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This paper explores the institutional agency of indigenous women-led organisations in Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria and Uganda. It examines the power dynamics between funders and beneficiary institutions and the implications this has for long-term development benefits and transformation for women.

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The power imbalance in international politics has undoubtedly permeated the international development ecosystem. The question is: Are recipients of development assistance in the Global South trapped in the neo-colonial establishment? The intersection of race and gender within the discourse suggests that the politicisation of development assistance may worst hit women-led organisations in Africa. Thus, the dynamics of global development need to be probed to uncover the power-play between the rich Global North and developing countries in the southern hemisphere who are forced by their poor socio-political and economic circumstances to go cap-in-hand seeking foreign development aid to support even the most basic human development programs. Sadly, the current political landscape of countries of the Global South projects an image of dis-solidarity, desperation, and vulnerability, which is a breeding ground for gross inequality in the negotiations surrounding aid administration. This paper, therefore, examines the practice of grant-seeking and making within the backdrop of the current political and socio-economic context within which Indigenous Women-led Organisations (IWLOs) in Africa operate. The article further dissects the power dynamics and the long-term benefits of development assistance. Interviews with decision- makers of IWLOs in Africa and women of African descent employed by donor agencies in the Global North answered two key questions:How can IWLOs advance their visions/missions under covert or overt donor agendas and remain true to their causes and stakeholders? How can aid administration to (women) beneficiaries in the Global South be more equitable, non-predatory, and transformative?

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This paper reflects on facilitating a Community Organising framework with Indigenous youth in the Nilgiris, adapting Marshall Ganz’s People, Power, and Change model to build grassroots leadership, collective agency, and power among tribal youth facing structural exclusion.

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Drawing on the People, Power, and Change framework developed by Dr. Marshall Ganz, the initiative adapted global movement-based organising practices to a tribal context shaped by historical dispossession, exclusion, and limited power. This paper reflects on my facilitation of Community Organising framework with Indigenous youth in the Nilgiris, framed within ongoing conversations on re-imagining development and shifting power to the grassroots.

As a facilitator from marginalized Dalit community, my positionality became central to the process. Shared socio-political values rooted in anti-caste and movement traditions enabled me to build trust, nurture relationships, and create a learning space grounded in dignity and mutual recognition. Initially, youth were hesitant to speak or claim leadership, reflecting long-standing social marginalization. Through collective reflection, storytelling, relationship-building, and strategic planning, I observed a gradual shift toward confidence, agency, and shared responsibility.

Key outcomes included the emergence of collective leadership, youth-led facilitation of community discussions, and the development of locally grounded campaigns addressing forest rights, housing, and access to public services. Youth began organising teams using shared leadership models and planning strategies rooted in lived realities rather than externally imposed development agendas.

The work, also exposes structural constraints. Continued dependence on donor funding and limited access to resources restrict long-term sustainability. These challenges are intensified by oppressive socio-political structures that systematically marginalise Indigenous communities. Despite these constraints, this case study demonstrates how community organising can function as a decolonial development practice, one that centres political education, relational leadership, and Indigenous youth agency as pathways toward enduring social change.

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This paper explores the significance of reflective practice for resource-constrained charities and community organisations in supporting their volunteers, bringing together critical reflection theory and practice.

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Since the pandemic and cost of living crisis, organisations in Since the pandemic and cost of living crisis, organisations in the nonprofit sector (NPOs) in the UK have experienced a perfect storm of challenges, experienced particularly acutely by small NPOs. This paper explores the significance of reflective practice for resource-constrained charities and community organisations in supporting their volunteers, bringing together theory and practice. It draws on the early stages of an ongoing research project, undertaken January 2023 – September 2024 to explore whether and how models of reflective practice could support small charities or NPOs working with their volunteers. The wider purpose is to consider what happens at this critical juncture when researchers attempt to translate theoretical knowledge about volunteering into practice.

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This research examines the 'shrinking humanitarian space' in Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict through the 2021 MSF suspension, showing how contested neutrality, historical distrust, and state security concerns converge, and argues for context-specific, decolonised humanitarian frameworks.

