Adrian Ganic – DDRN

What the Black Loyalists Tell Us About America

Adrian Ganic — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:31:57 +0000

History can be construed for political purposes, often to the detriment of marginalised groups who find themselves underrepresented in the mainstream narrative. The way history is written also determines which lessons are taken from past events. A politicised historiography risks obscuring the real mechanisms driving history, leading to an inability to act efficiently when old socio-political and economic problems arise in a new form.

One such example is the way the struggle of Black Loyalists—individuals of African descent who fought for the British during the American Revolution (1775–1783)—is overlooked in the dominant historical narrative in the United States.

The American Revolutionary War is often framed as a conflict between freedom and oppression, with the American rebels on the side of freedom—“all men are created equal”, as is stated in the Declaration of Independence issued in 1776.

Such freedom was not the experience for the 20% of the population who were enslaved. Historian Edmund Morgan, in American Slavery, American Freedom, named this contradiction the American Paradox. From that perspective, the equality of the US founders—men like George Washington—and people who looked like them depended on and was sustained by the inequality of their African slaves.

Further complicating matters, Lord Dunmore, the British Governor of Virginia, in 1775 issued a proclamation granting freedom to slaves who abandoned their masters and fought against them. Although Dunmore’s Proclamation only applied to Virginia, some estimates claim that up to 100,000 slaves from all over what was to become the United States escaped to British lines.

For Dr Tad Stoermer, External Lecturer at the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, the story of the Black Loyalists highlights the way history can get skewed to serve political aims. In his upcoming book, A Resistance History of the United States, the Black Loyalists are one of the case studies used to show US history as shaped by struggle. Not against outsiders such as the British, but through confrontation with the very system established after the American Revolution.

A Resistance History of the United States

According to Dr Stoermer, the master narrative of the US founding is that the state and the institutions the revolution created—the US Constitution, separation of powers, the Electoral College, etc.—are inherently good because they were founded on principles of democracy and equality; “all men are created equal”.

Both sides of the political spectrum share this view, although articulated in different ways. The conservative reading is based on the idea of Originalism, meaning that legal texts, including the Constitution, should be interpreted as they were understood at the time of adoption. For instance, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court, in 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade, a previous decision recognising the right to abortion in all 50 states, arguing that in the original text of the Constitution, there is no mention of abortion rights. Instead, the issue should be left to the states. This perspective makes extending rights to previously excluded social groups an arduous task.

Crucially, liberal forces in the US also end up reproducing a version of Originalism. The progressive movement, even while in favour of more expansive rights and protections for minorities, often assumes, like its conservative counterpart, that the state founded in 1776 is, at its core, just. The shortcomings of the system, in this narrative, are due to malign individuals and movements corrupting the original institutions and their purpose. By accepting this “Patriot Myth”, both sides have “created a ceiling on all possible opposition”, Dr Stoermer contends.

This conclusion is not new. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the historian Charles Beard argued in 1913 that it is possible to view the US political system as an arrangement designed from the outset to protect the property rights of a rich minority by preventing majority rule and constraining the power of the state legislature from limiting gains on capital through checks and balances.

“So if the institutions are failing, if they are captured, if they in fact are operating against the rights of the people, you cannot escalate outside of them because they are inherently legitimate … All opposition has to get channelled through these pre-ordained, accepted ends. And if they don’t work, then you just have to live with the results. That is not what is shown as having achieved gains in US history,” Dr Stoermer continues.

How have gains been achieved? The argument in A Resistance History of the United States is twofold. Firstly, the book posits that most of the progress in protecting human rights in the US over time has come from resistance to the establishment, not as a result of the establishment’s inherent morality. The experience of the Black Loyalists illustrates that this tension existed from the start.

Secondly, that resistance towards what Dr Stoermer calls abusive authority is a gradual process that begins with protest and legal opposition when a government misuses its authority, escalating if the system fails to correct the injustice. Due to blocking forces within the state, such resistance takes time, and battles over particular rights—abortion, for example—may have to be fought over and over.

The story of the Black Loyalists is also instructive. To avoid re-enslavement, they were evacuated to other British colonies in North America as defeat in the Revolutionary War became inevitable. About 800 arrived in the Bahamas, where they had to struggle to maintain their freedom.

Black Loyalists in the Bahamas

“My main character, for example, Prince Williams, is enslaved. He’s freed by certificate for his military service in the British Army, and then he comes to the Bahamas, and somehow he shows up in a newspaper ad as a runaway [slave]. He has to fight for his freedom a second time,” Dr Christopher Curry, Associate Professor of History at the University of The Bahamas and author of Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas, told DDRN.

Prior to the American Revolution, the Bahamas were largely underdeveloped. The settlement of both Black and White Loyalists had a transformative effect. By 1790, several new islands were settled, the colony’s white population doubled (3,500), and the black population tripled (6,500).

Freedom and Resistance shows how Black Loyalists had to adapt their politics and actions depending on their local circumstances—sometimes violently confronting racial inequalities, sometimes seeking out white patronage for personal advancement, acquiring land and even owning slaves. Black Loyalists also established social and religious institutions, such as churches and schools. In fact, we know that Prince Williams eventually regains his freedom because he is listed as an owner of the property that will eventually become Bethel Baptist Church, which still exists today.

Moreover, the Black Loyalists contributed to the political development of the Bahamas. They understood the rights afforded to them as free subjects of the British Empire, using them to protect their freedom and laying the groundwork for deeper inclusivity. “There was a franchise act passed in 1833, allowing persons of colour to get elected to the House of Assembly. The decade-long struggle for that political right would not have happened if you did not have the Black Loyalists, who began the foundational work in the 1780s and 1790s, agitating for their rights in courts, demanding that they be considered free persons,” Dr Curry says.

As in the United States, the Black Loyalists have traditionally been excluded from the mainstream historical narrative in the Bahamas, which instead glorifies the White Loyalists. Dr Curry explains: “Since the White Loyalists were the ones who had access to power, wealth and most of the land, monuments and so on were built for them. Their story got told because they had the power and the opportunities to do that.”

Today, a lot of work is done to highlight the Black Loyalists’ role in Bahamian history. For instance, with the help of Dr Curry and other scholars from the University of The Bahamas, the country revised its history textbook for high schools in 2025. The new textbook incorporates recent scholarship on Bahamian history, with a particular focus on the Black Loyalists and other previously overlooked groups.

Freedom: A Tenuous Process

Above all else, Freedom and Resistance emphasises just how fragile freedom can be. In doing so, Dr Curry says, “it opens an interesting Pandora’s box to thinking about what the American Revolution actually achieved, and how freedom is often tenuous and murky when it crosses transnational borders”.

In the case of the United States, a method for going beyond the Patriot Myth could entail something similar: “If you can engage people in a conversation about what the American Revolution was really all about, you can detach that discussion from an appreciation that this nation-state [the US] is the best way to support those [liberal] principles,” Dr Stoermer says.

The American Revolution was, as the name suggests, a continental—even transatlantic—event, with battles fought in what is now the United States, Canada, several Caribbean countries, Portugal, Gibraltar, Spain, Guatemala, France, Ireland, and off the coast of North Africa. Like other major revolutions, it had many causes and outcomes, the political systems in the Bahamas and the United States being two of them.

Dr Stoermer concludes: “If you care about democracy, if you care about [liberal] principles, then you need to understand that [the US political] structure isn’t serving them. Why? Because it was not created to. That’s the conversation for me.”

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Teaching Swedish Exceptionalism: An In-depth Look at Sweden’s Civic Orientation Programme

Adrian Ganic — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 12:48:39 +0000

The topic of migration has gained increased salience over the past decade, with anti-immigrant parties growing in popularity across the Global North, achieving significant electoral success. These movements have used their increased influence to push for stricter migration policies. Yet, despite migration inflows decreasing, they have not ceased. For example, over 4 million people migrated to countries in the European Union in 2023, and roughly 1.6 million to the United States.

Ample research exists on how to best assist recent migrants to settle into their new contexts. Civic orientation—educational classes designed to teach migrants about the host country’s values, laws, and social norms—is the primary tool used by states in the Global North to “integrate” migrants into the labour market and society. Civic education, moreover, can be used by the state to promote certain values and norms, creating a national identity. Historian Jeffrey Mirel, for instance, has found that civic education played a key part in redefining American identity during the early 20th century. Similar processes can be seen in other countries.

Simon Bauer, Assistant Professor in Swedish as a Second Language at Stockholm University, in March 2025, defended his PhD thesis, titled Locating, Constructing, and Disciplining Self and Other: A Discourse Ethnography of Civic Orientation. The thesis analyses the discursive constructions present in Sweden’s Civic Orientation for Newly Arrived Migrants programme. The programme has been active since 2010 and is offered to migrants who have recently obtained a residency permit.

