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The United Kingdom is resetting its relations with Africa and other countries in the global south after more than a decade of neglect. At the United Nations in September, British prime minister Keir Starmer promised his government was

returning the UK to responsible global leadership.

This should include reconnecting with the countries of the global south which feel they have been neglected and among whom Britain’s voice is now at a discount.

The new Labour government’s recently launched reviews of Britain’s global impact and its international economic and development policies provide an opportunity to reevaluate and relaunch these relations. The opportunity must be seized for the sake of global stability.

The post-cold war order is fraying. America is increasingly reluctant to act as a global guarantor for a multilateral system governed by international rules and respecting human rights and freedoms. China, Russia and emerging middle powers such as Iran, Turkey and the Gulf States seem happier with a multipolar system based on the exercise of military and economic power. Meanwhile, the accelerating impact of climate change adds to the challenges to regional stability in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

I have followed these questions for nearly 50 years, as an academic and diplomat. Much has changed in those years, but recent British governments have been slow to adapt to these changes. To reconnect with countries in Africa and the global south, Britain needs a new attitude as well as new policies; and, paradoxically perhaps, the Commonwealth can play a constructive role in achieving this.

Britain’s problem

Distracted by its domestic political and economic difficulties since Brexit, recent British governments have neglected both Africa and the Commonwealth.

Aid has been cut, and policy incoherence exacerbated by the merger between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department for International Development.
An investment conference with Africa due earlier in 2024 was scrapped at short notice.
Successive prime ministers gave little time to meeting African and other leaders from the global south. They had no answer to the questions being asked about Britain’s relationship with the south.

Yet Britain’s links to these countries remain strong. Not least through the growing diaspora communities in the UK that are now an integral part of Britain’s social and political fabric. With 5.5 million people of Asian heritage and 2.5 million of African or mixed heritage in the UK in 2021, these bonds need to be politically recognised.

Read more:
How Commonwealth countries have forged a new way to appoint judges

Most of those Britons come from Commonwealth countries. The Commonwealth as an organisation is no substitute for closer engagement with individual countries. But it provides a forum where connections can be made and a new, more equal relationship built.

Though British governments have neglected it, King Charles, the ceremonial head of the Commonwealth, has not, as his visit to Kenya in 2023 showed. And other countries are still seeking to join, as Gabon and Togo did last year.

Commonwealth heads of government meeting

From 21-26 October Samoa will host the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (Chogm), which will choose a new secretary-general – this time from Africa. The summit brings together representatives from every continent: from G7 members to least developed countries, from the most populous country (India at 1.45 billion people) to the smallest (Tuvalu with under 10,000), from major greenhouse gas emitters to small islands at risk of disappearing beneath the sea.

Despite its imperial origins, the Commonwealth is an international network that cuts across the multi-polarity that risks dividing the world. It includes countries from the global south, the global north and the global east. The diversity makes it an ideal forum for honest conversations on difficult issues like climate change and multilateral institutional reform.

Unlike the recent Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac) in Beijing, the Commonwealth is an organisation run by its members. They share common values and interests as well as a common language. They come together to exchange ideas, not pledges of investment or aid. Its traditions of democracy and equality between members make it unique and valuable. It provides, for example, a ready-made network of global influence for any member state. For small island states, particularly in the Caribbean and Pacific, it is one forum where their voices can be amplified.

This is important. With the community of nations struggling to address global challenges of the scale of climate change and pandemics, or to resolve regional conflicts, opportunities to build consensus are needed more than ever. The wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa are a portent of things to come if we fail to sustain a global structure that can resolve rather than exacerbate such conflicts. UN peacemaking efforts might then be crowned with success rather than with futility and frustration.

What Britain needs to do

Britain is only one among many voices, so it needs a persuasive narrative that will help preserve a world order that can tackle humanity’s challenges, rather than one that simply fights over what is left. The Commonwealth, like the UN, is a place where the UK can start building support for a more equal and more effective global system.

A new narrative, and a new relationship with Africa and the global south, should be based on four elements.

Firstly, repentance for sins past. Britain’s empire played a central role in making the modern world, for better and worse. While the better is often taken for granted, the sins of empire still rankle, and – like a stone in the shoe – will distract relations. Best therefore to acknowledge them, and move forward.

Secondly, the new relationship must be based on mutual respect and partnership. In particular, the age of traditional development programmes with their paternalistic tendencies is past. What countries in the global south are seeking, as many feel they do get from China, is a genuine partnership of equals that recognises the relationship as a whole and focuses on the political as well as economic sources of growth.

Thirdly, Britain needs to work with African and other southern governments to amplify their voice in multilateral institutions such as the UN and international financial institutions, so that those institutions genuinely protect their interests and those countries defend the institutions.

Finally, Britain needs to engage with the public as much as with governments in these countries. The BBC World Service, the British Council and Britain’s education sector are becoming more important in challenging disinformation as the battle of narratives hots up. Now is the time to reinforce them, not let them fade away.

