By Melissa Castlemaine, Sophy Kohler

This new policy brief examines how endangered flora are being systematically removed from the wild to meet international consumer demand for rare or unusual plants. This trade, once limited and opportunistic, has become more organized, commercialized and transnational, with buyers now concentrated in Europe, the US and Asia.

 South Africa, known for its rich biodiversity, faces threats from the increasing illicit trade in ornamental plants. Endangered species, like *Clivia mirabilis*, are being illegally harvested to satisfy international demand, with over 15,000 plants removed from the Oorlogskloof Nature Reserve by August 2025.

The illegal trade has expanded beyond succulents to include a variety of ornamental plants, with online platforms facilitating this activity. This poaching not only leads to biodiversity loss but also harms ecosystems and local communities.

Despite efforts like the National Response Strategy and Action Plan to Address the Illegal Trade in South African Succulent Flora (2022) and the National Integrated Strategy to Combat Wildlife Trafficking (2023), enforcement remains difficult. 

Upcoming international proposals aim to strengthen protections for threatened plant species. Coordinated responses are urgently needed to combat the illegal trade and protect South Africa’s unique flora.

Geneva: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2025. 36p

By Barry R. Chiswick and RaeAnn H. Robinson

This paper analyzes the characteristics of the free population who were recorded as “owners” of enslaved people in the antebellum Southern states. We utilize the first nationally representative sample linking enslaved and free people - the 1/100 sample microdata files of the 1850 Census of Population from Schedule 1 on free people, and Schedule 2 on the enslaved population - to identify the slaveholders and their slave holdings. The reduced form regression analyses consider both owning at least one enslaved person, and among slaveholders the number held. The findings indicate that 90 percent of the enslaved population were reportedly held by free males, that among men this was more likely for those who were married, but among women it was lower for the married, that for both genders slaveholding increased with age, being literate, and having been born in the US. Moreover, it varied by free men’s occupation, in part because of the extent of self-employment and in part due to their wealth. While most slaveholders were self employed farmers, many of the slaveholders were professionals, including clergy, doctors, and lawyers who used enslaved people in their household, in their professional practice, or in the farms/plantations that they also owned.

IZA DP No. 18031 Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics2025. 62p.

By Cath Collins

This article considers historic and recent approaches to disappearance in transitional justice settings, identifying search, identification and restitution as a uniquely persistent cluster of needs and rights adhering after periods of past political violence. It examines how international and regional norm development, transitional justice dynamics, and needs on the ground have combined to elicit reinvigorated state action over unresolved disappearances in post-authoritarian and post-internal armed conflict Latin America. Dedicated state search offices are considered among various possible responses, but the continued importance of judicial and ‘resistant’ (victim-driven) search is underlined. The ‘forensic turn’ in human rights practice is examined, and aspects of its subsequent evolution – including the proliferation of non-state forensic teams – identified as a potential source of decoupling between the truth and reparations promise of search and identification, and justice imperatives.

The article examines upload and download between present-day search configurations, originating contexts and overarching norms, focusing on search principles adopted by the United Nations in 2019. It suggests that a transitional justice perspective can help assess whether and when apparently divergent or noncompliant approaches should be deemed acceptable – for example, where the fate of the disappeared may be knowable, but they may not be recoverable, or where the passage of time has rendered perpetrator prosecutions a virtual chimera. Finally, the case of Chile’s recent (2023) search office design is used to consider the interplay between norms and country-level diagnostics in creating workable search plans that complement (but without displacing) other important aspects of the struggle against disappearance.

Journal of Disappearance Studies, 1(1), 115-138. Retrieved Oct 6, 2025,

By Laura Huttunen

This article suggests a conceptual framework to think about migrant disappearances. It argues that juxtaposing them with disappearances in other contexts, such as armed conflicts and totalitarian regimes, makes it possible to understand the specificities of each context. The suggested conceptual framework approaches missing and disappeared people as members of families and local communities, but also as subjects of state power and systems of governance across the globe. Migrant disappearances are framed within the tightening border regimes between the Global North and the Global South, and huge global inequalities. The article maps the specificities of migrant disappearances and the challenges of the reconnecting work of search and forensic identification in the context of irregular or undocumented migration. It argues that migrant disappearances often result from migrants being exposed to dangerous circumstances and being left unprotected by any state. The uncertainties and agonies as well as practical and judicial problems faced by families and communities left behind are foregrounded. Moreover, it argues for attention to be paid to various forms of symbolic ‘reappearances’, such as memorial practices and political activism. It also argues that there is a need for more empirical data and theoretical understanding of the complexities of migrant disappearances and reappearances across the globe, both at a global systemic level and in the multiple localities touched by disappeared community members.

