Taliban prohibition on women attending university

By CEID Blogger, on 9 January 2023

By Shuhra Koofi

Student, MA Education and International Development

On 20^th December 2022, the Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan released a statement prohibiting women from attending university. The statement read: “You all are informed to implement the mentioned order of suspending education of females until further notice.” This resembles statements issued from 1996-2001, when the Taliban were first in power and issued wide bans on education for girls. At that time, my mother was a medical student in Kabul University. After missing out one year of her studies, she decided to get married and resumed her education only when the Taliban’s regime was overthrown in 2001. She is now a law and political science graduate of Kabul University. The return of this form of prohibition on girls’ education means depriving a generation from progress. It took my mother 20 years to catch up following the period when she was banned from university. The country now faces the same kind of scenario where girls and women, for more than one year are not allowed to continue their education beyond a secondary school level. This will not only impact individuals like my mother, but rather it will impact everyone.

Since 15^th August 2021, when the Taliban re-took power, Afghanistan has entered an era of darkness for the women of the country. The Taliban de facto authorities in 2021 banned girls from attending schools above 6^th grade. Nearly 850,000 out of 1.1 million girls of secondary school age have not attended schools since the decree was issued. The 2022 ban on women’s participation in universities further restricts education equality.

These prohibitions have created tensions inside and outside the country. No pretext was provided justifying the decree before it came into action. A sudden move was announced, followed by prompt implementation of the order by Taliban’s officials. The decree came into effect on the last day of university exams, and female students, who were sitting exams, were summarily asked to step out of classrooms. Some male students opposed the ban on female colleagues and declined to proceed with their own exams. In addition, more than 100 university professors resigned in protest.

The Taliban’s decision to exclude women from many forms of education, work and public life has faced resistance from women inside Afghanistan and from the Afghan women politicians, feminists, and activists living in exile. This resistance gained momentum as the United Nations (UN) issued a statement condemning the Taliban decision and asking for its immediate revocation.  The UN statement read “suspending women from education is in clear violation of Afghanistan’s obligations under international law”.

Many Afghan women find the decision to deny girls from basic rights baseless, as they believe that the Taliban’s toxic ideology is not founded on Islamic principles or Afghanistan’s historic ethos. Rather, it promotes components of patriarchal custom practiced in some areas of Afghanistan, along with the Taliban’s one-sided interpretations of Islam, taught in certain religious schools. In particular, the decision of the Taliban to deprive girls from education has no legitimate religious justification as the first word in the holy Quran is “Eqra”, which commands Muslims to read. While there are various interpretations of the Quran’s verses, no one can agree that the word “Eqra” may carry a different meaning other than “read”, which is the first command given to Muslims. However, the Taliban are denying this fact and inaccurately interpreting Sharia for their own gains. “I study Sharia Islamic law and argue the Taliban’s order contradicts the rights that Islam and Allah have given us”, says a Kabul university student forced to stay home and disrupt her studies, in an interview with the BBC. She adds; “They have to go to other Islamic countries and see that their actions are not Islamic.”

The Taliban justify their decision by claiming the need to change school and university curricula. Nevertheless, there are fears that changes in the education system in Afghanistan through the new curricula will raise a new generation, who strongly support the Taliban’s extreme ideology, believe that a woman’s place in society is at home, promote suicide attacks and the use of violence to attain political aims, perceive backing other terror groups in the region and beyond as a religious duty, and support, as a common practice, the killing of those who oppose them.

The Taliban’s actions since coming to power contradict promises made during the Doha peace talks, on February 29, 2020. A member of the Taliban’s negotiations team at those talks, Shahabuddin Delawar, stated “Education is the right of women, starting from 1^st grade of school up to PhD”.  What the Taliban pledged during peace negotiations is fundamentally different to what the group has been doing since seizing power. Taliban officials during the peace talks committed to protect Afghan women’s rights, yet, they have issued decrees of prohibition on women, such as; prohibition on traveling alone, attending school and university, visiting parks, obtaining employment, and having access to their means of sustaining their livelihoods and living as human beings. Taliban rulers, have established the world’s first gender-apartheid system through a most restrictive government, removing women from public life and forcing thousands into exile.

To address what women in Afghan universities are going through, a number of actions can be taken by UK academics and universities. These include: giving Afghan feminist leaders in exile a platform to talk about the deteriorating situation of women in Afghanistan, offering scholarships for Afghan women students to study in the UK, and providing online courses for them to continue their education inside Afghanistan. Seminars and conferences on Afghanistan are needed to place pressure on the UK government to impose conditions on their humanitarian aid to the government of the Taliban as a means of political pressure on the Taliban. Above all, a commitment in academic discourse must be made not to normalise the events in Afghanistan, or dismiss them as a local cultural phenomenon: on the contrary, we must ensure that the voices of women and girls protesting this regime are kept centre-stage, for theirs are the voices that matter most in this story.

Delhi’s Education Revolution: Teachers, agency and inclusion

By CEID Blogger, on 4 October 2022

As part of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda, governments worldwide have committed to delivering inclusive and equitable high-quality education for all children. India has been no exception. India’s Right to Education Act (RTE) has ensured a quantitative expansion so that all eligible schoolgoing students are brought within the formal education system at the elementary/primary education level . However, government schools continue to suffer from high dropout and low retention rates, leading to questions surrounding the implementation of the SDG agenda. Most research into Indian government schools has also concluded that government education provision is of poor quality. These problems are compounded by an exodus of the middle and lower-middle classes from government schools into private provision. Anecdotal evidence shows that even teachers teaching at government schools often choose a private alternative for their children.

Together with Dr Kusha Anand, CEID’s Marie Lall has just published a book on education policy and practice in Delhi government schools that critically examines these dynamics. The open access volume focuses on the past 6 years, during which Delhi schools have experienced major reforms led by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government, which was elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2020 on the basis of improved public service provision. Anand and Lall’s book, Delhi’s Education Revolution, explores in depth the connections between the AAP’s policy and practice in this area.  The book is available for download free here.