A new narrative along these lines at Chogm, and incorporated into the government’s reviews, could be the start of a genuine reset in Britain’s relationship with the global south, to the benefit of all. Läs mer…

The hardship of war does not end when the shooting stops, as every wartime death leaves behind family members whose struggle will go on for decades, if not generations. Millions of these bereaved survivors have lost their kin, including parents, children, siblings, cousins, spouses and friends, with scores being added daily by wars like those currently ravaging Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan.

As well as plunging lives into mourning and sorrow, wars destabilise the basic foundations of wellbeing, health, and family care. They can also fuel desires for retribution and, coupled with intimate familiarity with violence and feelings of injustice, propel cycles of war far into the future. If we are to break these deadly patterns, we need to pay close attention to bereavement among the survivors of war.

Measuring war bereavement

In our recent study, we quantified the extent to which family bereavement outnumbers war casualties, as each wartime death entails the loss of a relative for various members of the surviving population. This is exacerbated in the context of protracted wars in which people can accumulate bereavements – someone might lose a parent to war when they are young, and then a child to the same war in old age.

In Palestine, one of the regions most affected by war in the last decade, there were an estimated 10,500 conflict fatalities between 29 September 2000 and 6 October 2023, and more than 41,000 fatalities since October 7, 2023. On average, each of these deaths has resulted in 1.7 grieving parents and 1.9 grieving children. This means that around 1 in every 43 surviving Palestinians has lost a child to the conflict, and 1 in every 59 Palestinians has lost a parent to war during their life.

These are, of course, population-level averages: some individuals have experienced a great deal more family deaths than others. The real numbers may also be much higher – a Lancet study accounting for indirect deaths estimates over 186,000 lives have been lost in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

Read more:
Gaza conflict: rising death toll from hunger a stark reminder of starvation as a weapon of war

Psychological and social damage

War bereavement leaves long-lasting scars in populations because bereaved survivors carry the experience of loss throughout their lives. Wars end, but the trauma endures.

Consider the case of the ongoing war in Gaza. According to our calculations, bereavement levels in the territory will remain extremely high in the decades to come, regardless of the war’s future development. Even if all hostilities were to cease immediately, we estimate it would take 50 years of uninterrupted peace to reduce the proportion of bereaved individuals in the Palestinian population to a quarter of current levels.

This population of bereaved survivors of war deserves special attention. Studies have shown that they are at a higher risk of prolonged grief disorder, depression, suicidal ideation, substance use disorders, and physical diseases.

The sudden death of kin is not only an emotional shock, it can also result in the loss of resources and support for those left behind. For instance, the death of a parent deprives young children of important financial and emotional resources at a key stage of their emotional and physical development. This can be highly detrimental for the child, or even fatal when coupled with the destruction of infrastructure like schools and health clinics.

Similarly, wellbeing in old age can be irreversibly damaged by the loss of children who act as caregivers. In fact, older adults are becoming increasingly at risk in wars around the world.

The political impact of family bereavement

The collective experience of losing kin affects shared perceptions of a conflict. While bereavement is a fact of life, war deaths are massive, untimely, unexpected and violent, creating the ideal conditions for collective trauma to take root and endure over time.

This is compounded by the fact that war casualties tend to be clustered within family groups and, as a result, some families experience the loss of multiple members to war. The targeted bombing of residential buildings in Gaza, for example, has brought about bereavement hotspots in which individuals experience much higher levels of bereavement compared to other members of the population.

Read more:
Domicide: the destruction of homes in Gaza reminds me of what happened to my city, Homs

The higher the levels of bereavement in a population, the more likely it is that individuals will have a deeper personal and emotional connection to the armed conflict. If a war is protracted, these experiences of loss will accumulate, eventually leading to a situation where members of different generations share similar experiences of violent kin loss. This makes finding a political solution to armed conflict very difficult in the long run.

Moving towards reconciliation

Large scale, violent kin loss has the potential to reshape the very fabric of society. It pushes young people towards radical ideologies, dictates political decisions, influences religious traditions, and drives further escalation of violence.

However, it may also foster a desire for reconciliation and reparation, pushing individuals toward seeking peace and justice. Reconciliation processes are complex, often involving diplomatic engagement, economic support agreements, the establishment of truth and reconciliation committees, and careful mediation. Engaging with those who lost family members and addressing their demands for accountability and justice are critical components of this process.

It is imperative that we protect lives, and not just on humanitarian grounds – reducing war deaths will curtail the growth of bereaved populations, and break the cycles of violence fuelled by pain, resentment, and trauma. Ultimately, this is essential for ensuring stability and security on a global scale. Läs mer…

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to scientists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.

Inspired by ideas from physics and biology, Hopfield and Hinton developed computer systems that can memorise and learn from patterns in data. Despite never directly collaborating, they built on each other’s work to develop the foundations of the current boom in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

What are neural networks? (And what do they have to do with physics?)

Artificial neural networks are behind much of the AI technology we use today.

In the same way your brain has neuronal cells linked by synapses, artificial neural networks have digital neurons connected in various configurations. Each individual neuron doesn’t do much. Instead, the magic lies in the pattern and strength of the connections between them.