Dr Bauer’s study was conducted as a multi-level ethnography, meaning it analyses civic education from multiple perspectives—through media narratives, policy documents and in-person interviews with students and civic communicators. DDRN recently interviewed Dr Bauer, discussing his thesis and how to improve Swedish civic education going forward.

How Civic Education in Sweden has Changed Over Time

Q: Why were you drawn to study civic orientation?

I’ve always been interested in ideas connected to identity and groups. I’ve previously looked at more explicitly political movements, at political Zionism and how that grew out of European nationalism, and at different Islamist groups looking to reestablish the caliphate after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then I thought it was cool to get to look at Sweden, which is the country where I grew up, from a similar perspective—thinking about how Sweden actually presents itself, how Sweden is made into a nation.

To get to do that through a course such as civic orientation, where the state actually explicitly has to define what it is, because it’s telling people about “well, this is Sweden and this is how things are here”. I believe that it’s at the sort of boundaries between who we are and who they are—self and other—that we can really start to define different group settings and different ideas of community.

Q: Your PhD dissertation is of course on this topic. Could you tell me a little bit about it?

I could show, for example, how Swedish media discourse has gone from talking about democracy and human rights as universal values to more and more describing them as Swedish values. Within that context, it’s not so strange that, in the classroom, we see that when we talk about gender equality and human rights, or when teachers or civic communicators, as they’re called, talk about these topics, they’re talked about as Swedish values. There’s this general political understanding that’s been increasing over time that these [values] are fundamentally Swedish.

What Civic Education Tells us About the Swedish State

I think another interesting finding is the very disciplinary way in which civic orientation has been taught in the classes that we have observed, whereby Swedishness is assumed as the more—or as the most—scientific way of living. I didn’t expect to see it as strongly. We also see some of this in Swedish schools, where we teach children about, for example, food and health, which we also see in civic orientation—how much water you should drink, how many vitamins you should eat, and where to find them.

[These values] are taught to adults as sort of value-neutral, scientifically-based ideas, but it’s actually teaching people how to be Swedish. [Migrants’] previous experiences and knowledge are discussed, but used to understand why they’ve been wrong before and how they can now live in a better way as Swedes. But “Swedes” in this context is disguised as scientific.

There are cases [in civic education] where people are told that they should eat rye bread rather than white bread because rye bread is healthier. People were also told what foods to bring into work, that they should not bring smelly food boxes because that would annoy Swedish people. In one of the classes, women were told they had to do pelvic exercises as they got older to prevent urine leaking during menopause.

It’s also the system as a whole. The civic orientation classes are part of the wider establishment programme, only a small part of the Swedish migration regime. [Students] usually have a lot of other things that they also need to attend. Their time is quite tightly controlled. Part of it is also the state making people follow these very specific steps at a very specific rate and at a certain time. It’s about becoming complicit in the system and getting used to what it’s like living in Swedish bureaucracy.

Q: What do you think are some consequences, negative and positive, of the system you’ve described?

I think one of the positive things about civic orientation that Sweden has done very well, but which is at risk of being taken away due to recent suggestions, is that it has been given in migrants’ first language. Civic orientation classes can be a great place for people to ask questions about everyday things. I think [civic orientation], when it works well and people attend, can also be a great way for the Swedish state to inform people against disinformation campaigns, for example.

But I do think, on the other hand, that when you also tell people about what to eat, what to drink, and how to do specific things. In some of the classes, students were given an exact hour when they had to put their children to bed. When there are also many things like this, then people just think, “Why are we learning about this?”.

When students are given information they think is obvious or not relevant, the risk is that the things that are actually important or helpful, like: In Sweden, it is illegal to hit children, it is illegal to abuse your wife, or your husband for that matter. When this important knowledge is given alongside a lot of strange information, these things might also be seen as less important. I think the state is doing itself a disservice by trying to talk about these things under the same breath.

Q: Does this tie into the more nationalist outlook in civic orientation today, into the process of universal ideas being framed as Swedish?

I think it does. The need for these courses, firstly, shows that the state thinks this is such important information that everyone needs to know it. There are now further suggestions and proposals to have testing both for permanent residency and for citizenship, based on both Swedish language skills and civic information and knowledge. So, what’s taught in these courses will determine whether someone can stay safely in Sweden or not.

So this becomes another step in enforcing this boundary that I was talking about between who we are in the Swedish state and who you are outside it, and what you need to know and do to step into this community.

“It shouldn’t be seen as easy”

Q: Do you have any thoughts on how to reform civic orientation in Sweden?

It’s always hard with specific ideas. I am also not sure I’m the one who should say exactly what to do. But I do think that the idea of dialogue that’s been prominent in Swedish civic orientation, at least in the policy documents, is good and should be encouraged.

I think that what’s been lacking more is more training for the communicators, because what the state is trying to do here is extremely hard. This is something that there are decades of research in many different disciplines—education, linguistics, and political science on how to do. It’s not just something that you can throw someone into and expect them to do very well.

Yes, some very conservative people migrate to Sweden. Some people migrate to Sweden exactly because they’re very progressive and they’re persecuted. So, to really see that the people in the classroom are actually people. Facilitating this kind of open dialogue is extremely hard, but I think [civic education] is an extremely hard thing to do, and it should be seen as that. It shouldn’t be seen as easy.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Why People Send Remittances: Lessons from Cuban Communities Abroad

Adrian Ganic — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:11:41 +0000

Approximately 1 billion people rely on remittances—money sent by migrants to family and friends back home—to support their livelihoods, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The total value of global remittances to low- and middle-income countries was $656 billion in 2023, more than foreign direct investment and official development assistance combined. Yet, even though many people depend on them, and although remittance flows have increased by 500% over the last 20 years, remittances remain a peripheral area of research within the broader field of migration studies.

Among other things, scholars have examined how remittances influence economic indicators such as growth and investment capacity. Moreover, it has been observed how remittance flows not only transmit money but ideas and norms between receiving- and sending-country communities—so-called “social remittances”, first articulated by American sociologist Peggy Levitt in a paper published in 1998. Remittances’ effect on institutions, and whether remittances spur democratisation or strengthen authoritarian regimes, is also heavily debated. What these distinct strands of scholarship have in common, however, is that they overwhelmingly focus on the impact of remittances on recipient countries, sometimes referred to as the migrants’ “home countries”, or on people living there.

Denisse Delgado, a migration specialist and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and American University, Washington, D.C., has sought to address the lack of focus on individuals in sending countries. In 2024, she successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled Remittance Behaviors Among Cuban Migrants in Miami and Madrid: Motivations, Practices and Experiences, which explores remittance attitudes and practices among Cuban migrants living in Madrid and Miami. Dr Delgado’s research comes at a time when debates around migration in the United States have held centre stage for some time, with previous Republican and Democratic governments both in favour of tightly controlled borders. Since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, such policies have been further entrenched and escalated.

While attending the 4th International Forum on Migration Statistics (IFMS) in Malmö, Sweden, Dr Delgado sat down with DDRN to discuss her research and how the Cuban case informs the wider remittance literature.

Highlighting the Cuban Diaspora in Madrid

On why she chose to study Cuban migrants, Dr Delgado points out that “there is very limited information on Cuban migration and even less about remittances, so there is a gap in the literature that I think is valuable to fill. The other aspect is that being someone who was born in Cuba, I personally feel motivated to explore how families connect while living in different countries and across large distances.”

Most scholarship on Cuban migration and its social and economic consequences focuses on the large Cuban community in the United States, which is estimated to number approximately 2 million people, including Cuban-born migrants and their descendants, according to the Centre for Demographic Studies (GEMI) at the University of Havana. Of these, some 900,000 live in Miami, Florida, the largest Cuban community outside Cuba. Consequently, Cubans in the US sent a majority of the $1.83 billion worth of remittances entering Cuba in 2023, as estimated by the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank.

Remittances are the second-largest source of foreign currency income for the Cuban state, meaning they are crucial for the import of goods and products not available on the island. For example, Cuba imports 70%–80% of its food.

A major contribution of Dr Delgado’s dissertation is the introduction of the Cuban diaspora in Madrid as a case to study Cuban migration beyond Miami. Some of the significant differences between Cuban migrants in Miami and Madrid in Dr Delgado’s sample are that the median age is lower in Madrid, with a higher representation of mixed and Black individuals.

