policy
Africa up for grabs?
There has been a lot of interest in African land deals in the past few weeks. Amy Glass raised the case of Madagascar on this blog, and Gwynne Dyer in a syndicated article calls it a ‘neo-colonialist land grab’ noting the ‘new’ colonists now include a new set of powers including China India, South Korea and the Arab Gulf States. The scale of foreign companies entering the Africa land market is huge, and while all of these deals may not go through, the implications of the some that do go ahead have enormous implications for peasant agriculture on the continent.
Gender and Security Sector Reform
Without a feminist understanding of what is gender and why promoting gender equality is important in development, a risk with these manuals and guides is the danger of assuming gender is a “fix it” tool, something one whips out of the development kit to solve operational issues, streamline programmatic responses, or donor compliance. The integration of gender into security sector reform may also risk taking certain things for granted, such as the assumption that by reforming the security sector, women will benefit from the trickle-down effect, as opposed to asking the harder questions which feminists have been raising: whether an institution (i.e. the military) which legitimises the use of violence can be made user-friendly? [...]
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