Delhi’s Education Revolution is a rather unique book in that it is based on the voices of 110 Delhi teachers who reflected on their classroom practice and critically discussed how far the changes have indeed improved education for all children, no matter what background they are from. The book aims to show that listening to stakeholder voices is key for the continued success of reform processes. It argues that the AAP reforms have largely delivered higher quality and more appropriate education for a wide section of society. However there have been costs to teachers’ lives and practice, and the children from the poorest sections of society receive a reduced level of education through the practice of setting, in order to improve a school’s and a city’s overall achievement score. The book critically evaluates the AAP government’s education policy through the eyes of those most affected by the changes – the teachers.

Analysis: The history of secret education for girls in Afghanistan and its use as a political symbol

By CEID Blogger, on 31 August 2022

Writing in The Conversation, Professor Elaine Unterhalter (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society) explores the history and past shortcomings of efforts to educate girls in Afghanistan, ranging from development efforts in the 1960s to secret schools under the Taliban.

In August 2021 the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, and since then secondary education for girls in the country has been banned. However, there have been reports of clandestine girls’ schools operating despite the ban. Teenage girls are reportedly taking extraordinary risks to attend lessons. Their teachers bravely share knowledge, even if they do not have extensive experience or the backup of an education system.

Education for girls was also banned during the previous era of Taliban rule in Afghanistan (1996-2001). In this period, too, girls attended secret schools.

Not much was known about these schools during Taliban rule. A 1997 report noted that the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan supported 125 girls’ schools and 87 co-education primary schools and home schools. An article in the Guardian in July 2001 stated that aid agencies had estimated 45,000 children were attending secret schools.

After the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, the educational work of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which they carried out during Taliban rule, was much documented.

Before 9/11, there was very limited international knowledge of these secret schools for girls. But after 9/11, the misogynistic actions of the Taliban regarding women’s rights and girls’ education became a pillar of the argument for the US War against Terror.

When visiting Afghanistan in December 2001, UNICEF executive director Carole Bellamy referenced secret schools as part of a call for aid funding. The existence of these schools exerted considerable symbolic power.

Since the 1960s, the education of girls has been promoted in international development and aid policy as a way to limit population, address economic growth, or attend to political stabilisation. Girls and their education have been portrayed as a development intervention and a “good buy” for project funding. The argument runs that when women are educated and in work, they contribute to reducing poverty, enhancing the health of their children, and promoting social and cultural cohesion.

But these policies can fail to address or inquire into the needs, rights or capabilities of girls themselves, or the wider conditions of gender and intersecting inequalities. They are often promoted without any sustained engagement with wider policy goals for gender equality or women’s rights.

A commitment to women’s education can be hampered by nsufficient long-term funding for broader gender equality initiatives, as well as and inadequate representation of gender equality concerns in peace-making discussions. They mean that even when girls return to school in large numbers, practices inside and outside education can still reflect the social divisions and gender inequalities that preceded the conflict.

In November 2001, Laura Bush, the wife of US president George W Bush, made a high profile radio address condemning the “severe repression and brutality against women in Afghanistan”. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” she said. War was justified because of the Taliban’s ban on girls’ access to school. A narrative emerged of the need to “save” Muslim women.

One consequence of this was the risk that conservative groups in Afghanistan could link the education of women and other women’s rights measures to American aggression and colonial or geo-political ambitions – meaning that a future anti-American movement could also look to restrict these rights.

Nevertheless, in the post-Taliban era (2002-2021), a huge expansion of education took place in Afghanistan, with many important initiatives in girls’ education and women’s rights. Profound social divisions remained, though, and many girls still lacked schooling.

The Taliban seizure of power in August 2021 halted the growth of secondary and tertiary education for young women that had taken place over two decades. Promises made by the Taliban about reopening schools in 2022 were retracted.

In contrast to the limited reports on clandestine girls’ schools in the 1990s, many accounts are now circulating of secret schools. The more extensive reporting may come from better opportunities to share information using new technologies, or from the initiatives of educated girls and women.

But, to date, there has been no systematic analysis of these reports. There are reported divisions among the Taliban leadership on how, or under what conditions, girls should be in secondary school and university.

The fragmentary reports mean it is difficult to know who can and cannot attend clandestine schools, what the girls in these schools can and cannot do, and who is financing them.

In the 2000s, education for women became part of the narrative behind the War on Terror. Today, the positioning of girls’ schooling, gender and women’s rights in the process of peacebuilding remains a work in progress.

Key international organisations which oversee the allocation of funding and consult widely on strategic direction regarding education and gender equality are developing more wide-ranging policy on gender equality and women’s rights. An example of this is the UN’s Education Cannot Wait. According to its website, Education Cannot Wait is active in Afghanistan.

But one kind of initiative is seldom enough. Many coordinated processes are needed. These processes of global cooperation and policy direction are cumbersome and far away from the pressing needs and wishes of girls locked out of school in Afghanistan, but they are a necessary step.

The debate continues as to whether girls’ education alone is an approach which will allow other transformations to follow – or whether is just a limited intervention, which can be undertaken without engaging the politics of peacebuilding that would secure a stronger foundation for women’s rights.

This article was originally published in The Conversation on 23 August, 2022.

UCL Students Produce a Database of Resources on How to Support Ukraine

By CEID Blogger, on 11 August 2022

By Nicholas Chiu 

BSc Politics and International Relations

The dramatic Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has led to a plethora of humanitarian appeals and databases to catalogue these appeals, leading, paradoxically, to anxiety among ordinary people on how to navigate this information to help Ukraine. Perhaps you are a Ukrainian citizen, or have friends or family living there. Or you may be a concerned citizen whose horizons extend beyond Britain’s borders. You might be unsure of how to help Ukrainians in their time of need. If you were to probe Google for answers, you might discover websites such as WRAL’s list of charitable organizations to support, Charity Watch’s Top-Rated Charities Providing Aid In Ukraine or CNBC’s list of the top-rated charities to help the Ukraine relief effort. Whilst useful and concise in themselves, such lists only provide cursory summaries, lacking breadth and detail. To bridge the information gap and present the information in a more directly accessible way, a team of UCL undergraduate students, myself included, have created an online database that provides critical evidence on charities aiding Ukraine (such as Charity Navigator ratings, methods of donating and past controversies), media sources and journalists covering the war (such as sources of revenue and ownership) and circulating myths.