Neurons in an artificial neural network are “activated” by input signals. These activations cascade from one neuron to the next in ways that can transform and process the input information. As a result, the network can carry out computational tasks such as classification, prediction and making decisions.

Johan Jarnestad / The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Most of the history of machine learning has been about finding ever more sophisticated ways to form and update these connections between artificial neurons.

While the foundational idea of linking together systems of nodes to store and process information came from biology, the mathematics used to form and update these links came from physics.

Networks that can remember

John Hopfield (born 1933) is a US theoretical physicist who made important contributions over his career in the field of biological physics. However, the Nobel Physics prize was for his work developing Hopfield networks in 1982.

Hopfield networks were one of the earliest kinds of artificial neural networks. Inspired by principles from neurobiology and molecular physics, these systems demonstrated for the first time how a computer could use a “network” of nodes to remember and recall information.

The networks Hopfield developed could memorise data (such as a collection of black and white images). These images could be “recalled” by association when the network is prompted with a similar image.

Although of limited practical use, Hopfield networks demonstrated that this type of ANN could store and retrieve data in new ways. They laid the foundation for later work by Hinton.

Johan Jarnestad / The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Machines that can learn

Geoff Hinton (born 1947), sometimes called one of the “godfathers of AI”, is a British-Canadian computer scientist who has made a number of important contributions to the field. In 2018, along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, he was awarded the Turing Award (the highest honour in computer science) for his efforts to advance machine learning generally, and specifically a branch of it called deep learning.

The Nobel Prize in Physics, however, is specifically for his work with Terrence Sejnowski and other colleagues in 1984, developing Boltzmann machines.

These are an extension of the Hopfield network that demonstrated the idea of machine learning – a system that lets a computer learn not from a programmer, but from examples of data. Drawing from ideas in the energy dynamics of statistical physics, Hinton showed how this early generative computer model could learn to store data over time by being shown examples of things to remember.

Johan Jarnestad / The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Boltzmann machine, like the Hopfield network before it, did not have immediate practical applications. However, a modified form (called the restricted Boltzmann machine) was useful in some applied problems.

More important was the conceptual breakthrough that an artificial neural network could learn from data. Hinton continued to develop this idea. He later published influential papers on backpropagation (the learning process used in modern machine learning systems) and convolutional neural networks (the main type of neural network used today for AI systems that work with image and video data).

Why this prize, now?

Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines seem whimsical compared to today’s feats of AI. Hopfield’s network contained only 30 neurons (he tried to make one with 100 nodes, but it was too much for the computing resources of the time), whereas modern systems such as ChatGPT can have millions. However, today’s Nobel prize underscores just how important these early contributions were to the field.

While recent rapid progress in AI – familiar to most of us from generative AI systems such as ChatGPT – might seem like vindication for the early proponents of neural networks, Hinton at least has expressed concern. In 2023, after quitting a decade-long stint at Google’s AI branch, he said he was scared by the rate of development and joined the growing throng of voices calling for more proactive AI regulation.

After receiving the Nobel prize, Hinton said AI will be “like the Industrial Revolution but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities”. He also said he still worries that the consequences of his work might be “systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control”. Läs mer…

Comprehensive sex and reproductive health education aims to promote positive attitudes toward sex and reproductive health, and empower young people to make informed decisions.

But decent sex and reproductive health education is still lacking in many parts of the world. This leaves significant gaps in young peoples’ knowledge and understanding.

We have carried out research to figure out what young people in England are missing in their sex education lessons. We reviewed the relationships and sex education (RSE) curricula across the UK.

We found that, in England, much of the focus of sex and reproductive health education is on pregnancy prevention. Much less emphasis is given to reproductive health topics such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, fertility and the menopause.

We also carried out a survey of 931 students aged 16-18 across England. We found students were missing key aspects of reproductive health knowledge.

Students are not being adequately informed about fertility, despite the RSE curriculum guidelines stating that students must be taught “the facts about reproductive health, including fertility, and the potential impact of lifestyle on fertility”.

Lack of knowledge

For example, despite the fact that students learn about the menstrual cycle in RSE lessons, half of them did not know when women are most fertile during the menstrual cycle.

Less than 3% of teenagers in our study told us that they had been taught about specific reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS. Just over 10% said they had learned about menopause.

Over 70% of students recognised the decline in egg quality and quantity with age, but only about 50% understood the effects of age on sperm quality and quantity.

In our survey, we asked students what reproductive health topics they research about outside of school. Students told us that they had sought out knowledge on a variety of reproductive health topics, including PCOS, endometriosis, menopause, miscarriage and abortion – subjects that are seldom covered in detail during RSE lessons.

Many turned to social media and the internet for answers on sex and reproductive health. While these platforms offer easy access to information, they can also expose students to misinformation from non-credible sources.

In our survey, 70% of students said that they had “a little” sex education at their school. Only 30% rated their school’s sex education as good or very good. This shows a major gap in the quality of sex education most students are getting at school.

