and public resources to influence voters. In this instance, the regime used state resources, such as mobilizing the social assistance budget, to further its political interests. Jokowi (at the end of his second presidential term) played a huge role in the success of Gibran’s candidacy, which seems to have been well prepared ahead.  

These dirty measures continued throughout the campaign. Prabowo and Gibran successfully whitewashed Prabowo’s dark history and blood legacy, including his involvement in the 1998 human rights violations, through their ‘gemoy’ campaign and use of jargon to reshape Prabowo’s image into that of a cute, chubby grandpa. With the massive use of social media campaigns and narrative battles to rebrand this pair, they successfully won the election with 58% of the votes. 

 

What is it like to have a president who is allegedly a human rights violator?

Amnesty International said that Indonesia is experiencing the most serious deterioration of human rights since the 1998 reform era. This can be seen in many areas: the massive militarization of civil spaces, the absence of meaningful public participation in the policy planning and implementation process, and the excessive police repression that has been increasingly normalized. In November 2025, the House of Representatives and the government passed a revision of the Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP) that further facilitates the police’s use of brutality. In response to the legislation, Indonesia witnessed a massive protest in August 2025 against police brutality and to demand reform of the bureaucracy. Yet instead of listening to that protest, the regime continues to pave its way toward authoritarianism. 

 

Strategies of power consolidation under the current regime 

In October 2025, the documentary  “Dirty Vote II: O3” was released and went viral. The video exposed how this regime consolidated its power via three pillars: otak, otot and ongkos(O3) or mind, muscle, and money. The documentary suggests that the regime is deploying these three pillars as an expression of insecurity. The regime needs to strengthen its muscles (otot), namely the security apparatus, such as the military and police. These institutions have been repurposed by the regime and no longer function to protect citizens or provide external defence, but increasingly act as instruments and defenders of the ruling elites’ interests. Another strategy is demolishing the opposition as a manifestation of the mind (otak) to push through laws and other political decisions that serve oligarchic interests. And this strategy has been successful, as is evidenced by how easily this regime has passed many problematic laws that have been protested against for years. The last strategy is to strengthen guided capitalism, as a manifestation of money (ongkos). This constitutes an elite-driven mechanism of power consolidation to manage the regime’s interests. One recent example of this was to change the electoral system from direct elections to selection by the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR), an institution that has been criticized as dysfunctional and not representing the people.  

One of the most visible implications of deploying these three pillars is how this regime continues to ignore people’s voices. This is clear in policy decisions that are not grounded in public interest, for example, the decision to impose budget cuts in strategic sectors such as health and education to fund the problematic free-meal programme, which, rather than resolving the policy objective of addressing stunting, has generated widespread cases of food poisoning. We are also witnessing how this regime openly dismisses any criticism, for example, when it passed the Indonesian National Armed Forces Law (UU TNI) and the revised Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP) despite nationwide protests, some of which included fatalities.  

Using paternalistic logic, this regime has also silenced women’s voices with its many militaristic policies and projects, such as making the military a strategic partner in the free-meal programme (MBG) while at the same time ignoring the protests of mothers who live in fear of their children being poisoned by it. Indeed, even the President regarded the poisoned children as merely numbers. The way this regime is refocusing the budget by cutting spending in the care sector while continuously increasing defence spending is another example of how this regime is structurally marginalizing women. 

 

Reproducing colonial logic 

From the practices above, we can see that this regime is currently continuing the colonial legacy by deploying colonial logic in its way of governing. The way this regime defends elite interests while continuing to delegitimize critics by using expressions such as ‘ndasmu’ (an insulting word, like bullshit) or ‘antek asing’ (a political slur used to label someone as a lackey of foreign interests in order to delegitimize their action) to describe critics, is evidence of how this regime is trying to normalize its exploitation. This is an important pillar in the coloniality of power – seeing the population as inferior in order to justify their exploitation. In order to maintain its power, the regime is also deploying a strategy of whitewashing collective knowledge, such as denying the historical fact of the 1998 mass rapes and reframing human rights violators such as Soeharto as national heroes. This is a manifestation of coloniality of knowledge, which controls the knowledge and production systems as a means of asserting superiority within the hierarchy of power. 

Fundamentally, this regime reproduces the logic of coloniality, which works by producing the hierarchy of ‘being’, with certain groups being treated as more fully human than others. This is manifested in people’s voices and interests being easily dismissed, with their interests taking second place to those of elites. People’s voices are seen as noise that obstructs power, rather than expressions of political agency. This forces critics of the regime to continue our collective movement to resist this colonial structure, which promises the dream of modernity while steadily narrowing the space for civic action in the name of stability. 

 

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

 

About the author:

Fatimatuz Zahra 

Fatimatuz Zahra is an alumna of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), where she majored in Social Justice Perspectives. Her work engages with gender, religion, and political issues in Indonesia, with an interest in decolonial approaches and feminist analysis 

 

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

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

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

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. 

 

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

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

PhotoCredit: Human Rights Watch

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

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

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

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

Opening the Discussion 

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

Reorienting Focus to Proactive Protection 

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

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

Humanitarian Diplomacy, Principles and Accountability 

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

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

Civilian Harm 

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

Rise and Fall of RtoP 

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

Moving Forward 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

But has it?

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

Photo Credit: Rob Curran

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

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

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

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

The Middle Is Large, But Quiet

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

About the authors:

Anne-Marie Jeannet

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

Marcela Rubio

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

Lois Mobach

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

 

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

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Prevailing responses to digital violence against women and girls remain overwhelmingly reactive. We demand justice only after revenge‑porn, doxxing, or cyber‑bullying has already shattered a woman’s livelihood, dignity, or sense of safety. The scale of the crisis is undeniable: globally, between 16-58% of women have experienced some form of online violence, and in Nigeria, 45% of women self‑report digital abuse. Yet our interventions continue to treat symptoms while leaving the systems that enables digital violence unchallenged.

We are holding only one end of the line.

In this blog, Emaediong Akpan argues for a dual approach that confronts both the structural and cultural roots of digital violence. First, we must hold tech platforms and legal systems accountable for the architectures that make abuse easy, anonymous, and viral. Second, we must rethink how we prepare and support the next generation, beginning with digital literacy from childhood. This is not about shifting responsibility to users; it is about building collective resilience against the weaponized shame that underpins digital abuse. When we meet survivors with belief, care, and solidarity, we disrupt the culture of silence and return shame to its rightful place — with abusers and the systems that protect them.

 

Photo Credit: UN Women


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, designed 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.

 

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.

I use “digital violence” throughout this blog 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, is 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 children 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

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.

 

 

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

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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. 

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  1. 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.

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.

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

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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.

Photo credit: Unsplash

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

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.

 

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

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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. 

Photo credit: Unsplash

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.

 

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

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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.

 

Photo Credit: Unsplash 

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

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.

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

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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.

Photo Credit: Esteri

We began observing Melissa on October 21st. 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 21st. 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 29th, 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 31st, 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.

 

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