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useless-catalanfacts · 4 years

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hey great blog, thank you for your work and dedication. I have been studying in bcn for 8 years, I can speak catalan but not perfectly so I get embarrassed to talk... if you haven't already, can you make a post with a list of trusted groups/NGOs that support catalan causes? Legal help to immigrants, anti-racist, anti police brutality, for equality of gender, climate change, LGBTQ+ etc. I want to participate and learn without putting myself at risk of expulsion as a foreigner.

Thank you very much!

Crida LGBTI: organization for sexual and gender liberation, with the purpose of fighting against LGBTIQ+-phobia, patriarchy and capitalism.

Òmnium Cultural: this is probably the biggest organization, they work for many different causes in Catalan society but focus on freedom of expression and thought, the right to self-determination and freedom of political prisoners, promotion of Catalan language and culture, and education. Right now they’re doing a campaign to investigate the Spanish monarchy’s corruption.

Unitat contra el feixisme i el racisme: as you can see in the name they work against fascism and racism. It’s a wide platform made of many local organizations that come together to oppose and confront right wing extremism (like Vox, but more than just that).

SOS racisme: an organization that fights against racism and xenophobia. They work to eliminate this discrimination in all its forms and all ambits of society, attend victims of racism/xenophobia, and work together with institutes of human rights of the Catalan government.

Casa nostra, casa vostra: organization that works to welcome refugees to Catalonia and other things against racism. Now they’re doing the campaign Papers per a tothom (papers for everyone) to demand regularization of immigrants (right now you’ve probably heard the news about the temporary workers who come annually from Africa to work in the fields during harvest season that are sleeping on the streets in Lleida, it’s for that people and more who could be in a similar situation).

Stop maremortum: platform to stop the deaths of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. They work raising awareness, in the judicial sphere protecting the rights of migrants, demanding political parties to make clear solutions, etc.

Tanquem els CIE: campaign to close the CIEs (internment centers of foreigners) and stop deportations.

Associació Catalana per la Pau: they do different things around the world.

Irídia: an association that works for civil and political rights in Catalonia, it’s formed by lawyers, psychologists, journalists, sociologists and more. They are mostly known because they offer free defence for victims of police brutality and human rights repression (like people who are accused of injuries against the monarchy, ““enalting terrorism”“ for a pro-independence tweet, people arrested at protests, labour rights activists, etc), but they also work to change public policy. If you become associated you give a monthly donation and participate in the general assemblies to decide where to direct efforts next.

Fridays for Future Barcelona

while looking for f4f I found this website for being a volunteer in different wildlife and nature projects. I don’t personally know the organizations of this website though, but they’re legit.

You can also look for your local food bank and the unions for your job (or if you’re a student there are too). Most unions also have specific sectors for specific causes (women, LGBTIQA+, migrants).

And depending on your politicial affiliation, there’s other organizations that work on a wider range of topics. I don’t know your age or anything else, but for example La Forja (the youth organization) and Poble Lliure (the non-youth organization), or Arran (youth) and Endavant (not youth), or Jovent Republicà or many others work on all those topics from different approaches.

If you are pro-independence, I recommend you look for your local CDR. It’s the horizontal assemblies of towns or quarters that work on so much more than just for independence and against monarchy. They’re very left-wing and all social causes are considered important in creating a new society.

These are the ones I could think of that are well-known and respected nation-wide, but most importantly there are a lot of local associations for each town or quarter (for example, there’s a list of associations that collaborate in the platform against sexist violence Plataforma Unitària contra la Violència de Gènere and you can see a lot of organizations of each quarter of Barcelona and other cities).

I don’t think you would be at risk of expulsion for being a foreigner in any of these organizations nor in left-wing organizations in general. I hope you didn’t say that because of you experienced it 😔

Lastly, since we’re talking about NGOs and volunteering, maybe you’d be interested in Voluntariat per la Llengua. It’s a volunteer programme organized by Plataforma per la Llengua (NGO that works to defend Catalan and Aranese languages) that pairs together a native Catalan speaker (or someone who has lived here for a long time and speaks very well) with someone who is learning the language, most often immigrants, so they can practise together.

#ask #anonymous

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duchessofostergotlands · 4 years

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This is my favourite sign from a pro refugee protest I went to a few years back. The U.K. government has responded to its repeated mistakes during covid by re-directing hate on to migrants and refugees. Don’t forget that migrants and refugees add more to our society than they take. Migrants from the Caribbean and Asia in particular built our NHS and continue to make up a huge part of the workforce. And most refugees in the U.K. over the last year have been from Iran, whose crisis we were involved in creating and we hold a moral responsibility for. Support the incredible Help Refugees who were leading the work on the ground impeccably when I went to Calais - while international NGOs were nowhere to be found - and complain to the BBC and Sky News for their dehumanising coverage of refugees in recent weeks.

#non royal #refugees #immigration #politics

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

After twelve years of the “war on drugs” in Mexico, a period when almost 260,000 were murdered and at least 37,000 disappeared, a new government has arrived with refreshing ideas about drugs, peace, and security. The new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promised to promote a pacification policy including conversations on justice and reconciliation, amnesty for minor offenders, and the decriminalization of marijuana and poppy crops.

