By The International Crisis Group

What’s new? A violent siege of Haiti’s capital in early 2024 triggered the creation of a transitional government and the eventual arrival of a Kenyan-led mission to help counter the gang threat. But infighting has paralysed the government, empowered the gangs and made it unlikely that planned elections can come off safely. Why does it matter? Haiti urgently needs a legitimate government able to lead the campaign to curb gang violence and respond to the country’s dire humanitarian emergency. But holding polls prematurely could backfire, allowing gangs to play a deciding role in the vote and entrenching their power. What should be done? Haiti’s transitional authorities should strive to overcome internal wrangling and chart a realistic path to safe elections and constitutional reform. With future U.S. funding in doubt, the UN Security Council must find a way to support either the existing international security force or a peacekeeping mission to weaken the gangs.

Efforts by Haitian politicians and their foreign partners to quell surging gang violence have yet to bear fruit. A transitional government drawn from the country’s main political forces took office in April 2024, promising to hold the first elections in nearly a decade. Soon thereafter, the first contingent of Kenyan police disembarked, part of an international security mission tasked with loosening the gangs’ stranglehold on the capital Port-au-Prince and its vicinity. But the hopes invested by Haitians in the transitional government and the foreign mission remain unfulfilled. Partisan infighting and corruption allegations have prolonged political dysfunction. Violence rages, with gangs perpetrating some of the worst massacres ever as the understaffed, underfunded foreign mission struggles to rein them in. With safe elections looking improbable in the near term, transitional authorities should get past their internal disputes to plot a realistic course to polls and constitutional reform. The UN Security Council, for its part, must decide how best to respond to Haiti’s request for support in fighting the gangs. February 2024 saw a grim milestone in the gangs’ growth but also the beginning of what seemed to be a concerted effort to stabilise Haiti. Instead of fighting one another, gangs banded together to mount a multi-pronged assault. Besieging Port-auPrince, they cemented control of more than 80 per cent of the city, emptied jails, ransacked police stations and forced the airport to close. With Prime Minister Ariel Henry stranded in Kenya, where he had been negotiating deployment of the security support mission, the time was ripe for a bold response. Caribbean countries, the U.S. and other foreign states gathered Haiti’s leading political forces for a summit in Jamaica on 11 March, prodding them to form a transitional government to take Henry’s place. The idea was that with a new cross-party government promising a route to fresh elections, the country’s leaders could arrest plummeting public trust in the state and the collapse of its institutions. In tandem, the foreign mission would arrive to join local police in beating back the gangs. Marrying the goals of rebuilding legitimate government and restoring security, the plan was geared around leadership by a new Transitional Presidential Council, alongside a prime minister whom it would appoint. This arrangement, however, proved to be a seed of fresh strife. Council members clashed repeatedly with the first prime minister, Garry Conille, a long-time UN official. Conille’s dismissal in November and replacement by businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé ended the impasse, while also sending a clear message that the council would run the show. But the wrangling did not stop. Council members are also at loggerheads with the political groups they are supposed to represent, known as the “sectors”, which see the councillors’ growing independence as a threat to their interests. Some parties are so affronted by their supposed loss of power that they have demanded a radical overhaul of government. Lastly, corruption charges against three councillors, who have refused to resign or cooperate with the authorities, have corroded the government’s public standing. To make matters worse, plans to push through constitutional reform, to be voted on at referendum in the first half of 2025, as well as hold elections before year’s end, have made scant progress. Members of provisional electoral bodies were appointed only in December, and Haiti lacks an up-to-date voter register. Moreover, polls held in current conditions would be unsafe for candidates and voters alike. Despite isolated achievements by police and the foreign mission in their campaign against the gangs, these groups control much of the capital and essential roads to the rest of the country, while fighting is expanding into other regions. In the past five months, gangs have carried out at least four massacres – carnage that has claimed around 400 lives. Staggering the voting schedule or placing polling stations outside gang-controlled territory could make balloting possible in some areas. But the result would likely be very low turnout, possibly under the 20 per cent witnessed in Haiti’s last polls in 2016. Gangs could also sow fear in places under their sway to ensure that their allies win positions of power. Instead of rushing toward elections, the transitional government should focus on the nuts and bolts of responsible governance. Drawing on the agreement that created the administration, it should establish an assembly where political groups represented in the Transitional Presidential Council can resolve their grievances without threatening to upend the state. The authorities should also act quickly to appoint a National Security Council and to provide the secretary of state for public security with the support required to map a strategy for reducing violence anchored in concrete, achievable steps. The government should also show it is serious about fighting corruption by ensuring that its members are held accountable. Transitional authorities should work alongside foreign partners to explore how security assistance from abroad can be made more sustainable and effective. It is all the more crucial that they do so at a time when funding from the U.S., Haiti’s main donor, has been partially frozen by the Trump administration, putting Washington’s commitment to underwrite future security operations in serious doubt. Donations for the multinational mission have fallen far short of what was expected, and not all the promised 2,500 officers and materiel have arrived. The UN could backstop the mission’s financial and logistical needs along the lines of its support for African Union forces in Somalia, but it is unclear whether this approach would address all the current gaps in its operations. The UN Security Council is also considering the possibility of turning the Kenyanled force into a blue-helmet peacekeeping operation, as the Haitian government has requested, which would help address the mission’s funding shortfall. Should the Council choose this option, the UN, in close coordination with Haitian authorities, should make the campaign to weaken gangs its priority and stand ready to follow up with support for state-building and development. For almost three years following President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in July 2021, many Haitians cried out for a government that could build on broad public support to quell rising violence. The gang siege of Port-au-Prince appeared to mark a turning point. But Haiti’s transitional government has been drawn toward battles of self-interest rather than the pursuit of safe polls. The country’s new leaders should now rise to the occasion, working with foreign partners to stem the bloodshed that has tipped Haiti close to the breaking point.