Knowledge seeking

Our study shows that students in England want to learn more about these topics in school. When we asked them what could be done to improve sex education at school, they called for a more inclusive and comprehensive curriculum that covers a wider variety of topics – including miscarriage, abortion, masturbation and how to access sexual and reproductive health services. One student said:

All we’ve done in school is go over and over having safe sex and talked about periods which whilst is important is barely scratching the surface of things people need to know about.

Students want greater focus on sex positivity because current discussions mostly highlight negative aspects of sexual activity. They believe the importance of sexual wellbeing is often ignored. They want honest, transparent, and non-judgmental education – not teaching methods driven by fear.

Based on our findings, our research team, as part of the non-profit International Reproductive Health Education Collaboration has developed evidence-based educational resources to enhance reproductive health education. These include an education resource for teachers, information leaflets and a fertility education poster.

These tools aim to help teachers, health professionals and the public access accurate and comprehensive reproductive health education.

Teens turn to other sources, such as social media, to get information they’re missing at school.
Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock

Under the previous government, the Department of Education proposed an update to the RSE curriculum, which included the addition of topics such as “menstrual and gynaecological health, including endometriosis, PCOS, and heavy menstrual bleeding.”

The results of a consultation on this and other proposed changes are currently under analysis. But adding these topics to the curriculum would be a crucial advancement in school reproductive health education.

Reproductive health education must be given equal importance to core academic subjects, and schools need to actively engage with students, addressing their reproductive health needs and concerns. This is crucial, as school is often the only time that students receive formal education on these topics.

By providing comprehensive and accessible information at this stage, schools can equip students with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their reproductive health throughout their lives. Läs mer…

Commuters in Scotland faced a shock at ticket machines as the Scottish government abandoned a pilot scheme that removed peak rail fares. During the pilot, tickets were the same price all day. But now that it has ended, the increase in fares is significant. The cost of commuting at peak time from Glasgow to Edinburgh, for example, has gone from £16.20 to £31.40.

The aim of the pilot, introduced in October 2023, was to encourage what’s known as a “modal shift” from cars to more sustainable transport.

Defending its decision, the Scottish government made two claims: that the pilot increased passenger numbers by only 6.8% (when an increase of 10% was required for it to be self-financing) and that it mostly benefited wealthier passengers.

These claims were widely reported, but are they correct? And what does this mean for similar schemes in other countries?

Passengers using the train to get to and from work benefited most from the pilot, which made travel cheaper at peak times (early morning until around 9am and evenings until around 7pm). It is true that wealthier people in the UK tend to use trains and cars more, while poorer people are more likely to travel by bus.

The graph below shows how much £100 of train and bus tickets, and £100 of petrol ten years ago would cost today.

Cost of transport in the UK (2014-2024)

Source: Office for National Statistics. Indexed to 100 in August 2014., Author provided (no reuse)

The increase in train fares has been smoother, but mostly faster, than the increase in petrol prices. However, bus fares have increased faster than both. Scotland has not followed England in capping bus fares, a policy that might have benefited lower-income passengers more.

In theory, a decrease in price for a product will result in an increase in demand. But it is impossible to calculate exactly how much passenger numbers increased due to the pilot, because we cannot know for sure how many passengers would have travelled anyway (the “counterfactual”).

To estimate the rise in demand brought about by cheaper fares, we must make assumptions about the counterfactual, where peak fares remained in place. This is especially difficult for two reasons. First, the pilot began as passenger numbers were rising again after the COVID lockdowns.

Read more:
Catching public transport in Queensland will soon cost just 50 cents. Are cheap fares good policy?

Statisticians must make assumptions about how much demand would have continued to rise in this case. Depending on these assumptions, the estimated effect of the pilot on demand for rail travel ranges from an increase of 16% to a fall of 5%, compared with the final figure of 6.8%. A change in assumptions can change the estimated rise in demand substantially.

Second, the pilot spanned a period of disruption on the railways. Strikes in Scotland in 2022 may have put people off train travel, and again, we cannot know whether they would have returned in the counterfactual scenario.

And bad weather in Scotland in early 2024 and disruption caused by strikes in England and Wales make it difficult to use the rest of Great Britain as a control group to compare against Scotland.

To estimate the effects of a policy like the pilot, statisticians must make many other assumptions. For example, in April 2024 there was a big increase in fares across Scotland. The analysis underlying the report assumes that this would have happened even without the pilot.

All these assumptions (and more) lie beneath the reported 6.8% increase in demand and make it impossible to be confident that this was the true number of passengers who shifted to rail travel because peak fares were axed.

What’s happening elsewhere?

Similar schemes have been piloted in other countries, including a flat rate €49 (£40) per month (increased from €9) rail pass in Germany, a 50 cent (30 pence) flat fare across all public transport in Queensland, Australia, and a £2 flat bus fare in England.

As with the pilot in Scotland, it is difficult to determine whether these schemes have caused a modal shift. Some new evidence from Germany suggests that cheaper fares encouraged people to make more journeys overall, but that the shift from cars to trains was limited.

However, we know that the elasticity (how much demand changes as prices change) of public transport fares is greater in the long term than in the short term. There is a danger that, as in Scotland, governments will cancel them before the long-term effects are clear.