His program goes against the grain of mainstream narratives, which still depict an anachronistic image of 1980s-era drug cartels as the main source of violence in Mexico. Hit shows like Narcos portray megalomaniac narco-traffickers singlehandedly terrorizing whole countries, fueled by the North’s insatiable appetite for drugs.

AMLO recognizes that a policy of confrontation against organized crime is not enough to address the violence in the country and proposes to tackle its deep causes, promoting education and work alternatives to youth and rural communities depending on illicit activities.

Most researchers in Mexico argue that it is the state’s militarization that has escalated and preserved violence in Mexico. Researchers like Guadalupe Correa, Dawn Paley, and Oswaldo Zavala, point out that outbreaks of violence in a region tend to be triggered by the deployment of soldiers — tens of thousands of which have participated in Mexico’s internal security affairs since 2006. The US-funded drug war only encouraged cartels to buy more guns, recruit more soldiers, and fight dirtier.

But these researchers point out something else: that the cartels no longer rely primarily on the drug trade for profit. Mexico’s criminal syndicates grew into complex, militarized organizations just as the country’s economy was opened up to international capital in the 1990s and early 2000s. This revealed new, lucrative frontiers off which they could parasitize.

Today, the country’s heavily armed criminal networks don’t limit themselves to drug trafficking. They also profit from migrant smuggling, fuel theft, iron ore exports, extortion, illicit logging, or kidnapping for ransom in addition to drug trafficking.

But what they’ve come to specialize in beyond any one profit stream is territorial occupation, through which they attempt to control all economic activity, both legal and illegal, within a certain area. Under this model, it’s rational for them to battle for control over areas richest in profitable natural resources, and position themselves accordingly towards the international capital these areas have been opened to. This is evident in the fact that territories hit by crime and extreme violence, such as Juarez Valley or the Tamaulipas border state, are usually the ones richest in hydrocarbons and mineral resources.

Authors like Paley and Correa argue that, in light of these factors, the extreme violence in several Mexican regions actually benefits some actors in transnational capital, particularly the energy, hydrocarbons, mining, private security, finance, and arms trade sectors.

One reason is that forced displacement caused by conflicts enables the occupation and buying of lands — even communal ones or ejidos, a Mexican collective form of land ownership that does not allow selling terrains — at low prices and avoids local resistance to extractive developments. According to the last annual report of the Comisión Mexicana de Derechos Humanos — an independent Mexican NGO — the cumulative figures of internally displaced people were at least 329,917 by the end of 2017.

This is not to say that there was any planned, centralized effort to use the drug war to open up sections of Mexico to transnational extraction. The course of the war has been too chaotic, with too many shifting actors, to make this conclusion. However, that neoliberal restructuring occurred simultaneously with the increasing paramilitarization and sophistication of both “sides” of the drug war produced a dangerous outcome.

Now, sections of international capital are codependent with the violence of Mexico’s narco-state — and its ability to displace, terrorize, and monopolize territories — to achieve its agenda. And capital’s collaboration with criminal paramilitaries, who exist on a spectrum with the corrupt state, has increased their sophistication and entrenchment within the Mexican economy.

This means that to confront Mexico’s endemic violence and transform its security framework, AMLO will have to do more than reform drug policies. He will also have to take on international capital.

The War on Drugs

In December 2006, Felipe Calderón took office as the president of Mexico. Days later he announced the Joint Operation Michoacán, named after his home state. It was a coordinated effort of the army, the Mexican Naval Infantry, and the Federal Police to attack organized crime and drug trafficking. It was a move by a president with little legitimacy in the need of an internal enemy — he won office by only 0.62 percent, narrowly defeating the current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who claimed electoral fraud. According to many, it was the foundational event of Mexico’s “war on drugs.”

With that confrontation policy, Calderón intended to tackle the drug cartels and reestablish security in the country. Instead, the homicide rate doubled during his six-year tenure. Tens of thousands of soldiers were deployed over the country to perform internal security tasks. Other than the surge in troops, there was no significant strategic shift between Calderón’s and outgoing president Peña Nieto’s security policy.

In 2007, George Bush and Felipe Calderón signed the framework agreement for Mérida Initiative, named after the city where the meeting took place. Inspired by the Plan Colombia — a US aid package to fight both drug trafficking and left-wing guerrillas signed in 2000 — the Merida Initiative committed millions of US dollars towards counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security; public security and law enforcement, including technology and training; and institution building. The Department of State delivered $400 million in 2008 alone.

According to Dawn Paley and her book Drug War Capitalism, the US-Mexican cooperation on institution building under Mérida Initiative and other programs sponsored by USAID had a key role in boosting neoliberal and pro-business structural reforms in Mexico. During his tenure, the outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto pursued structural reforms including constitutional changes in education, banking, the judiciary, energy, and the tax system.

