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Youth, Citizenship and African Governance

By Jesper Bjarnesen, Kajsa Adu Hallberg, Cristiano Lanzano, Henning Melber and Patience Mususa

Citizenship plays an increasingly important role in governance at a time when globalisation and population mobility have shifted the context of belonging. As a legal status associated with national identity, citizenship is both negotiated and contested. The often-synonymous use of the terms “nationality” and “citizenship” make such disputes apparent. With reference to African states the human rights scholar Bronwen Manby maintains, that “citizenship is not just a legal concept but also a profoundly political question of self-definition”. Continue reading “Youth, Citizenship and African Governance”

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Behind the Scenes: The Strong Voice of Pacific Women in Climate Negotiations

By George Carter and Elise Howard

Women from Pacific Island countries have long been strategic and decisive leaders in climate negotiations, yet their stories are relatively unknown.  Our recent work explores women’s leadership at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the making of the Paris Agreement 2015. We provide a snapshot of one year in  three decades of climate negotiations and explore, how women played strategic roles to elevate the Pacific’s position on a global stage.  Continue reading “Behind the Scenes: The Strong Voice of Pacific Women in Climate Negotiations”

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Hidden Hands of the City: How the Pandemic Unveiled the Systematic Neglect of Indian Migrant Workers

By Nitya Rao, Ayesha Pattnaik, Arundhita Bhanjdeo and Nivedita Narain

India’s national lockdown announced on March 24th, 2020 came into force 12 hours later. Within a few days, the big story emerging from across Indian cities was of inter-state migrant workers, stranded in cities without work, money or food. With no public transport, many started walking hundreds of kilometres to their homes. Those who stayed, exhausted their savings and were further sucked into debt. The lockdown drew attention to the invisibility of migrant workers in the policy space, and the systematic neglect of their basic rights: at origin, in transit and at destination. Continue reading “Hidden Hands of the City: How the Pandemic Unveiled the Systematic Neglect of Indian Migrant Workers”

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How Can Development Cooperation Be More Sensitive To Power Relations?

By Tim Kornprobst and Anna Schwachula

Ever since development cooperation began in the 1950s, it has fallen under suspicion of upholding colonial conditions. Proponents of post-development theories therefore stress that the concept of development cooperation is problematic in the way it divides the world into “developed” countries on the one hand and “less developed” countries on the other, as this is considered to represent a Western, capitalist paradigm. In the eyes of critics, this bifurcation serves to perpetuate a colonial power structure in which experts from the global North recommend solutions to societies of the global South they consider to be “backwards”. Continue reading “How Can Development Cooperation Be More Sensitive To Power Relations?”

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How Moving (Academic) Conferences Online Could Help Address Social Injustices

By Dennis Penu | EADI/ISS Blog Series

Curtailing the movement of people around the world in a bid to control and eventually stop the spread of Covid-19 has forced many, including academics, to gather online. A recent online conference of the European Consortium for Political Research I attended shows that such conferences can not only be a roaring success, but can also help address social injustices, in particular economic and social barriers to participation. Yet these practices should become the ‘new norm’ to ensure that these barriers are broken down once and for all. Continue reading “How Moving (Academic) Conferences Online Could Help Address Social Injustices”