While median incomes for Cuban migrants are higher in Miami, although they have a higher cost of living, the employment rate is higher in Madrid. Dr Delgado argues that the latter difference can be attributed to the absence of language barriers and a younger demographic among migrants in Madrid, compared to a larger share of retirees in Miami. Still, individuals in both cities face challenges entering the labour market, with initial jobs often underpaid and lacking job security. There is also a slight overrepresentation of women in both cities, following global trends.

Migrants’ Remittance Behaviour in Miami and Madrid

As it pertains to migrants’ remittance-sending behaviour, migrants in Miami sent $2,615 on average per year, while those in Madrid remitted $1,604 annually. Such a difference reflects the higher median income in Miami, and both amounts fall within the range for a typical migrant worker globally, as estimated by the United Nations in 2019.

The vast majority of migrants were driven to send remittances due to a strong sense of responsibility to support their families, with mothers being the primary recipients of remittances from Miami and Madrid. On average, migrants in both cities have been sending remittances for seven years.

Because of the US trade embargo against Cuba, there is a “slightly higher reliance on informal [remittance-sending] mechanisms in Miami compared to Madrid, partly due to more limited access to formal channels such as bank accounts. Nonetheless, migrants in Miami still use parcel agencies, Western Union, and other OFAC-authorised providers, which are formal mechanisms. Overall, migrants in both Miami and Madrid combine both formal and informal mechanisms to send remittances,” Dr Delgado explained.

“Remittances are not gender neutral”

Her dissertation finds that female recipients are more likely to use remittances to fulfil essential needs, like buying food or medicine for their family. Men, on the other hand, spent remittances on non-essential expenses. Women in both Miami and Madrid also send a higher proportion of their income as remittances compared to men, despite earning lower wages on average. This gender disparity is echoed by the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) and is arguably related to traditional gender roles and women’s perceived position as the family caregiver. Dr Delgado believes such gender dynamics are not sufficiently accounted for: “I would say that a big problem, especially with policies related to remittances, is thinking that all migrants and remittances are the same, but remittances are not gender neutral.”

She adds, “If women in Cuba are receiving remittances and mostly spending remittances on essential consumption, that means they are not doing much for [their own] development, such as education, savings and investments. But men, when they were sent a higher proportion of remittances, were investing in businesses. So it’s important to develop policies where women, for example, could also invest in businesses if trained on how they could use remittances for that.”

Cuba as the Canary in the Coal Mine for Increasing Transfer Costs

Although remittances play a crucial role for both the Cuban people and the state, the country is usually omitted from the wider remittance literature, perhaps due to a lack of official data. The Cuban government does not publish official remittance figures, leaving researchers to estimate.

Regardless, studying Cuba can bring valuable insights. For example, remittance flows to Cuba are, because of the US trade embargo limiting formal banking and trade with the island, more politicised than those to other countries. This, in turn, leads to increased use of informal remittance channels. These include relying on personal networks or unlicensed agents, such as so-called Money Mules, to deliver money in a way which bypasses official institutions. Dr Delgado found that the cost of sending remittances to Cuba is generally between around 8%–11%, shooting up to 40% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The UN has identified the average cost of sending remittances globally at about 5%, with the intention of lowering it to 3%. However, “there have been some discussions, in the United States, for example, to start taxing remittances. And what I can see happening, just because I know the Cuban case and how the restrictions impact the remittance market there, is that those migrants living in the United States wanting to send remittances to their families are going to go through more informal mechanisms trying to avoid [the higher costs],” Dr Delgado said.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Financing Local Actors to Drive Africa’s Sustainable Future

Adrian Ganic — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 05:19:00 +0000

The Climate Policy Initiative reported in 2022 that Africa will need $250 billion in climate finance annually until 2030, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres calling at COP29 to transform the continent into a global leader in renewable energy.

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) constitute over 90% of all firms, according to a paper by Sebhatu Kefleyesus Ogubazghi and Willy Muturi. Research by Oluwayemisi Adebola Abisuga-Oyekunle and collaborators, moreover, concludes that SMEs are well-suited for the developmental challenges of SSA because they are labour-intensive while requiring relatively little capital to get started. Successful SMEs, in turn, can generate economic growth through innovation and rapidly growing business as companies scale. These assertions have been echoed by other scholarship on SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as by Gift Mugano, although the effect of such firms on development and poverty reduction at the global level is ambiguous.

Dr Abel Gwaindepi, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS), underscores the importance of African SMEs. He told DDRN: “I can give an example from Zimbabwe, where studies show that 80% of jobs are in the small, informal players. So, currently, if you’re thinking of growth strategy, you cannot ignore small and medium enterprises . . . The real innovators are your small and medium players.” Highlighting SMEs’ crucial role in Africa’s green transition, scholars like Nara Monkam argue that African states need to support local ventures to fully realise the potential of projects funded by international climate finance.

Studying South African Companies and Their Access to Green Finance

The push towards a sustainable future is not without challenges, however. African countries have limited institutional and technical capacity to develop attractive investment projects. Then, there are questions related to the effectiveness of climate finance as a catalyst for domestic firms. Can African companies access climate finance? And, if they do, how does green finance shape their climate responsiveness?

Dr Gwaindepi is investigating the latter two questions, recently obtaining funds from the Danida Fellowship Centre to study how South African SMEs in the agricultural and food (Agrifood) sectors adapt to the demands of climate finance and the adoption of sustainable business strategies. The four-year project, called Green Financing for Agrifood SMEs (GreenFi), will also explore the implications of green financing on the growth of SMEs in South Africa.

The GreenFi project has not yet produced any findings, but Dr Gwaindepi hypothesises that access to green finance will, first and foremost, depend on a company’s bottom line, its profitability. In South Africa, where inequality is very high, according to the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, “we anticipate a varied outcome, where we may see that firms from previously disadvantaged regions may fail to meet the requirements to access this green finance,” Dr Gwaindepi notes, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities.

It is currently uncertain, he continues, whether potential access to climate finances makes South African agrifood SMEs step up adherence to sustainable business practices, such as switching to renewable energy—or if these firms were already adapting to changing climate conditions on their own.

The SME Finance Gap

Accessing finance is hard for many African firms, even beyond the agrifood sector. Between 60% and 70% of SMEs in SSA require a loan. Yet, only 17% of small firms and 31% of medium-sized companies can obtain financing, Abisuga-Oyekunle et al. found. This funding gap risks entrenching existing socioeconomic inequality, as noted by Dr Gwaindepi.

Access to finance also intersects with gender dynamics: “Women are active in livestock keeping, primary farming, raising crops and selling food that will eventually go to the market. Despite being such active players in these economies, service providers sometimes don’t look at [women] as viable customers,” says Edel Were, Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP, a think tank focusing on financial inclusion. Brookings lists several reasons for women’s economic exclusion, including poverty, limited formal employment, as well as societal barriers to land and property ownership.

It is important to empower women financially because, as Ms Were explains, “with women, we tend to see a lot of investment back into the community. This could mean health [for themselves and their children], or they could start a side business, using their surplus to accumulate savings or build some long-term insurance.” Such activity affects development because if “you multiply this case times whatever number, it can increase the economic wellbeing and development of that area, that country, that region”, she adds.

Of Africa’s total estimated climate finance needs by 2030—$2.4 trillion—only around 12% has been obtained, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Hurdles to Overcome

A major issue for African states and firms is that loans, even climate ones, come at a high, perhaps even unrepresentative, cost. “We don’t have a thorough assessment of risks in developing countries. What that means is that your access to credit, because you have this elevated risk profile, is very hard. [African states are] going to pay, say, 15% while Denmark or Sweden pays below 2% depending on the type of loan. That, then, creates cycles of indebtedness,” Dr Gwaindepi says. Indeed, UNDP estimates that unequal so-called sovereign credit ratings have cost African states more than $24 billion in excess interest and over $46 billion in forgone lending.

Additionally, research by Carmen Broto and Luis Molina Sánchez shows that sovereign ratings are closely linked to borrowing costs for domestic companies, restricting their access to international funds, green or otherwise. For example, African commercial banks can only offer SMEs loans with high interest rates, mirroring the banks’ own steep borrowing costs.

Another hurdle, specifically related to climate finance, is the lack of common frameworks and definitions between money that goes towards projects reducing greenhouse gas emissions—climate mitigation—and funds to develop infrastructure to adapt to climate change—climate adaptation. This incongruity matters, argues economist Francois Bourguignon, because developing countries tend to prefer financial flows that address climate adaptation. While international actors often prioritise emission reduction efforts. Secondly, without distinguishing between the two types of funding, it becomes harder to evaluate the impact of climate finance and how to improve it in the future.