Institutional changes run parallel to extreme violence in several territories of the country far beyond the traditional corridors of drug production and trafficking. The “drug war,” consisting in the military and other federal forces performing police tasks in urban environments, as well as controlling rural territory, failed to stop violence. The initial strategy of beheading criminal organizations contributed to their division and further diversification into more illegal activities, boosting conflicts among criminal syndicates and violence against the population. Military repression also triggered the adoption of military tactics and heavy weaponry among criminal organizations.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #AMLO #mexican politics #war on terror #drug trafficking

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rightsinexile · 5 years

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News on Countries of Asylum

Global

Eric Kaufmann: A proposal of closed permanent refugee camps on Western soil

The creeping criminalisation of humanitarian aid

Africa

BOTSWANA: High court ruling decriminalising same sex practices is promising

KENYA:

For the children of Dadaab refugee camp education is still limited

LGBT+ refugees in Kenya slums face homophobic attacks and evictions

UGANDA:

Kabale parish faced with 120 Rwandan asylum seekers

DGF donors freeze funding for NGOs after audit uncovered widespread corruption

Americas

COLOMBIA: Awareness-raising campaign seeks to protect Venezuelan migrants from trafficking and smuggling networks

ECUADOR: Colombian refugees stage weeks-long protests in Quito against UNHCR

MEXICO: For Central American asylum seekers it is better to stay in Mexico than return home

USA:

USCIS director tells asylum officers to stop allowing people in at initial border screening

Increasing numbers of Cubans trying to enter US through Mexico

How migrant families separated at the border could make US government pay

Trump cuts off aid to Central American countries over migrants

Asia

BANGLADESH: The novel approach to reach refugees: Speak Rohinya

Europe

Growing sanctuary efforts to assist migrants by churches in Europe

EU Summit must give effective answers to migrant issues

Legal submission to ICC calls for prosecution of EU over migrant deaths

UNHCR warns of “sea of blood” unless rescue vessels are deployed to rescue migrant boats

MSF: EU policies continue to claim migrant lives on the Mediterranean Sea

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: Local authorities relocate refugees to areas where landmines remain

FRANCE:

Imam jailed for selling dinghies for migrants to cross the Channel

Record refugee convictions near Calais aiming to halt Channel crossings

GERMANY: German politicians stand up for refugees who receive death threats

GREECE:

At least seven people drowned after boat goes down on the Greek coast

Refugee integration in Greece against the backdrop of a weak economy.

Why the Greek reception system failed to provide sustainable solutions

HUNGARY: New police department takes over asylum and immigration related tasks

IRELAND: Ireland’s strange and cruel reception system for asylum seekers

ITALY:

Domenico Lucano, former mayor of pro-migrant Riace, stands trial

Italian government passes law to fine those who rescue refugees at sea

How the Italian mafia makes millions by exploiting migrant workers

SPAIN: Spanish rescue service saves 292 lives in the Strait of Gibraltar

UNITED KINGDOM:

Campaigners call for the UK to accept 10,000 child refugees

Discredited language test used on two in five Syrian asylum seekers in the UK

Middle East

LEBANON:

More than half of refugee girls in Beirut risk sexual violence, says report

Lebanese authorities order Syrian refugees to demolish their makeshift homes

Lebanese government denies forcing Syrian refugees back home

Thousands of Syrian refugees could be sent back, says Lebanese minister Bassil

Syrian refugees forced to evacuate camp after tensions

#refugees #countryofasylum

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ss-neokagashi-ss-blog · 6 years

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The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel has called attention to the demographic shift in France saying Muslims are having far more children than native French and slammed the widespread “promotion” of abortion.

The Archbishop of Strasbourg went against the grain of Church leaders in France who have largely remained politically correct on the issue of demographic changes occurring in the country. He said the rising birth rate of Muslims in France was leading to what prolific French writer Renaud Camus has termed “the Great Replacement”, French conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles reports.

“Muslim believers know very well that their birthrate is such that today, they call it … the Great Replacement, they tell you in a very calm, very positive way that, ‘one day all this, it will be ours’,” he said.

The concept of the Great Replacement was coined in 2010 in a speech given by Camus and then later in his 2011 political book, The Great Replacement. Camus defined the Great Replacement as the transition of a society, often through mass migration, in a few generations in which the names of places remain the same but the people and their values totally change.

Camus called the current mass migration policies in Europe the biggest shift in peoples and their values since the barbarian invasions in the third century which led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

In recent years, the term has become more commonplace in French political dialogue. Many in the anti-mass migration Front National have adopted the term as well as conservatives like Gaullist politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who allied with FN leader Marine Le Pen during the presidential campaign.

Mayor of Béziers Robert Ménard also used the term earlier this year when referring to the high number of Muslim students in the city’s schools. A court fined Mayor Ménard 2,000 euros for his comments after finding him guilty of “hate speech”.

The anti-mass migration Identitarian youth movement is also an advocate of Camus’ theory and uses it as a basis for their rejection of the open borders policies of those on the left. The group, known for their often spectacular protest actions, are currently organising their own search and rescue (SAR) mission in the Mediterranean Sea labelled “Defend Europe” where they say they will work with the Libyan coastguard to monitor migrant rescue NGOs.

The pro-migrant NGOs have been accused by Italian prosecutors of conspiring with people smugglers and the Identitarians say they will use their own ship to track the NGOs and document any evidence of collusion with the smugglers.

#mass migration #islam #islamic #refugees #jew #jews #israel #globalism

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tinyshe · 4 years

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The EU ignores neutrality, provides funding to undermine political foes

Countries in the EU are theoretically bound to the neutrality obligation in its use of tax revenues: The taxpayer's money must not be used for political purposes. But just as the German government wants to spend 1 billion euros in the next four years on the so-called “fight against the right”, the EU is funding a network of “civil society” NGOs that represent clearly left-wing politics, actively combatting conservative politicians and their parties – Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban are but two examples.

