Disaster Risk Reduction and Furthering Women’s Rights

By Supriya Akerkar

You can read the full discussion on links between disasters, development and women's rights in the article here 

CENDEP Newsletter September 2022 issue is available now!

Read the latest issue of the CENDEP Newsletter,

• The new Design in DEP module
• New Project - Ageing in Displacement
• Pathways Home
• Discussing Social Life of skills with Young Women in Cameroon
• Peace - justice tensions in post-war Sri Lanka
• Latest news from MA HAP and MA DEP
• Student Profile
• New Staff at CENDEP
• Other news and events
• Publications

From Fieldwork to Academia - Europe's migrant movement

By Sue Walsh (CENDEP alumna MA DEP 2021- 2022) 

In September 2015, the world awakened to the image of ‘Humanity washed ashore’ 2 year old Alan Kurdi dead on a beach in Turkey. A whole other part of the world woke up realising this symbol of the migrant crisis was now a European one and did not just belong to the Global South. 

This photograph was my introduction to volunteering, refugees and humanitarian aid. From that September 2015, I evoked community energy to canvassing radio stations, newspapers and groups to donate aid. We raised funds and dispatched it to Syria, Serbia, Hungary and Greece; regions selected because the march of the migrants along the Balkan route increased through the winter and their needs were ever great.

Pathways Home launch

 By Sue Webb and Bill Flinn

Download Pathways Home here

For the first time, guidance for humanitarian actors aiming to support the process of self-recovery after disasters has been published. A new publication from the Global Shelter Cluster articulates the need for a change in mindset in humanitarian responses to disasters linked to natural hazards and to other crises that result in loss of homes.

First Responder Trauma from major incidents

By Dr Melanie Henwood (OBE, Associate Consultant at the Institute of Public Care, Oxford Brookes University)   

Barely a day passes without national or international news of some natural disaster, major accident or terrorist incident causing fatalities and life changing consequences for survivors.  From the recurrent mass shootings and murder of multiple school children in the US, to a car being deliberately driven into a crowd in Berlin, or earthquakes, tsunami, and famine devastating communities, particularly in the developing world.  There are also frequent anniversaries of major incidents, in the UK alone there are regular reminders of such events as the terrorist attack at Fishmongers’ Hall (29 November 2019); the Manchester Arena bombing at the Ariana Grande concert (22 May 2017), the London Bridge and Borough Market terrorist attacks (3 June 2017), the Grenfell Tower fire (14 June 2017), and the July 7th terrorist bombings in London in 2005.  For people involved in such events, whether as survivors, bereaved families, or emergency responders, each anniversary risks retraumatising and revisiting unresolved issues and grief. 

Understanding displacement through collaborative research and artistic productions with young people in Jordan and Lebanon: New publication

Authors: Cathrine Brun, Zoe Jordan, Alexandra Kassir

Download the book here

The article was first published on the Centre for Lebanese Studies website here

Understanding impacts of Sanitation on Women and links to Gender Based Violence: Focus on East Africa

As part of CENDEP's Working Paper Series, our second paper no WP-02-2022, is by Aparna Maladkar on 'Understanding impacts of Sanitation on Women and links to Gender Based Violence: Focus on East Africa.'

The full paper can be accessed via https://doi.org/10.24384/CENDEP.WP-02-2022

Humanitarian Shelter in Southern Malawi

 CENDEP’s Sue Webb reflects on her recent visit to Malawi

The flooded Shire river valley in Chikwawa, Southern Malawi

CENDEP and CARE UK, with other partners, have been working for several years to advocate for an approach to humanitarian Shelter and Settlements assistance that supports shelter self-recovery, recognised by the Global Shelter Cluster and many humanitarian actors as being appropriate, effective and good value-for-money. However, to date, there has been no guidance on how to do this in practice. Through the GCRF-funded Self-recovery from Humanitarian Crisis project (2019-2021) the Guidance for Supporting Shelter Self-recovery has been developed; this will be published in the coming weeks - watch this space!

CENDEP Newsletter March 2022 is out!