My own involvement with this database began on the fateful morning of the 24^th of February, when I saw the news that Russian troops had crossed the border into Ukraine. Like many of my peers, I was under the myopic assumption that Europe could not, once again, see a conflict involving a major power break out within its borders, at least not within the decade. To us students of international relations, Putin’s flexing of military muscle in 2021 had been no more than posturing for diplomatic concessions. We were gravely mistaken. We woke to the realisation that one man had seized the imperium by thwarting his country’s nascent democratic endeavours and appointing himself dictator perpetuo: dictator for life. His Soviet-red-tinted glasses only filtered through visions of a Ukraine that had once existed under Communist hegemony as a glorious breadbasket of the Soviet Union under Russian control, but it failed to admit the grey and dismal spectres of Ukrainians starving in the man-made Great Famine of 1932-1933 and other divisive narratives that had entrenched Ukraine’s desire for freedom and independence. Putin knew no world order than the one he grew up in, and saw no alternative than to throw a generation of young Russian and Ukrainian soldiers into the meat grinder, as well as anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire, in an effort to erase Ukrainian statehood.

After days of constantly refreshing news apps and attending solidarity protests on Downing Street, three groups of people would not leave my mind: the Ukrainian soldiers fighting against the Russian army, the Ukrainian civilians caught in a warzone, and the Ukrainian refugees spilling out across the country’s borders. I was plagued by the lingering, reverberating thought that I was not doing enough as an individual to contest this injustice. Therefore, I took the opportunity to materialise my sentiments into action. I joined Students for Ukraine, a project run by Professor Brad Blitz, the Head of the Department of Education, Practice and Society, where I led a team of 7 Politics and International Relations and Philosophy, Politics and Economics students to research pathways for assistance (Emilijia, Maria, Jia Yue, Wynsey, Ingrid and Laurynas).

Together, we created a database congregating data and information on charities, media sources, individual journalists and war myths, conveniently assembled into one Google Sheet. We evaluated the transparency and trustworthiness of 32 charities (as well as 46 media sources and journalists), utilising data from Charity Navigator, a prominent charity assessor, in addition to analysing the charities’ own annual financial statements. The database includes references and all information was cross-checked. Collating the results of our research, we created a leaflet to be posted around campus that appealingly visualised key facts on our top 10 recommended charities supporting Ukraine.

The war is far from over. Ukraine needs our help now. Eventually, when the conflict subsides, Ukraine will yet need our support to rebuild and rehabilitate. It is never too late to donate, and if you are unsure or uncertain where your contribution goes, our database and leaflet are here to assist you.

Life in Limbo: Brad Blitz unpicks the legal and political logic for deporting asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda

By CEID Blogger, on 13 June 2022

In June, 2022, High Court Justice Jonathan Swift ruled that the British Home Office’s planned deportation of some 31 asylum-seekers to Rwanda could go ahead, against evidence offered by UNHCR and others that such removal could lead to serious violations of the asylum-seekers’ human rights. These deportations have allegedly been approved out of respect for assurances that the asylum-seekers will be offered protection and a right to remain in Rwanda. However, in his latest piece for the Byline Times, Brad Blitz argues that there is limited legal basis for such assurances, and, worse still, that there is no system in place for follow-up monitoring of the asylum-seekers to be deported by the Home Office. With the first removal flight scheduled for Tuesday, activists are pinning their hopes on the Court of Appeal overturning Swift’s decision. Yet, Blitz cautions against such optimism, since the appeal may only deal with the judge’s decision and not the critical evidence from UNHCR and other human rights authorities that was dismissed in the case. For a full break down of the case and its logical foundations, check out Blitz’s full article here.

How do we count the education impacts of the war in Ukraine?

By CEID Blogger, on 27 April 2022

By Rodie Garland

When a country is invaded, what are the effects on education – and how can we know? Given the scale of the assault on Ukraine, there is a sense in which it is impossible to assess these effects in their entirety – nationally, socially, and individually. If you’ve fled your home, leaving behind your family’s livelihood and, perhaps, family members; if you’ve been without shelter or water or food; if you’ve suffered trauma – then of course your education will suffer. But this impact is difficult to measure and may not be your foremost concern. The reliance on measurable data to support policy in education and international development is indeed recognised as controversial (see, for example, the work of Sotiria Grek). At the same time, missing elements in the existing data present obstacles to ensuring inclusive and equitable education: something the NORRAG Missing Data project aims to address. We also need to bear in mind that data, and how we use them, is not neutral. When we work with education data, we need to be asking what it is that we are and are not measuring, in what contexts, and with what purposes and consequences.

With all this in mind, there is much data currently being collected that is useful in giving us at least a partial picture of the education impacts of the war in Ukraine. A daily tally is kept of the numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and those leaving the country (respectively 7.7 million and 5.2 million as of 25 April), presenting a top-line indication of the level to which everyday life is disrupted. It is worth pointing out that for many Ukrainians, this did not begin on 24 February: conflict has been ongoing in the east since 2014, with an estimated 1.5 million people internally displaced before the recent invasion. Though none of these figures are perfect, as individuals slip through the cracks in war, they do disproportionately represent women and children: it was estimated, as of 1 April, that 999,500 school-aged children were internally displaced. By 18 April, Save the Children warned that two-thirds of all children in the country had been uprooted from their homes: clearly, an upheaval with enormous consequences, including for schooling.

Along with displacement come the concerns of basic survival that make any kind of learning difficult. Depending on what data are collected, when and by whom, education may or may not feature among these concerns. A survey of IDPs asks adults to report their current needs, selecting from a list of options; the needs reported as most pressing are financial and health-related, with others including clothes and shoes, transportation, information or means of communication (e.g., internet connectivity), food, accommodation and hygiene. Since much education is currently taking place online (see below), and since over half of displaced households contain children, we can speculate that the issues reported here indicate educational impacts.

Other data do seem to place more of an emphasis on children and their schooling, although reliable systems for monitoring and tracking children have also been severely disrupted. Throughout the country, children are experiencing separation from parents, the destruction of family units and the breakup of their communities. The Global Protection Cluster reports that the main issues faced by those living in shelters are a lack of rooms for family units and lack of gender separation, as well as overcrowding, lack of water and lack of electricity. It also identifies the main risks for this population which, alongside exposure to violence, shelling and mines, and family separation, include lack of access to education. Overall, 3.3 million children are estimated to need ‘education in emergency’ assistance.