Latin America & Caribbean Report N°107, Port-au-Prince/Mexico City/New York/Brussels : International Crisis Group, 2025. 40p.

By Nilay Saiya, Stuti Manchanda

This study examines the relationship between Christian nationalism—a political theology and cultural framework that seeks to amalgamate the Christian faith and a country's political life and privilege Christianity in the public square over other faith traditions—and attacks against religious minorities in the United States. Some Christian nationalists believe that it is justifiable to undertake violent actions in order to realize the goals of Christian nationalism. We theorize that the political empowerment of Christian nationalist ideology in the form of politicians expressing Christian nationalist sentiments corresponds to physical attacks on religious minorities carried out by self-professing Christians. We test this theory using a cross-sectional, time-series analysis of antiminority violence in the United States. The results provide robust support for our theory.

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion: Volume 64, Issue 1, 2025, 16p.

By The Center for Countering Digital Hate

Amidst the worst period of public disorder and violence targeting minority communities in recent history, social media platforms failed the British public. Worse still, they played a significant role in fomenting the lies, hate, extremist beliefs, and antipathy towards institutions that erupted over a series of warm summer nights into extraordinary spasms of violence across the United Kingdom. False claims about the Southport attacker’s identity – lies identifying him as a Muslim asylum-seeker – spread widely and quickly. Far-right agitators received millions of views on X, formerly Twitter. Towns and cities across the UK saw attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers, inspired by these online posts. My family was among those affected; my mother, sisters and nieces were among those to experience hate on British streets. While affected communities and authorities struggled to cope with violent attacks on- and offline, social media platforms did little to quell its spread and, worse still, profited from it. We have seen this before. In the immediate aftermath of tragic incidents, bad actors weaponise online spaces to spread disinformation and sow informational chaos. Before the facts are known, extremists capitalise on the opportunity to spread hate, mobilise new followers, and inject conspiracy into the public discourse at the moment of maximum vulnerability. Underpinning this cynical behaviour are powerful financial incentives: hate actors turn the grief that follows a tragic incident into online engagement for financial reward from social media platforms. One platform stood out. The owner of X, Elon Musk, shared false information about the situation to his 195 million followers and made a show of attacking the UK Government’s response to the outbreak of violence.i Rather than ensuring risk and illegal content were mitigated on his platform, Musk recklessly promoted the notion of an impending “civil war” in the UK.ii CCDH found far-right figures, previously banned from Twitter but reinstated under Musk’s leadership, receiving millions of views per day on X. The platform ran ads against posts inciting hate, encouraging the mobs to “permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.” iii Musk has transformed Twitter, once the go-to  source for journalists, politicians, and the public for real time news, into X, a platform with imperceptible moderation and the morality of Telegram. On the 16th of August, CCDH convened stakeholders from government departments, law enforcement, the online safety regulator, British advertisers, and frontline civil society groups to chart a path forward. The insights and policy proposals which emerged from that discussion are detailed in this paper. While recognising that there was undue criticism levied at the regulator for powers it cannot yet use under the Online Safety Act (OSA), there is also a case for action to ensure the OSA is fit for purpose. Future amendments will be needed to tackle its most glaring omissions 

London; Washington, DC: Center for Countering Digital hate, 2024. 19p.

By Stéphane Carcillo, Marie-Anne Valfort, Pedro Vergara Merino

This paper presents the first rigorous evaluation of school-based interventions aimed at reducing LGBTphobia. We focus on a classroom intervention that addresses the issue of LGBT harassment through perspective-taking and narrative exchange. Using a field experiment in France with more than 10,000 middle and high school students, we find robust evidence of strong positive effects, with variations across gender, age, and socio-economic status. We argue that changing perceptions of group norms is a key channel driving these heterogeneous effects.

IZA DP No. 17683, Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics , 2025. 65p

By The Center for Countering Digital Hate

Meta announced six key policy changes on January 7th . Halting “proactive” enforcement of some policies on harmful content . Demoting less content “that might violate our standards” . Dropping policies on “immigration, gender identity and gender” . Replacing independent fact-checking with Community Notes . Demoting less content about “elections, politics or social issues” . Moving trust and safety teams from California to Texas Meta intends for these policy changes to be “expanded beyond the US” • Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, has said that changes to fact-checking and enforcement will be “expanded beyond the US” in time. • Kaplan also said that changes to Meta’s hate speech policies announced on January 7th “have been implemented worldwide immediately.” 1) Meta will halt “proactive” enforcement of some policies on harmful content • Meta will halt proactive enforcement (including automatic detection) for some policies on harmful content, instead acting only in response to user reports. • Meta’s announcement explicitly states proactive enforcement will continue for terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. • Meta has not stated if proactive enforcement will continue for these policy areas used in Meta’s transparency reports, which we call “at risk” policy areas: o Bullying & Harassment o Dangerous Orgs: Organized Hate o Hate Speech o Suicide and Self-Injury o Violence And Incitement o Violence & Graphic Content • Meta previously credited its “proactive detection technology” as a key factor in reducing the prevalence of hate speech and harmful content on its platforms. Meta could halt 97% of its enforcement in key policy areas such as hate speech • We analyzed Meta’s transparency reports to examine the potential impact of Meta halting proactive enforcement in policy areas such as hate speech. • Last year, over 97% of Meta’s enforcement actions in “at risk” policy areas were “proactive”, with less than 3% made in response to user reports. • Even accounting for Meta’s claims about mistakes in proactive enforcement, Meta correctly acted on 277 million pieces of content in “at risk” policy areas. Meta must tell users which policies it will no longer proactively enforce, and how it will keep them safe if it stops acting on millions of pieces of harmful content.  