The SNP government in Scotland is facing difficulties balancing its budget. In these circumstances, any further subsidy to public transport seems unlikely. Instead, the government will have to find other ways to reach its net zero commitments.

There is evidence that people respond more strongly to an increase in price than to a decrease. If this is the case, the pilot itself could even cause a long-term decrease in passenger numbers in Scotland, because the fall in people using the trains due to the reintroduction of peak fares might be greater than the increase during the pilot.

It is impossible to tell yet, but in the long term this could make travelling on the railways more expensive for both passengers and for the government subsidising them. Läs mer…

Devolution is “a process, not an event”, according to the then-secretary of state for Wales, Ron Davies, in 1997. But it is unclear what may come next for Wales in that process under the new UK Labour government, despite the same party now being in charge in both London and Cardiff.

One ongoing debate among politicians and experts for several years has been whether Westminster should and will devolve more powers to Wales, including justice and policing.

It wasn’t until the passing of the Government of Wales Act 1998 that the then National Assembly was established. It allowed Wales to make decisions over issues such as education, housing and agriculture. Further primary law-making powers were subsequently granted to the now Senedd (Welsh parliament).

But Wales doesn’t have control over all matters and some are reserved for the UK parliament. A number of these are consistent across all UK nations, including fiscal policy, foreign affairs, nuclear policy and national security. But others are different for Wales when compared to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

One of the most obvious examples is in the area of justice and policing. Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales is not a separate legal jurisdiction with its own system of law, policing and courts. While there are increasing areas of divergence between England and Wales, technically speaking, Wales is part of a single jurisdiction with England due to decisions made during Henry VIII’s reign in the 16th century.

The issue of devolving justice and policing has cropped up consistently over the past 25 years. It has been the subject of a variety of debates in the Senedd, Westminster and in the media. It has also been analysed by a number of official reports and independent or cross-party commissions.

In 2011, the Silk commission was established by the UK government to explore the issue. In its 2014 report, it recommended devolving policing and youth justice to Wales by 2017. That never happened.

The Thomas commission, set up by the Welsh government in 2019, also recommended devolving justice to Wales, including youth justice and policing. Earlier this year, the independent commission on the constitutional future of Wales called on the UK government to agree to the devolution of responsibility for justice and policing to the Senedd and Welsh government.

Will UK prime minister Keir Starmer and Wales’ first minister Eluned Morgan agree on the same direction for Welsh justice and policing?
Associated Press/Alamy

In 2023, Keir Starmer said that a Labour government would introduce a “take back control bill”, to devolve new powers to communities from Westminster. Those intentions were echoed in Labour’s election manifesto ahead of July’s general election.

But the issue of devolving justice to Wales was absent from Labour’s manifesto. And in an interview in June, the now-secretary of state for Wales Jo Stevens described such a move as “fiddling around with structures and systems”. It is therefore unclear whether devolution to regions of England will take place in parallel to further devolution to Wales and the other nations.

And while this issue may not be at the forefront of UK Labour policy, it is an ongoing commitment of Welsh Labour. The latter commissioned even further research in August into the devolution of justice.

What are some of the potential challenges?

One significant issue is the age of criminal responsibility, currently set at ten in England and Wales. The Thomas commission recommended raising this to 12, aligning Wales with Scotland and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

But this raises logistical questions. For example, what would happen when a case crosses borders or involves children just above or below the age threshold? These practical challenges need to be addressed if justice is to be devolved smoothly.

The Thomas Commission also laid out detailed proposals for reforms to youth justice, prisons and probation services. The Welsh youth courts have already started implementing a more preventive and restorative approach, but a jurisdictional overlap with England has slowed progress. While children’s services are devolved, youth justice remains under UK government control.

Read more:
Crown estate: why it’s time to devolve it and put Wales on par with Scotland

Issues like transport to courts, funding and jurisdictional boundaries need careful consideration too. For example, how would authorities determine whether a crime committed near the Wales-England border falls under Welsh or English law?

Of course, this is an issue which already exists between England and Scotland, and there are complex rules in place. Dependent upon the nature and circumstances of the crime, “jurisdiction” is typically dependent on where it was first initiated. In turn, further challenges arise surrounding police force cooperation, as well as mechanisms for sharing different types of evidence. There are also legally-protected agreements regarding powers to arrest people in each other’s territories.

Ironing out these types of issues is particularly important in respect of female offenders, as Wales has made progress in providing better support for them.

Disparities in legal expertise may also become more of a challenge. Legal experts have noted that as Welsh laws become more distinct, judges in England may lack the relevant expertise to handle Welsh cases. This concern has already arisen in Welsh tribunals, where appeals are sometimes directed to England’s Upper Tribunal, raising doubts about how well English judges can handle increasingly Wales-specific laws.

Cooperation

While these issues are very real, they shouldn’t block progress. With cooperation between Cardiff and Westminster, the devolution of justice could happen without major disruption. Instead of having endless debates and reviews, time and resources could be better spent acting on existing expert recommendations.