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This paper examines the ‘shrinking humanitarian space’ in Cameroon’ Anglophone Conflict through the lens of the 2021 Doctor Without Borders (DWB) suspension by engaging with literature on contested neutrality (Fiona, 2000; Brauman, 2000) and State-INGO tensions (authoritarianism) (Walton 2015; Cunningham and Healy, 2025). The paper focuses primarily on Cameroon as a critical study although drawing parallels to contexts like Greece and Chad. Through document analysis of reports from DWB, personal field experience and statements from the government of Cameroon, the paper identifies three key drivers of humanitarian restriction which are; conflicting interpretations of neutrality, overlooked impact of historical relationship between the west and the global south and territorial integrity-focused security policies. The paper builds on and advances existing literature by exposing how these factors converge uniquely in Cameroon, while questioning the selective use of labels like ‘authoritarian regimes’. The paper proposes context-specific solutions such as the need to recalibrate the neutrality principle, decolonization of aid governance through prioritization on local inclusion. The paper offers pathways to preserving humanitarian access without sweeping aside legitmate concerns of the state.

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The global NGOs crisis is jeopardising civil society infrastructures as we know it, undermining its capacity to operate and exposing the limitations of the NGO sector. Activists in hybrid regimes navigate the crisis by trying to reimagine nonprofit architectures centring local agency and agendas.

Paper long abstract

NGOs are globally witnessing a decline in international support and legitimacy which was recently accelerated by the cuts to international aid and cooperation budgets by traditional donor countries. The crisis is further exposing the contradictions, limitations, and power imbalances within the global nonprofit architecture, which NGOisation theorists have long been denouncing.

In hybrid regimes, the crisis impacts not solely civil society's capacity to provide essential services and relief. It also further undermines the legitimacy of CSOs/NGOs in political landscapes where civil society is severely constrained or criminalised, with negative consequences on associational life.

In hybrid and authoritarian regimes of the SWANA region, where the NGO sector has grown exponentially for decades despite consolidated patterns of civic sphere repression, NGOs have provided crucial sites of participation while civic engagement remained severely restricted.

Particularly in the aftermath of 2011 revolutions, many activists turned to NGOs as abeyance structures, a function which NGOs were long able to perform thanks to the international legitimacy enjoyed by the nonprofit sector.

While the current NGO crisis threatens the very existence of their already precarious work, these activist-workers’ efforts at navigating shifting patterns in international aid raise crucial questions around neutrality and local agency in global NGO politics.

Drawing on interviews with activist-workers from Egypt and Syria, this paper explores the conditions under which NGOs can function as abeyance structures in hybrid regimes, arguing that their effectiveness is contingent upon navigating the complex landscape of international aid and local patterns of co-optation and repression of associational life.

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This study shows how political dynamics—rather than access constraints alone—shape inequitable humanitarian aid distribution in Myanmar, undermining local legitimacy and worsening conflict, and proposes feasible measures to correct structural aid disparities.

Paper long abstract

Humanitarian aid in armed conflicts is often seen to be unevenly distributed because of access constraints or the challenges of delivering assistance to dangerous areas. Recent initiatives have emphasized the localization of aid and the diversification of implementing actors to overcome such constraints. Yet these reforms remain limited in many conflict settings. This study argues that the central barrier is not merely technical or logistical, but political: the flow and reach of aid are significantly shaped by political decision-making.

Using the case of Myanmar, the analysis demonstrates how political intervention produces inequities in aid distribution, even in areas with clear needs. These allocation dynamics deepen divisions among communities and organizations and reshape the broader conflict structure. Such outcomes violate the Do No Harm principle widely shared across humanitarian and development fields, revealing that external assistance can generate unintended conflict consequences.

This study presents two empirical cases: (1) the dominance of UN agencies in channeling Japanese aid, which restricts assistance from reaching affected populations, and (2) the selection of local partners without attention to historical context, resulting in skewed support and community exclusion.

The study concludes by proposing two feasible improvements: redesigning aid routes that do not require UN agencies as mandatory intermediaries, and selecting implementing partners based on historical context and organizational legitimacy. These measures are essential to reduce structural inequities and ensure aid reaches those most in need.