Washington, DC; London: Center for Countering Digital Hate, 2025. 31p.

Edited by Mónika Contreras Saiz and Stefan Rinke  

This interdisciplinary volume analyzes the historical culture of Latin American society embodied in telenovelas and series from the 1960s to the present. Bringing together regional case studies on the representation of 20th-century dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, as well as the war against drug trafficking and the armed conflict in Colombia, it highlights the political and social relevance of ficcional television narratives.

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2024. 405p.

By Rebecca Meiksin, Ruth Ponsford, Nambusi Kyegombe, Chris Bonell

Dating and relationship violence (DRV) among young people is widespread. DRV is associated with subsequent mental ill health, substance use and sexual risk among girls and boys and is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among girls globally. Harmful social norms are widely recognised for their role in sustaining DRV, and interventions often seek to change these. However, little evidence is available to suggest which specific norms are most salient and where protective norms might be strengthened. We conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed consultations and semi-structured interviews with students (years 9 and 10), school staff and parents/carers from ten secondary schools in England. We also audio-recorded discussions in staff DRV trainings in four of these schools. Data collection took place between April 2017 and July 2018. This research explored participant accounts of social norms relating to gender and to DRV in schools and their influence on DRV behaviours. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, our thematic analysis found that sexist social norms subjugating girls to boys facilitated gendered practices of harassment and abuse, including DRV; and that these practices, in turn, reproduced this gendered power structure. Our data suggest that while physical DRV is socially proscribed, norms supporting controlling behaviours and inhibiting disclosure of victimisation directly underpin DRV. They further suggest that indirectly, gender norms concerning cross-gender friendships; sexual harassment; the policing of girls’ sexuality; homophobic abuse; and dominance, control and sexual activity as masculine ideals indirectly sustain DRV. Accounts demonstrated that students and staff challenge harmful norms, but that these efforts can be ineffective and socially punished. Our findings can inform DRV interventions, which should draw on evidence to foster protective norms and shift those that sustain DRV.

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 366, February 2025, 117621

By Ashmini Kerodal, Kelly Officer, Emma Dunn

During the 2019 legislative session, the legislature passed, and the Governor signed Senate Bill 577. Section 5 of the bill created a collection process for data on the prosecution of bias crimes, and requires the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) to analyze these data to identify gaps or weaknesses in the investigation, presentation, prosecution and sanctioning of crimes motivated by bias. This study pools the county District Attorney (DA) data submitted per SB 577 and ORS 137.676, with data from the Oregon State Police (OSP) and Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) to conduct a pre-post evaluation of SB 577 on bias crime prosecutions. The pre-SB 577 group covers all defendants with a bias crime court case or arrest between January 1, 2012 and July 14, 2019, while the post-SB 577 group covers all defendants with a bias crime court case or arrest between July 15, 2019 and December 31, 2022.1 Key Findings One thousand and nine bias crime cases were identified for the 11-year study period. This number excludes cases deemed unfounded by law enforcement (LE)2 and thus not referred to the deputy district attorney (DDA) for review for criminal charges, but includes fingerprintable arrests that were no filed, i.e., bias crime arrests for which no charges were filed by the prosecutor. A case with at least one conviction charge – guilty plea, jury or bench conviction, or no contest plea – was classified as a conviction, which was further divided into bias and non-bias convictions. Sentences and probation conditions were compared for bias conviction and non-bias conviction in the pre- and post-SB 577 periods to determine if conviction charge influenced sentence lengths and probation conditions, and thereafter compared for the pre-post periods to determine the effect of SB 577 on bias crime prosecution. • Eighty percent of filed cases in the pre- and 78.5% in the post-SB 577 group were disposed with a conviction on either a bias or non-bias charge; convictions in the post-SB 577 group are expected to increase as open cases (14.8%) are disposed (see Figure 4). • Slightly over half of defendants sentenced to probation on any conviction charge pre-SB 577 had at least one complex need – identified via post-conviction court mandated substance abuse, mental health or anger management treatment, or houseless status – which increased to 6 in 10 post-SB 577 (see Table 14). • There were no differences in sentencing for bias vs non-bias convictions, aside from the higher use of jail for bias convictions: 67.4% of defendants convicted on a bias vs 44.8% convicted on a non-bias charge in the pre-SB 577 group were sentenced to any jail time, while 54.8% of defendants convicted on a bias vs 41.1% convicted on a non-bias charge in the post-SB 577 group were sentenced to any jail time (see Table 9). • In the absence of formal bias crime treatment and restorative justice (RJ) programs, Clackamas, Multnomah, Wasco and Washington counties are assigning online courses and books/essays to improve defendants’ cultural awareness; community service in culturally appropriate community based organizations (CBOs); and RJ dialogue at the community level. Due to the lack of data on deferred sentences in the OJD Odyssey database, it is possible that these strategies are more prevalent than found in this study, and some creative RJ and sensitivity trainings were not identified. • Insufficient evidence, victim issue, 3 and defendant (in)ability to aid and assist were the most frequently cited reasons bias charges were no filed/no complaint, removed from the charging instrument, or dismissed – in the rare instance when details are provided in Odyssey (see Table 7). The county DA data is crucial to close this knowledge gap and identify challenges faced by DDAs when prosecuting bias crimes. Supplemental data from the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office (MCDA) indicate that aid and assist concerns were confirmed (22.5%) or suspected (29.8%) in over half of bias crime referrals between 2020 and 2022 (see Table A8 in the Appendix). • Some DDAs communicate justifications for no filing, filing/issuing a case as non-bias, plea bargaining, and deferred sentences to the referring officer, but this is not a consistent practice. Community members who share identity with the victim and who research shows are similarly psychologically harmed when a community member is targeted, have no right to be informed of these decisions and occurrences.4 Recommendations This report focuses on the prosecution and sanctioning of bias crimes, which is a necessary first step to formulate research design(s) 5 to identify gaps in the investigation and presentation of bias crimes. When bias convictions, global plea agreements, and non-bias convictions’ probation conditions are considered, it shows that the criminal justice system contains more accountability than is apparent when one queries a single criminal justice system data point. While accountability is a good start, CJC recommends: • Continuation of the current probation practice of utilizing a 4th generation risk assessment instrument with integrated case management (e.g., LS/CMI), mandating programming recommended by the assessment, and treating housing insecurity to reduce reoffending. • The DA, victim advocates at the DA office, or victim advocates at LEAs typically attempt to inform victims of case outcomes, but communication may be stymied due to justice system capacity, language barriers, time constraints, and other barriers. To improve future bias crime reporting and procedural justice, victims should be informed of which charges were filed, justifications for no filed decisions, their rights to participate in plea bargaining negotiations, case outcomes including probation conditions, and other efforts to hold the defendant accountable. • Additional, rigorous research that utilizes administrative criminal justice, victim services, prosecutors, law enforcement, and community perspectives is required to determine the extent of bias crime and non-criminal bias incidents, barriers to reporting, and resources service providers and the justice system require to ensure defendant accountability and meet the needs of victims and affected communities. Academics, policy researchers and graduate students can help fill these knowledge gaps with qualitative and mixed-methods studies. Interested researchers should contact the CJC.