African governments are also not without blame. Dr Gwaindepi emphasises that a reliable regulatory environment and macroeconomic fundamentals, such as a stable currency, low inflation and functioning institutions, are needed to attract financing and achieve development. “One bad policy can cause negative media coverage that creates negative investor sentiments. In such circumstances, capital retreats quickly back to stable markets, mostly in developed economies. And the spiral goes on. That’s what you don’t want,” he says.

Bridging the Gap

Addressing the barriers to climate finance access in Africa will require cooperation from a diverse range of actors working on multiple fronts. Research projects such as Dr Gwaindepi’s GreenFi, for instance, are crucial for uncovering new insights to formulate better policies. Such projects, moreover, push the frontiers of knowledge production through Global South-North research partnerships, allowing for the cross-pollination of ideas and methodologies. Ms Were’s work at CGAP collecting data on rural women’s economic activity to highlight traditionally excluded groups and supporting organisations providing financing for these local actors is another example of ventures that can make a difference. Both efforts are part of Accelerating Business to Empower Rural Women in Agriculture (ABERA), an initiative aimed at promoting inclusive innovation and financial solutions in rural economies.

International solutions will also be key. The African Development Bank’s SME programme, for example, aims to support African financial institutions with credit lines and technical knowledge to provide financing for SMEs across the continent. At the global level, the G77—a coalition of developing countries at the UN—has proposed several reforms to the unequal sovereign debt system.

Global North countries have firmly committed to mobilising climate financing for the green transition, Denmark included. Supporting local, national and international initiatives which increase the accessibility and fairness of climate finance is paramount—for the environment and African development.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

How Insights from Central Asia can Strengthen Global Democracy

Adrian Ganic — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 18:43:16 +0000

Central Asia is home to over 80 million people but is often overlooked and seen by many as a peripheral region. Central Asian countries also do not feature in classic academic works on authoritarianism around the world.

A consortium of 14 educational institutions was recently awarded a 60 million SEK grant to study authoritarian legal landscapes in Central Asia, funded by the European Union and the Swiss State Secretariat for Research, Education and Innovation (SERI). The project, called Sociology of Authoritarian Law: Insights from Central Asia, is headed by Dr Rustamjon Urinboyev, Associate Professor at Lund University. The project will examine how society, law and politics interact in Central Asian countries.

Sociology of Authoritarian Law: Insights from Central Asia is the first doctoral network led by Lund University under the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme and will include 17 PhD students from universities in Europe and Canada. In addition to PhD dissertations, the project will produce academic articles, books and policy briefs. A central aim of this research is to translate it into strategic intelligence and policy insights for policymakers in the EU and beyond, who seek to advance democracy, good governance and the rule of law in authoritarian contexts, says Dr Urinboyev, who recently sat down with DDRN to discuss the project.

Understanding the Significance of Authoritarianism in Central Asia

Q: Why should we study authoritarianism in Central Asia?

Because it can serve as an archetypal region to study authoritarian law and legality. Authoritarianism has different forms, and Central Asia includes several types of authoritarian states. Turkmenistan is a super authoritarian regime resembling North Korea, to some extent. There are also relatively liberal authoritarian regimes in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan, for example, is often seen as a hybrid political regime, combining authoritarian and democratic elements. In between, we have Uzbekistan, which was heavily authoritarian but is now opening up to the world. Then there is Tajikistan, which is drifting towards repressive authoritarianism.

This [regime variety] means that the tools, theories and frameworks we develop in the context of Central Asia can be used to study authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world.

Q: What is the Sociology of Authoritarian Law: Insights from Central Asia project, and why is it important?

The [project] is connected to my personal journey. I come from Uzbekistan, which is an authoritarian regime. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and many other post-Soviet countries, including Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan, became laboratories for international development assistance. The EU, the US and many Western donors invested a lot into the rule of law, good governance and democratisation programmes. But, so far, despite millions of dollars and euros spent on these development programmes, we have disappointing results. When the Soviet Union fell, there was euphoria, and we expected that democracy would become a universal form of governance. But after three decades, we know that authoritarian tendencies are resilient. These global developments influenced the design of this research project.

Using Local Dynamics to Strengthen Democracy

I also felt, growing up in Uzbekistan, that Western-centric paradigms and understandings of how authoritarian regimes work don’t fit the local context. We need new tools, new paradigms and new frameworks to understand what keeps authoritarian regimes so resilient. As a sociologist of law by education, I think looking at the legal landscape in authoritarian regimes can give us a more nuanced understanding. The legal system [in authoritarian countries] is a less politicised arena of communication between citizens and the state because, in authoritarian regimes, unlike democracies, channels of communication and daily interaction between citizens and the government take place through legal institutions, not political institutions. This means that we need to examine legal and societal dynamics to gain a better understanding of how authoritarian regimes operate.

Q: Can you give an example of such local dynamics?

The idea actually came from a wedding I attended outside Tashkent, [the capital of Uzbekistan]. Usually, guests are seated in rooms depending on social status. I ended up in a room with the leader of the community, a local politician, local businessmen and a police official. While we were eating, the community leader, as a representative of the people, started talking about social problems and addressed the local government official, “You have resources, and we have problems here. Why don’t you solve this problem?”.

At the same time, the community leader mentioned an instance of corruption. So did the police officer. It was a company that received money from the state to plant trees, but it wasn’t doing that. The local businessmen also pointed out the extreme checks by the tax office and the problems with doing business. The state official gave promises and said they would fix these issues. People are not passive. People can actually bring their concerns to the attention of state officials—not via state institutions but through these kinds of informal domains of society.

Very often, Western development actors have the understanding that legal and governance reform is a technical matter and if the right Western-style institutions are transplanted into the fertile soils of authoritarian regimes, change will come. [To advance democracy], it’s better to understand the local dynamics and maybe develop programmes based on these local structures and local level power geometries.

Research Partnerships on a Large Scale

Q: Let’s talk about the research partnership aspect of the project. How will it work in practice?

We wanted to onboard scholars from different disciplines—criminology, sociology of law, political science, economics, business science, public administration, anthropology. We also tried to bring partners with expertise in Central Asian studies.

According to the project design, we will have three research streams, and the 17 PhD students will be split into these streams. Each research stream will have stream leaders, and each PhD student will have two academic supervisors at their home institution. In addition, we are appointing two regional mentors for each PhD student from Central Asia to support the PhD student in doing fieldwork. We are collaborating with governments, civil society, the business sector, think-tanks, and international organisations [in Central Asia] to offer alternative career tracks to students. As part of the PhD training, there will be a [six months] compulsory non-academic segment. They might go to a think tank or the prosecutor’s office in Uzbekistan, for example, to do their internship or practical work, trying to understand the non-academic market.

[These local partners will also] enable PhD students to conduct fieldwork safely and give them access to the grassroots level of society. Otherwise, we know that authoritarian regimes are usually closed, and it’s not easy to collect data.

Mitigating Inequalities Between Researchers in the Global North and South

We try to treat all partners equally. Usually, researchers in the Global South produce and collect data, while the knowledge producers and the researchers [who publish academic articles and books] are based in the West. We want to change this by fostering collaboration and ensuring that knowledge is disseminated in both ways. That’s important. This has to do with my background. I want to contribute to ameliorating the inequalities in knowledge production between the Global South and the Global North.

Q: Do you have any ideas on how to improve research cooperation between the Global North and Central Asia or the Global South more generally?

More funding, especially more targeted funding to regions outside the West, and I think Central Asia is still under-represented. It is often seen as a peripheral region between China and Russia, but the EU has shown a renewed interest in Central Asia, evidenced by the recent summit between EU and Central Asian leaders in Samarkand, so things are changing.

Also, I think another reform proposal would be to build the competence of researchers and scholars outside the West. The EU’s MSCA Staff Exchange funding scheme, for example, where I’m currently leading three projects, is a good initiative that gives possibilities for researchers outside the West to enhance their capacity.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

The Rise of Avant-Garde Courts in a Multipolar World

Adrian Ganic — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 15:23:43 +0000

Many countries in the Global South have expanded their influence in recent decades, with nations outside the traditional West seeing a significant increase in their share of global GDP. Such a rise in economic power has allowed Global South actors to start challenging traditional institutions. For example, China has become an alternative source of development finance and the BRICS have formed a significant economic bloc. A less discussed but arguably equally important aspect of this global transformation is the shift from a Western-dominated international legal landscape towards a multipolar one.

Mikael Rask Madsen, Professor of law at Copenhagen University and Director of the Centre of Excellence for International Courts and Governance (iCourts), in 2024 received funding from the Carlsberg Foundation for a research project called Decentring Legal Power: Avantgarde Courts at the Frontiers of the Global Economy (AVANT-COURTS) spanning 2025 to 2030. The project will study how global processes enable new courts and litigation hubs to emerge and gain relevancy.

