In this letter, first published by Africa is a Country, the authors question the validity and fetishization of “African Studies” within British higher education. Wangũi wa Kamonji convenes the collective Afrika Hai from her base in East Africa. Orapeleng Rammala was born in South Africa and raised in England. Jesutofunmi Odugbemi applies her sense of justice, ingenuity, and leadership in areas

In this post, Stanislas Bisimwa Baganda writes about imbalanced power relations in field research, which can not only have negative impacts on the quality of work, but endanger the lives of local research assistants. He is a researcher in the Groupe d’Etude sur le Conflit et la Sécurité Humaine (GEC-SH) and a consultant in project management. This piece is part

Lately, I’ve enjoyed learning about the development and status of women’s rights movements and the feminist agenda in the Balkan countries, which in many ways sit uncomfortably within geopolitical and developmental binaries like Global South/Global North, developed/developing. Here is a compilation of some stand-out contributions from four of the most prominent women’s rights activists in the Balkans.

Vishwesh Sundar has recently graduated with an Advanced Master’s degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Leiden University, The Hague. He was also a research assistant at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies where he assisted with a project on South-to-West Asia migration governance. We live in a globalised world, and my family is an epitome of that phenomenon.

Felogene Anumo is a  pan-African feminist activist who is passionate about using her creativity, politics and intellect to strengthen feminist movements to build collective power. She co-leads the Building Feminist Economies program at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). If you have been on the breastfeeding journey or supported a loved one through it, you may have heard these myths:  “Breastmilk alone

Charles Dhewa is a knowledge management specialist working at the intersection of formal and informal agricultural markets. The organisation he founded, Knowledge Transfer Africa, has set up a fluid knowledge and information platform called eMKambo, which tracks trends and ensures agricultural value chains are driven by knowledge, technology and innovation. Between key informants and literature reviews, which are the most

Anam Parvez Butt is a Gender Justice Research Lead in the research team at Oxfam GB. Gopika Bashi is the Asia Campaigner for the Enough Campaign at Oxfam International. As researchers and campaigners in development organisations we constantly grapple with the question of how to design research that is useful to influencing change. At Oxfam, we’ve been thinking a lot

Next up in these highlights from this year’s LSE activism students is this post by Jacinta Gomez on her campaign proposal for saving Belize’s beleaguered fisheries The “Glory Days”. That’s what you’ll hear from fishermen today reminiscing on a time when the abundance of Belize’s Caribbean Sea gave the impression that its limits were non-existent and its bounty inexhaustible. Their reality today is

I thought I’d enliven the summer by posting some of the top blog posts from this year’s students in my LSE class on ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots activism‘. Their individual assignment was to design a campaign strategy for a cause close to their hearts, and write a blog about it. First up, Monica Moses on the plight of the sewer

This post first appeared on the Urgent Action Fund Africa site, under a Creative Commons License. Within women human rights activist circles, the recent rape and murder of Viktoria Marinova, journalist covering EU corruption, is all too familiar to circumstances surrounding the killing of Brazil’s Marielle Franco. And similar yet to the murder of Berta Caceres, a well-known environmental and human rights activist killed her

We recently spent some time reviewing the first 3 months of #PowerShifts, the new iteration of FP2P, aimed at transforming its messengers, messages and formats over the next two years. The project is in the hands of Maria Faciolince, a Colombian-Antillean anthropologist and activist, supported by Oxfam’s Amy Moran (if you’ve noticed an improvement in the way this blog looks

Jessica Horn is a feminist activist, writer and technical advisor on women’s rights. She is a co-founder of the African Feminist Forum and currently works as Director of Programmes for the African Women’s Development Fund.  Feminism is having its global moment – that heady feeling when a movement’s revolutionary demands are being heard by the majority, even echoed by the