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Co-produced with Qisetna, this paper presents two Syrian women’s recollections of the Euphrates River as forms of grassroots river knowledge that reimagine agency and kinship through thinking, living with river flow and that resist hydro-hegemonic modernisation in the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract

Co-produced with Qisetna, a Syrian-led cultural NGO rooted in civic storytelling, this paper brings together two sites of river-imagining: one drawn from local inhabitants—two women’s recollections of the Euphrates River in Al Mayādīn, a town in eastern Syria—and the other from contemporary environmental scholarship, particularly work on river ontologies and water justice movements. Situating both sites of knowledge within twentieth-century developments, including postwar nationalist state-building and large-scale dam construction in the Tigris–Euphrates basin, the paper presents them as sites of contestation that challenge centralised, technocratic governance regimes shaping modern socio-environmental relations. It argues that these sites of knowledge, in their mutual becoming, embody alternative modes of worldmaking grounded in diffuse agency across human and nonhuman actors and their daily interactions. Although vernacular river knowledge has been marginalised through hydro-hegemonic modernisation, bringing these recollections into emerging dialogues and movements of environmental ethics and justice allows the paper to present them not merely as testimonies but as living resources for eco-ethical futures.

Adopting an experimental approach to knowledge production, the paper follows recollections as guiding threads that shape its arguments rather than treating them as illustrative material. In doing so, it both demonstrates and enacts forms of resistance that emerge through dialogue as part of diverse processes of commoning, encompassing not only material practices and theoretical analysis but also memories and hopes amid loss and uncertainty.

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This longitudinal study shows how French newspapers framed three major protest movements through shifting negative lenses that constrained grassroots agency. Over 15 years, limited supportive frames reveal how media power shaped and restricted possibilities for solidarity.

Paper long abstract

This longitudinal study examines how seven major French national newspapers—Le Monde, Le Figaro, Aujourd’hui en France, La Croix, L’Humanité, Libération, and Les Échos—framed three major protest movements in contemporary France: the Banlieue Riots (2005), Nuit Debout (2016), and the Gilets Jaunes (2018–19). Drawing on a quantitative content analysis of news articles across a 15-year period, the study assesses protest visibility and 40 framing categories derived from the literature on media representations of social movements, and evenly split between positive and negative sentiment. The analysis is situated within broader critiques of protest reporting in France, including overreliance on official sources, the marginalisation of structural grievances, and declining trust in the press. Findings show that French protest coverage is consistently more negative than positive, though the balance and logic of negativity shift over time. In the Banlieue Riots, negative framing is dominated by a rigid law-and-order and accountability logic. By Nuit Debout, this evolves into a more political and ideological critique structured around cynicism, radicalisation, and diminished emphasis on security. During the Gilets Jaunes, negativity becomes hybrid, combining the blame-oriented lens of 2005 with the political mistrust of 2016. Positive frames increase across the cycles but remain largely emotional rather than structurally supportive. Despite clear ideological differences—where left-leaning outlets emphasise solidarity and social inequality, and right-leaning and financial papers prioritise stability and economic disruption—the press as a whole adheres to a common moral framework that views protest as legitimate but bounded by expectations of social stability.

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The paper raises important questions in relation to transnational humanitarian action in a global crisis (Covid-19), and the ways in which local networks of support and solidarity, at national and transnational level, pose an alternative to established humanitarian actors in the navigation of those.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on the everyday humanitarianism and emerging forms of solidarity in times of crisis among

migrant communities with liminal status in three cities in the Horn of Africa: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Khartoum. It is framed around the concept of lived citizenship, defined as a means to secure wellbeing through everyday acts and practices for those who lack formal rights and entitlements. Based on an analysis of comparative interview data among Eritrean and Ethiopian migrant communities in each city, the article takes the example of the Covid-19 pandemic as an unexpected crisis. It argues that Covid-19 has impacted lived citizenship practices to different degrees, linked to previous forms of precarity, and the means and networks of coping with those. Disruptions of transnational support

networks resulted in a turn towards local networks and everyday practices of solidarity. These forms of everyday humanitarianism range from spontaneous to more organised forms, united by a perceived lack of involvement by international humanitarian actors and the local state. The paper raises important questions in relation to transnational humanitarian action in a global crisis, and the ways in which local networks of support and solidarity, at national and transnational level, may .

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This work anticipates the elucidation that the determinant factor in Taliban’s complex scheme of authoritarian style of rule is either their religious deontology rooted in the hermeneutic of Islam lopsidedly politicized or their political ideology profoundly religionized.