AVANT-COURTS, which is still in its initial stages, will explore three distinct but related “empirical spaces”—as Professor Madsen, who recently sat down with DDRN for an interview to discuss the project, calls them:

New Economic Spaces
Outer Space
Virtual Spaces

New Economic Spaces

New Economic Spaces refers to the rise of English-language international economic courts in the Global South and their competition with traditional Western courts. Examples include the Qatar International Financial Court, the Dubai International Financial Court, and the China International Commercial Court (CICC). These and other similar legal institutions have sprung up in response to particular policy goals of their host countries.

China’s CICC aims to handle disputes related to its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure investment programme worth over $1 trillion. The Gulf States, meanwhile, see the development of international courts as part of a larger strategy to diversify their economies from dependence on oil and gas.

Becoming financial and legal hubs may be a way to attract investment. “It’s part of a complex transformation of [the Gulf States] that some might even call court-washing—they are trying to transform their economies towards something more sustainable, and one way of attracting capital is by providing somewhat trustworthy courts,” Professor Madsen explains. Other countries, such as Kazakhstan, seem to be following this blueprint, establishing the Astana International Financial Centre Court in 2018. In this way, courts are becoming an explicit part of global capitalism, with states using them to grow their economies and pursue strategic initiatives.

The establishment of new international courts is not without its challenges, however. A major obstacle to overcome is that these new courts lack a mechanism to ensure that rulings made in their countries, Kazakhstan, for instance, are recognised and enforceable in other states. This is because the new international commercial courts are state courts—courts that are part of a country’s legal system. Current global treaties for recognition and enforcement, such as the New York Convention, only cover arbitral tribunals, which are panels of independent arbitrators chosen by disputing parties to resolve disputes outside state courts privately. Being part of a state’s formal judicial system also questions the fairness and legitimacy of the new international courts. To make up for it, some of the courts can appoint foreign judges.

One might argue that Western judicial institutions are similarly biased towards the interests of Global North countries, but, as Professor Madsen points out, there are crucial differences: “Courts in the old West—Europe—were set up as public courts, typically with broad jurisdiction. But these [new international commercial] courts are deliberately set up to further particular projects … Western courts have a very high degree of autonomy which they have gained over a very long time. Some more than others, obviously. But that process means something. At the end of the day, that’s what makes a difference between a court and what looks like a court.”

Outer Space

The second empirical space, Outer Space, refers to how new courts disrupt established international dispute resolution practices in space law. Outer space has legally been a common good since the adoption of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty in 1967. The treaty affirms, among other things, that all countries are free to explore outer space and that any one nation cannot claim outer space. The Space Treaty and other subsequent UN treaties have created a legal architecture where space law is resolved between governments—a system which is challenged by the emergence of the private space industry.

The commercial space market is rapidly growing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, partnered with NASA and sent two astronauts to space in 2020, the first time a private company had done so. McKinsey & Company estimates that the sector will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035. This structural transformation is causing a scramble where “law, and particularly dispute resolution, gets mobilised and the first [country] to set up a space court was Dubai. They used the model of the new economic courts to create a space court [in 2021],” Professor Madsen said.

“It’s truly a frontier zone of law. If you smash your [commercial] satellite into another satellite somewhere in outer space, we don’t know for sure where that conflict will be resolved,” he added.

Virtual Spaces

The third and final empirical space under investigation is called Virtual Spaces and encompasses the clash between public law and corporations, using private law, vying for control of online content. Public law manages relations between individuals and the state, including areas like human rights and criminal law. Private law governs the relationship between individuals and private entities, such as contracts and property disputes. A crucial difference is that public law is enforced by governmental institutions for the public interest in line with constitutional practices. In this empirical space, AVANT-COURTS will limit its inquiry to freedom of speech.

Companies such as Meta, X and various Chinese platforms have created court-like institutions to settle freedom of speech disputes. For instance, the Meta Oversight Board rules on which content is allowed on Facebook and Instagram, famously suspending Donald Trump in 2021 after the January 6 United States Capitol attack. The ban was lifted in 2023.

This privatisation of dispute resolution for freedom of speech issues can blur the line between public and private law and weaken human rights protections. Professor Madsen explains: “If you look at [the Meta Oversight Board’s] jurisprudence, how they define freedom of expression, compared to a public court like the European Court of Human Rights, you’ll immediately realise that [Meta’s] conception of freedom of expression is different and essentially driven by an underlying commercial interest. So, in a very subtle way, the legal categories, the fundamentals, in this case of democracy, changes because of these new institutions.”

The three empirical spaces may seem distinct, but the common theme is that states such as the United Arab Emirates and China, along with private firms like Meta, seek to expand their authority as they become more influential. This transfers power from Western governmental and judicial instances. A part of this global shift is the creation of legal institutions catered towards particular commercial goals, be they private or state-backed. Consequently, argues Professor Madsen, the idea of independent courts detached from any specific project is fundamentally challenged.

Conducting the Project

The AVANT-COURTS project has several components: Emerging legal hubs will be identified and mapped out. The law produced by new international courts will be systematically analysed using computational and legal methods. And how geoeconomic and political processes enable such hubs will be studied.

There will, moreover, be an element of fieldwork, including archival research. For this, Copenhagen University will partner with local educational institutions. Currently, only Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Qatar has been officially onboarded. “This is what you call first-generation scholarship,” Professor Madsen said. “There’s a whole job in, with a coding expression, the archaeology of this. The question is, what are [these courts] doing? No one really knew until we started looking at it.”

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Beyond Totalitarianism: Redefining Brazil’s New Right

Adrian Ganic — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:07:40 +0000

Far-right parties in the Global North have expanded their relevancy over the last 20 years, most recently achieving success in the United States following the reelection of Donald Trump. The rise of these movements has led scholars to increasingly research the ideas and material grievances driving far-right movements. In the Global South, too, the far-right has seen remarkable results, with the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil in 2018 the most prominent example, whose time in office weakened the country’s welfare systems, environmental regulations and human rights protections.

Bolsonaro’s presidency ended with a mob of his supporters attacking several federal government buildings in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, on 8 January 2023, seeking to overthrow the newly elected Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. In 2024, federal police accused Bolsonaro and 36 people of also planning a coup to keep him in power. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that he should stand trial. Bolsonaro has been barred from running for office until 2030 but has said he will fight the ban to run for a second term in 2026.

Understanding the Religious Aspects of Brazil’s New Right Movement

In a forthcoming research paper, Dr Georg Walter Wink, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies/Latin America at University of Copenhagen, analysed two dystopian novels by Brazilian journalist and political scientist Bernardo Kucinski. A retired professor at the University of São Paulo, Kucinski is closely aligned with the New Right’s main rival, the Workers’ Party (PT), even serving as an adviser to Lula during his first term as president (2002–2006).

Kucinski’s books are called The New Order (A nova ordem) and The Collapse of the New Order (O colapso da nova ordem), published in 2019 and 2022, respectively. They narrate the successful implementation and subsequent overthrow in Brazil of a far-right, totalitarian, hyper-capitalist regime under the command of the military, which aims to control every aspect of citizens’ lives, including inventing microchips to control minds.

Dr Wink, who is also the coordinator of ILAS – Iberian and Latin American Studies Forum and head of the Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms (CSGN), is in his paper critical of Kucinski’s characterisation of the Brazilian Right—the New Right—because it overlooks the movement’s distinct anti-modernist features. “We should not portray the far right [in Brazil] as soldiers torturing and everything dark and brainwashing through computer controlled manipulation because the far right hates exactly that. Their utopia is a religious, well-ordered, bright, private, very local community,” he told DDRN in a recent interview.

Some recent scholarship by Ole Jakob Løland has noted the theological foundations of the electoral coalition that saw Bolsonaro elected. The 2018 election is the first time that Brazil’s Catholic upper clergy and evangelical lower classes have endorsed the same candidate for president, the first through discrete elite lobbying, the second through voting power. This showed the consolidation of different religious communities into a powerful political majority, which aligns with the neoliberal political right and neoconservative groups. Dr Wink agrees, saying his motivation for writing his research paper was to explain that the “far right in Brazil aims at order and liberty. Order in the private space, preserving certain values. On the other hand, the liberty dimension means opposition to all kinds of state control . . . It is far from what Kucinski describes [in his novels] as a totalitarian control society.” It is crucial to understand the dynamics of the New Right movement for those who wish to stop its rise and defeat it, he adds.