Salem, OR: Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, 2024. 54p.

By Susan McNeeley, Grant Duwe and Valerie Clark

A growing body of literature shows people released from prison have higher risk of mortality. However, few studies have identified characteristics that increase or decrease mortality among this population. Some studies suggest formerly incarcerated women may have especially high risk of death, despite their relatively lower mortality in the general population compared to men. We seek to contribute to the understanding of risk of mortality among people released from prison by testing whether demographic, social, and custodial factors differentially effect risk of mortality for men and women. We analyze a sample of 31,587 men and 5,129 women released from Minnesota state prisons between 2010 and 2019. We matched administrative data from the Minnesota Department of Corrections with death records from the Minnesota Department of Health. Separate Cox regression analyses were conducted for men and women to determine whether they exhibit different risk factors for all-cause, natural, and unnatural deaths. Our analyses found that release type and frequency of healthcare access were more strongly related to mortality among women, while educational achievement was more strongly related to mortality among men. The findings suggest there are sex-based differences in how programming, post-release community supervision, correctional health care, and education shape health outcomes during reintegration to the community. Examining how these aspects of correctional operations operate for men versus women may shed light on ways to improve releasees’ risk of mortality after release from prison.

St. Paul: Minnesota Department of Corrections, 2023. 32p.

Edited by Avis Whyte, Patricia Tuitt & Judith Bourne

In 1965 the UK enacted the Race Relations Act while the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) opened for signature and ratification. In the US, the changes that brought down the walls of segregation, conveying some equality to black people essentially began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These ground-breaking instruments marked a commitment—domestically and internationally by the state parties to the ICERD—to address racial injustice and inequality through legal means. Yet, the intervening years reveal the challenges of pursuing racial justice and equality through the medium of law. In recent years, allegations of institutional racism have been levelled against numerous public institutions in the UK, while the rise of populism globally has challenged the ability of law to effect change. This edited collection draws attention to the need to reflect on the persistence of racial inequalities and injustices despite law’s intervention and arguably because of its ‘unconscious’ role in their promotion. It does so from a multiplicity of perspectives ranging from the doctrinal, socio-legal, critical and theoretical, thereby generating different kinds of knowledge about race and law. By exploring contemporary issues in racial justice and equality, contributors examine the role of law—whether domestic or international, hard or soft—in advancing racial equality and justice and consider whether it can effect substantive change.

London: University of Westminster Press, 2024. 222p.

By The Office of the eSafety Commissioner (Australia)

Online hate is one of the most prevalent forms of digital violence. It affects many internet users in Australia and globally, especially individuals from targeted groups, including sexually diverse individuals, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders, individuals with disability, and those from other culturally and racially marginalised backgrounds. It can take the form of hateful posts or comments about a person based on discrimination or bias related to characteristics such as their sexual orientation, gender, race, disability, religion or ethnicity.

This report is the first in a series of two reports exploring encounters with online hate among adults in Australia. It explores the prevalence, nature and impact of online hate among adults who belong to one or more of the targeted groups, drawing on data from eSafety’s Australian Adults Online survey, conducted in November 2022.

Key findings

Adults who identify as sexually diverse, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, with disability, and/or linguistically diverse are more likely to be targeted with online hate.

Adults from these targeted groups are more likely to experience online hate based on discrimination or bias related to at least one aspect of their identity.

Most targeted adults experience online hate on social media, with the hate most often perpetrated by a stranger.

Online hate has harmful effects on the wellbeing of adults from targeted groups.

A minority of targeted adults act after encountering online hate, but many refrain from acting because they don’t think anything will change.

Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia 2025

By Onesmus Mugyenyi, Paul Twebaze. et al. Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE)

The Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE) and Global Financial Integrity (GFI) have published a new research report titled "Uganda's Mining Legal Regime: Addressing Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) Risks and Revenue Loss in the Mineral Supply Chain." This research looks at the pervasive enablers of IFFs within Uganda's mineral supply chain, highlighting gaps and challenges undermining Uganda's efforts to curb these practices.

The report identifies various enablers of IFFs in Uganda’s mineral supply chain, including informal mining, corruption, insufficient funding for regulatory bodies, misuse of trade-free zones, double taxation agreements, and limitations in mineral database management. These systemic challenges create an environment conducive to various types of illicit financial activities occurring along Uganda's mineral supply chain, such as tax evasion and avoidance, illegal mineral exploitation, money laundering, smuggling, informal trade, and other forms of financial misconduct. Such activities deprive the country of essential revenue for development.

