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Contribution short abstract

Despite focused welfare schemes and constitutional safeguards, development interventions directed at Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) in India continue to face challenges that obscure historical injustice, reproduce epistemic hierarchies and marginalise indigenous agency.

Contribution long abstract

Conceptually, drawing from Arturo Escobar’s (1995) formulation of development as a colonial knowledge regime that produces “underdeveloped” subjects through universalised categories of progress and deficiency. The persistent framing of the Asurs as backward reflects the construction of 'other,' where power operates through hierarchical knowledge production about the 'other.' These discursive constructions legitimise welfare-led and humanitarian responses that depoliticise structural inequalities, indicate that development functions as an “anti-politics machine” by displacing questions of power, land and autonomy.

This process results in chronic exclusion, constituting a form of symbolic violence. These mechanisms are further reinforced through state practices of enumeration, targeting, and policy categorisation, which align with insights on colonial domination illuminate how such structures generate internalised inferiority and cultural alienation among marginalised indigenous communities.

In the Indian political context, the paper foreground tribes as political actors embedded within extractive development and governance regimes, rather than passive recipients of welfare. Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) concept of political society further explains how the Asurs are governed as administratively managed populations rather than rights-bearing citizens. Additionally, drawing on subaltern representation, the paper interrogates the limits of participatory development and questions whose voices are authorised within development planning.

By foregrounding the Asur case, the paper argues for rejecting siloed and universalised development models in favour of locally driven, culturally grounded approaches that recognise indigenous epistemologies and political agency. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2014) notion of epistemologies of the South, it calls for redistributing power within development practice by centring indigenous knowledge, dignity, and participation.

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Contribution short abstract

This study rethinks humanitarian and development divide through a decolonial lens. It shows how principles can police legitimacy, shrinking local agency and turning localisation tokenistic. Haiti, Gaza and Rohingya illustrate. It calls for shifting decision power, resources and risk to local actors.

Contribution long abstract

This paper revisits the humanitarian-development divide through a decolonial lens by arguing that humanitarian principles function not only as ethical commitments but also as a governance language that allocates authority, legitimacy, and knowledge within unequal humanitarian aid architectures. With developed the concept of principled depoliticisation to explain how being principled can, under specific institutional and geopolitical conditions, narrow what can be said and done thereby constraining locally driven, cohesive responses to polycrises.

The paper traces a three-part mechanism: First, epistemic gatekeeping shapes who defines needs, what counts as valid evidence, and whose priorities become programmable. Second, discursive depoliticisation reframes claims around rights, redistribution, and accountability as politicisation, access risk, or unprofessionalism. Third, procedural gatekeeping, through compliance burdens, risk management, and administrative requirements, limits local organisations' decision space even when they are central to implementation. Together, these dynamics narrow local development agency, pushing localisation toward tokenistic partnership and weakening humanitarian-development cohesion.

These claims are analyzed across three crisis settings. In Haiti, post-disaster response practices, in Gaza, discourses about access constraints and illegal controls and in the Rohingya response, recurrent funding shocks and externalised decision-making.

The paper concludes that rejecting humanitarian and development siloes is necessary but insufficient: more cohesive, equitable, locally driven responses require decolonising the principle regime itself by redistributing decision-making power, resources, and risk, and by pluralising the normative grounds through which principled action is authorised.

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Contribution short abstract

In crises, South Africa's aid needs tomerge relief & development through ubuntu-led, community solutions. Donor control heightens fragility amid cuts; a 2015–2025 review shows reliance risks. It calls for 50% localization by 2030, ubuntu nexus frameworks, & epistemic justice for resilient economies.

Contribution long abstract

Amid multiple global crises—including pandemic outbreaks, wars, environmental disasters, high poverty, unemployment, inequality and financial instability—reforming assistance involves breaking down divides between emergency relief and long-term growth to support community-driven solutions in South Africa's aid-reliant society. Conventional funding systems sustain outdated dominance patterns, deepen vulnerability and slow progress to meet the 2016 Grand Bargain's commitments by donors. Recent policy shifts, such as aid cuts and reprioritisation have exposed the vulnerability of silo managed systems in donor dependent communities. Receiving communities experience prolonged years of joblessness, hardships, and disparity, since isolated efforts favour market-driven indicators over local wisdom and community-centred approaches rooted in ‘ubuntu’. This paper conducts a structured review of 25 publications spanning from 2015–2025 from Google Scholar, JSTOR, OECD iLibrary, and other sources, analysing themes of unequal control, broken commitments, funding inefficiencies, grassroots approaches and reformed funding architectures. Results highlight how reliance on donor created solutions deepens fragility, with scenarios indicating that without these divides, local driven programs could generate jobs, strengthen community sustainability, reduce poverty and income inequality. It suggests transformative strategies, urging 50% locally managed funding by 2030, blended nexus models incorporating ‘ubuntu’, and fairness checks on knowledge systems to shift authority, nurture interconnected markets, and strengthen independent endurance amid withdrawals from wealthy nations.

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Contribution short abstract

Timor-Leste is considered a paradigmatic humanitarian and development success. This paper highlights shortcomings of external intervention, the unsustainability of the governance structures imposed, and hence a state of "unpeace". It argues instead for a local-led lower case hdpn.

Contribution long abstract

Southeast Asia is a region deeply affected by conflict and conflictual legacies, whether colonial, Cold War, territorial, ideological, religious, or related to resources. Throughout the region a premium is placed on economic development, with rapid success combined with high levels of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. Despite dramatic progress in economic development and governance, however, major challenges to human security endure. In some cases, these have been exacerbated by national security and development policymaking, while at the same time human insecurity and distributive injustices threaten to undermine a fragile peace. Timor-Leste became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century on 20 May 2002, but with ongoing UN and other international security support for another decade. It has been championed as a paradigmatic success story of UN-led liberal peacebuilding (humanitarian intervention), statebuilding, and development. This paper identifies, however, the extent to which top-down, narrow and siloed approaches can undermine all these governance aspirations, leading to a state of “unpeace”. It introduces instead the need for comprehensive and hybrid approaches like the humanitarian-development peace nexus (HDPN) combined with a greater focus on the local as well as vulnerable individuals and groups (a lower case hdpn). Only through the implementation of governance measures informed by such perspectives can truly sustainable peace and development be fostered in Timor-Leste, or in other conflict-affected societies in Southeast Asia.