Economic Grievances

These ideological influences become even more persuasive in times of economic insecurity. A study by economists Laura Barros and Manuel Santos Silva found that Bolsonaro’s rhetoric based on masculine stereotypes and authoritarianism increased in popularity among Brazilian men who experienced a relative decline in economic status. One could also argue that the Workers’ Party (PT) has not done enough to disrupt the dominance of economic and political structures unfavourable to most Brazilians despite controlling the federal government between 2003 and 2016.

“What makes people not believe in the progressive forces in Brazil is probably precisely that social reformism is very timid. For example, they never dealt with the question which is probably the main cause of inequality in Brazil—the tax system. There’s one detail perfectly characterising Brazilian inequality: the average salary is very different from the median salary,” Dr Wink says. Brazil is one of the world’s most unequal countries, with levels comparable to Southern Africa, the most unequal region globally.

Historical Roots

In Brazil: Land of the Past, published in 2021, Dr Wink analyses the origins of the ideas underpinning the New Right. The book’s thesis is that Brazilian conservative thought revolves around defending the country’s “natural order”, as constituted when Brazil gained independence in 1822 as a monarchical empire. The far right, argues Dr Wink, emerged as a reaction to a military coup overthrowing the monarchy in 1889 to found a republic. This process differs from the other Hispano-American colonies—such as Argentina and Colombia—which became republics at independence.

Brazil’s Armed Forces have a history of ousting civilian governments, most recently in 1964, when the military established a dictatorship lasting until 1985. The military is, however, not the driving political force of either the Old or New Right: “The military is not in the centre. They are those who carry out ideas. Behind the military, you have a very conservative elite in Brazil, which, of course, defends with whatever means its inherited privilege from the colonial times,” Dr Wink posits.

The country’s economic inequality has deep roots. For instance, non-white Brazilians are disadvantaged by widespread systemic racism, a 2024 report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found. Moreover, research shows that contemporary land distribution in Brazil is partly inherited from the colonial era.

How the New Right in Brazil Can Inform Similar Movements Elsewhere

Far from simply being a mirror of developments in the Global North, conservative political forces in countries like Brazil have a distinct history and features. “[These movements] have their own ideas and, above all, their own means of political mobilisation. We can learn a lot from WhatsApp use in Brazil, for example. We can learn a lot from state-controlled media propaganda in China. But I think the key lesson to learn from the New Right in the Global South is the importance of desecularisation,” Dr Wink explains.

He is currently heading a research project at the Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms investigating how the far right across the World uses notions of tradition and spiritualism to oppose Western ideas of modernity. The project, part of HUM:Global Flagship Initiatives, was launched in 2024.

“I think in Europe, and especially northern Europe, we are in that bubble to think that the world is secularised, and it never has been the case. In the Global South, you have many people strongly believing in the desire for spirituality, religion and such things. The New Right in the Global South have learned how to surf on that wave of desecularisation,” Dr Wink says.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Understanding Long-term Inequality Trends in Africa

Adrian Ganic — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:06:12 +0000

Africa contains the widest between-country variations in income inequality globally, with the top 10% of the region controlling almost 56% of total income. The roots of many issues underlying this inequality go back to the colonial era. Yet, international development scholars and practitioners are, understandably, often concerned with analysing contemporary challenges in an attempt to solve them. Limited data availability from Africa’s colonial period adds to the difficulty of studying the historical causes of inequality.

Since 2019, the African Long-term Inequality Trends (AFLIT) research network has been collecting data and analysing the colonial origins of current-day inequalities in Africa. AFLIT is centred at the Faculty of Economic History at Lund University but has research partners around the world. The project’s primary methodological approach is the production of social tables to study between-group inequality. A social table is a historical method for estimating income distribution and economic inequality within a society at a specific point in time. It categorises different social groups—elites, middle classes and labourers—based on their estimated population size and average income (see image).

“My background in anthropology and my work with small-scale farmers in Africa have shaped my focus—I really want to include them. They are often left out of historical narratives because they are difficult to track, so it has always been my ambition to make sure they are represented. Some 15 years ago, my former supervisor led a project on exploitation during the colonial era, and that’s where the idea of using social tables came up. I picked up on it, and I’ve been working with it ever since,” Ellen Hillbom, Professor of Economic History at Lund University and coordinator for AFLIT, told DDRN in a recent interview.

AFLIT has produced full social tables for Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda, with work ongoing for Angola and the other former Portuguese colonies, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar), Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Research Findings

AFLIT’s main research findings thus far are that:

income inequality increased in all cases over the study period, roughly between the 1910s to 1960s
levels of inequality are impacted by the presence of Europeans—and to a lesser degree, Asians—in the wage or agricultural sectors
there have been unequal opportunities for African groups to profit from commercial opportunities

Professor Hillbom and collaborators lay out these findings in a 2024 paper analysing income inequality and commercialisation using data from the six countries with completed social tables. All studied economies are predominantly agrarian. Colonial mining economies in Africa, such as the Belgian Congo and Zimbabwe, were not part of the study.

A crucial mechanism for increased inequality in the six cases is that colonial powers introduced monetisation and export-oriented commercialisation of agriculture in their occupied territories. By creating markets for agricultural products, colonialism puts a monetary value on such products—meaning that individuals with significant ownership can increase their wealth. This process, in turn, leads to heightened income inequality.

The presence of mainly European expats heavily impacts how the profits from commercialisation are distributed and, therefore, the level of between-group inequality. Non-Africans, where present, secure a large share of the profits either through farming and business or indirectly through higher salaries. More opportunities were available for African groups to benefit from export sectors when non-Africans were less prevalent. In such cases, the inequality between African classes is higher.

The paper also finds evidence that inequality is higher in colonial economies exporting more capital-intensive agricultural commodities such as livestock because of the higher barrier of entry into the export sector.

Botswana: A Case in Point

“Take Botswana, for example: even before colonial rule, there were significant differences in how many cattle people owned. But because there was no export market to sell them to, that wealth did not translate into monetary income, which means it didn’t show up as income inequality. Colonial capitalism changed that,” Professor Hillbom said.

Colonial Botswana is Professor Hillbom’s primary area of expertise. It was a research collaboration starting in 2012 with Jutta Bolt, currently Professor of Global Economic History at the University of Groningen, to produce social tables for the country that eventually sparked the idea of establishing a research network to study income inequality during the colonial period across Africa.

Botswana is a case that strongly illustrates AFLIT’s findings. Studies show that the nature of chieftainship in Botswana changed under colonialism in the sense that the social contract between ruler and subject was no longer just about patronage but a capitalist class relationship through which chiefly families could build personal wealth, creating new income inequalities. After 1930, the British started to develop Botswana’s cattle export industry. In the absence of significant amounts of white settlers, the large-scale cattle-owning African elite could use its economic advantage to dominate the growing sector.

While large-scale herders grew their wealth by participating in colonial trade, the colonial economy pushed the lower African classes into poverty. Botswana’s original role in the British imperial economy was to act as a labour reserve for the mineral industry in the neighbouring Union of South Africa. Britain and South Africa implemented a series of taxes and other policies suppressing producers. Such taxes pressured local Botswana chiefs to send their subjects to work in the mines to earn a wage used to pay the colonial taxes. With thousands of men migrating to work in South Africa, most societies in Botswana lost their economic self-sufficiency, impoverishing and transforming them into communities defined by the supply of cheap labour. As a result, wealth inequality between the lower classes and the elites had increased by the time Botswana achieved independence—75% of Botswana’s total cattle herd was in the hands of 15% of the population.

Botswana is today an upper-middle-income country. The nation’s population has also seen living standards rise dramatically thanks to the redistribution of profits from its vast diamond reserves. Yet, Botswana remains one of the world’s most unequal countries, with the same elite group of large-scale cattle owners dominating the political landscape until the Botswana Democratic Party’s (BDP) unexpected defeat—the first in its history—in the 2024 elections.

The Significance of Historical Perspectives for Development

Understanding the historical roots of present-day development challenges is crucial for formulating strategies and policies to combat such issues. Professor Hillbom believes that studying international development and economic history go hand-in-hand, although the fields remain significantly divided. She explains: “I think that these two subjects go really well together, but I also understand that development studies are very present-focused for natural reasons, that there are a whole lot of challenges today, and having this historical research maybe isn’t something that is necessarily prioritised at African universities.“

On the other hand, Professor Hillbom notes that most economic-historical investigations are done on Global North cases since the majority of research is being conducted in Global North nations by individuals from those countries. “You could fill libraries with [research on the] British industrialisation, whereas there are comparatively few researchers working on the economic history for Africa, Asia and Latin America. But I think it’s growing. There is a growing interest in the economic history of the world outside Europe and North America,” she said.