Published: January 23, 2021, 9:39 am

'Extremists use schools to pervert UK education'

'Accusations of racism is the ideological weapon of globalists'

'EU governments participating in mass-scale human trafficking'

'Conspiracy theory' on fluoride proven right

'Progressive' multinational exploiting children in Turkey

'Floating protection systems' against illegal immigrants

'Italians, we will cut your throats'

“In view of the current economic plight of many citizens in Germany and the EU, every taxpayer must be appalled that the EU is spending all our money on so-called ‘civil society’ NGOs that promote illegal migration and ‘no borders’ and undermine conservative EU governments want,” said the rapporteur for the budget of the Commission for the year 2019 Joachim Kuhs from the Identity and Democracy Group in the European Parliament. “This is infidelity and must be stopped immediately.”

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the pioneer of these “civil society” NGOs in Europe, received €29 930 from the EU in 2019 for a project on “European sovereignty”. ECFR is one of the most important lobbyists in Brussels and has a great influence on EU politics. So the EU pays ECFR to lobby the EU.

At the same time, however, the EU intervenes in the “sovereignty” of member states such as Hungary and Poland through NGOs such as the ECFR. In order to create transparency about the influence of foreign NGOs in Hungary, the Hungarian parliament passed a law based on the Israeli model in 2017, according to which NGOs have to disclose their funding. This transparency law was found to be “discriminatory” in 2020 by the European Court of Justice . The Hungarian government wants however to continue to insist on transparency in the financing of NGOs.

The command center of the left-wing human rights organizations in Hungary is the “Hungarian Civil Liberties Union” (HCLU), which in 2019 received €17 847 from the EU for “voter motivation campaigns” according to the EU financial transparency portal. The HCLU received $50 000 from the Open Society Foundation in 2018 and $365 500 in 2016.

The HCLU, along with other NGOs, belongs to the “Civil Liberties Union for Europe” (LibertiesEU) based in Berlin, which was funded by the Open Society in 2017 to the tune of $2 550 000. According to the Jerusalem Post on March 15, 2018, the head of LibertiesEU Balázs Dénes boasted:

“We are very strong. This week I am meeting with a think tank, a lobby group that has influence on the German government and the German Foreign Ministry, and I bring them copies of the law (the NGO Transparency Act) that have been translated from Hungarian and will explain to them what they can do against it.”

The members of LibertiesEU also enjoyed generous funding from the EU in 2019: the Civil Rights Defenders (Sweden) received €81 363, Center for Peace Studies (Croatia) €267 392, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Finland) €38 118, Nederlands Juristen Comite voor de Mensenrechte €96 617, Irish Council for Civil Liberties €56 928, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Poland) €38 118, Estonian Human Rights Center €129 691, Lithuanian Center for Human Rights €157 493, and the Mirovni Institute Slovenia €281 797.

From Italy, the NGOs Associazione Antigone received €172 832 and Coalizione Italiana per le Liberta e Diritii e Civili (CILD) €88 379. The Italian Coalition for Freedom and Human Rights CILD, founded in 2014, is a large network of NGOs that campaign for illegal immigration and complain against the Italian government when it tries to protect its borders.

These include the Lawfare NGOs Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione (ASGI) and A Buon Diritto, which, among other things, took legal action before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) tried to deprive Italy of the right to reject illegal immigrants at the border. Since then, border protection has been referred to in the mainstream press in Europe as “illegal pushbacks”, even though the protection of external borders is part and prerequisite of the Schengen Agreement.

The European Center for Law & Justice (ECLJ) documented in February 2020 that 22 of the 100 judges at the ECHR were former employees of Open Society NGOs. The CILD network also includes the left-wing community network Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (ARCI), which is currently trying to bring the former Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini to trial for alleged “deprivation of liberty”. ARCI and its sub-organizations received €967 298 from the EU in 2019.

The Italian NGO network, which is suing Italy and Salvini for wanting to impose their “No Borders” policy, is also funded by the Open Society: ASGI received in 2018 according to their website $385 715, CILD received $2 016 575 000 and ARCI received large amounts from 2016 to 2018 from Open Society.

In 2019, at least €25 243 412 went to NGOs that were directly linked to the Open Society Foundation. These so-called “human rights groups” finance projects to “mobilize voters” against unwelcome conservative governments, against “propaganda and hate speech in the Balkans” or for “no borders” lawfare and the rights of illegal migrants.

“I am not aware of the EU financing conservative or pro-Israel human rights groups, for example against anti-fascist terror and violence against conservative politicians and parties, against state censorship on the Internet and the suppression of alternative media, for politically persecuted critics of Islam, for border protection and against illegal migration, or against Islamization and Islamist violence against women, gays, Christians and Jews,” said Joachim Kuhs. “The EU has to behave politically neutral, and not to abuse the tax millions of the citizens for left-wing NGOs.”

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queeranarchism · 7 years

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Fascist boat against sea rescue has been rescued at sea

The boat that went to the mediterranean to ‘disrupt rescue missions’ has been rescued at sea - by a group dedicated to refugee rescue at sea.

Defend Europe, an offshoot of the white nationalist Identitarian movement, crowdfunded the ship ‘C-Star’ last spring with claims it would target NGO’s that try to rescue refugees.

