Repurposing Everyday Discourse on Social Accountability: A Precise, and Strategic Agenda from Dalit activists in India

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} Transparency, accountability, participation are contested concepts. Though these buzzwords are widely used, they tend to convey different meanings depending on the user. Dalit youth fighting caste oppression in the district of Bhilwara in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan articulated…

We Want to Know: Strengthening Accountability in Sudan

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} Following the ouster of the al-Bashir regime in Sudan after five months of a wide-scale non-violent resistance, a new civilian-led government was appointed to lead the transition from autocracy to a democratic rule. However, changing the political system has yet…

Bibingka Strategy: A Conceptual Summary

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} The ‘bibingka strategy’ is a popular framework used by civil society groups in the Philippines in pursuing reforms and promoting accountability. It comes from the word bibingka — a type of Filipino rice cake that is cooked by placing live…

The Promise of Whistleblowing in China

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} A notable example of Chinese neologism, the creation or use of new words, from the coronavirus pandemic is the notion of the whistleblower, or chui shao ren 吹哨人. The emergence of whistleblowing in the Chinese public discourse is inextricably linked to  Dr.…

The Swahili Word for Transparency, and the Fallacies of Linguistic Determinism

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} I recently attended a workshop where participants were debating, among other things, why reform initiatives to promote government transparency and other anticorruption measures in places like sub-Saharan Africa had such a (seemingly) poor track record. In the course of the…

A Novel Attempt to Break the Language Barrier in Research

{!{wpv-post-title}!} Author(s): {!{types field=’blog-author’ separator=’, ‘}!}{!{/types}!} Date: {!{types field=’blog-date’}!}{!{/types}!} Country: {!{types field=’country’}!}{!{/types}!} Language(s): {!{types field=’language’}!}{!{/types}!} What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. – William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet Language is known to be the medium of knowledge creation and dissemination of ideas. However, it…