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This article was first published by The Conversation. 

Sten Rynning, Professor of International Security and War Studies from the University of Southern Denmark, writes about the new role of western actors in Afghanistan after the Talibans took control over the nation on August 15. 

“Pakistan, which nourished the Taliban and played for time to maintain its sphere of influence, will thus durably “own” Afghanistan. It has the largest political and economic stakes in Afghanistan, it has more sway over the Taliban movement than any other outside player, and its longstanding ally, China, has already indicated its willingness to be of help.” 

“A forward-looking policy must begin with an overt recognition that the Taliban and Pakistan have been victorious. It should then spell out the terms of western engagement. Having lost the war, the west must offer the Taliban development potential: diplomatic recognition and, with it, opportunities for finance and trade. The west should also offer to channel humanitarian aid into Afghanistan on terms that suit both sides.”

“For its part, the west cannot accept international terrorism emanating from Afghanistan – and Europe, especially, cannot accept a continued flow of refugees for fear of further inflaming domestic politics. Western states would be right to signal that financial sanctions, covert military operations and other means of coercion could come into play if they are pushed.”

“Time is of the essence. Afghanistan could be on the precipice of civil war while bewildered western governments seem to be mostly concerned with their public image in the face of human suffering. One can all too easily imagine that nothing much will happen in terms of western response – and certainly not a coordinated one.”

This post was first published as part of the EADI/ISS Blog Series.

“Let us be honest to you from the beginning: we have never organized an online conference before. We feel like we are inventing the wheel in many ways, because many things are absolutely new to us. We’ve never had to do this. But now that we have organized the EADI-ISS Conference 2021 #Solidarity2021, which is to start in just a few days, we know one thing for sure: we will never organize a conference again without providing substantial online participation facilities.”

In March 2020, nobody had any experience in online conferencing

Of course, we did not realize this over a year ago when the pandemic emerged and the conference was postponed by one year. In March 2020, nobody had any experience in online conferencing. We believed that the pandemic would be over in a few months and that the conference could still be held in The Hague.

“How naïve we were! By October 2020, it was clear to everyone involved that the pandemic would last much longer than a few months, and for many people worldwide probably more than over a year. So we decided to cancel our preparations for a face-to-face conference which would have taken place in five different venues, all closely together and located in The Hague’s city centre, with the ISS hosting the conference. This also meant no visits to peace and justice organizations in The Hague, no massive information market with our international Master’s students, and no gala ‘beach party’ to show off The Hague’s in all its splendour. Everything was going to happen online. And we had to make peace with it and work with it.”

Read about the key takeaways and lessons learned in the full article.

This post is written by Kees Biekart, Basile Boulay, Susanne von Itter and Sushrutha Vemuri for the EADI/ISS Blog Series.

This article was first published on D+C.

For more than a decade, there has been much talk of middle classes in the global south – including in development studies regarding Africa. But who exactly is middle class? Henning Melber explores the concept in this blog post on D+C.

“The middle classes of the Global South became a focus of attention mainly because of the changes economic growth brought about in the social structure of developing countries. In East and Southeast Asia (especially in China), progressing industrialisation rapidly lifted ever more people out of poverty. However, a precarious minimum income was all it took to be considered middle class. The fact that groups in the lower rungs of this broadly defined middle class live in anything but stable circumstances is often ignored. Raphael Kaplinsky of the British Open University dryly remarked in 2014 that the middle class now seemed to include anyone not suffering hunger.”

“However, the soaring expectations turned out to be wishful thinking. The reality is a far cry from the myth of a large, cohesive and progressive middle class.”

What are the key characteristics of a middle class? The term is not clearly defined. Playing statistical games with income data is all too simplistic.

“Regardless of many valid objections, it makes sense to pay attention to Africa’s middle classes. Their actual size and substance need to be examined more closely from both an economic and political angle. For doing to, inspiration could be usefully drawn from Marxian class theory. Its focus is on who owns the means of production – and that determines who depends on whom economically. Tackling this matter would help demythologise the concept of middle class.”

This article is written by Henning Melber for D+C.

This article was first published as part of the EADI/ISS Blog Series in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”.

“Discussions on the impact of higher education and research have increased, together with the rise of strategic thinking in the management of universities during the last decade. Governments, taxpayers and private funders want to know which benefits they get from universities. Academic Institutions, in turn, want to prove how their work is beneficial to society in multiple ways. This tells us much about the global management culture in public services – and about a new pressure against the academic authority and standing of universities.”

“The rhetoric of the importance of industry and ‘value for money’ invested in universities and the simultaneous cuts in their public funding resonates both with the technocratic and populistic views of higher education, if not reactionary voices against educated elites all over the world.”

Calls for decolonisation in the aftermath of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Fees Must Fall” student uprising at the University of Cape Town have drawn attention to the fact that a decades-long evolution of higher education in independent South has not abolished global asymmetries in knowledge production.

“What does this rhetoric mean for the production of scientific knowledge in different disciplinary fields and in governance and development studies in particular? For medical sciences or engineering, identifying and measuring their impact and relevance can be quite straightforward. But for sciences focusing on policies and their critiques, such a task is complex, as their impacts are diverse, often indirect, slow and long-term.”

This article is written by Liisa Laakso for the EADI/ISS Blog.

SweDev Steering Committee member Henning Melber writes about colonial power structures and the fundamental transformation of societies necessary to decolonise knowledge production.