This level of disruption is caused not only by displacement, but by the destruction of educational institutions themselves. Evidence from eye witnesses, key informants and satellite imagery allows for frequent updates on the total number of educational facilities damaged – 1,237 as of 21 April, with over 9% of educational institutions destroyed completely. There are also reports of at least three instances of schools being used for military purposes, and 14 where they have been used as shelters or for other humanitarian purposes. Using schools for military purposes turns them into military targets, endangering children’s lives, not to mention the damage to educational infrastructure.

While little of the data currently being collected mention gender differences, undoubtedly there are specific risks to girls, as illustrated by the awful news reports of the rape and murder of women and girls in Bucha. While women and girls will not be the only victims, the Global Protection Cluster reports that gender based violence (GBV) is a reality for those who are internally displaced. This comes amidst increased military presence, lack of access to safe shelter and basic goods, and a high risk of trafficking at borders, in a country where even before the war 67% of women reported experiencing some form of GBV after the age of 15. At the same time, there is a warning that the widespread proliferation of light weapons is likely to increase the risk of school-aged youngsters being drawn into armed groups, something that is perhaps most likely to affect boys.

And yet, while the war rages, schools open wherever they can, for face-to-face or online learning. One of the many ‘unprecedenteds’ of the COVID pandemic is a situation where a country like Ukraine now has a developed infrastructure for remote learning, while its children have experience of turning to technology for their education. The Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science (MON) reports that as of 21 April, nearly 90% of schools are operating in some form. Over 12,000 secondary schools have introduced remote learning, with over 3.7 million students taking part in some kind of schooling (out of a total of 14,000 schools with 4.2 million students, excluding Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk). In 14 of 25 regions, all educational institutions are operating, via remote learning; three regions are running remote, blended or face-to-face learning; and at least some schools are running remotely in remaining regions. Kindergartens operate in 15 regions, while most vocational, professional and higher education institutions are running where the local situation permits.

Many children who have left their homes are either taking part in remote learning, or accessing schools in the places where they now live. The MON puts the figure for the latter group at nearly 87,000 (21 April), a growing number. Levels of online learning will vary between regions, but to give some perspective (albeit anecdotally), a teacher contact in Kyiv reports that around 70-80% of students at her school are attending remote lessons. Schools were asked to report data on online attendance up to 14 April, which suggests that more concrete information on participation might soon become available. She also tells me that of those learning remotely, around 85% are in Ukraine, with 15% elsewhere. Indeed, Education Minister Serhiy Shkarlet claims that Ukrainian pupils abroad are prioritising online learning in their home schools, and want to complete the school year with their own teachers. Most Ukrainian students in the Netherlands, he says, are choosing remote learning, with special classes and even schools being set up for them. Ukraine has also asked members of the Standing International Conference of Inspectorates to disseminate information about Ukraine’s online platforms to enable children to access Ukrainian education wherever they are. At an event held recently by NORRAG’s partners the International Parliamentary Network for Education, Serhiy Shkarlet underlined the MON’s work to ensure that learning continues. Such education offers a pathway of resistance: a subject for a future blog post.

One unknown is what becomes of those children who have crossed into Russia. Russia claims that over 863,600 people, including more than 158,170 children, have crossed into its territory since 24 February. While the UN cannot verify these figures, it estimates that as of 17 April, over 522,000 people have travelled to the Russian Federation. There are reports that in some cases people have been subject to forcible deportation, and concerns that Russia is intending to implement the enforced adoption of some Ukrainian children. In any case, those crossing into Russia will include students at all levels of education, and as yet it is hard to guess at the consequences for their educational futures.

Even while schooling continues for the majority of children, we currently know little of how children and adults are experiencing this. International evidence from the pandemic points to inequalities, including gender inequalities, in who accesses online learning. And for children living through war, there are issues that technology alone cannot solve. The very nature of education will need to change: one teacher reports taking her students through breathing exercises to manage their anxiety, while mine risk education is now critical, according to the Education Cluster. Alongside this, it states, must come training for teachers on life skills education, and emotional and psychosocial support – and help for them in their role as care-givers as well as educators. Children attending their usual school between air raids, or adjusting to life in another country, whether in a new school or connecting with familiar faces online, will have vastly different experiences. Understanding all of these, with the help of monitoring and evaluation techniques like  AGEE framework, associated with CEID, will help address some of the issues of missing data, and is part of understanding the costs of war.

Rodie Garland is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education, Practice & Society (EPS) at  UCL IOE, where her research focuses on home-school relations. She holds a BA in Russian. The research for this blog was funded by EPS and linked to the work of the AGEE project.

Beyond Ukraine: The Full Scale of the Russian Invasion

By CEID Blogger, on 28 February 2022

By Alexandra Lewis

In 2009, I was working in Russia on a research project looking at Chechyna. I was threatened (in a roundabout way as these things are done) and shifted my research instead to Somalia and Yemen – two safer places – which I then spent almost a decade looking at as an education and conflict specialist. I have since travelled all over the world, to Afghanistan, Bosnia Herzegovina and beyond. Yet the feeling of something unfinished has never left me. Over the past three years I shifted my focus back to Russia, because the parallels between my ancestral home and the war-torn countries I was studying began screaming to me that they could no longer be ignored. In particular, I saw an extreme securitisation of identity politics emerging, with volatile potential. How countries wage war on domestic populations elsewhere has been informative to me when considering the current assault on Ukraine. However, what we are witnessing today is not Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen either.

It is easy now, when thinking about “War”, to lean on examples from recent history to try to understand what Ukraine must look like today. Running with this comparison, let me state that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is nothing like, for example, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. We are talking here about a highly trained military operation supported by an immensely sophisticated intelligence apparatus. Moreover, since we are now dealing with the potential absorption of Ukraine into Russian territory or into a Russian sphere of influence, we need to plan ahead of time to work within the Russian repressive architecture of foreign agents laws, censorship and totalitarianism, which brings with it significant dangers for aid recipients. This complicates the humanitarian response so aptly described by my colleague, Brad Blitz, below. To truly understand the needs created by this crisis, we therefore have to look at the bigger picture, which takes us beyond simply Ukraine’s borders to Belarus and Russia.