Journal of Disappearance Studies, 1(1), 75-93. Retrieved Oct 6, 2025,

By Nikolas Kyriacou

Enforced disappearance is a severe human rights violation with historical roots and global prevalence, perpetrated by state and non-state actors, leaving victims and families in a state of uncertainty. This article explores its legal dimensions in international human rights law. While definitions vary slightly across instruments, a core definition has emerged from the UN Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the Inter-American Convention, the Rome Statute and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Key elements include deprivation of liberty, state involvement or acquiescence, and state refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate, placing them outside of any legal protection.

Enforced disappearance is characterized as a multiple human rights violation. It inherently violates the right to liberty and security, and can involve the right not to be subjected to torture. It also frequently serves as a precursor to violations of the right to life. International human rights mechanisms have addressed these violations through various remedies. While the monetary compensation offered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is noted as inconsistent and opaque, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has developed a broader system including monetary and diverse non-monetary measures, emphasizing the duty to investigate and the right to truth. The 2007 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CPED) offers the most comprehensive framework, explicitly recognizing the rights to justice and reparation, which includes compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition. Despite these advancements, challenges in implementation and enforcement persist, highlighting the ongoing need for global commitment to end impunity and ensure justice.

Journal of Disappearance Studies, v. 1, 2025.

By Physicians for Human Rights

The United States maintains the world’s largest immigration detention system, detaining an average daily population of nearly 60,000 people in immigration detention.¹ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains people in a network of facilities across the country where they often endure inhuman conditions, including solitary confinement.² Solitary confinement is the practice of isolating people in small cells without meaningful human contact for 22 hours or more per day.³

Over the past decade, the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention has risen at an alarming rate, with unprecedented numbers of immigrants held in isolation.⁴ Congress recently authorized a significant increase in funding to expand immigration detention, which will likely exacerbate this widespread, prolonged use of solitary confinement as detention capacity increases.⁵

The effects of prolonged solitary confinement can be lethal, as in the case of Charles Leo Daniel, who died after spending more than 13 years of his life in solitary confinement in various detention settings, including almost four years in solitary confinement in ICE detention.⁶ The adverse health effects of solitary confinement are well-established, extensively researched, and thoroughly documented across decades of literature,⁷ including post-traumatic stress disorder, self-harm, elevated suicide risks, lasting brain damage, and hallucinations.⁸ These effects often persist beyond the confinement period, resulting in enduring physical and psychological disabilities, especially among people with preexisting medical and mental health conditions.⁹ Vulnerable populations, including those with medical and mental health conditions, are often subjected to solitary confinement at high rates despite ICE’s own directives mandating its use as a last resort.

New York: Physicians for Human Rights, 2025. 21p.

By The Anti-Defamation League

The attacks on October 7, 2023, and their aftermath have profoundly reshaped Jewish American life. This joint report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish Federations of North America draws on two large, nationally representative surveys of Jewish Americans conducted earlier this year to illustrate the complex dynamics affecting them. The findings highlight both the widespread effects of antisemitism and the remarkable resilience of Jewish communities. 

Key Findings

Over half of Jewish Americans (55%) report experiencing some form of antisemitism in the past year.79% of all respondents are concerned about antisemitism.

Nearly one in five (18%) were either the victim of an assault, experienced threat of physical attack, or experienced verbal harassment due to their Jewish identity in the past year, while over one-third (36%) witnessed actual or threatened antisemitic violence.

Jewish Americans experienced antisemitism in many contexts, with the most common ones including online, public spaces, the workplace, and educational institutions.

Safety concerns are widespread among American Jews; over 50% are somewhat, very or always worried about personal safety, one-third have discussed with others what they would do in a “worst case” scenario, and 14% have developed a plan should they need to flee the country due to rising antisemitism. These rates are significantly higher for those that experienced direct antisemitic harm.