 Read the latest issue of the CENDEP Newsletter, including

Gender and Older People: Research paper and online event

CENDEP Director, Dr Supriya Akerkar’s ‘Gender and Older People’ has recently been published (link here) which was undertaken for the Programme and Ageing Unit (PAU), United Nation Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA).

Supriya has also been invited as one of the panellists for a virtual event ‘Shameful Contrast: Inequality at the Intersection of Age and Gender’ on Tuesday, March 15 (8:00-9:30 am ET OR 12:00-1:30 pm, UK time). The event places a spotlight on older women and aims to transform political momentum into action that will empower older women and further promote gender equality.

Welcome to the 20th Oxford Human Rights Festival

The Oxford Human Rights Festival launches on the 11th March with the annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture given by Yasmeen Lari, the first female architect in Pakistan and the recent recipient of the prestigious Fukuoka Prize (2016) and the Jane Drew Prize (2020), the latter awarded by the Architect's Journal in honour of the English modernist architect, Jane Drew.

Dr Supriya Akerkar, the new Director of Centre of Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) has this to say about the festival this year,

Calais experiences and reflections on OxHRF 2022 theme ‘Movement’

As the 20th Oxford Human Rights Festival (OxHRF) kicks off on March 11th, MA DEP Post Graduate student, Victoria Greenwood reflects on the festival theme of ‘Movement’ through her experience in Calais.

“Extreme inequality in our world makes free movement safe and easy for those of us privileged to hold a British passport and be protected by double vaccines.” by Victoria Greenwood. 

Human rights and root causes

In the last of a series of three blogs on human rights, Richard Carver writes, 

…[T]o be ‘for’ human rights means… to be willing to venture interpretations of those rights in the same place and with the same language employed by the dominant power, to dispute its hierarchy and methods, to elucidate what it has hidden, to pronounce what it has silenced or rendered unpronounceable. (Edward Said)

In my previous posts, I argued that human rights are only one possible lens for examining social and political issues and that they should not aspire to offer a universal panacea. In this post, I discuss the view that human rights practitioners can, or should, address the “root causes” of human rights issues.

Human rights as the universal panacea

In the second of a series of three blogs on human rights, Richard Carver writes, 

      Increasingly, people of good will concerned about poverty are drawn into debate about a series of ultimately impossible legal quandaries—right of whom, against whom, remediable how, and so on — and into institutional projects of codification and reporting familiar from other human rights efforts, without evaluating how these might compare with other uses for this talent and these resources. (David Kennedy)

I argued in my previous post that the besetting weakness of the human rights community is our apparent inability to understand that human rights constitute only one possible lens for viewing a particular problem. To illustrate this, consider an issue that seems to belong indubitably within the human rights sphere: the prohibition of torture. Yet human rights do not constitute the only approach to this issue. For example, the laws of armed conflict contain a clear and absolute prohibition on torture, along with mechanisms to punish its perpetrators. It is not unreasonable to assume that in certain circumstances, that might be a more appropriate way to address torture.

What we talk about when we talk about human rights

In the first of a series of three blogs on human rights, Richard Carver writes,

 What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics. (Edmund Burke)

The conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke probably finds little favour with most readers of this blog. However, for the past 13 years I have been in the slightly unusual position of teaching human rights in an architecture school and, with a bit of tweaking, Burke’s words have resonated with me fairly often. What is the use of discussing a person’s abstract right to adequate housing? I shall always advise to call in the aid of the architect and the structural engineer – in plentiful supply among my colleagues – rather than the human rights lawyer (me).

Jordan: How the EU is using trade deals to curb migration (An interview with CENDEP's Zoe Jordan)

This interview was first published in the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) written by ALICE TROY-DONOVAN (6 January 2022)

https://www.diis.dk/en/node/25402

Migrants drowning in the English Channel and freezing to death at the Belarus-Poland border have captured public and media attention across Europe, but these events only tell part of the story of EU attempts to block migration to its member states, says researcher Zoe Jordan.

The impact of EU migration policy now stretches far beyond the Union’s actual territorial borders, with millions of euros invested in efforts to control and curb mobility from and between African and Middle Eastern countries – also known as border ‘externalisation’. Such initiatives are profoundly impacting the lives of migrants themselves as well as entire political and policy-making landscapes within the countries from which they move.