Last week, we were in all probability looking at the end of Ukraine as a country, and at the least at the end of Zelensky’s Government (which may soon be replaced by a Russian puppet state). Though now we see the resilience of the Ukrainian people to invasion and support incoming from the West, this is still a distinct possibility. We are also looking at the end of Belarusian sovereignty, which Russia has simply swallowed on its way to Ukraine. Finally, and not to be forgotten, we are also witnessing the death of any remaining freedom in Russia: under incoming sanctions and the threat of national security, Putin can completely cut Russians off from the wider world and return the country to full totalitarianism, which he is doing. In one move, Putin has this week effectively destroyed three countries.

This is not Afghanistan, these are not the Taliban

In 2021, prominent Kremlin aid, Vladimir Surkov, famously wrote in an essay that Russia has a social entropy problem. Using metaphors rooted in thermodynamics, Surkov explained that chaos always increases, and that social chaos and political instability follow the same principle. According to him, in order to ensure Russia’s future stability, the country’s social entropy must continuously be exported from the centre to the peripheries, and the easiest way to ensure this is through regular military expansion.

I have spent the last year writing a book on Pre-Conflict Imperialism in Russia: a book on the idea that Putin has deliberately been pushing the Russian people to adopt a new identity based around a continual readiness for war, that Putin leaches off the very idea of war to ensure the continuation of his regime. This trend has been active for a long time, and the invasion of Ukraine has been years in the making. From Putin’s testing of the waters in Crimea in 2014, to the Russian involvement in Syria as a military training exercise writ large, Russia has been continuously investing in the professionalisation and expansion of its armed forces, since their embarrassing performance in Georgia in 2008. At the same time, Russia has been destabilising Ukraine and testing Western reactions to this by feeding conflict and insurgency in the Donbas Basin. Commentators will now say “yes, but what about the supply issues that the Russian army is facing? What about the failure to commit sufficient resources to hold cities in Ukraine?” These to me can only be taken as evidence of incompetence on the part of the state if the aim is to occupy Ukraine. I do not believe that is the end game: to me, war itself and the chaos that it produces are the purpose of this invasion.

But why the long preamble to war?

The long preamble to the invasion, with the mobilisation of forces along the Russo-Ukrainian border for months on end in 2021 and 2022 was immensely costly. It led to speculations on all sides, the raising of opposition voices in Russia, not to mention the logistical and morale costs of housing military units far from home in a state of constant readiness. It could be argued that this was done to provoke Ukraine into firing at Russian personnel, so as to provide Russia with a legitimate justification for attack. That this did not happen is an incredible testimony to the sheer fortitude and strength of will of the Ukrainian people and their servicemen and women. In an awesome show of collective national commitment to peace, the likes of which I do not think we have ever seen before, Ukrainians did not fire a single shot across the border at Russia. It made no difference. That Putin chose to invade regardless implies that he had confidence enough that he could sell this war at home without a need for even this pretext for invasion.

This leads me to conclude that the need for a highly visible build up lay elsewhere. Over the past several years, and since the invasion of Crimea, Russia’s actions have led to a loud discussion of possible sanctions among Western powers in particular, and Putin has taken note. By triggering this discussion, Russia has been able to anticipate the sanctions regime that is now being discussed and prepare its economy and reserves for their imposition. The strength of the Russian economy and its ability to weather crisis has routinely been miscalculated: the standard phrase one hears jokingly applied in this field is that “Russia has the GDP of Texas”, a totally meaningless phrase and a meaningless comparison between a state and a country where costs of living are totally different, and where GDP does not reflect funding to the armed forces and active military personnel, whose loyalty is carefully financed. It is also meaningless in a context where the suffering of ordinary people under sanctions – and make no mistake here, it will be ordinary people and not the elites who suffer their impacts – simply does not factor into state decisions.

A long preamble to war allowed Russia to anticipate the international response to their takeover of Ukraine, plan for it, and, importantly, secure relative non-intervention from China.

Sanctions and propaganda

Many commentators are stating that Putin’s popularity will fall when sanctions hit the Russian people and body bags start being sent home from Ukraine. But body bags from distant wars have rarely led societies to turn on their Governments (we can count the cases). Given that Russia has banned non-state media, declared online rigorous and independent journalists to be foreign agents, and imprisoned, murdered or chased out its opposition parties, the full telecommunications apparatus of the state will now be turned towards converting body bags into fuel for budding hatreds between Russians and Ukrainians, and it will have a pretty clear and open field in which to do so. Let us keep in mind here that in the build-up to war, the belief was already spreading across Russia through state news channels that this confrontation has been orchestrated by NATO, not Putin. There are some incredibly brave Russians protesting in cities across the country, despite the arrests, despite the repressions: but the propaganda machine has largely been effective.

Sanctions and counter-sanctions will assist the Kremlin in maintaining its lie about the “special operation in Ukraine”: Putin can now close airports, sever business ties between Russians and the West, prevent travel, move the country from an internet to an intranet if he wants to and ban YouTube, arrest even more dissidents, and bring down the iron curtain, all the while blaming these moves on the cruel international community and its unfair decision to cut off Russia from the world. We are already seeing debates in Latvia, Estonia and Belgium about banning all Russians from travelling to these countries: these are places that have traditionally offered safe harbour to those fleeing Putin’s repressions, who now have fewer and fewer avenues through which to run. Added to this is the reality that Russia is not comprised of ethnic Russians alone – a conveniently unremembered truth in Europe. There are no “pure” Russian families there (indeed I would argue there is no such thing as purity anywhere), and yet there is a long history of targeting ethnic and religious groups for repression on the basis of identity. The borders must stay open, at the very least in the short term for mixed Russo-Ukrainian families to get out.

Three birds with one stone

Even as Russia uses this war to entrench Putin’s totalitarian dictatorship and seize large chunks of Ukraine, it is also finalising its soft annexation of Belarus, whose shell of remaining sovereignty is now crumbling to dust before our eyes. This brings all three territories under Russia’s legal and security frameworks, which means: those receiving assistance from the international community through financing and external support may very soon face accusations under the foreign agents law, which has already been used to shut down everyone from NGOs to newspapers in Russia. Russia’s military campaign has been implemented hand in hand with a large scale information crack down, with restrictions on internet freedom, Twitter and Facebook, alongside threats of closing down Telegram. Russia is working hard to control the narrative at home and will bend its will to doing the same in any Ukrainian territory it takes over, which will mean targeting in the first instances organisations with ties to Western funding.