C-Star entered the mediterranean on 15 July 2017 and has been on it’s mission for less than a month. Late July it met it’s first obstacle within that same month when it’s ship was held and it’s crew detained on charges of human smuggling.

Today, on August 11th, 2017, C-Star’s engine broke down and it send out a distress call. EU naval forces in the area passed on this distress call to Sea-Eye, a German volunteer run ship dedicated to rescuing refugees at sea.

Sea-Eye came to C-Star’s aid, reporting “To help in distressed persons is the duty of everyone who is at sea - indifferent to their origin, skin color, religion or spirit.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/11/anti-immigrant-defend-europe-vessel-has-rescued-mediterranean/

http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2017/08/11/le-bateau-anti-migrants-c-star-secouru-par-une-ong-pro-refugies_a_23074496/

http://www.ankaradegillefkosa.org/the-anti-refugee-boat-is-involved-in-human-smuggling/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/27/anti-migrant-boat-crew-arrested-famagusta-cyprus-people-smuggling

This is the funniest news ever.

#mediterranean #fortress europe #c-star #refugees welcome #no borders

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commoningblog · 4 years

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Bangladesh - an overview on geography, climate and governance

This blog post aims to give the reader an overview of Bangladesh - its urban and rural life form/ formal-informal growth and governance.

GEOGRAPHY & HOW IT SHAPES LIFE

Bangladesh sits beneath the Himalayan ranges from which two rivers - Bhamraputra and Ganges - branch out and run through towards the Bay of Bengal. These two rivers have been flowing through for hundreds of years, accumulating silt and thus have created this 150,000 sq km of land (2/3rd of which is delta) which currently houses 161.4 million (2018) people.

Source: https://water104website.weebly.com/bangladesh-flooding-and-impacts.html

Bangladesh is called a land of rivers as it has about 700 rivers including tributaries. The rivers of Bangladesh are very extensive and affect both the physiography of the country and the lives of the people.

Source: https://www.imchbd.com/library/3

Majority of the rural population relies on agriculture for their livelihood and thus the relationship between land and water is very important and almost instrumental in the functioning of the settlements. The rivers are not only a major source of transportation, fishing and agriculture but also dictate the geography of livable and arable land.

Whenever the dominant crisscrossed rivers change their course, they either emerge new land or cause land erosion at the banks.

Source:

CLIMATE AND ARCHITECTURE

The region has a sub-tropical climate. Here the summers are hot and humid. Monsoon stays for half the year. Winters last a few weeks and are very mild. However, with the changes in climate patterns worldwide, the seasonal patterns show extremities more often than expected.

The basic elements of architecture depending on the climatic context is thus a roof to cover from rain, shading or buffer from the scorching sun and raised plinths to protect from changing water levels. Unlike Europe’s insulating provisions, an in-between/buffer space between the inside and outside is desired. Courtyards act as such an threshold space which then develop into sites of many social and communal activities. They ensure passive ventilation in the hot-humid climate.

Materials depending on the location range from bamboo, mud to brick and concrete. All construction is done by hands and human labour, with minimal use of machines only seen in bigger city construction sites.

CLIMATE CHANGE IN BANGLADESH

Being the biggest delta and sat at the gateway to Indian Ocean, Bangladesh is prone to disasters associated to climatic events. It is estimated that by 2050 17% of its land will be under water due to impacts of climate change, triggering around 20 million climate refugees (Mallick and Vogt, 2012; National Geographic Society, 2016). With the population density of 1,240 people per sq. km. of land area and the associated risk factors, Bangladesh currently ranks as the world’s sixth most disaster prone country (UNU-EHS, 2015).

During monsoon, much of the land goes under water and dry seasons make the same lands farmlands. However, with the rapid change in climate, the seasons no longer follow its regularities. Over the years rates of bank erosion, cyclones and flash floods have rapidly increased in intensity and occurrence. Additionally, border sharing country India controls the water flow of the rivers through their dams as they are closer to the Himalayan sources. During dry season, they retain the water from the Himalayas upstream (leaving Bangladeshi rivers dry) and open floodgates into the Bangladeshi lands during monsoon. These factors contribute to regular non-seasonal flash floods in Bangladesh.

Following are some recent climatic disasters and their damages

1970 great Cyclone Bhola - 300,000 casualties

Cyclone Sidr in 2007- 3,406 fatalities with 2.3 million households damaged

Cyclone Aila in 2009 - 234 deaths

1998 flood submerged about two-thirds of Bangladesh (Huq, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2016; Mallick, 2014).

Although Bangladesh is ranked as 162 out of 199 countries listed by The World Bank (2014) in terms of producing CO2, the impacts of climate change are catastrophic in Bangladesh.

Interesting video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co5uywe-1Z8).