For instance, both governments could agree on a ten-year timeline – as recommended by the independent commission – to devolve justice, starting with policing. It’s an area which already has strong ties to devolved services at the local level. Youth justice and probation could then follow.

Despite the potential challenges, the new Labour UK government has a chance to bring about meaningful change. Devolving justice may take time, but it could bring Wales closer to achieving the legal autonomy many believe it deserves. Läs mer…

Governments and public relations firms are under pressure to, in UN secretary-general António Guterres’s words, stop “fuelling the madness” and ban fossil fuel advertising or cut ties with the industry.

France, Amsterdam, Sheffield and Edinburgh have all restricted fossil fuel advertising to differing degrees in recognition of the industry’s responsibility for climate breakdown.

People working in the advertising industry are among those calling for an end to working with fossil fuel companies. There is a reputational risk with continuing to represent these businesses. Four advertising agencies recently lost a sustainability certification for taking an oil company as a client.

Oil and gas advertising is perhaps most prolific in sport. A recent report estimated that fossil fuel companies have invested more than £4 billion across 200 sponsorship deals.

Fellow researchers have appealed for sport to be included in any further advertising bans. There is a precedent: a tobacco advertising ban came into force in the UK in 2002. Bear in mind, that ban took nearly 40 years of campaigning and tobacco executives have shown they’re capable of navigating its loopholes.

Even so, the fossil fuel industry will prove significantly harder to purge than tobacco. Here’s why.

‘No fossil fuels, no sport’

Human development is largely a story of increasing energy use. Oil in particular has transformed everyday life beyond comprehension.

Whether it be in the form of high-profile sponsorship deals, sporting equipment made from petrol-based products like carbon fibre or flying to meet the demand for ever more fixtures, modern sport reflects society’s oil dependency.

Sport is entwined with high-carbon industries.
Parkdolly/Shutterstock

The fossil fuel industry knows this. Despite the longstanding scientific consensus that fossil fuels must be phased out, the industry seeks to convince the public that oil and gas will still be needed for a very long time.

Analysis of one oil company’s sustainability reports identified how its communications strategy shifted from denying the results of climate science to more subtle efforts to delay an energy transition. These included the argument that fossil fuels are an irreplaceable precondition for “the good life”.

Sport is a vehicle for perpetuating this argument. In 2021, an oil and gas trade association in the US launched a campaign showcasing sports products made from petroleum, the implication being that people cannot enjoy sport without fossil fuels.

Sport is poised for corporate piggybacking because it evokes connection, pride and security in fans and spectators – feelings the fossil fuel industry is keen to capitalise on. An analysis of the Canadian oil industry’s advertising between 2006 and 2015 documented a shift from images of the natural environment to those depicting family life and domesticity.

This kind of pernicious messaging, which entrenches fossil fuels within the things people hold dear, will be hard for legislators to reverse.

Oil change

Imre Szeman, a professor of human geography who specialises in the energy transition, urges us to comprehend just how deep our relationship with oil runs.

Addressing climate change is not simply a technical matter, but a cultural one as well. An issue of how we grasp what is so often taken for granted in everyday life.

Change will not only require acknowledging the severity of the environmental crisis, but to recognise how its primary causes have shaped society, including in elite sport. It’s crucial to understand modern societies as oil societies if we are ever to envisage one no longer dependent on it.

Sport sponsorships reflect the infiltration of fossil fuels in modern society.
Trong Nguyen/Shutterstock

So, considering sport, the first step is to remove the cognitive dissonance that surrounds modern elite sporting culture, the nature of its oil dependency and the consequences of climate change.

Sporting organisations can start by saying no to fossil fuel sponsorship. There are examples of this happening already in tennis, rugby and the Olympics, with Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo indicating an oil company was not welcome as a sponsor of the 2024 Games.

Change happens by disaster or by design. It’s time to recognise the decades long influence wielded by the fossil fuel industry.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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In the rural village of Téssékéré, the increasing number and intensity of droughts linked to climate change is making the lives and livelihoods of the local Fulani communities increasingly vulnerable. Here, in the northern Sahel desert region of Senegal (known as the Ferlo), the pastoral population walks over dry, dusty ground with their livestock in search of grazing areas and working borehole water pumps. In favourable years, these farmers can stay in the fields around their local borehole, but climate change is forcing them to move further afield to find pasture to feed their cattle.

In the small Ivory Coast town of Kani, a farmer is concerned about the increase in plantation areas to the detriment of forests, which no longer provide shade. The scarcity and fluctuation of rainfall is altering the sowing periods for rice, maize and yams, and the intermittent nature of the rains is leading to a drop in production quality.

These issues of gradual desertification – where more of the land slowly becomes desert – affects both nature and people. As soil degrades, people migrate to different areas and it can be harder for them to access health services and education while undermining subsistence and production economies, therefore increasing poverty.

As a response, the African Union set up an ambitious continent-wide megaproject in 2007 to address these social-ecological issues and combat poverty. The Great Green Wall initiative is a tree planting restoration project that stretches from Senegal to Djibouti, 5,000 miles (8,000km) across Africa’s Sahel region.