Jewish-Americans who experienced direct antisemitic harm or witnessed antisemitic acts within the past 12 months exhibited higher rates of symptoms used to screen for anxiety and depression.

One in five Jews who wore something distinctively Jewish before October 7 have since taken it off.

American Jews showed great resilience, with 84% of those who were directly harmed in the past year making some positive change because of the antisemitism they experienced.

What Jewish Federations terms “the Surge” - a marked increase in Jewish engagement - continues, though at slightly lower levels than in 2024, with nearly one-third of Jews reporting increased participation in Jewish life.

New York: ADL, 2025

Against Excessive Use of Force and Other Human Rights Violations by Law Enforcement Officers Through Transformative Change for Racial Justice and Equality

Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 47/21, in the present report, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights examines calls for reparatory justice presented in his agenda towards transformative change for racial justice and equality, building on recommendations by the Secretary-General and United Nations human rights mechanisms. The High Commissioner highlights the role of States and others in confronting legacies of enslavement, the trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism, including dismantling structures and systems that perpetuate systemic racism at all levels. The High Commissioner reaffirms that reparatory justice requires a multi-pronged approach that is context-specific, intersectional, grounded in international human rights law and designed through meaningful consultation with and the participation of people of African descent. Building a reparatory justice momentum requires mobilizing all of society, the creation and reinforcement of existing networks and solidarity across equality movements. The High Commissioner calls for renewed leadership and vision, through creative, effective and comprehensive reparatory justice responses, as a critical component of dismantling systemic racism. 

United Nations, 2025. 18p

By Macnab, A. J., Besigye, I., & Tusubira, B

High rates of sexual and gender-related violence (SGRV) against girls occur in sub-Saharan Africa. SGRV generates fear, anxiety, and depression and leads to multiple adverse outcomes; its pervasive nature constitutes a significant public health crisis; the need for effective interventions is evident as currently applied programs have known limitations, and 1 in 3 women still suffer gender-based violence in their lifetime. This report reviews the challenge and mental health impact of SGRV in sub-Saharan Africa, summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently applied interventions, and describes a novel social empowerment intervention piloted in Uganda which achieved nationwide reach. Girls were engaged in high schools to identify the SGRV issues they saw as priorities. A music video was recorded by celebrity artists with scenarios to illustrate these issues and promote positive interventions; this used the framework for Education-Entertainment media, a validated form of health promotion. Over 12 months, the video was viewed 36,651 times on YouTube and generated >200,000 social media posts; streaming platforms saw 113,757 individuals downloaded the song; >310,000 people at public concerts heard the song performed; and eight national broadcasters played the video or song at least 30 times reaching a combined audience of >9,500,000. We suggest these data and the inherent merit of a preventive SGRV intervention warrant further consideration of this music video model; other countries can produce region-specific, population-focused versions to meet the urgent need for targeted interventions to raise societal awareness and enhance mental health support for those living in fear of sexual violence.

Academia Mental Health and Well-Being 2024;1.

By Kelly Bescherer, Stephan Scheel

The capacity to establish migrants' legal identities is key to states' attempts to control access to their territories. This paper introduces the concept of regimes of proof to shed light on this often-neglected aspect of border and migration control and related migrant struggles. Negotiations around legal identities play a central role in deportation, but also in migrants' access to rights and government services. At the current conjuncture, this tension has become particularly relevant: new digital means of identification such as biometric residency cards or the analysis of mobile phone data are rapidly being introduced across the globe to establish and fix migrants' identities and to determine their country of origin. Drawing on ethnographic research in West Africa and Germany, we consider the implications of shifting regimes of proof in the context of asylum, deportation and regularisation procedures to highlight the centrality of identification to all aspects of migration management.

International MigrationVolume 63, Issue 6 Nov 2025

By Rupert Horsley

Human smuggling across these regions continues to evolve rapidly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes have emerged in the volume and direction of migratory flows and smuggling networks. These shifts are closely linked to ongoing political, economic and security developments, including protracted conflict, governance crises and economic uncertainty.