Interesting source to be check later: https://ejfoundation.org/reports/climate-displacement-in-bangladesh

More images on https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/pictures-bangladesh-front-lines-climate-crisis-191203102447517.html

CLIMATE REFUGEE MIGRATION

It is predicted that every one in 45 people (Brown, 2008) and every one in 7 people will be displaced by the impacts of climate change (CDMP II, 2014), making the climate refugees. In the context of Bangladesh, climate refugees can be defined as people who have lost their homestead, arable land or livelihoods in the rural settings after extreme climatic disasters (Ahmed, 2018). In most cases, climate refugees internally migrate to urban areas in search of livelihoods and living such as Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

Source:

Dhaka is the epicenter of Bangladesh’s urban expansion and is said to be the fastest growing city in the world – it is currently estimated that 400,000 migrants, mainly poor and from rural areas, continue to arrive each year. Of an urban population of 44 million people in 2010, an estimated 9.4 million people (21.3 per cent) are living in absolute poverty, and 3.4 million (7.7 per cent) are in extreme poverty with consumption levels of around 1,805 Kcal per day or less. Urban migration is largely a result of seeking better educational and employment opportunities, especially in the readymade garments sector. Push factors are also important: While most people migrate for economic reasons, more than 26% do so due to environmental and climate related reasons such as natural disasters, river erosion and recurrent flooding. Many of the migrants are concentrated in urban slums as squatters where they live in poor conditions, with limited access to urban basic services.

Source: Bayes Ahmed, 2018

Because of the fluid nature of the land-water relationship, a sense of “temporariness” or “impermanence” is quite dominant in the way the people function, live and eventually how they shape their built environment.

It notions towards an informal way to organise, plan and live.

GOVERNANCE and PARTICIPATION

Like most south Asian countries, it is rare in Bangladesh that people on the ground contribute to urban development activities or participate in planning or implementation of any development program. They are often treated as “clients” who have no stake or opinion in the structure. The private sector builds and runs the city by dominating the navigation of its resource, skills and labour.

Two decades ago, left parties in Bangladesh would organize such rallies and advocate land reform. In the 21st century, such events are organized by indigenous NGOs that are funded by Western donors. In rural Bangladesh, Nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) play an instrumental role to incorporate participatory research, participation, and participatory appraisal. NGOs through their innovative, flexible and active promotion of democratic development and the establishment of the citizenship rights in the rural society have to the donors their reliability and effectiveness. This has led to establishing that participatory processes can only be attained by NGOs in such contexts when the conventional development efforts have failed (Barua, 2009).

In Bangladesh, the social mobilization NGO Proshika Human Development Forum (third largest NGO in BD) has occupied the rhetoric of "non-party-politics" and undertaken the organization of the poor (households that live below the Bangladeshi poverty level and own 0.5 acres of land or less fall into the category of poor) into a "grassroots political mobilization" both at the local and national levels. In the 1990s, Proshika, under the auspices of the largest NGO umbrella organization in Bangladesh, the Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB), organized public demonstrations of its members for the distribution of government land and for a pro-poor budget, successfully sponsored NGO women members in village level elections, and increased the participation of poor women in public rallies.

As a result of the donor’s role and support, the NGOs received a total of 379 million dollars through foreign aid that is 34 percent of the total aid flows disbursed to Bangladesh (Transparency International Bangladesh, 2007) in the financial year of 2003–2004, establishing. This initiative was taken to implement participatory development projects and programs for the mobilization of the marginalized people in rural Bangladesh. In fact, with the acceptance of participatory grassroots development and foreign aid, the participatory research and grassroots development toward empowerment and liberation of the disadvantaged people has been marginalized (Rahman, 1995). (note)

Through their programs and links to Western donor nations, NGOs continue to play a very prominent role in national politics. Such visibility, resources, and support from Western donor agencies give the leading NGOs tremendous power to effect changes in the lives of most people they work with. In a country with a very high unemployment rate, the leading NGOs offer the promise of jobs to the youth and the educated middle class. It is estimated that these NGOs employ 200,000 young men and women as fieldworkers. The NGOs have also introduced some novel ideas into rural communities. In contrast to the government bureaucrat who seldom goes for field visits, the educated NGO worker comes in daily contact with the villagers, visiting them in their homes. (note)

The welfare and advocacy of the NGOs straddle several contradictory and competing forces. The intention to help the poor often gets entangled in and constrained by market forces, donor mandates, state policies, national politics, and local power structures. Working in the context of these competing and at times contradictory forces, NGOs have increasingly resorted to "credit" (the extension of small loans for micro enterprises) in the 1990s as a strategy for economic and social development, targeting, above all, women as beneficiaries. (note)

To the reader who assumes that the left should be the ally of the poor, it may appear odd that NGO and not the left has come to occupy this critical role in society. In Bangladesh, the left remained trapped inside a programmatic deployment of Marxist categories of class relations, the revolutionary working class for example; but, in a country that is eighty percent peasant and nonindustrialized, this approach failed to offer any creative solutions to the problems facing the poor. Furthermore, issues of class struggle became entangled with issues of Bengali linguistic and cultural nationalism which began in 1952 and culminated in the freedom struggle against Pakistani domination in 1971. Many of the ideologues of the leftist parties in pre-independent Bangladesh, for whom nationalism was not the real revolution of the working class, failed to appreciate the importance of these cultural and political forces. In comparison to the left, the NGOs have been far more innovative in their relationship with the poor. (note)

CITIZEN-LED/DESIGNED DEVELOPMENTS IN BANGLADESH

A 2013 Rockefeller Foundation report suggested that rather than focusing on a linear vision of “world-class cities”, planners and policymakers should adopt an alternative lens of “hybrid cities”, in which:

… informal economies are directly integrated into city planning and priorities.