This trend is highlighted not least by the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson. They argue that different types of European colonialism have determined which institutions—inclusive or extractive—form in a particular territory. In each instance, over time, minor variations in inherited institutions interact with critical junctures, leading to growing economic divergence. How Europe colonised the United States differs from Botswana, for example. The authors have popularised their thesis in the book Why Nations Fail.

The argument is far from perfect. It has been criticised for being Eurocentric in how it describes development and for ignoring that “inclusive” institutions are also a legacy of extractive colonialism, such as slavery in the US. Nonetheless, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson deserve credit for reintroducing the developmental impacts of colonialism through institutions into the mainstream.

AFLIT’s research is based on detailed statistical studies of individual cases, while the works of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson aim to produce a general theory of inequality applicable across contexts and continents. Both approaches, however, seek to show how historical developments matter for current-day inequality in Africa and the wider world. Professor Hillbom emphasises that AFLIT’s next phase is “to get our calculations accepted by other major inequality research groups so that they show up in their networks and get cited and used to a greater extent”. The causes of inequality are global in scope. They can only be understood with insights from all regions.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Resistance through Humour: Satirical Media Around the World

Adrian Ganic — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:54:01 +0000

“We make them tiny to be able to grab them because it is easier to have those things small so that in the future they might become a reality, like an amulet,” explained Daniel Gutiérrez, journalist at El Diario, a Bolivian newspaper.

He is describing the miniature newspapers found at the Alacita festival in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital—a celebration held in January every year in homage to the pre-Hispanic Andean god Ekeko. The publications are satirical, jokingly criticising powerful people and society in general. Nowadays, mainly journalists from Bolivia’s major media outlets, such as Daniel Gutiérrez, publish content. The practice of satire through miniature newspapers at Alacita, however, stretches back to 1846 and was incorporated into the UNESCO Memory of the World initiative in 2012. “It is a tradition that demonstrates, satirises and jokes with the day-to-day news. It’s like a release, in my case, to show that some things are bad and can be criticised in a more humorous manner,” Mr. Gutiérrez said.

Satire as Resistance

Satirical media is a means for people to speak up against bias and injustice across the globe. Nigeria’s so-called Nollywood films, for instance, use satire to exaggerate the stereotype of Nigerians as scammers, thereby deconstructing such prejudice. In Zimbabwe, the satirical Magamba TV produces several shows poking fun at everything from politics to sports. The Savala Vada—India’s version of The Onion—describes itself as the country’s most honest news source, making fun of Indian politicians and societal issues under anonymity. Satire is popular in the Global North, too, with famous outlets such as The Daily Show in the US.

These are just a few of countless examples highlighting how satirical media is used as a form of protest. Resistance does not, after all, encompass only organised political action, as demonstrated by James C. Scott’s book Weapons of the Weak. The book illustrates how exploited groups can resist oppression in various passive ways, such as sabotage, foot-dragging and even verbal defiance. Paul Alonso, Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech, agrees. He is an expert on satirical media in Latin America and believes that “if you are critiquing the status quo, critiquing the societal and cultural values of your time, you are trying to resist them in an intellectual and discursive way.”

In his research, Dr Alonso has shown how satirists across Latin America during the 21st century blend international formats with local traditions of humour and social critique, creating new forms of satiric media. One example is the Mexican online show The Pulse of the Republic (El Pulso De La República), hosted by the comedian Chumel Torres. An adaptation of The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, Torres has adapted his show to the Mexican context, frequently discussing and satirising national political and social issues.

When to Say What

Dr Alonso had a career as a journalist before turning to academia, even hosting a satirical show in his native Peru ten years ago. “I don’t think it was very well understood at the time, but I think satire at that moment was not very prevalent in the Peruvian media. I think things have changed since then.”

Indeed, satirists need to tread the line of what is deemed acceptable irreverence at any given time, constantly engaging in negotiations to this end with their platforms and audiences. Dr Alonso gives the example of the partly satirical Chilean magazine The Clinic—established in 1998 and named after The London Clinic, where Augusto Pinochet, former military dictator of Chile, was first held after his arrest in London that same year. The Clinic started publishing anti-Pinochet content at a time when the mainstream media did not yet discuss the crimes committed by Chile’s government during the military dictatorship (1973–1990). Chilean society changed a lot during the next 10-15 years, and what was viewed as transgressive had evolved beyond The Clinic’s initial quips. Still, the magazine was crucial in acknowledging past injustices, significantly contributing to Chile’s collective healing process.

Satire allowing people to laugh about their problems—past or present—is also visible in other parts of the world. In Japan, for example, the skit group The Newspaper (Za nyūsupēpā) are one of the only comedians making fun of politicians and societal issues in a country where powerful figures and other sensitive topics are rarely satirised. They were founded in 1989 to “snap everyone out of this dark time and make them laugh”. Similarly, over 200,000 Danes have signed a satirical petition to buy California from the United States in response to Donald Trump’s recent attempt to purchase Greenland.

Can Satire Change Politics?

Whether satirical critique can have a tangible impact on political developments, such as forcing politicians to resign or spurring protest movements, is unsettled. On the one hand, it is hard to discern what people who consume satirical content do with that information. Dr Alonso, for instance, is cautious to suggest that satire has a concrete impact on society beyond challenging the dominant discourse. In doing so, satire can deconstruct the dominant narratives and assumptions of a certain ethnic group, for example, showing how prejudiced they are compared to reality.

A 2017 study by Hsuan-Ting Chen, Chen Gan and Ping Sun shows that individuals need to believe an issue is personally important for satire to spur them to participate in politics. However, the generalisability of this conclusion is limited because some research suggests that different forms of satirical content can have unique effects.

On the other hand, satire has been part of successful protest movements—such as the protests calling for the impeachment of South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol in December 2024 after he, a few weeks earlier, had declared martial law and tried to dissolve parliament. Satirical messaging was featured heavily digitally and on the protesters’ flags. One of the most popular reads: “Please let us just stay home. We’re tired of leaving the house.” One protester explained online: “These flags show that anyone can participate. You don’t need to belong to a political group or have a loud voice.” In this case, the movement was successful, with Yoon Suk Yeol removed from office after getting impeached by parliament.

Moreover, the intensity with which governments sometimes go after satirical media arguably confirms its impact. For example, Colombia admitted in 2016 that the state was responsible for the 1999 murder of popular political satirist Jaime Garzón.

A Growing Research Field

The emergence of accessible digital media and the international success of satirical formats such as The Daily Show have allowed for increased production of satirical content globally. Satire has become a more established form of political communication in many countries and can perhaps even be considered mainstream. This has led to greater satirical literacy—as Dr Alonso calls it—among ordinary people.

Consequently, there has been a rise in academic interest in satire. There now exist numerous research institutions dedicated to studying satirical media and its societal impacts. One of these is the Satire Research Network at Roskilde University in Denmark. The programme, founded in 2024, aims to investigate the ethics and aesthetics of satire to understand and mitigate public controversies about satire.

The inhabitants of La Paz have had strong satirical literacy for almost 200 years. “[T]he people have become accustomed to this type of content and demand it. They want a funny newspaper to read and laugh and share with their friends”, as Daniel Gutiérrez puts it. While satire may or may not directly reshape politics, it remains a sharp instrument for questioning authority and challenging societal norms.

Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT

Charcoal Consumption in East Africa: A Climate Change Dilemma

Adrian Ganic — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:53:19 +0000

The fight against climate change demands that nations decarbonise their energy grids, but this transition puts contradictory pressures on many Global South countries. For instance, charcoal is the primary energy source for households in Tanzania and Uganda, dictating the social and political economy of livelihoods, gender relations, informal economies, ethnic relations and private sector growth. A sudden transition away from charcoal risks overlooking such complex dynamics.

To investigate these structures, Copenhagen University has partnered with Makerere University, Uganda, and St. Augustine University of Tanzania—receiving Danida funding for a four-year project (2023–2027) called Charcoal Conflict in Climate Change’s Decarbonisation Dilemmas: Knots of Livelihood, Nutrition, Communities, Gender, Migration & Energy in East Africa. The project includes extensive fieldwork in Tanzania and Uganda and aims to shape ideas on climate justice and global policies by centring voices from the Global South.

The initiative is led by Ole Wæver, Professor of Political Science at Copenhagen University and head of the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC).

DDRN recently interviewed Dr Susan Mlangwa, post-doctoral research fellow for the Charcoal Conflict project and lead investigator, Tanzania, part-time lecturer at St. Augustine University, and deputy country director for Tanzania at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, as well as Dr Sylvie Namwase, lead investigator for Uganda, lecturer at Makerere University School of Law, and post-doctoral research fellow at the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC), Makerere University.