In Téssékéré, bare, scattered plots of fenced-off land covered in cracked soil is now being used to test out techniques for growing seedlings and protect it from further damage by grazing cattle. Winter crops such as peanuts or black-eyed peas are being grown based on an agroecological model, a sustainable farming strategy considering ecological processes.

But large-scale projects like this often don’t consider the needs of local people or places. Our new research shows that the Great Green Wall won’t work effectively unless it considers more localised contexts.

Fulani family moving with their cattle in Téssékéré, Senegal. Élie Pédarros.

At the other end of the continent, the Green Legacy Initiative, a project launched by the Ethiopian government, claims to have planted 566 million trees in one day. In Ivory Coast, which lies outside the original route, local and state authorities see the project as a means of stabilising the ecosystem. However, local populations are concerned that it will be implemented in an ad hoc, unstable and unsustainable manner. In short, the project gives rise to a diversity of opinions and, above all, a multitude of implementation strategies.

Two decades after its launch, the Great Green Wall project is not meeting the expectations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other independent experts, especially regarding forest cover increase in the area and global implementation of the project.

In 2021, the French president Emmanuel Macron launched the Great Green Wall accelerator to bring the project into line with a new political timeframe to speed it up.

With investment of US$19 billion (£14.82 billion), more action, such as land restoration and investment in farming, can be rolled out across Africa, so the focus is now on large-scale change rather than localised projects. The Great Green Wall has become an umbrella term, a brand encompassing many development projects managed by different international and intergovernmental organisations. This is at odds with our research findings confirming that the ambitious aims of the project aren’t being implemented locally in an effective manner.

This “takeover” of the project by developed countries prompts us to question what the project has now become and its ability to meet its original purpose.

Set to fail?

The Great Green Wall will fail unless it returns to its original aim of being a pan-African project made up of a multitude of aspirations, imaginations and local social-ecological contexts. Project funding alone is not enough to ensure the success of the project – it needs local appropriation. Success should not be measured solely in terms of how many trees are being planted, but on whether local people see a positive difference from the project in their areas and on their lives.

From Senegal to Ethiopia, our research shows that the Great Green Wall implies a diversity of world views. The project is therefore implemented specifically in each region, in each country, to form a project mosaic. The initiative loses its substance and its capacity for local appropriation when homogenised and globalised to fit into external political agendas.

An agroecological initiative like this one only works when it involves the people living on the ground. More than simply an eco-project, it is a diverse, pan-African and locally embedded social-ecological initiative with scope to make substantial change at scale if executed well.

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Each year, people visit museums and memorial sites as part of educational interventions organised around the remembrance of a genocide or an atrocity. Many schools visit a concentration camp as part of Holocaust education, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Others travel to memorial sites associated with other genocides, such as the massacre of Muslim men fleeing Srebrenica in Bosnia or the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Cambodia.

Two important goals for such education are to foster empathy towards the victims and to increase students’ personal identification with them as a group. In this context, empathy is the ability to feel with the victims and to be able to take their perspective .

But what does science say about the effect of visiting genocidal memorial sites on empathy and identification with a victim group? Our study, published in Holocaust Studies in July, sheds some light on the question.

The science of empathy

While we may justly think of empathy as a personality feature, it is also a capacity that can be activated through social experiences. When we identify with a group of victims we perceive a “we” connecting us with the members of the group.

We do know that both empathy and identification with another group have been shown to foster positive relations with others.

They are also important qualities that can protect people threatened by genocide. Empathy was an important factor among those who helped persecuted people to survive during the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, for example.

Evidence suggests that Israeli high-school students visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau may increase their empathy towards Palestinians. That’s if they initially are already somewhat positive towards Palestinians in principle and if they are prepared to see suffering in universal rather than national terms.

Auschwitz-Birkenau.
wikipedia, CC BY-SA

It has also been shown that groups of Polish students visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau increased their identification with Jews as a group before and after visiting the concentration camp.

Clear evidence

In our recent study, we investigated 143 high-school students from Malmö in Sweden, of which 46 took a short course on the Holocaust, including a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We collected data both before and after the trip. We measured two facets of empathy in the students, “empathic concern” (such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”) and “perspective taking” (such as “Before criticising somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place”).

We also measured to what extent they identified with Jews as a group by ratings of how close they felt.

The results for this group were then compared with responses from a control group of students who did not participate in the course or trip to Auschwitz.

We found that the Holocaust education and trip increased the students’ preparedness to identify with and take the perspective of Jews compared to those who didn’t go. However, both groups showed similar amount of empathic concern.

Looking more closely at the change registered among students after the trip, we also found that a feeling of increased closeness to Jews as a group was related to increased perspective taking.

Our work suggests a role of genocide education in fostering a broad empathic understanding of a victim group’s life and culture. This can provide important stimulation for students to put themselves in the shoes of an often “otherised” group, whose experience of hate and violence can be appreciated as if it is known from the inside.

This is clearly important at a time when both Holocaust denial and Islamophobia are rising.