Since 2016, the GI-TOC has monitored the political economy of human smuggling and trafficking in North Africa and the Sahel. This work was expanded and formalised in 2018 with the establishment of the North Africa and Sahel Observatory (NAS-Obs). Through annual country reports and thematic studies, the Observatory has provided a detailed understanding of the actors, routes and dynamics shaping mobility and exploitation in the region.

The 2025 series features country reports on Libya, Niger, Chad and Tunisia. Together, they capture the current transformations in human smuggling across both regions: from the persistence of hybrid smuggling systems in Libya, to evolving migration routes through Niger and Chad, and the increasing mobility of Sudanese refugees across North Africa. The reports also analyse the political and security contexts driving these trends, including the deepening conflict in Sudan, ongoing instability in Libya, and growing pressures along Tunisia’s coastal migration routes.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, . 2025. 36p.

By The American Immigration Council

The first six months of the second Donald J. Trump administration have arguably seen the most significant changes to U.S. immigration policy in the nation’s history. Taken one by one, as they have been announced or revealed, the effect can be overwhelming: it seems impossible to even comprehend everything that has happened, much less to understand it in a systematic way or to anticipate what might come next. The purpose of this report is not to recapitulate the last six months of chronology. Nor is it to contextualize the last six months within the history of immigration policy. The administration is simultaneously continuing some policy trends in place under the previous administration; taking latent powers within immigration law and using them as a matter of course; reanimating laws whose enactment predates the modern immigration system; and asserting wholly new powers that have never existed in law before. Lists like these can make anyone feel as though they have no idea what is actually going on. We aim to do the opposite of that: to provide a framework for the American people to understand what has been done to noncitizens, the communities in which they live, and the entire U.S. immigration system since January 20, 2025. We hope this framework will remain useful as the Trump administration continues its effort to fundamentally transform the American government, character, and role in the world. Our report is organized as a survey of the immigration policy landscape as of mid-2025, seeking to answer three key questions: The first six months of the second Donald J. Trump administration have arguably seen the most significant changes to U.S. immigration policy in the nation’s history. Taken one by one, as they have been announced or revealed, the effect can be overwhelming: it seems impossible to even comprehend everything that has happened, much less to understand it in a systematic way or to anticipate what might come next. The purpose of this report is not to recapitulate the last six months of chronology. Nor is it to contextualize the last six months within the history of immigration policy. The administration is simultaneously continuing some policy trends in place under the previous administration; taking latent powers within immigration law and using them as a matter of course; reanimating laws whose enactment predates the modern immigration system; and asserting wholly new powers that have never existed in law before. Lists like these can make anyone feel as though they have no idea what is actually going on. We aim to do the opposite of that: to provide a framework for the American people to understand what has been done to noncitizens, the communities in which they live, and the entire U.S. immigration system since January 20, 2025. We hope this framework will remain useful as the Trump administration continues its effort to fundamentally transform the American government, character, and role in the world. Our report is organized as a survey of the immigration policy landscape as of mid-2025, seeking to answer three key questions.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2025. 74p.

By Justyna Sempruch

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent “hag” on the margins of culture or to unrestrained “feminine” sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of “feminine” sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the “hag” into a “superwoman” can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti, with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008.

Edited by Alan Gallay

The essays in this collection use the complicated dynamics of Indian slavery as a lens through which to explore both Indian and European societies and their interactions, as well as relations between and among Native groups.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

By Andrew Woolford

This Benevolent Experiment is a nuanced comparative history of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harm caused by assimilative education.

Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2015. 

By Jeffrey Lesser

Jeffrey Lesser focuses on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood to examine the competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials.

There is a saying in Brazil: “Mosquitoes are democratic: they bite the rich and the poor alike.” Why then is bad health---from violence to respiratory disease, from malaria to dengue---dispersed unevenly across different social and national groups? In Living and Dying in São Paulo, Jeffrey Lesser focuses on the Bom Retiro neighborhood to explore such questions by examining the competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. He analyzes the fraught relationship between Bom Retiro residents and the state and health care agencies that have overseen community sanitation efforts since the mid-nineteenth century, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. Lesser employs the concept of “residues” to outline how continuing historical material, legislative, and social legacies structure contemporary daily life and health outcomes in the neighborhood. In so doing, Lesser creates a dialogue between the past and the present, showing how the relationship between culture and disease is both layered and interconnected.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.