This is the second research collaboration between Dr Wæver and Dr Namwase. They previously cooperated on a project on militarisation, sustainable growth and peace in Uganda, which concluded in 2024.

The importance of studying charcoal consumption in Tanzania and Uganda

Q: So, Dr Susan, you notified the team about the call for proposals?

Dr Mlangwa: Yes. Some of my colleagues, actually past colleagues of my late husband, would always send me calls for such projects. And, this time, when they shared a call, I remembered that Sylvie was working in Denmark. So why not give it a try?

After finishing my PhD, I worked with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs as the head of research and evaluation and continued to work on projects advancing [human] agency in terms of [disease] prevention behaviour. Not only through what we get from institutions, NGOs, hospitals and educators. But also what the peoples’ prevention initiatives themselves say about those interventions. Rather than imposing a change in social behaviour, you should actually work with the people themselves to understand how it can work better.

When we conceived this project, I saw myself looking at the same area of my expertise: How are the people navigating energy transitions? Are they doing it through what they’ve been told to do, or is there a level of agency going on?

Dr Namwase: It’s a lot that we are unpacking. It is the dilemmas of the energy transition within the broader context of climate change and we are exploring these issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.

It’s three universities, and each team is bringing a unique perspective. The University of Copenhagen, specifically the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts [CRIC], brings the international relations perspective. Then we have the Makerere University School of Law, specifically under the Human Rights and Peace Centre [HURIPEC], bringing the law and policy perspective. St. Augustine University in Tanzania provides the sociological, anthropological, conflict and geographical lens to the problem.

By acknowledging that, yes, we have a problem. We are destroying our environment. And, yes, on the other hand, there is a problem if the voices that are working for good, although unintentionally, end up enacting results that are oppressive. We need an intermediate discussion, discourse. This is why this project is important. It will provide the space for that discourse.

Q: Do you have any preliminary findings?

Dr Mlangwa: It is a bit too early to be conclusive. So, the preliminary results will basically only be from observations in Uganda.

We are seeing that these things are really intertwined at the micro level. You see that communities are heavily relying on firewood and charcoal due to affordability and accessibility. But when you look at the regional and national level you find things like government bans on charcoal production and attempts to cut deforestation that create economic hardship for those dependent communities. We see governments using the police in policy enforcement to regulate charcoal production. But, at the same time, it encounters things like corruption and weak institutional capacity. At the macro level, charcoal production contributes to carbon emissions and climate change. This is also a fact.

The way I see the data, it’s material that, on the one hand, is systemic and, then, on the other hand, is nested—meaning that it builds on each other. If you want to come up with policies which will work you have to do a multi-level analysis. This needs an interdisciplinary approach.

“If the government is going to impose a total ban on charcoal, it’s almost as if they just want to kill us”

Dr Namwase: We have been very deliberate in speaking to cultural institutions and then also to communities that practice particular cultural aspects tied to the question of production and use of charcoal vis a vis preservation of specific tree species. We are also being deliberate on language to maintain the local language and references. And, of course, we are also very intentional about reflexivity.

In fact, early on, before we went to the field, we had a methodology and epistemological seminar as a multidisciplinary team, where each side shared key aspects to look out for that are common in their own fields so that we could all learn from each other.

In summation, the initial findings [from the legal perspective] are that the government and the state are using top-down militarist approaches, which are resulting in injustice and dispossession for quite a number of people. It is not engaging and offering alternative and affordable alternatives for these communities, and to a large extent, women are being particularly affected by these bans. Once the bans are put in place, what happens, as Dr Susan said, is that charcoal production does not stop. It continues.

Because of the additional burden of bribing the numerous police and military officers you find on the way, [charcoal] ends up becoming expensive once it reaches Kampala. That then affects the profit margin of women [selling food at markets] and the youth, by the way, as well. Youth are also engaging in businesses that rely on charcoal. For instance, Rolex-making. I don’t know if you know about Rolex. It’s a special street food here in Uganda, which consists of chapati and fried egg. It is a very popular food among the youth because it’s cheap and affordable.

And there is no room for people to negotiate and say, “Maybe give us more time” or “Where are the alternatives?”. In fact, what we found in quite a number of cases is that there is a sense of despair. Because on two or three occasions, we’ve had respondents saying that “if the government is going to impose a total ban on charcoal, it’s almost as if they just want to kill us”.

Research Aims

Q: Is the aim for your research findings to be translated into policy?

Dr Namwase: There is flexibility in what we can produce in terms of outputs. So, for instance, policy briefs are not out of the question. We should also have policy briefs at the end, with which we engage the key stakeholders—the ministries [in Tanzania and Uganda].

Then the whole point, of course, is also getting people to move away from charcoal because, ultimately, we want to protect the environment. Uganda and Tanzania are losing a lot of forest cover. But we want it to be done in a fair way, in a way that is not dispossessing people. That is not forcing them into a state of despair where they feel left behind by their governments. So we are aiming for the whole package if I’m to say that. Influencing policy, but also getting people to transition in a fair way, with energy justice in mind.

Dr Mlangwa: I think that’s correct. We actually looked at the whole package. We aim for people to move away from the energies which are harmful to them healthwise and environmentally. We intend to trigger action-oriented programs and projects through the dissemination of our results. We hope it can trigger collaborations, initiatives and interventions with the different players in this space.

We are also anticipating that, from our results, there can be some kind of reorganisation of the discourse not only in the academic world but also in the international organisations, the ones dealing with climate. [Our results] can also trigger a re-examination of how the whole issue of climate mitigation and implementation has been going and how it can change for the better with more voices from the Global South. That’s also a very keen aim of ours, to change the discourse in these international spaces.

Research cooperation between the Global North and South

Q: Switching focus now. What are the main strengths of research partnerships between countries in the Global North, Denmark in this case, and the Global South?

Dr Namwase: The main strength of such partnerships is, first and foremost, the logistics. We are in contexts where research is maybe not as much of a priority for our governments as other competing interests and needs. So funds are being channelled into other things and yet new knowledge is required to inform policy. Collaborations such as this open up access to funds that allow us to do meaningful work by going on the ground and interacting with the affected communities.

Also, secondly, is the cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines. It’s an opportunity to enrich each other because we can learn from the Danish way of doing things, which I must say I really admire. And I think that is somehow rubbing off on us. At least I can speak for us here at HURIPEC. And, on their end, we challenge them in terms of decolonial approaches because it is true that when you’ve grown up in Europe, you have a certain way that you see yourself in the world and a certain way that you’ve been given knowledge about the world. We can challenge that from a decolonial perspective.

Another strength of the collaborative research grants with Denmark is the PhDs. Africa suffers a very low PhD percentage rate per capita compared to global percentages. The charcoal project supports one PhD from Uganda and one from Tanzania. So the grants help build the much-needed expertise on the continent through scholarships for local PhDs.

Dr Mlangwa: I think Dr Sylvie did a good job exhausting it. I just want to continue emphasising that cross-pollination is really the greatest, and it’s not only for the South but everyone. Because I know this is very important in academic career advancement and professional development. So feeding into each other through such collaborative research is a win-win for both sides, as well as for our professional development.

Q: Do you have any ideas on how to improve research cooperation between Denmark and your respective countries?

Dr Mlangwa: l think there should be a player who coordinates the three countries. It would have been good if we could have an institution which is our monitor or a coordinator taking an audit of everything. It’s a lesson learned for everybody to do the audits themselves, but I’ve seen many collaborations where there is such [a coordinator]. They are more efficient and cost-effective.

Dr Namwase: I very much appreciate the opportunity to collaborate, and I’ve already given the reasons why I find it such a rare opportunity, at least from where I’m sitting. But with that said, I think one of the issues that could be looked into is the issue of overhead percentages that go to the Global South universities. It could be a problem that we have as Global South universities, but it is a thing that the universities also want to get their hands on the [international] funds that are coming to particular research centres. So perhaps there should be some specific percentage that is put aside for the central university and then a percentage for the department.

The second is the issue of travel visas. I can tell you the visa question is such a headache. It’s very disorienting and demoralising. I don’t know if it has changed, but it was quite notorious right after COVID. You could go three months without your passport because you’ve submitted it for a visa. On this project, we had a colleague who got his visa on the day and then had to travel [to Denmark] and return to Tanzania the same day.

Dr Mlangwa: Yes. That was painful.

Dr Namwase: It’s really not necessary because we sit back and feel like, “Okay, are we like some of the biggest criminals or what?”. And it can ruin it. You know that imbalance in the team? It’s a reminder that there is that hierarchy.

Adrian Ganic is M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN Correspondent