This requires inclusion of social movements and grassroots organisations that exist in and around informal economies. A hybridised city looks to light up those areas where communities are already bringing together existing needs, new ideas, vigorous debate and innovative possibilities. John Thakara observes that informal settlements have a “DIY urbanism”, which has implications for urban design, planning and development:

The shadow economy is more fragmented, and more reliant on social networks, than the formal one – but it is no less dynamic for that. Because social practices are a key part of this urban transformation, the tasks of design are mutating.

An integrated approach would recognise how these practices – and associated urban planning processes – respond inventively to the limits and loopholes of rapidly expanding cities. According to the Rockefeller report, such limits include:

… information asymmetries in the labour market that prevent equitable access to jobs; and insufficient access to resources (for example, skills, finance and markets) that enable growth.

Kim Dovey (2020) on his visit to the capital, Dhaka, describes it as a city that has seen growth in an informal organic manner. He uses the word “informal” to describe development that occurs outside the state controlled planning scheme.

The state puts in place a planning scheme and says that this is a residential area or that it has a particular street morphology and then the informal processes take over and a different kind of functional mix and land use emerges. Indeed a different kind of morphology often emerges if there are height limits and setbacks – they are often violated. Therefore, you get a very informal process layered on top of a formal process.

https://contextbd.com/dhaka-formal-informal-conversation-kim-dovey/

https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/informal-urbanism/events/news/dhaka-trip

https://www.infur.org/about

Informal urbanism is not necessarily illegal, rather it is self-organised. It is not separate from but intersects with the formal structures of state regulation and control, often in reaction to practices of displacement, marginalisation and exclusion. (note)

Architect Marina Tabassum identifies three principles that people live by in such situations (Source Harvard GSD talk):

Negotiation

Appropriation

Optimization (Minimal and basic)

They range from smaller ad-hoc interventions such as

Boat bridges

When water becomes stagnant/or unable to move, Water Hyacinth (Bengali Kochuri pana) grows which makes it impossible for boats to move and transport people. Boat men are left without no earning and people stuck at the two ends. In many villages, it boatmen build a collaborative “boat bridge” by joining their boats together and charge people 2 taka (2p) to use the bridge to cross the rivers.

...housing solutions for the displaced such as

Geneva Camp was designed as temporary accommodation for internally displaced Pakistanis in 1971 – now up to 6 stories. 05 Jul 2019

and trading areas...

temporary Informal trading zones in Old Dhaka

and large scale man-built settlements as...

The informal settlement of Karail with new housing on reclaimed land

And also technological interventions

Kolorob: a participatory platform

Kolorob is an urban innovation initiative stemming from a multi-sectoral collaboration with the communities of two slums in Mirpur, Dhaka. Young people have been integral from the start as mappers and facilitators to collect data about services and involve communities in the application’s design.

The co-design of Kolorob has found significant scope for participatory platforms to enhance access to existing services and employment opportunities in these areas. They also generate the potential for broader capacity-building by linking people to skill development and institutional support where available.

http://www.kolorob.info/

Reference list:

Ahmed, B. (2018). Who takes responsibility climate refugees?. International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, 10(1), 5-26.

Barua B.P. (2009) Participatory Research, NGOs, and Grassroots Development: Challenges in Rural Bangladesh. In: Kapoor D., Jordan S. (eds) Education, Participatory Action Research, and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Brown, O. (2008), Migration and Climate Change, IOM Migration Research Series. No. 31, IOM, Geneva.

CDMP II (2014), Trends and Impact Analysis of Internal Displacement due to the Impacts of Disasters and Climate Change. Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme (CDMP II), Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, Dhaka.

Huq, S. (2016), Cyclone Roanu Hits Bangladesh: A Story of Loss and Damage Avoided, The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, available at: www.iied.org/cycloneroanu-hits-bangladesh-story-loss-damage-avoided.

Mallick, B. and Vogt, J. (2012), “Cyclone, coastal society and migration: empirical evidence from Bangladesh”, International Development Planning Review, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 217-240.

Mallick, B. (2014), “Cyclone shelters and their locational suitability: an empirical analysis from coastal Bangladesh”, Disasters, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 654-671.

National Geographic Society (2016), Climate Refugee, available at: http://nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/climate-refugee/.

United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) (2015), World Risk Report 2015, available at: www.worldriskreport.org/.

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ultra-madhukar-blog · 4 years

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IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN 4.0 IN INDIA

While the whole world is busy in fighting this deadly virus with no vaccine made yet, lockdown all over seems to be the sole and right method to cope up with the deadly COVID-19.

In the recent advisory issued by the Ministry of home affairs, the nationwide lockdown has once again been extended by 2 weeks till May 31. This edition of the lockdown is a bit different from the last 3 lockdowns which we have witnessed since March 23, 2020. As, the government has taken many steps not just to fight this invisible enemy, but also to resume the locked economy.

This virus hasn’t just been a global health crisis, but also an economic crisis, as even the most developed of the economies have failed to reduce its effect. Talking in the context of a developing and populous country like India, the situations would have been more grave and serious had the government not taken the right decision of declaring the nationwide lockdown on time.

However, despite the early measures been taken by the government this virus doesn’t seem to get weaker any soon. It’s so severe that people are facing a lot of problems in their day-to-day life, especially the migrant workers who are stuck at the places where they had been to work before this pandemic, they have no money left for them, many have lost their jobs, many are heading their hometowns either on foot or on bicycles, which is very heart-breaking to see, yet the governments seem to be taking no proper steps to ensure their safe and convenient journey.