By Peter Hopkins

Available open access digitally under CC BY NC ND licence. Everyday experiences of anti-Muslim racism include accounts of Islamophobia in public spaces, in the school playground, on social media and on public transport. This book explores how Islamophobia pervades the daily lives of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim, drawing upon work by the author and leading researchers. Everyday Islamophobia tends to be regarded as low level or trivial. This book considers the influence of organisations, agencies, and individuals on those who find themselves negotiating its significant harms in education, the community and online. It concludes by exploring strategies to challenge and resist Islamophobia.

Bristol UK: Bristol University Press, 2025. 

By The Right Hon. Viscount Bryce

When Essays and Addresses in War Time appeared in December 1918, the Great War had not yet fully settled into memory. The armistice was scarcely a month old; the dead lay uncounted; the maps of Europe were still provisional, and new nations were appearing almost daily. It was into this unsettled moral and political landscape that Viscount James Bryce (1838–1922) published this set of reflections — part justification, part analysis, and part moral plea — for what he regarded as one of civilization’s defining struggles.

Bryce was no ordinary commentator. Historian, jurist, diplomat, and moral philosopher, he had served as British ambassador to the United States (1907–1913) and was known across Europe and America as one of the most lucid defenders of democratic government. His monumental works — The Holy Roman Empire (1864) and The American Commonwealth (1888) — had already secured his international reputation. Yet Essays and Addresses in War Time reveals another dimension: a statesman confronting the collapse of Enlightenment ideals under the strain of modern total war, and seeking to explain to neutral nations why the conflict could not be reduced to a mere clash of power or empire, but must be seen as a moral contest over the principles of civilization itself.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 156p.

By Mohamed Nassir

In a report published in September 2025, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, reveals that anti-Muslim prejudices have been increasingly prevalent in Australia in recent years. He finds that these issues have been exacerbated by geopolitical events such as 9/11 and the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict. Malik’s Report attributes this to factors such as negative media coverage and “divisive comments by politicians”. It concludes with 54 recommendations for the Australian government to consider in combating Islamophobia.

In his report published on 12 September 2025, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, describes the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia as “pervasive and, at times, terrifying”. The report entitled, A National Response to Islamophobia: A Strategic Framework for Inclusion, Safety and Prosperity, argues that, despite there being no universally accepted definition of Islamophobia, it should be acknowledged that incidents of privilege and discrimination against Australian Muslims are increasing.

 The report begins by examining the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments in Australia in recent years and identifies some of the key factors that explain the phenomenon. It concludes with 54 recommendations aimed at addressing the problem. These recommendations are a valuable resource for countries like Singapore, which value social harmony and strive to protect vulnerable groups and foster inclusivity.

S. Rajarat nam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore, 2025. 6p.

By Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is a powerful and evocative account of the Great Plague that devastated London in 1665. Though written decades after the event, the narrative is presented as the firsthand observations of “H.F.,” a saddler living in the city, and blends historical fact with fictional storytelling. Defoe, who was a child during the outbreak, drew upon official records, personal testimonies, and his own journalistic instincts to reconstruct the atmosphere of a city under siege by disease.

The plague of 1665 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England, killing an estimated 100,000 people—nearly a quarter of London’s population at the time. It was part of the Second Pandemic, a series of plague outbreaks that began with the Black Death in the 14th century and continued into the 18th. The disease spread rapidly through crowded urban areas, exacerbated by poor sanitation, limited medical knowledge, and ineffective containment measures. The government imposed quarantines, marked infected houses with red crosses, and employed “watchmen” to enforce isolation, while mass graves and plague pits became grim symbols of the crisis.

Defoe’s narrative captures the fear, confusion, and moral dilemmas faced by Londoners during this time. He details the breakdown of social order, the flight of the wealthy, the suffering of the poor, and the varied responses of clergy, physicians, and common citizens. The book is not only a historical document but also a reflection on human behavior in the face of catastrophe. Its themes of resilience, public health, and social responsibility remain strikingly relevant, offering timeless insights into how societies confront pandemics.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 202p.