COVID-19 and the Law: Framing Healthcare Worker Risks as Women’s Rights Violations

Posted by & filed under Beyond the COVID Curve, Gender

Today, public health is ‘delivered by women and led by men’, with a glaring absence of women and nurses at the decision making table.[1] Globally, though women only make up 25% of those in healthcare leadership they make up the majority of healthcare workers (70%) and nurses (90%).[2]  This exclusion skews the agendas on health so the gender dimensions of research, diagnosis, treatment, and care are rendered invisible.[3] It also perpetuates a historical legacy whereby women health workers have been underpaid, undervalued, and their needs underprioritized.[4]

Photo: Mecklenburg County CC BY

Read More

Bosnia and Herzegovina – a Failed State 25 Years After the Peace Accords

Posted by & filed under Governance, Peacebuilding, Regions and Powers

The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are governed by three presidents, 14 prime ministers, 180 ministers, and 700 members of parliament (who sit in 14 different parliaments).

The beautiful and symbolic bridge in the capital Mostar. Wikimedia Commons.

A ping on my phone last fall told me that she was now a widow. The message was from my Bosnian friend in Sarajevo. Her husband had lost his struggle after a long illness. She sits alone in her apartment with her dog, her memories and responsibility for two children fast approaching adulthood.

They will not benefit from any dependents’ pension or war pension. In addition, due to the pandemic, the organization she worked for has lost its funding. They have had to close down, so now she  has also lost her income.

When I call her on Zoom to ask how she is doing, she sheds brave tears and wonders how she will manage. She has worked in an organization focused on peace and reconciliation since the Bosnian War, but no one will pay for this work any longer.

The war ended long ago. Now the priority is to combat the pandemic. Why should one do anything to support more efforts to promote peace and reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina today? It is now 25 years since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.Read More

Which Countries Win (and Lose) When We Add Democracy to the Human Development Index?

Posted by and & filed under Conflict Patterns, Humanitarianism

The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) is a major achievement. It has focused the world’s attention on the human aspects of development, highlighting and featuring not just economic gains but also schooling and education and life expectancy. In this, it was a hugely important corrective for a development community that tended to have a pure economic growth -focused agenda.

Over the years the UNDP has also refined the index. Creating alternatives that alongside these core human development factors also feature gender equality, inequality, and, most recently, planetary pressure.

But so far the human development index has not included democracy and democratic governance as part of the features they combine when they measure the amount of human development in a country.

This is perhaps not surprising. Democracy remains contested in international governance and for the United Nations talking clearly and unequivocally positively about democracy is still hard, even though the new sustainable development agenda has made that easier. Luckily for us, as researchers, we do not have to take the hurt feelings and animosity of autocrats and dictatorial regimes into consideration. So we went ahead and built a version of the human development index, inspired by the gender, inequality, and planetary pressure (carbon dioxide emissions per person) versions, which includes democratic government as part of the criteria and recalculated each country’s score and position on the HDI.Read More

Clean Cobalt? A new initiative for a key mineral in electric vehicles

Posted by & filed under Energy Transitions and Conflict

Photo by Andrew Roberts on Unsplash

In September of this year, Tesla joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA), a new fair trade initiative launched by the Impact Facility earlier this year. The initiative aims to develop a supply of fairly sourced cobalt by improving practices and behaviors at cobalt mining sites. Specific goals of the FCA include eradicating the use of child labor, making conditions at cobalt mines safer, and investing in programs to diversify local economies in mining communities. Tesla’s membership is an important private sector addition to the FCA, which includes companies like Glencore, the world’s largest mining company by revenue and a major producer of cobalt.

Read More

Truth and Logic for a More Peaceful World: Kristian Berg Harpviken in Conversation with Arne Strand

Posted by & filed under PRIO Stories

Kristian Berg Harpviken as Director of PRIO (2009–2017). May, 2017. Photo: Ebba Tellander / PRIO

Kristian Berg Harpviken in conversation with Arne Strand

If we fast-forward to today, peace research – well, actually all research – faces a new challenge that has become more and more obvious over recent years. This is that powerful political forces do not respect the core values that serve as the foundation for research: namely, the obligation to seek the truth and to build logical and consistent arguments.

Read More

Welcome to the Green Curses Blog Series!

Posted by and & filed under Energy Transitions and Conflict

Ain Beni Mathar Integrated Combined Cycle Thermo-Solar Power Plant. Photo: © Dana Smillie / World Bank (Creative Commons)

Welcome to the new Green Curses project blog series “Energy Transitions and Conflict”!

We write about research, news, policy interventions, events, and other items of interest that pertain to the social, political, and economic dynamics underlying the often contentious implementation of renewable energy projects. We focus especially on the potential for renewable energy projects to trigger various forms of violent conflict – riots, protests, social conflicts, and even armed conflict – in local contexts and communities. While the world is on a much-needed path to a major energy transition, “green” is not always “good”.

Revisiting Emergency eLearning

Posted by & filed under Beyond the COVID Curve

On April 30, 2020, my article “COVID-19 and Emergency eLearning: Consequences of the Securitization of Higher Education for Post-Pandemic Pedagogy” was published in Contemporary Security Policy. In that piece, I argued that securitization theory could help understand the experience of teaching and learning online as an emergency measure, but also that the lessons of desecuritization could help us to thoughtfully prepare for a post-pandemic pedagogy. Now, with news outlets reporting promising signs in vaccine development and deployment, I thank the PRIO “States of Emergency as Disruptive Pandemic Politics” research group for inviting me to reflect again on emergency eLearning.

With the hindsight of a second semester teaching under COVID-19, I would like to revisit the state of emergency literature and focus on how it can help explain the pandemic present within the higher education sector.

Photo: MChe Lee on Unsplash

Read More

The Coldest Cold Chain: Chilling Effects of Covid-19 Vaccines

Posted by , and & filed under Cities and Populations, Security

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash.
Covid-19 Vaccine Bottle Mockup (does not depict actual vaccine).

After various stretches of lockdowns and the related dire political, social, and economic consequences, the world has welcomed the news that several companies – including Moderna, AstraZeneca and Pfizer – are approaching an effective vaccine for Covid-19. Approximately 200 more are in the pipeline, of which 48 in clinical and 164 in pre-clinical stages of development. While there is thus hope on the horizon, for low and lower-middle income countries the roll-out of the vaccine will be enormously expensive, whatever option is eventually selected. As such, the life-saving vaccine may bring ramifications for future prioritization within domestic health budgets as well as allocations in foreign aid budgets.

Read More

Police Brutality and Nonviolent Protest: The Case of Nigeria

Posted by and & filed under Civilians in Conflict, Security

A protest in 2020 against SARS. Photo: Becker1999 via Flickr

In the past weeks, the Nigerian city of Lagos had been rocked by numerous youth-led protests against police brutality by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, also known as SARS. These protests which started peacefully turned deadly with numerous reports accusing the Nigerian police officers of shooting the demonstrators, resulting in at least 10 deaths and dozens more wounded.

Read More