Last up in this short series of ’emergent agency’ case studies from the Interface Journal. María Jose Ventura Alfaro describes how independent feminist collectives in Mexico have created solidarity networks across the country to tackle the gravest socioeconomic consequences of the virus at the local level: shortages of food, medicine, and other essential products and an upsurge in domestic and

Hongwei Bao argues that rather than seeing the pandemic as an obstacle to social movements, it can be a good opportunity to experiment with flexible and creative modes of social and political activism. This piece is a shortened version of a paper in the Interface Journal. From January to April, many Chinese cities including Wuhan were locked down in a

We’ve had an amazing response to our launch of the project on ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid‘, and are now processing all the contacts and info we’ve received. For those wanting examples of the kinds of experiences we are interested in, I’ll be posting some examples over the next few days. First up, Sobhi Mohanty argues that the

Guest post by Jon Harle Many of the inequities which COVID-19 has exposed – and exacerbated – have been with us for a long time.  Setting aside very stark disparities in access to health services, and the ability to maintain decent livelihoods, COVID has shown us once again the processes of exclusion that are baked into the ways in which

Guest post from governance guru Graham Teskey. The aim of this blog is to suggest ways in which the ‘governance discourse’ (what a grand term!) is changing – indeed has already changed – as a result of Covid-19. I know that blogs are supposed to be discursive and informal. Recently our office was privileged to have a session with that

Guest post by Paul Knox-Clarke While Europe adjusts to a ‘new abnormal’, COVID-19 infection and mortality are still increasing in much of the rest of the world. The global response to this pandemic still has a long way to run, and it is too early to judge how effective emergency management and humanitarian actions have been, particularly in fragile and

On the occasion of the “ILO Global Summit on COVID-19 and the World of Work” Oxfam’s Filippo Artuso, Iñigo Macías-Aymar, and Franziska Mager looked into what we know about the unequal impact of COVID-19 on workers, and how to rebuild fairer societies. The coronavirus pandemic and global lockdown measures have shone a light on pre-existing inequalities in labour markets. What

This is a shortened and slightly updated version of a post by Alcinda Honwana and Nyeleti Honwana, which first appeared on the SSRC’s Kujenga Amani blog The African continent has, thus far, fared comparatively well in the pandemic, with just under 400,000 confirmed infections and about 10,000 fatalities at the end of June 2020. Even so, the heavy economic, social, and emotional

Jordi Vaquer is the Director for Global Foresight and Analysis at the Open Society Foundations The radical uncertainty resulting from the crises triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic makes prediction harder than ever and, yet, there has rarely been a time where everyone – thinkers and parents, artists and bankers, activists and teachers – had to confront urgent questions about the

There’s an interesting pattern that emerges from the coverage of how different countries have performed in their Covid-19 response: it is greatly influenced by their experience of previous disease outbreaks:  Kerala had Nipah, which made all the difference according to this piece in The Guardian China had SARS and South Korea had MERS West Africa, Uganda and DRC had Ebola But the worst-hit

Guest post by Julien Landry and Ann Marie Smith What is possible today that was not possible before the pandemic? In early April, we brought together (on Zoom, of course) over a dozen seasoned activists, advocates and governance practitioners working on the ground in ten countries to share how COVID-19 is affecting them, their work, and their own learning as

Given recent events in the United States that have sparked mass protests around the banner of #BlackLivesMatter not only there, but across the world, we ought to talk about this right here. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us to rethink solidarity, and these protests calling for racial justice force us to ask questions also of the aid and development sectors.