This blog post was first published on EADI Blog.

“Social organisations tend to be based on asymmetric power relations – almost always, almost everywhere. Inequality characterises interaction both inside and in between societies. Class-based hierarchies, peppered by gender imbalances, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and many other forms of discrimination are the order of the day, both nationally as well as internationally. Colonial power structures and mindsets – understood as a hierarchical system imposing normative values which exclude and discriminate – remain almost always an integral part of any form of social reproduction, even when we believe that colonialism as a system in which foreign powers occupy and execute rule over other territories and people, is a matter of the past.”

Not all that is based on knowledge counts, and not all that counts is based on knowledge.

“Educational systems as the institutionalised form of transmitting  knowledge are substantial elements of social reproduction. They execute colonial functions in the sense of domestication by affirmatively entrenching dominant value systems and norms for internalisation. While being a student at the German private school in Windhoek during Apartheid days in the late 1960s, Namibia was a South African occupied colony. Our rulers which were a gift from a local branch of an international bank carried the slogan “knowledge is power”. I only realised much later its true meaning: that only certain knowledge is power, and that the power of definition is the decisive element. In other words: Not all that is based on knowledge counts, and not all that counts is based on knowledge. In our case, the transmitted knowledge cultivated the firm justification of inequalities as naturally given order. Colonial racist knowledge in perpetuation of white supremacy – barbarism taken for granted as a form of civilisation.”

“Decolonisation remains work in progress and requires more than a focus on curricula. Addressing institutional racism understood as racism in certain institutions is a necessary but not sufficient step. Fundamental transformation of societies must embrace all forms of discrimination and “othering”, but also material aspects of transformation.”

This blog post is written by Henning Melber for EADI Blog.

This article was first published by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

“Researchers are testing new climate-smart agriculture (CSA) technologies in a semi-arid region of Zimbabwe. After a field day the local team was overwhelmed by the response of hundreds of smallholder farmers. Their request was simple: “Register our names for the installation of the Subsurface Water Retention Technology (SWRT) in our fields”. SWRT, one of the CSA technologies being investigated in the project, improves soil water and nutrient management and has shown phenomenal yields during the last two maize growing seasons.”

“Since 2019, the researchers have been conducting on-farm experimentation of different climate-smart agriculture options in Zimbabwe.”

“In 2019, SLU, The Alliance and MSU built on the existing knowledge with an additional technology, SWRT, that allows further harnessing of soil water whether from rainwater, irrigation or harvested water. While very low rains were received during the first maize growing season, in the second season (December 2020 to April 2021) average to above-average rains were received. However, under both conditions, the benefits of investing in SWRT were visible to the farmers who expressed their interest in the technology on the spot.”

“At the end of field day, with the leadership of the Chief of Marange district, a long list of more than 300 smallholder farmers registered to be considered for new installations of the technology on their farms if resources are available. The farmers also indicated that they are ready to co-invest in the installation of SWRT. While the testing of the technologies continues for another cropping season, the team is now exploring opportunities to make the technology accessible for resource-poor farmers that have also expressed a willingness to play their part.”  

This article was originally published as a research project news by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

This post was first published on CIFOR Forest News.

“A new policy brief demonstrates the role forests and trees play in sustaining food production and food security and nutrition (FSN).”

“Featuring four dimensions of FSN, including availability, accessibility, utilization and stability, it aims to inform policy and decision making in forestry, while detailing actions that could help strengthen related aspects of the food system in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Published by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) to coincide with the 16th session of the U.N. Forum on Forests (UNFF16) and dialogues leading up to the U.N. Food Systems Summit during the U.N. General Assembly in September.”

“The brief aims to contribute to discussions and ensure that policies designed to achieve the SDG2, Zero Hunger goal take into consideration the many contributions of forests and trees to food security and nutrition. Maximizing these contributions requires policy coherence and landscape approaches that better integrate tree crops into farming systems, the brief states.”

This post was first published on Global Bar.

“Should aid be given to authoritarian regimes if they are efficient in reducing poverty? Or do we risk that donor money will keep the dictators in power? The issue of Authoritarian aid is very much in the discussion right now. But what is the right thing to do – Should we stay or should we go when things turn bad?

In articles and in several episodes of Global Podd we have discussed the Swedish aid to authoritarian regimes in Myanmar, Cambodia, Tanzania, Belarus and other countries. As a result of our reporting, Sweden decided last year to close down the support to the regimen in Belarus.

But when can you justify development aid to authoritarian regimes, and when should donors withdraw? How do we decide when to keep relation open as a chance to influence and keep the dialogue ongoing and when should we draw the line and leave? Are we naïve, or just betting against the odds when we invest in countries like Tanzania and Rwanda with the hope to make those regimes change?

These are the topics for the discussion in episode 59 of Global Podd.

Participants:

• Nic Cheeseman, professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the author of Authoritarian Africa: Repression, resistance and the power of ideas
• Jonas Ewald, Researcher and Program Director for the Master’s Program in Peace and Development Work Peace and Development Studies at Linnaeus University in Sweden
• Göran Holmqvist, Head of Department of Asia and Middle East and Humanitarian Assistance at the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)

Moderators: Ylva Bergman and David Isaksson”

Source: Global Podd 59. Should we give aid to authoritarian regimes? – Global Bar