In the latest lockdown 4.0, the areas across the country have been divided into three zones i.e. “green zones” where the contamination or the cases are quite less or nil followed by the “orange zone” where no new case has been reported from the last 14 days and then followed by the “red zones” which have buffer zones and containment zones in it. The economic activities have been opened to some extent in the former two like – transportation(taking care of social distancing), the opening of shops, e-commerce activities, etc. while there is still a no for the metro, rail, airways, salons, gyms, etc.

However, the government has recently announced an economic package worth of 20 lacs crore, it will still take time for the economy to get back to normal.

Though the cons, in this case, are more than the pros, nevertheless we still have some things to cheer for in this hard time, as this lockdown has brought us more closer towards each other, we have got and still have ample time for our hobbies and other skill enhancement avenues, in this lockdown, we have also understood the real meaning of being a true warrior, as our Corona warriors – the doctors, police, administration, NGOs despite having so many challenges are not giving up.

There’s still a long way to go, but one day we will win over this invisible enemy, as Simon Sinek has said ‘Panic causes tunnel vision. Calm acceptance of danger allows us to more easily assess the situation and see the options.

#coronavirus #covid_19 #quarentine #lockdown #india

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ingridgabriela87 · 4 years

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#MiercolesDeMigrantes y MexicoBorder

Since the begging of the 2000′s and the “Tech” era, terms as Digital diplomacy, E-Diplomacy, and Cyber Diplomacy (DiploFundation 2016) had been used to refer to any foreign affairs communications to the public, or between States that involves using new platforms in social media to deliver it.

Yesterday the current USA administration (one more time) took a massive step in applying Digital Diplomacy to show how an historic interconnection between countries can be shut down with a simple tweet without further explanation.

Mexico-US Border, Since 1848, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 55% Mexico’s territory was officially US soil (History 2019) and since Nixon’s Administration in 1969 we haven’t seen this type of action (Noah 2019) shutting down the border it’s only increasing damage in, and already reckless mental health crisis in both countries, this action will hit more the rising unemployment numbers, the cost of fruits and vegetables in the States is going to rise badly and more tension between population it’s setting the mood to keep fighting irrationally.

Of course, the pandemic is real, the number of cases of people infected with COVID in the US and around the world keeps increasing and we are only having hopes for a vaccine during the summer of next year.

Oil prices went down, unemployment it’s up, the economy in every part of the world is (once faster than the others) sinking, academia and policy planning are doing debates and research about the consequences in every aspect of how this COVID is setting a footprint for the upcoming months and how the workforce it’s going to take a hard shift.

In Nuevo Laredo Tamaulipas, the business has dropped 80 to 90% (Burnett 2020) so for the rest of the border area the perspectives are similar, in the US case, according to Washington Office on Latin America Three-quarters of the money paying for the Border-wall, it was obtained by raiding the defense budget: $13.9 billion that right now could be paying for a host of more urgent emergency need (WOLA 2020) – adding to that the same organization calculates the cost of military troops deployed in the border area means this- maintaining 5,000 troops both at the border and in a ready state at their bases has cost over $500 million since October 2018. (WOLA 2020)

I agree with the fact that governments (International, Federal and local) are responsible to fix the problems, but here is the question, what we can do to demand action? What we can do to turn the heads and look in the flesh the problems they are generating. From my point of view here it is a small list of recommendations.

1. Problem: Border shut down / Level of Government: Federal & International social demand: Open borders and take back essential business.

Strong recommendation: Stop politized everything and play fair, people come first, political issues must come last

Proposition: Take back essential workers (travels) and relocate the budget of security in the customs area and health care system, hire more people to really target the consequences of this pandemic.

2. Problem: incarceration population / Level of Government: Federal & Local

social demand: partial animist and set free incrassation population.

Strong recommendation: Relocate the budget in national security to social programs and invest in update the technology that federal and local government use to manage the data.

Proposition: choose those with low criminality or, those that are about to get their release date, if they can prove they have a house where to go and that they can stay there a minimum of 15 days, set them free under parole.

Pair up with local business and for those who are set free, relocated them in a first job social pragma, so they can reinsert into their communities.

3. Problem: Detention centers and immigration courts / Level of Government: Federal & Local

social demand: Set them free and stop deportation.

Strong recommendation: Relocate the budget that you label in national security and relocated to social programs for migrants’ families. Use parole arriving at asylum seekers at ports of entry.

Proposition: Stop deportation and analyses the urgent cases. Maximizing the use of humanitarian parole Hire more social workers and low down your number of security staff, in order to relocate those special family separation cases and send them to their houses. Reactivate the migration hearings and collaborate more with academia and think tanks, to find pro-bono or volunteer attorneys

Link about: https://www.wola.org/analysis/trump-covid19-response-at-border/

This is not a moment to create more chaos and uncertainty, we are already living that, right now is a moment to find solutions and propositions to fix things, together, probably are not perfect but that’s why we need more feedback and a sense of belonging to a major thing.

During these tough times, we need empathy and tons of patience and resilience, therefore find your nearest NGO and volunteer yourself, your humanity will be gratefu.

#immigration #Miercolesdemigrantes #mexico #open borders #covid_19 #Migración #frontera

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