Additionally, the report also examines the challenges associated with the implementation of Uganda's mineral legal framework in addressing these issues. Key obstacles include limited inter-agency cooperation, resource limitations within regulatory bodies, and an insufficient alignment between Uganda’s mining legislation and international best practices. The challenges have hindered Uganda's ability to maximize revenue collection while ensuring sustainable governance of its mineral resources. “operationalization of the Mining and Minerals Act, 2022 by putting in place and enforcing the regulations is critical in mitigating illicit activities and revenue loss” Onesmus Mugyenyi, Research Fellow, ACODE.

The report presents actionable recommendations to address these challenges by enhancing transparency, strengthening enforcement mechanisms, and promoting regional and international cooperation. Proposed measures encompass the implementation of enhanced regulations regarding mineral traceability, the augmentation of investment in capacity-building for oversight institutions, and the establishment of effective mechanisms for data sharing and coordination among the relevant agencies. “It is imperative to enhance Uganda's mining legal framework in order to maximize the sector's revenue potential while curbing illicit financial flows. Actionable recommendations are provided in our report to ensure that mineral wealth benefits all Ugandans. It is time to implement reforms to protect Uganda's resources and future prosperity,” Philip Nyakundi, Policy Director, Global Financial Integrity.

This report is a call to action for policymakers, Civil Society Organizations, and industry stakeholders to prioritize reforms that can reduce IFFs risks and improve revenue collection from Uganda's mineral wealth.

Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity, 2025. 35p.

By Asylum Aid, et al.

 Stateless people are not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its laws, and many have no right to live in any other country. The protection of stateless people living in the UK is an obligation under two post Second World War UN Conventions which the UK has agreed to implement1 and in 2013 the UK government introduced a statelessness determination procedure through which stateless people can gain recognition and regularise their status. However, protection continues to fall short both because stateless people face barriers to recognition, and because protections for those recognised are insufficient. Some recent changes have further reduced protection. Many people in British communities right across the UK are stateless or at risk of statelessness. Most are migrants, who are often forcibly displaced and some are children born in the UK to non-British parents. They are left in legal limbo, vulnerable to discrimination, poverty, and exploitation.2 They cannot work and are often denied access to essential services, including healthcare. While many of these issues overlap with those faced by others without immigration status, stateless people without a right to reside in any country face distinctive problems in resolving their status. Neither the 1954 nor 1961 Statelessness Conventions have been fully incorporated into domestic law which feeds into key policy and legal problems that create barriers to stateless people accessing protection and rights. These include: ● Problems with the statelessness determination procedure: Statelessness is inherently difficult to prove, and wrongly refusing someone recognition and the status that entails has grave consequences. Nonetheless, the current determination procedure contains excessive barriers to recognition, and has too few safeguards on decision-making. There is no right of appeal, and applicants are refused without interview and can be refused permission to stay on grounds which apply to non-stateless migration routes. All of this contributes to years of delays in decision-making for stateless people. ● Poor access to legal advice: Stateless people face huge barriers to accessing legal advice. In England and Wales, statelessness is not in scope for legal aid. However, even across jurisdictions where it is in scope, as it is in Scotland, there exists a UK  wide crisis in legal aid provision, including poor rates of remuneration, complex bureaucracy and large advice deserts. ● Detention: Because they exist in legal limbo and are often unidentified, stateless people are at disproportionate risk of long and arbitrary detention, which compounds the limbo and uncertainty central to their lives. Immigration detention in the UK has no time limit, and relatively few procedural safeguards, and statelessness is often not considered in detention decisions, despite the obvious impact which having no nationality has on the likelihood of a stateless person being admitted to another country. ● Limited access to family reunification: Changes made to the Immigration Rules in January 2024 have made it significantly more onerous for stateless people to be joined by their family members. ● Barriers to Citizenship: Some children born in the UK to non-British parents are left at risk of statelessness because Home Office decision-makers have wide discretion to deny them citizenship.3 Further, citizenship fees are too expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, but there is no fee waiver for adults. The 1961 Convention does not permit any fees to be charged for children’s citizenship applications, yet although fee waivers are available for children in principle, the process for obtaining a fee waiver for children is excessively onerous. This both places people at risk of statelessness, and prevents those recognised as stateless from finally accessing citizenship.     

Jesuit Refugee Service UK, Asylum Aid, the University of Liverpool Law Clinic, the European Network on Statelessness, and JustRight Scotland : 2025. 11p.

By Heather MacLeod, et al., GAO

The U.S. economy depends on the quick and efficient flow of millions of tons of cargo each day throughout the global supply chain. However, U.S.- bound vessels and maritime cargo shipments are vulnerable to criminal activity or terrorist attacks that could disrupt operations and limit global economic growth and productivity. The James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 includes a provision for GAO to assess federal efforts to secure U.S.-bound vessels and maritime cargo from national security-related risks. This report addresses (1) how DHS secures these vessels and cargo from supply chain risks, (2) the extent that DHS used selected leading collaboration practices, and (3) the extent that DHS assessed its approach. GAO reviewed agency policies, procedures, and collaboration efforts and government-wide strategy documents, and assessed DHS collaboration efforts against five relevant leading practices identified in prior GAO work. GAO also interviewed Coast Guard and CBP officials from 16 field locations at a non-generalizable sample of eight U.S. seaports selected for varying volumes of cargo and diversity of geographic regions. What GAO Recommends GAO recommends that the Coast Guard, with sector partners, develop objective, measurable, and quantifiable performance goals and measures and use this performance information to assess progress towards the goals and effectiveness of the layered approach to securing vessels and maritime cargo on an ongoing basis. DHS concurred with our recommendations.

Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office, 2025. 56p.