We must continue to donate to and help these organisations, even as we do so with eyes open, knowing that this danger may be coming. But we must do so while preparing to help colleagues to get out of Ukraine if they need to. The British decision to suspend visas to Ukrainian nationals this week is utterly disgusting in this regard. I must repeat here: this is not Afghanistan, these are not the Taliban. The Russian Government will absolutely have the capacity in place to find and punish threatening institutions that it sees receiving funding from abroad. And yet despite this fact, we must continue to help Ukraine, and we must widen the net of support: we must help Ukrainian colleagues flee for their lives in the immediate moment and finance those humanitarian organisations choosing to stay behind, but we should also prepare to help colleagues do the same in Belarus and Russia tomorrow.

Quick thoughts on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and among its neighbours.

By CEID Blogger, on 27 February 2022

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugees_from_Ukraine_at_border_posts_in_the_west_of_the_country.jpg

By Brad Blitz

As Putin’s assault on Ukraine continues, hundreds of thousands of people will seek safety in Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary. Only Poland has some recent experience of receiving mass flows of refugees, which was not handled well.

The outpouring of support and sympathy from Ukraine’s neighbours is most welcome, but there are urgent matters to consider if European states and their partners are to manage this impending humanitarian crisis.

First, we have entered a zero-sum game for the future of a sovereign Ukraine, which is likely to lead to mass and long-term displacement. This then begs the question of refugee integration, which should be considered now.

The creation of reception centres especially in Poland is vital but no one should see this as anything but a temporary and emergency measure. Centres should be open, allowing movement in and out, but need to be secured too, not least because the inflows are largely from women and children.

Reception centres, camps, and collective housing are generally not good for refugees. Especially during a time of Covid. They can quickly become sites of conflict, infection, and insecurity. This raises both public health and security risks, which need to be managed from the outset.

Reception centres may also undermine people’s agency, something that the neighbouring states have sought to protect in their decision not to treat incoming Ukrainians as asylum-seekers. However, as time goes on, their agency will be challenged unless opportunities are created to empower refugees and to prevent the loss of skills and networks that occurs when people are displaced not only from their homes but from their livelihoods and careers.

The best possible option for incoming Ukrainians is to find ways to permit them to continue to live in family units, including in small-scale developments – we should do all possible to avoid the creation of large centres, however efficient it might seem for the receiving states. Despite the tremendous solidarity shown by Greeks, the Italian model of reception was much better for refugees during the Mediterranean crisis, than the reliance on UNHCR managed refugee centres as seen elsewhere.

The highly gendered flows into Poland, also raise other matters of concern, including for the safety and wellbeing of women and children, who have been separated from their husbands, fathers, and brothers. This is not simply a military or operational matter. The receiving states and humanitarian agencies will need to mobilise female staff, including health experts, social workers, psycho-social experts, and educators to name a few. Antenatal care should be prioritised – and pregnant women and mothers should not be placed in temporary reception centres, but moved to secure locations in neighbouring cities.

Families will need to log locations, mobile numbers, and contact information for those still in Ukraine. They should consider using secure servers, and encrypted email systems like ProtonMail and Telegram.

Copies of identity documents, school and university certificates, medical and personal information should be scanned and uploaded to secure sites. Those still in Ukraine as well as refugees should consider sending copies to themselves using secure systems like ProtonMail.

Children have specific needs, including the mitigation of trauma due to family separation, war, and discontinuation of their education. Social activities, such as we saw in Greece, are helpful but they do not replace schooling. Short-term interruptions of schooling may be acceptable but it is vital to minimise disruption to children and to facilitate their integration in the host state. We must remember that among the displaced will be Ukrainian teachers who are best suited to help refugee children and to design a transition from one system to another. Schooling also helps parents, by giving them time to grieve privately away from their children and to focus on their own needs.

Given that this is a war about an identity conflict, where Putin is seeking to erase the political identity of a sovereign state, educational provision in the host state should affirm Ukraine’s distinct identity and democratic traditions through the preservation of historical, cultural, and social activities as informed by refugees themselves and refugee teachers.

———————-

Brad Blitz is Professor of International Politics and Policy in the UCL Institute of Education. He has recently served as principal investigator on projects on refugee reception and the protection of communities conflict in the Mediterranean and Afghanistan. 

@ProfessorBlitz

Gde sobaka zaryta: A problem of translation

By CEID Blogger, on 7 February 2022

By Alexandra Lewis

When I was a child, growing up in France in a Russian-English family, I had to attend Russian language and music classes on Sundays. Every week, my homework included memorising a poem, usually one in some way evoking the natural beauty of the homeland and linking this implicitly to the indomitable Russian spirit. Every class would then start with me writing out this poem, and I would be graded on the accuracy of my memory, spelling and penmanship. Each time I effectively spilled a poem out onto a blank sheet of paper (usually having memorised it fifteen minutes before class), it would promptly be erased from my brain forever.

One day, when reading over a new poem that I would have to take home with me at the end of a lesson, I came across a word I did not know – ‘mosh’’. I furrowed my brow in confusion.

“What is it?” my teacher asked. She was in many ways a stereotype of the Russian education system – strict, serious, proud – but also, as is far rarer, very kind and quick to laughter when her students behaved themselves. She had a deep and sonorous voice, which she used to great effect as a folk singer, entertaining wealthy expats in Russian restaurants on Friday nights when she would wear bejewelled traditional clothing and extravagant headpieces that brought out her pale complexion, oval cheeks and bright crystal eyes. She could fill any room with her presence.

“What does ‘mosh’ ’ mean?” I asked her.

She looked around for a moment, considering.

Suddenly, she slammed the palms of her strong hands flat on the desk before her, threw her shoulders back, and with absolute certainty proclaimed in a powerful tenor:

“‘Mosh’ ’ – eto ya!” – “‘Mosh’ ’ – is me!”

Afterwards, she began searching for synonyms and further definitions. I laughed and said it was unnecessary. I had understood perfectly once and forever what the word meant.

A quick search in the dictionary today tells me that ‘mosh’ ’ is translated into English to mean ‘power’. Yet, to me, ‘mosh’ ’ will forever be associated with something grand, something dignified, and something distinctively untranslatable. It is, for instance, totally different in meaning to ‘vlast’ ’ – also meaning ‘power’, but referring rather to the power of authority, or ‘sila’ – meaning ‘strength’. ‘Mosh’ ’ is mighty.

