With a focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals 5: Gender Equality and Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities, we have published research addressing all of the Equality Act 2010 protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
As an organisation, we believe that people from all walks of life should be able to participate in society on a level playing field. Themes around social justice and equal opportunities run through all of our publishing lists and underpin our overall strategy.
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Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
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Debate on the need for more fairness in academic research collaborations between actors in Africa (or the ‘Global South’, broadly) and counterparts in the Global North has intensified in recent years, while practice-oriented frameworks and efforts to foster more equitable partnerships have proliferated. Important approaches to recognise and undo asymmetries in concrete collaboration arrangements – division of labour, decision making, access to rewards, capacity building – have been identified.
In this provocation we draw on African and other postcolonial, decolonial and feminist scholarship, as well as systems thinking and global science data to argue that such ‘equitable partnerships’ efforts at best sidestep the urgent need for a much more profound rebalancing of the positioning of Africa and ‘Global North’ in the worldwide science and research ecosystem as a whole. We consider why such wider rebalancing is an imperative for both Africa and the global community, propose that research collaborations must be understood as a key entry point for advancing such a systemic shift, and suggest a necessary transformative collaboration mode to this end. We conclude by positing an urgent need to think and act beyond ‘equitable’ partnerships and highlight where responsibilities for action must lie.
Recent studies emphasise gender attitudes as an explanation for the gender gap in the radical-right vote. However, little is known on whether the (mis)match between the issues that are given the most salience by radical-right parties and (wo)men’s issue priorities accounts for the gender gap in the radical-right vote. Merging a large series of barometers conducted in Spain, including more than 9,000 radical-right voters from January 2020 to March 2023, we find that issue priorities are gendered and that VOX’s support is mainly driven by male issues. Also, importantly, regional nationalism and gender – two of VOX’s flagship issues – affect women’s and men’s probability of voting for VOX differently. These findings indicate that the main determinants of voting for VOX are largely driven by men, not women.
Despite it being not only central to the politics of critical studies on men and masculinities but also one of Connell’s four patterns of masculinity developed alongside the now-canonical ‘hegemonic masculinity’, the concept of ‘complicit masculinity’ has received little attention. This article suggests that complicit masculinities should be understood as political masculinities, in that they are from the beginning shaped by the existing politics and power relations that construct gender. This means acknowledging that masculinities are always at risk of complicity. Rather than this rendering the notion of ‘complicit masculinities’ redundant, I draw on a range of critical studies on men and masculinities to argue that identifying complicity as a feature of masculinities: first, allows us to identify three interrelated dimensions of complicity, which I label as ‘intentional’, ‘structural’ and ‘intersectional’ complicity; and, second, can serve as the starting point for a men’s profeminist politics.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Freedom of religion and belief is crucial to any sustainable development process, yet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) pay little attention to religious inequalities.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of how efforts to achieve SDGs can be enhanced by paying greater attention to freedom of religion and belief. In particular, it illustrates how poverty is often a direct result of religious prejudice and how religious identity can shape a person’s job prospects, their children’s education and the quality of public services they receive. Drawing on evidence from Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the book foregrounds the lived experiences of marginalized communities as well as researchers and action organizations.
This article examines the views of 29 victim survivors (who were part of a larger study) who retrospectively disclosed non-recent child sexual abuse regarding their reasons for disclosure, the child protection and criminal justice responses to them, and the possible ways for improving system responses to address their needs and interests. The reasons for disclosure centred on a desire to pass the burden of the abuse to someone else, to achieve a subjectively defined form of justice and to regain power and control over their lives. Following disclosure, victim survivors often found themselves involved in two forms of investigation: child protection and criminal justice. The findings suggest that criminal justice systems do not adequately address victims’ needs in these circumstances. They often feel marginal to child protection investigations and feel used instrumentally in those proceedings. However, having social workers ‘rattle the cage’ of perpetrators provided comfort for some victim survivors who failed to get justice through criminal justice mechanisms. Based on the research presented in this study, it is suggested that restorative justice may have something to offer as part of the response to non-recent disclosures of child sexual abuse as part of both criminal justice and child protection investigations and processes.
Most politicians are men, yet there is a surprising lack of focus within political science on the causes and consequences of male dominance. This article outlines how political science could benefit from greater engagement with scholarship on men and masculinities. The concept of ‘political masculinities’ has focused on the importance of ‘the political’ to masculinities scholarship; we argue for extending this concept to analyse men and masculinities within political science. We identify insights from scholarship on masculinities that would deepen our understanding of power within formal political arenas. We consider how gender and politics scholarship could benefit from expanding its focus on men. We highlight feminist institutionalism as a tool for bringing masculinities into the study of political institutions. We then offer a framework for taking this research agenda forwards, showing how we can better understand male dominance by thinking about how men access, exercise, maintain and reproduce power.
Children in the Global South continue to be affected by social disadvantage in our unequal post-colonial world order. With a focus on working-class children in Latin America, this book explores the challenges of promoting children’s rights in a decolonizing context.
Liebel and colleagues give insights into the political lives of children and demonstrate ways in which the concept of children’s rights can be made meaningful at the grassroots level. Looking to the future, they consider how collaborative research with children can counteract their marginalization and oppression in society.
Intimate partner violence is a global problem experienced by all population groups, irrespective of socio-economic, religious and cultural background, and including both women and men. This systematic narrative review synthesises empirical research to draw conclusions on facilitators of, and barriers to, accessing help for victims of intimate partner violence. A search in Scopus, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Medline and PsycInfo conducted in October 2021 identified 864 articles that were independently reviewed to yield 47 relevant studies published between 2011 and 2021 in peer-reviewed journals. The included studies were synthesised using the following headings: (1) personal aspects; (2) family and friends; (3) community factors; (4) referral channels; (5) financial aspects; and (6) service issues. The severity of injury seemed to be a key factor in deciding to seek help. Family and friends were helpful to victims who were looking for support with their relationship and as a support on their journey towards services. A third key finding was that health and care systems are important referral channels for intimate partner violence services. As supports in intimate partner violence develop, consideration is required not only of the trauma of the victim but also how to communicate and facilitate access to help.
This article contributes to debates on international collaborations by examining contradictions between the decolonial turn and the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund which imposed Global North leadership on Global South partners. Through the lenses of compromise and complicity, the article explores how collaborators strive to work together equitably within the constraints of a UK government Official Development Assistance funding scheme. Drawing on focus group discussions with members of a research team, the article traces, first, their engagement with political and institutional constraints and, second, their articulation of collaborative compromise and productive complicity. The article foregrounds the generative potential of complicity as a productive concept that can help partners to navigate the challenges of interdependence and partnership entailed in North–South, South–South, cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration.
It can be difficult for researchers to access research participants from vulnerable populations. Focusing on the single victim interviewee recruited for my human trafficking-related research, this article will examine the method employed to conduct research with her, which I term ‘case study by proxy’: a new hybrid qualitative methodological approach combining elements of the case study and interview by proxy methods. This may prove to be a valuable methodological tool for researchers studying vulnerable populations.