By Guillaume Nicaise, Kaunain Rahman

Our research highlights that integrating anti-corruption measures within sustainability reporting frameworks can enhance corporate transparency and contribute to reducing corruption risks. However, inconsistent global sustainability standards and enforcement challenges limit the effectiveness of these measures. We present evidence and practice from the development cooperation sector to support practitioners in navigating governance and accountability frameworks in the private sector. Main points ▪ Integrating anti-corruption measures within sustainability reporting frameworks can enhance corporate transparency and improve governance. ▪ Sector-wide collective action initiatives can be effective in raising integrity standards and facilitating knowledge sharing among organisations. ▪ However, inconsistent global sustainability standards, superficial requirements, and enforcement difficulties can undermine the effectiveness of sustainability reporting. ▪ Detailed and transparent sustainability reporting by organisations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Swedish Development Cooperation (Sida), and the African Development Bank Group (AFDB) demonstrate the value of comprehensive anti-corruption measures in fostering accountability. ▪ These examples can help development professionals, aid donors, and policymakers who aim to improve governance frameworks and promote accountability in their practices.

Bergen, Norway: U4 is part of the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), 2025. 37p.

By Pablo Madriaza, Ghayda Hassan, Sébastien Brouillette-Alarie, Aoudou Njingouo Mounchingam, Loïc Durocher-Corfa, Eugene Borokhovski, David Pickup, Sabrina Paillé

Exposure to hate in online and traditional media: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of this exposure on individuals and communities

Pablo Madriaza, Ghayda Hassan, Sébastien Brouillette-Alarie, Aoudou Njingouo Mounchingam, Loïc Durocher-Corfa, Eugene Borokhovski, David Pickup, Sabrina Paillé

The problem: People use social media platforms to chat, search, and share information, express their opinions, and connect with others. But these platforms also facilitate the posting of divisive, harmful, and hateful messages, targeting groups and individuals, based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. Hate content is not only a problem on the Internet, but also on traditional media, especially in places where the Internet is not widely available or in rural areas. Despite growing awareness of the harms that exposure to hate can cause, especially to victims, there is no clear consensus in the literature on what specific impacts this exposure, as bystanders, produces on individuals, groups, and the population at large. Most of the existing research has focused on analyzing the content and the extent of the problem. More research in this area is needed to develop better intervention programs that are adapted to the current reality of hate.

Objective: The objective of this review is to synthesize the empirical evidence on how media exposure to hate affects or is associated with various outcomes for individuals and groups.

Search methods: Searches covered the period up to December 2021 to assess the impact of exposure to hate. The searches were performed using search terms across 20 databases, 51 related websites, the Google search engine, as well as other systematic reviews and related papers.

Selection criteria: This review included any correlational, experimental, and quasi-experimental study that establishes an impact relationship and/or association between exposure to hate in online and traditional media and the resulting consequences on individuals or groups.

Data collection and analysis: Fifty-five studies analyzing 101 effect sizes, classified into 43 different outcomes, were identified after the screening process. Initially, effect sizes were calculated based on the type of design and the statistics used in the studies, and then transformed into standardized mean differences. Each outcome was classified following an exhaustive review of the operational constructs present in the studies. These outcomes were grouped into five major dimensions: attitudinal changes, intergroup dynamics, interpersonal behaviors, political beliefs, and psychological effects. When two or more outcomes from the studies addressed the same construct, they were synthesized together. A separate meta-analysis was conducted for each identified outcome from different samples. Additionally, experimental and quasi-experimental studies were synthesized separately from correlational studies. Twenty-four meta-analyses were performed using a random effects model, and meta-regressions and moderator analyses were conducted to explore factors influencing effect size estimates.

Results: The 55 studies included in this systematic review were published between 1996 and 2021, with most of them published since 2015. They include 25 correlational studies, and 22 randomized and 8 non-randomized experimental studies. Most of these studies provide data extracted from individuals (e.g., self-report); however, this review includes 6 studies that are based on quantitative analysis of comments or posts, or their relationship to specific geographic areas. Correlational studies encompass sample sizes ranging from 101 to 6829 participants, while experimental and quasi-experimental studies involve participant numbers between 69 and 1112. In most cases, the exposure to hate content occurred online or within social media contexts (37 studies), while only 8 studies reported such exposure in traditional media platforms. In the remaining studies, the exposure to hate content was delivered through political propaganda, primarily associated with extreme right-wing groups. No studies were removed from the systematic review due to quality assessment. In the experimental studies, participants demonstrated high adherence to the experimental conditions and thus contributed significantly to most of the results. The correlational and quasi-experimental studies used consistent, valid, and reliable instruments to measure exposure and outcomes derived from well-defined variables. As with the experimental studies, the results from the correlation and quasi-experimental studies were complete. Meta-analyses related to four dimensions were performed: Attitudinal changes, Intergroup dynamics, Interpersonal behaviors, and Psychological effects. We were unable to conduct a meta-analysis for the "Political Beliefs" dimension due to an insufficient number of studies. In terms of attitude changes, exposure to hate leads to negative attitudes (d Ex = 0.414; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.005, 0.824; p < 0.05; n = 8 and d corr = 0.322; 95% CI = 0.14, 0.504; p < 0.01; n = 2) and negative stereotypes (d Ex = 0.28; 95% CI = -0.018, 0.586; p < 0.10; n = 9) about individuals or groups with protected characteristics, while also hindering the promotion of positive attitudes toward them (d exp = -0.227; 95% CI = -0.466, 0.011; p < 0.10; n = 3). However, it does not increase support for hate content or political violence. Concerning intergroup dynamics, exposure to hate reduces intergroup trust (d exp = -0.308; 95% CI = -0.559, -0.058; p < 0.05; n = 2), especially between targeted groups and the general population, but has no significant impact on the perception of discrimination among minorities. In the context of Interpersonal behaviors, the meta-analyses confirm a strong association between exposure to hate and victimization (d corr = 0.721; 95% CI = 0.472, 0.97; p < 0.01; n = 3) and moderate effects on online hate speech perpetration (d corr = 0.36; 95% CI = -0.028, 0.754; p < 0.10; n = 2) and offline violent behavior (d corr = 0.47; 95%CI = 0.328, 0.612; p < 0.01; n = 2). Exposure to online hate also fuels more hate in online comments (d = 0.51; 95% CI = 0.034-0.984; p < 0.05; n = 2) but does not seem to affect hate crimes directly. However, there is no evidence that exposure to hate fosters resistance behaviors among individuals who are frequently subjected to it (e.g. the intention to counter-argue factually). In terms of psychological consequences, this review demonstrates that exposure to hate content negatively affects individuals' psychological well-being. Experimental studies indicate a large and significant effect size concerning the development of depressive symptoms due to exposure (d exp = 1.105; 95% CI = 0.797, 1.423; p < 0.01; n = 2). Additionally, a small effect size is observed concerning the link between exposure and reduced life satisfaction(d corr = -0.186; 95% CI = -0.279, -0.093; p < 0.01; n = 3), as well as increased social fear regarding the likelihood of a terrorist attack (d corr = -0.206; 95% CI = 0.147, 0.264; p < 0.01 n = 5). Conversely, exposure to hate speech does not seem to generate or be linked to the development of negative emotions related to its content.