Paper long abstract

In the convoluted history of Afghan politics, the Talibanization phenomenon reflects a complicated nexus of religious deontology and political ideology. The Taliban-brand deontology – their commitment as a moral obligation to waging war against all anti-Islamic forces – has been manifesting in terms of their strict adherence to the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They have been putting all their efforts into flourishing practices and norms in order to establish a religious-sociopolitical order that they think they are divinely mandated for as the vicegerent of God on earth. This reflects their dedication to the religious-cum-deontological framework guiding their actions as obligatory pursuits as per their interpretation of Islam. The politico-ideological foundations of the Talibanization phenomenon is characterized by the accumulation of power as an instrument to validate their religious-deontological commitment. This dual nexus of religious deontology and political ideology can be defined as a pragmatic resolution where ends are justifying means and the selective religious principles are hermeneutically employed for fulfilling their political-ideological desires. Furthermore, the calculated interplay of religious intensity with political strategy has already created a highly persuasive narrative for the Afghan people. Now in the Afghan social order, the deontology-ideology composite defines the Taliban dominion as a dynamic synthesis of the religious absolutism and the political expediency, whereby religious obligations strengthen political aspirations and political aspirations exploit religious principles. The power practice of Taliban in terms of their religiously dominated politics has given rise to extremism that has complicated the structure of international relations in the region.

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This paper explores how The Heart of Redness and The Famished Road reimagine development through African agency, indigenous knowledge, and speculative futures, challenging Western paradigms using postcolonial critique and African futurist vision.

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This paper explores how African literature articulates grassroots agency and alternative visions of progress by analyzing two seminal texts: The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda (2000) and The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991). Grounded in postcolonial theory and African futurism, the study examines how both novels challenge dominant development paradigms and offer culturally rooted frameworks for imagining African futures. Mda’s narrative, structured around the ideological conflict between the Believers and Unbelievers in post-apartheid South Africa, critiques the imposition of Western development models and foregrounds indigenous knowledge systems as vital resources for community renewal. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial insights, the paper argues that Mda positions development as a contested terrain where agency is reclaimed through collective resistance, historical memory, and cultural resurgence. In contrast, Okri’s The Famished Road employs magical realism to destabilize linear, technocratic notions of progress. Through the spirit-child Azaro, the novel bridges the material and metaphysical, offering a vision of development rooted in cyclical temporality, spiritual resilience, and imaginative autonomy. Using African futurism as a lens, the paper interprets Okri’s narrative as a speculative reimagining of futurity, where uncertainty becomes a catalyst for transformation rather than a barrier to advancement. By placing these texts in dialogue, the paper argues that African literary traditions offer powerful critiques of Western teleologies and illuminate alternative pathways of progress grounded in indigenous agency, communal ethics, and ontological plurality.

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This paper interrogates the causes and consequences of the proliferation of gender justice NGOs in India. Using empirical case studies of two grassroots NGOs, it argues for the need to reclaim grassroots agency and power, re-envisioning community participants and field staff as agents of change.

Paper long abstract

The 1970s-80s marked the proliferation of NGOs, particularly in the gender justice arena. In the Indian context, this was followed by the advent of neoliberal economic reforms. As governments began outsourcing several developmental functions to NGOs, the latter grew increasingly dependent on funding agencies to implement their grassroots interventions. Consequently, neoliberal forms of accountability influenced the functioning of grassroots organisations, signalling the shift to output and outcome-driven approaches.

This paper draws upon my fieldwork with two case study NGOs in New Delhi which have their origins in the contemporary Indian women's movement of the 1970s-80s. It delves deeper into the pull factors which encouraged movement activists to institutionalise their autonomous groups into NGOs. Further, interviews, focus groups and observational data suggested institutionalisation, donor dependency, and professionalisation as key consequences of NGO-isation. These were seen to have implications for empowerment of both communities and field staff. A service delivery model risks reduction of community participants to passive ‘beneficiaries’. Another finding concerned the disempowerment of field staff stemming from low status within the organisational hierarchy, the pressures resulting from donor demands, and lower levels of professional skills.

This paper argues for the need for grassroots NGOs to reclaim their transformatory potential. Promoting grassroots agency and power entails reimagining community participants as active agents of change, and field staff as leaders.

This paper aims a theoretical contribution to the literature on the development sector in India and the global South, and an empirical contribution to perspectives and practices of NGOs in civil society.