By Joanna Bourke Martignoni and Elizabeth Umlas. Geneva: Geneva Academy. 2018. The UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights (UNGPs) make a key contribution to the implementation of human rights guarantees through their definition of the concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD), which directs companies to “identify, prevent, mitigate and account for” their…
As part of its week-long research meeting, the DEMETER team held a public event the 6th of June at the UN Economic Commission for Africa which attracted an audience from several regional international organisations, including the African Union as well as a number of specialised agencies, academics from Ethiopia and elsewhere and from civil society.…
A scaling-up workshop of the project Demeter takes place from the 4th to the 7th of June in Addis Ababa. Team members will discuss the publications of Demeter, seek to create dialogue with scholars in Ethiopia, communicate with international and national stakeholders and plan forthcoming project activities. A public event is organized by Demeter on the…
In this research brief, Saba Joshi discusses the gendered impacts of land commercialization in Cambodia. Based on qualitative interviews conducted during multiple field visits in 2015 and 2016 in Ratanakiri, Kratié and Kampong Thom, she shows how commercialization affects women’s access to the land and the commons, gender division of labour, violence against women in three…
This international workshop (23-25 May – Halle/Saale, Germany) was organized by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and McGill University. During this programme, Christophe Gironde presented a paper entitled “Losing land, losing ground? Dispossession and resilience in Northeaster Cambodia”. Since the 1990s, northeaster Cambodia has been undergoing a rapid and radical agrarian transition, driven by…
In the context of the Gender Seminar Series, Saba Joshi presented a part of her PhD research on land conflict in Cambodia. Using data collected through semi-structured interviews and field research with several rural communities affected by land conflicts and with Cambodian NGOs, she is studying the emergence of women-led grassroots movements and gendered political…
We are pleased to announce that the Swiss National Research Council and the Presiding Board have allocated funding for the Demeter project for the next three years (2018-2020). Hereafter we give you an up-date on our research findings and an insight in how we will go along. From phase one to phase two: Research findings…
Convening in Bern, Switzerland, 5–8 September 2017, the 4th International Conference on Research for Development (ICRD) gathered researchers, policymakers, and societal partners in order to discuss ways to support transformations towards sustainable development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Demeter team was particularly invested in this event organizing one Panel session and participating in…
By Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey. Cassava is one of the commonest food staple crops in Ghana. Its growing importance is seen in the way it is increasingly being used as a substitute for a variety of cooked food meals in Ghana. It is widely observed that in forest zones, cassava has become a key substitute for…
By Saba Joshi. During my fieldwork in Cambodia, I took part in a project called Davis Projects for Peace. The Davis Project for Peace is an initiative of the Katherine Davis Foundation, which allows students from the Graduate Institute, Geneva to design and implement a grassroots project anywhere in the world. This year, my project…