Author's conclusions: This systematic review confirms that exposure to hate in online and in traditional media has a significant negative impact on individuals and groups. It emphasizes the importance of taking these findings into account for policymaking, prevention, and intervention strategies. Hate speech spreads through biased commentary and perceptions, normalizing prejudice and causing harm. This not only leads to violence, victimization, and perpetration of hate speech but also contributes to a broader climate of hostility. Conversely, this research suggests that people exposed to this type of content do not show increased shock or revulsion toward it. This may explain why it is easily disseminated and often perceived as harmless, leading some to oppose its regulation. Focusing efforts solely on content control may then have a limited impact in driving substantial change. More research is needed to explore these variables, as well as the relationship between hate speech and political beliefs and the connection to violent extremism. Indeed, we know very little about how exposure to hate influences political and extremist views.

Campbell Syst Rev, 2025 Jan 16;21(1):e70018, doi: 10.1002/cl2.70018. eCollection 2025, 47.

By Angela E. Addae, Monica Cox

In 2022, Oregon legislators enacted Senate Bill 1510 (SB 1510). SB 1510 appropriated $10,000,000 to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) to create the Justice Reinvestment Equity Program (JREP). JREP is encompassed under the state’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), which includes the Justice Reinvestment Program (JRP) established in 2013. The Oregon Legislature enacted JREP to “promote racial equity, reduce racial disparities, reduce recidivism and decrease a county’s utilization of imprisonment in a Department of Corrections institution, all while protecting public safety and holding offenders accountable.” JREP is administered by the Northwest Health Foundation Fund II (NWHF) and provides grant awards to culturally specific organizations and culturally responsive services, as defined in SB 1510. The Legislative Assembly directed the CJC to “evaluate the implementation of the Justice Reinvestment Equity Program and monitor the progress of subgrants provided by the Northwest Health Foundation Fund II under section 15 of this 2022 Act.” No later than September 30, 2024, the CJC must submit “a report detailing the progress of the evaluation . . . and include recommendations for additional evaluation needs.” The CJC convened an evaluation advisory group and contracted with two external researchers to facilitate the evaluation. Based on analyses of JREP administrative materials, surveys, secondary data, focus groups, interviews, and engagement with over 150 members of the JREP community, the evaluation advisory group proffers the following recommendations: 1. Support the adoption of community engagement practices that prioritize high levels of involvement, collaboration, and empowerment for all phases of JREP. 2. Provide robust support for equity-centric grantmaking, ensuring that grant administrators have the access, resources, flexibility, and time to effectively meet the diverse needs of grant recipients. 3. Implement leadership development and capacity-building initiatives that support emerging leaders and staff, particularly those with lived experience, to promote resiliency and sustainability among culturally specific organizations and culturally responsive programs. 4. Facilitate the creation and expansion of formal partnerships and collaborative frameworks between culturally specific organizations, culturally responsive programs, and state public safety institutions to promote shared goals and mutual accountability. 5. Develop and implement evaluative criteria that incorporate culturally grounded definitions of success, ensuring that the unique contributions of culturally specific organizations and culturally responsive programs are recognized and supported in legislative outcomes.

Salem: Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, 2024. 48p.

By Éloi Laurent

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This innovative book promotes a holistic, pragmatic and proactive approach to just transitions. Arguing that justice is both a goal and condition of transitions it rearticulates environmental and social challenges and rethinks the policies designed to overcome them

Cheltenham, UK · Northampton, MA: E. Elgar Press, 2024. 136p.