Academic texts on Russian politics and society (including those I am currently working on myself) are full of references to such allegedly distinctive Russian concepts. The most frequently cited example is ‘toska’ (meaning sadness), which Nabokov famously described as an untranslatable word. “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska”, Nabokov believed: “At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. … At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom” (1990). Yet there is something inherently elitist and exclusionary about this assessment. The English concept of ‘sadness’, for instance, can easily incorporate the full spectrum of meanings embodied by Nabokov’s ‘toska’, for these meanings can be inferred from its context: “I feel as though I have for months been drowning in an all encompassing sea of sadness”, versus “I feel a bit sad when I’m on my own and don’t know how to entertain myself”, or simply “a sadness comes over me whenever it rains”. We can nitpick the subtle nuances that are lost in translation, but by referring to ‘toska’ as ‘sadness’, it is certainly possible to be understood in English. (Incidentally, ‘toska’ without context would likewise lose all of its complexity.)

Russian studies based in English are riddled with Russian words. The propensity to include them stems in the first instance from Russian scholars themselves, who imply that no other words can fully capture the nuances needed to explain the Russian condition. The practice is further entrenched and reproduced by foreign researchers, not to be outdone or left out, who use Russian words in order to justify the legitimacy of their writing by demonstrating their assimilation of the culture. Until recently, I never questioned this approach. On the contrary, I played along to demonstrate my own ‘insidedness’. Then, something forced me to pause and reconsider.

On the morning of January 30th, I logged onto Twitter and was offered a totally random post “based on my interests” from an account I did not yet follow. In it, Michael Idov wrote sarcastically:

“My favorite type of Russia essay is when they take a regular-ass word like ‘boredom’ (skuka) and go ‘To truly understand the Russian mind, you must familiarize yourself with the concept of skuka. To stave off skuka, a Russian might take a walk, or play a game on a ‘smartfon’” (2022).

This made me laugh perhaps more than it should have, because it so aptly called out the book I am currently working on. Deferring to the Russian language has become a habit for many analysts, supporting the notion that to understand Russian culture, society and politics, one must operate within a totally different frame of reference than that generally used within English language social sciences. Obviously, the ability to speak and read Russian is a massive advantage in understanding Russia, for this gives a researcher access to policy, laws, official statements, critical commentary, and homegrown debate in their original form. However, is such an understanding translatable through academic writing into English? What interests me most in this question is whether there is any harm caused by an over-reliance on Russian words in Western academic discourse, and what such harm may be.

I am at heart a Foucauldean scholar, because I believe in his notion that human beings internalise the ways of thinking that we are routinely forced into through repetition and discipline (1975). I believe therefore that there is an implicit assumption, which Russia scholars internalise whenever they are forced to import Russian words into English to debate Russian society, and it is this: that Russian politics, culture and thought are inherently alien, other and untranslatable, that the “Russian mind” differs from the (often implicitly more civilised or more logical) Western one. On the Western side, this leads to the Barbarisation of Russian culture, and on the Russian side it amounts to what we frequently call at home “good old russkii chauvinism“. Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish, would lead us to conclude that this assumption of difference provides a conceptual stranglehold, forcing analysts to keep returning to a fundamental partitioning of Russia from the Western world, which determines in many ways the political chasm growing between the two.

Few would dispute that there is a state-led war of ideas and ideals building between Russia and the Western World. In January 2022, as I was scrolling through Twitter, I was mainly looking for indications as to whether this war was about to turn violent, looking for signs that would indicate whether Russia was about to (re)invade Ukraine. Analysts and Twitter folk were divided: there were the obvious ideological splits between those in favour of war and those against, those buying into Putin’s narrative of the conflict and those rejecting it, those critiquing Biden and Europe, those wanting peace at any cost and those wishing to protect Ukrainian sovereignty. However, a more fundamental split across these camps could be seen between those who claimed Russia would invade because Putin did not want to appear weak by backing down from confrontation, and those who claimed that Russia would not invade because Putin was too risk-averse a President to initiate a war with an uncertain outcome. I am, of course, oversimplifying these positions. Most analysts highlighted the extreme unpredictability of the moment. Yet many argued that those in the opposite camp to themselves did not fully understand Russian domestic affairs: that those disagreeing with them were doing so simply because they did not understand Russia.

The Russian Federation is currently embroiled in what has been deemed by multiple observers to be a game of ‘History Wars’ (see, for example, Kolesnikov, 2021; Edele, 2017; Emmerson, 2014). Through these History Wars, the Russian state is competing with other nations and, in some cases, with its own historians to establish the preeminence of its authorised discourse of the Second World War in particular, as well as of other adjacent events. Most of this discourse is in line with the teaching of World War history elsewhere in Europe, though placing a stronger emphasis of course on the role of the USSR in the conflict; just as British schools would emphasise the leadership of Winston Churchill and the movements of British soldiers; American schools of the American involvement; and so on. However, aspects of Russia’s discourse are proactively argumentative, going against dominant academic thinking.

The Russian elite are divided “between those who see the past as something to be liberated from, and those who deeply regret the loss of a golden past” (Gjerde, 2015, p. 157). The state for its part is striving to reform this relationship by promoting a discourse of history that builds national pride in the present, which is a distinct trajectory emerging from between these two positions. It is doing so in the face of more internationally recognised narratives emerging from the West and former Soviet bloc that are highly critical of the USSR, and this has led to Putin’s aggressive rejection of much mainstream academic historic consensus.

Russian history reform under Putin has coincided with a similar yet discordant wave of reforms in the post-Soviet bloc, one that emphasises how Russia’s neighbours suffered under Soviet repression. “Tendencies in these countries to equate Nazi and Soviet occupation,”  summarise Bækken & Enstad, have helped to justify Russia’s securitisation of history to protect its internal social cohesion by preventing the spread of these discordant narratives into Russia, where comparing the USSR to Nazi Germany is now outlawed (2020). Bearing this wider context in mind, Putin’s positive history provides an insulating cocoon to protect against foreign criticism while incubating national unity and pride.