Remaining mysteries

There is a great need for more research on moral education interventions that involves a site or museum visit. Evaluating how this education works, and which aspects that have the intended effects, is of key importance. Cutting edge scientific methods, such as virtual reality, are now just beginning to make a difference to education in this area.

We will next be working to pinpoint how trips to sites of atrocity affect students’ moral values, attitudes or behaviour. Läs mer…

For the first half of my music career, I never fully considered the technical aspects of the art form I practised. Up until my mid-30s, I’d been driven to pen lyrics by a compelling sense of advancement and peer recognition – to achieve some form of artistic acclaim in the UK rap genre.

When thinking back to this earlier time, I imagine myself as being completely immersed in a darkness of my own ignorance, scrabbling around for passages and phrases without any real understanding of how and why these elements of the craft meant so much to me.

As a mature student – during the final stages of a masters degree in creative writing – a seed of self-discovery began to germinate. I decided to combine my newly acquired passion for creative writing, critical analysis and literary techniques with my 20 years’ plus career as a rapper, music producer and live performer and embark on a PhD.

On beginning my research, it became apparent that a technical element of my craft I desperately coveted was called “allusion”. Allusion is an implied reference, perhaps to another work of literature, art, person or event that forms a kind of appeal to the reader or listener. It’s a means of reaching out and sharing an experience with them.

When using allusion, a writer draws upon common knowledge shared with their audience to find links between cultural understandings or traditions. Most importantly for me, some forms of allusion can be more specialised, even deliberately difficult to grasp. Almost immediately, a realisation hit me: I had practised, been inspired by, adapted and searched for, this technique in rap since my earliest memories of the art form.

Allusion, as with the more contested literary concept of intertextuality (a term coined in the late 1960s by French philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva to recognise the multiplicity of meaning within a text) has been used in rap and hip-hop culture since its beginnings. In fact, as musicologist Justin Williams points out in his book Rhymin’ and Stealin’ (2013), intertextuality serves as an integral part of the culture’s function. To “borrow” from a wide variety of artistic mediums is key to how hip-hop works, and is partly responsible for how it has thrived for half a century.

I discovered multiple forms of intertextual engagement in rap while researching my PhD, but one technique stuck out to me the most. Rappers would draw on the words of authors to clarify their points, or further emphasise emotional impact in their work.

The poster for my album S.T.A.R.V.E (right) makes an intertextual reference to the poster for the 1990 film, Jacob’s Ladder.
Author provided (no reuse)

For example, Nas and Kendrick Lamar have used the power of novelist Alice Walker’s writing to enhance their lyrics (both have “borrowed” from The Colour Purple). Lamar also employed the writing of Maya Angelou to add depth and complexity to his early conceptual material.

Even borrowing a mere two words can have huge intellectual implications for a rap song. Just listen to Earl Sweatshirt’s Shattered Dreams (2018), and his use of James Baldwin’s voice from his inspirational 1962 lecture The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity. It’s a prime example of how this technique manifests itself in the genre.

When thinking about how rappers engage with allusion and intertextuality, activist and rap artist Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, sums it up well:

Hip Hop is a medium where you can get a lot of information into a very small space. And make it hold fast to people’s memory. It’s just a very radical form of information transferal.

A ‘sonic-literary journey’

With a clearer understanding of how deeply allusion and intertextuality runs through hip-hop, I began to craft a new body of work. This material eventually translated (after almost a decade) into a trilogy of LPs, the first of the three being titled S.T.A.R.V.E..

I wanted to make S.T.A.R.V.E. part of a literary and musical tradition that has long attempted to decipher the feeling of isolation, and its links to mental illness or psychological downfall.

To do so, I alluded to (and intertextually engaged with) various texts that have historically served as investigations into the sense of disconnectedness, or loneliness within a crowd, that I believe we have all felt at some point in our lives. In my opinion, S.T.A.R.V.E. is more of a novella than an album. It is a narrative as old as the hills, retold in my own image. It just so happens that my preferred medium is music, and my preferred practice is rap.

Strongbow, the leading track on the author’s album, S.T.A.R.V.E.

S.T.A.R.V.E. is a highly intertextual project. Poetic quotes on the album span from Charles Bukowski to Robert Frost, while borrowed themes stretch from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890).

Previously conceived conceptual frameworks are also built upon, such as the nihilistic sentiment captured in Nas’s early work on Illmatic (1994), and Mark Fisher’s ideas on capitalism and “depressive anhedonia” in Ghosts of my Life (2014). This is all set against a backdrop of purgatorial imagery prominent in the work of figurative painter Francis Bacon and depicted by film director Adrian Lyne in his groundbreaking psychological horror film, Jacob’s Ladder (1990).

Of all artistic mediums, I believe music is most open for interpretation. This means that what is taken from the music can often seem a million miles from authorial intentions. But this might be the point.

When S.T.A.R.V.E. is heard, it will ultimately be down to the ear of the beholder as to which connections and meanings are drawn from the recording. At the end of the day, as Ethan Hawke states on Strongbow, a leading track taken from S.T.A.R.V.E. that quotes Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed: “It’s about you.”

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