By Liam Duffy

Salman Rushdie finally sensed that normality was returning to his life, some 33 years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s four paragraph fatwa called for his murder. “Nowadays my life is very normal again,” he told German magazine Stern in an interview over the summer of 2022. Just two weeks later, he was knifed multiple times on stage in Chautauqua, New York. Having evaded the fatwa’s enforcers for so long, one had finally penetrated the layer of secrecy and security which had followed Rushdie for his own protection all those years. Rushdie survived, but has lost sight in one eye and the use of one of his hands. The story which led to this point is by now well known. On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, called for the British-Indian author’s death in a fatwa, offering financial and spiritual reward to any Muslim willing to carry out the murder. The assassination order also extended to anyone connected to the publication and promotion of Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. There are various elements to the novel that were perceived to be insulting to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. These will not be detailed at length here, save to say that the novel’s title refers to verses in the Quran which were relayed to Muhammad as the word of God, but later revealed to be a deceptive ploy by the devil. In English, these verses were sometimes referred to as the Satanic verses. The novel itself recounts and reimagines episodes in the life of Muhammad. Although the novel’s publication was met with protest in various parts of the world (including the United Kingdom), it was Khomeini’s fatwa that ignited the affair into a global controversy. It transformed not only Rushdie’s life but the relationship between the West and the Muslim world, as well as between Western states and their growing Muslim populations. As Kenan Malik put it in From Fatwa to Jihad: “With his four-paragraph pronouncement, the ayatollah had transcended the traditional frontiers of Islam and brought the whole world under his jurisdiction. At the same time, he helped relocate the confrontation between Islam and the West, which until then had been played out largely in the Middle East and south Asia, into the heart of western Europe. For the West, Islam was now a domestic issue.” This is not to mention the impact on the individuals concerned. There were attempts on the lives of publishers, promoters, and translators in Japan, Italy, Turkey, and Norway. The first assassin to successfully complete his task murdered Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, in a frenzied attack outside of his office at Tsukuba University in 1991. Like so many of these incidents, the perpetrator was able to slip away and never face justice. The most tragic episode of the affair would unfold in Anatolia, Turkey, where a riled-up crowd would set the Madimak Hotel ablaze, targeting a secularist activist who had translated excerpts of The Satanic Verses in a newspaper. Their target, Aziz Nesin, would escape the inferno but 37 people would not. Owing to the fatwa, Rushdie spent much of his life in hiding, always on the move, with his public appearances tightly controlled. But just as the fatwa was fading from memory, it remained every bit as valid—and lethal—as the day it was pronounced. As The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood explains, “fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously,” and so the bounty still “hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors.” The fatwa also helped set the precedent for later blasphemy affairs and controversies. To Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, there was little doubt that later blasphemy affairs were connected. During the fallout from the 2005 Jyllands-Posten cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, he complained that “if any Muslim had carried out the fatwa of Imam Khomeini against the apostate Salman Rushdie, those despicable people would not have dared to insult the Prophet Muhammad.” The logic of the fatwa, and of the violence was not only punishment, but deterrence. The fatwa would also cross the sectarian divide in Islam. Part of its logic was for the Shia regime in Tehran to assert itself over their Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia for de facto leadership of global Islam. This did not stop the Shia regime’s power play from energizing Sunni Islamist movements the world over, including the indirect empowerment of legal, non-violent Islamist groups in the West. As Western governments scrambled for interlocutors with the suddenly vocal “Muslim community,” offshoots of organizations like the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami were happy to fill that hole. As will be returned to later in the discussion, on blasphemy too, one sees the ideological distance between jihadists and other Islamist movements reduce. After the initial round of violence connected to The Satanic Verses, much of which bears the fingerprints of the regime in Tehran and its proxies, the Sunni jihadists of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) would later lead the bloodshed against blasphemers. Islamists of all stripes and from across the spectrum of non-violence to violent jihadists would, at various times, jostle to take the initiative on blasphemy disputes and position themselves as the true defenders of Islam. On some occasions and for political expediency, they would take the backseat in blasphemy affairs, waiting for the right moment to capitalize. This demonstrates that for all their professed zeal and the alleged offence taken, strategic thinking can in some cases take precedence, even when it comes to insulting Islam. Allegations of insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad have often carried dire and bloody consequences globally. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons affair, for instance, sparked rioting and unrest around the world in which hundreds died. Other events have reverberated similarly, such as the demonstrations, violence, and internet blackouts which greeted the uploading of a trailer for the film The Innocence of Muslims to YouTube. This report will focus on the bloody consequences of those allegations and accusations against individuals and institutions in the West, detailing both the plots and the successful attacks directed against those perceived to have insulted Islam and the Prophet. Also included are those plots where blasphemy has been cited as the motivation, but their target is not the alleged transgressor.

New York: The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) , 2023. 46p.

By Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE)

Post-war far-right movements have primarily been concerned with domestic issues, preferring to focus on national sovereignty over foreign entanglements, and interested predominantly in their particular domestic landscape. This is in contrast to traditional left-wing movements, particularly socialists and communists, which historically organized across borders.

But things have fundamentally changed in recent years, as an extensive far-right international network has developed over the past two decades. Nowadays, campaigns undertaken in one country by far-right groups and influencers leap quickly across borders and are adopted wholesale by others on the far right.

Key to this policy and campaign coordination are transnational far-right conferences, where movement leaders and supporters from multiple countries share their ideas. Through these interactions, relationships among far-right actors have deepened, creating a truly transnational movement that shares ideological positions, policy preferences, targets, tactics, and strategies. The support this transnational network provides has contributed to the global spread of far-right extremist ideologies.

Far-right activists are forthright about their global ambitions, which often target marginalized communities, restrict human rights, and push for more illiberal democratic systems.

To gain further insight into the far right, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) compiled a dataset of speakers and organizations involved in far-right conferences held between 2000 and 2024. The dataset includes 3,000 individuals representing 1,800 organizations, and 302 conferences that occurred in 35 countries during this 24-year time period.

In the 302 events analyzed, there were speakers from nearly every country in North America, South America, and Europe, as well as a significant number of participants from parts of Africa and Asia. Though the dataset is large, it still likely underrepresents the true number of events and participants during that period, since GPAHE only looked at speakers, not all attendees.

GPAHE’s data reveals a startling — and strengthening — network of events and speakers that has helped spread a global pandemic of far-right extremism.

Many of those conferences have continued over years, if not decades, expanding their audiences and demonstrating that far-right ideologies increasingly transcend national borders.

Birmingham, AL: Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) 2024.