An essay on ‘The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ written by Putin in 2021 is a perfect illustration of this rebellion against mainstream history. Here, Putin writes that:

“the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. … Hence the attempts to play on the ‘national question’ and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another.” (12/07/2021)

On the surface, this part of the address calls for unity and understanding, but its message of friendship has been severely undermined by Russian troop movements on the Ukrainian border.  Underneath what is written, there are therefore other interesting things happening in the essay:

1. We must note the term “historical and spiritual space”, which, in the Russian version of the essay appears directly as “odno istroricheskoye i duhovnoye prostranstvo“, or a “single” space. This extends the Russian spatial terrain to its past Soviet historical reaches, disregarding any present day confinement by territorial borders. In a departure from common state political discourse, the essay then frames this space as comprising “russkiye zemli” – ethnic “Russian lands”, rather than “rossiiskiye” lands (or lands pertaining to all peoples of the Russian Federation). The word choice is targeted towards the conflation of “Ukrainianness” with “russkii-ness”, negating the former by subsuming it into a singular ethnic Russian grouping;
2. Ukrainian independence from Russia is depicted as unnatural and its more recent estrangement as the goal of Russia’s enemies. The present renewed Ukrainian political turn away from Russia is, according to Putin, the product of “a forced change of identity” on the Ukrainian side: “Russians in Ukraine are being forced … to deny their roots” in favour of a “path of forced assimilation”, and “the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us [Russians]” (ibid). It is essential to note that what Putin conceives as an artificial segregation is also to him an ideational construct that speaks to the need to tightly control heritage and history discourse in the region in order to protect Russian (“russkii”) people from both overt ethnic cleansing and subtler erasure by their enemies;
3. Conversely, Ukrainian independence is explained to be the product of a Russian mistake: “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era”, writes Putin later on (ibid). Russia, as the “legal successor of the Soviet Union” (Malinova, 2017, p. 44), bares ultimate responsibility for allowing Ukraine to exit from its administration, and Ukrainian independence is not seen as reflecting any Ukrainian agency or legitimate political will;
4. Further, though this may seem to be a contradiction to point 1, the essay notes that Russia must not simply be thought of as a territory for ethnic Russians and must not be divided by “the national question”. Instead, it stretches to include all territories with which it shares a “spiritual unity”; and,
5. The people of the Russian and former Soviet territories (especially ethnic Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians) are, Putin believes, “one people” with a common Russian core, and all other divisions that have followed are arbitrary products of historical accidents.

With his emphasis on the strength of the Russian state and pride in Russian history, it is clear that Putin is writing more to an internal audience than to his Ukrainian neighbours. Putin’s dismissal of Ukrainian sovereignty is totally at odds with European history discourse and NATO understandings of contemporary geopolitics.

Putin’s essay is evidence that the Russian state is in the process of fully delinking its teaching of history and support to the study of geopolitics from Western academic discourse. Increasingly, voices that stand in opposition to the state view of history as prescribed by President-historian Putin are silenced, labelled to be foreign agents, pressured into leaving the country, or imprisoned and in some cases poisoned (or poisoned and then imprisoned, as was the case with public enemy #1). Underneath the authorised cannon is an insidious assertion: we are in conflict with the Western world and they are in conflict with us because they do not understand our history or our identity. This is a classic “clash of civilizations” dichotomy underpinned by an inherent assumption of Russian exceptionalism.

Sen writes that the notion of a “civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorisation along so-called civilizational lines”, a categorization based on the “imagined singularity” of the identities of those on both sides of the divide that is designed to obscure their shared humanity (2006, p. 9). Accordingly, Russian exceptionalism is both artificial and largely imagined. I believe this is chiefly a political divide, one that is carefully maintained through education, academic discourse, media, history, aesthetics and heritage. As academics, we sometimes contribute to the problem. It begins with the very tools that we use to engage with Russian politics: it begins with language and the idea that any analysis of Russia, written in any language, requires its own terminology, rooted in Russian itself, to highlight Russia’s otherness and division from the world. Vot gde sobaka zaryta – that’s where the dog is buried.

Farewell to a CEID Friend: Dr Hilary Perraton

By CEID Blogger, on 14 January 2022

Dr Hilary Perraton – died 15 November, 2021.

Hilary Perraton was associated with the University of London, Institute of Education, Education in Developing Countries (EDC) Department (now The Centre for Education and International Development – CEID), since the late 1970s. As a member of the International Extension College (IEC), Hilary worked with Michael Young (Lord Young of Dartington) and Professor Peter Williams of EDC, to establish postgraduate courses about distance education within the EDC international education programme. These courses ran from the early eighties until 2006. During that time, scholars and activists worked in EDC/CEID to research, write about and extend the use of distance teaching in newly independent countries across the world. In 1980, Hilary, together with Michael Young, Janet Jenkins and Tony Dodds, wrote ‘Distance Teaching for the Third World: The Lion and the Clockwork Mouse’. The lion was formal education via schooling and higher education, and the clockwork mouse was an alternative, via distance teaching. This early book was essentially an argument for using distance teaching to extend access to education for those who had missed out. It was to prove a manifesto and rationale for more than 40 years of committed research, scholarship, publishing, and activism aimed at helping many newly independent countries to extend access and improve the quality of education in lower income settings. In 1982, Hilary edited ‘Alternative Routes to Formal Education: Distance Teaching for School Equivalency’ which was published by the World Bank, but perhaps his best-known work was ‘Open and Distance Learning for the Developing World’, first published in 2000 by Routledge, and later, updated and published as a second edition in 2007. In retirement, Hilary turned his attention to researching the history of students who came from overseas to study in Britain. This work built on an earlier study Peter Williams had done entitled ‘The Overseas Student Question’. He researched and wrote two further histories of students who came to Britain to learn: (i) Learning Abroad: A History of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, published by Cambridge Scholars in 2009, and (ii) ‘A History of Foreign Students in Britain published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2014. Throughout his life, Hilary remained a focused and committed international educator; a true scholar and supportive critical friend to most. He could be a tough critic but he was always kind, thoughtful, encouraging, and clear. He lived a driven and worthwhile life, dedicated to improving the lives of others through better education and opportunity.  He inspired many people to work on hard things in the interests of improved education quality, fairness and equity. Hopefully in the future, more CEID scholars will be inspired by his work and life to push the Education for All project forward by whatever means feasible, relevant, and appropriate. Hilary’s wisdom, kindness and sound counsel, are already sadly missed.

Chris Yates

Lecturer in International Education