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This chapter presents the research findings of a case study of an accountability project implemented with the Uganda Police Force between 2010 and 2013. The project set up a series of workshops involving the police and a variety of societal actors, and organized activities to create awareness of changes to the public order management regime. The impact of the accountability project was assessed by comparing feedback from police districts where the project was implemented with that from districts that did not take part. Analysis of crime statistics does not show a difference between the two groups of districts. A survey conducted among 600 police officers demonstrates that the project has influenced the way in which they respond to integrity issues in their day-to-day work. Interviews with 23 middle- and high-ranking police officers show an enhanced awareness of accountability issues related to the treatment of civilians and their rights. Although the project is not a sufficient condition for behavioural change, it may lead to changes in attitudes, which are a necessary condition for changes in the behaviour of the police toward the public.

This paper examines North–South linkages in the politics of contemporary food assistance and social welfare, and in particular the normalisation of poverty and humanitarian crisis caused by increased digitalisation, privatisation and individualisation of aid or welfare. Migrants and displaced populations are considered as extreme cases and we examine how these policies and practices are leading to the growth of a global precariat who are constantly on the edge of survival (or death). We use Sudan, India and the UK as case-study countries which have seen persistently high levels of acute malnutrition or rising levels of hunger (as in the case of the UK), as well as the introduction of new digital welfare systems. Digital practices often aim to improve access to food and form a key part of humanitarian and welfare assistance, thereby creating digital welfare states. In the past decade Sudan has seen a shift from emergency food aid to digital cash interventions, including the establishment of a new national cash-based Family Support Programme (FSP). India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) has been undergoing digital transformation since 2010. In the UK, welfare has been digital by default since 2012 and from 2016 assistance for asylum seekers is provided through biometrics and debit cards. The Covid pandemic has accelerated processes of digitalisation across all three countries. In this paper, we argue that digitalisation has not addressed hunger, but instead is likely to lead to exclusions and invisibility of the already politically marginalised groups. Additionally, a number of troubling political and economic questions linked to identity, surveillance and profit have been subsumed in the lar

Over the past two decades, indebtedness has been at the centre of the world's attention, but social conflicts against private debts have only rarely been studied. Drawing on a global database of 65 cases ranging from 1765 to 2020, we offer a preliminary glimpse at such mobilisations. We find that anti-debt conflicts seem to have increased exponentially since the early 1980s and that they have involved different social classes with various political objectives, ranging from ‘populist’ to ‘revolutionary’, hence their multifaceted ‘awkward’ nature. Credit/debt relations are an underestimated root cause of many economic conflicts because of their foundational role in the (mis)workings of capitalism, their lasting consequences in terms of discipline and dispossession, and their potential to change one's class location, downwards or upwards. While the repression of anti-debt protests and the particular subjectivity associated with debt have often deterred mobilisations, we argue that the situation seems to be changing, as ever more people are discontented with the ‘debtfare state’ and the financialisation of everyday life, including that of farming.

This paper examines how and why a zoonotic, ‘novel’ coronavirus disease, Covid-19, became a pandemic of such magnitude as to bring the world to a standstill for several months. Though the WHO inaccurately projected Covid-19 as the first pandemic by a coronavirus, it had been preceded by two others also caused by a similar coronavirus: SARS (severe acute respiratory

It was in the 1990s, that the possibility of increased transmission of HIV with the use of injectable contraceptive Depo-Provera®, was first flagged in medical literature. This has posed a challenge for its use in countries, particularly in the African region, where the prevalence and transmission rate of HIV is high. In 2015, a randomised ‘clinical’ trial, the Evidence for Contraceptive Options and HIV Outcomes (ECHO) was launched in four African countries to resolve the question whether the increased risk was causal. Contrary to expectations, the ECHO trial successfully recruited and randomised the specified number of girls/women participants. This paper argues that this was made possible by exercising undue influence, by using incentives, coercive language, and by concealing the real nature of the clinical trial during recruitment. The ECHO trial is unique in subjecting a group of healthy girls/women knowingly to a contraceptive drug with an intention not of finding out whether it is efficacious as a contraceptive, but to find out how risky or life-threatening its use could be. Thus, the ECHO trial has violated one of the central tenets of the Helsinki Declaration by privileging pursuit of knowledge over the interests of the girl/women trial participants from Africa.

Transitioning towards a plant-based diet is considered both ethical and environmentally friendly from a Western perspective of high per capita consumption of flesh foods. However, in contemporary India, beef-eating has emerged as a political act of subversion in the context of its current ban by the Indian state which is transforming unapologetically into a theocracy under the aegis of Hindu fundamentalist groups. To understand the contemporary discourse on beef-eating, it is important to locate it in the discourse prevalent during the Independence movement, when there was an attempt to unify the Hindus to forge a nationalist identity, and to bring the ‘outcaste’ ‘untouchables’ – who were a sub-group acknowledged to consume beef – within the Hindu fold of ‘caste purity’. Data from an ethnographic study of over fifteen months in a village in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, demonstrate the place of flesh foods, including beef, in the everyday lives of people, and question the concept of a ‘normative’ Indian diet. The paper argues that contrary to the notion that vegetarianism is morally superior, in the context of Hinduism, where vegetarianism is a marker of upper caste identity, the food hierarchy is a function of the caste structure. Hence, the protests, particularly from the former ‘untouchable’ caste groups, reclaiming the right to eat transgressive foods as a marker of their identity, poses a serious challenge to upper caste hegemony. The violence which ‘vegetarian’ India has unleashed on such transgressions has laid open the structural violence embodied in the caste system and questions its claim to moral superiority.

The Public Report on Health (PRoH) was initiated in 2005 to understand public health issues for people from diverse backgrounds living in different region specific contexts. States were selected purposively to capture a diversity of situations from better-performing states and not-so-well performing states. Based on these considerations, six states - the better-performing states of Tamil Nadu (TN), Maharashtra (MH) and Himachal Pradesh (HP) and the not-so-well performing states of Madhya Pradesh (MP), Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Orissa (OR) - were selected. This is a report of a study using food diaries to assess food intakes in sample households from six states of India. Method: Food diaries were maintained and all the raw food items that went into making the food in the household was measured using a measuring cup that converted volumes into dry weights for each item. The proportion consumed by individual adults was recorded. A nutrient calculator that computed the total nutrient in the food items consumed, using the 'Nutritive Value of Indian Foods by Gopalan et al., was developed to analyze the data and this is now been made available as freeware (http://bit.ly/ncalculator). The total nutrients consumed by the adults, men and women was calculated. Results: Identifying details having been removed, the raw data is available, open access on the internet http://bit.ly/foodlogxls.The energy consumption in our study was 2379 kcal per capita per day. According to the Summary Report World Agriculture the per capita food consumption in 1997-99 was 2803 which is higher than that in the best state in India. The consumption for developing countries a decade ago was 2681 and in Sub-Saharan Africa it was 2195. Our data is compatible in 2005 with the South Asia consumption of 2403 Kcal per capita per day in 1997-99. For comparison, in industrialized countries it was 3380. In Tamil Nadu it was a mere 1817 kcal. Discussion: The nutrient consumption in this study suggests that food se

This working paper examines the construction of a ‘native’ diet in India by the British from the early 1900s to mid 1900s when the country gained Independence. It was not until the 1920s that malnutrition was ‘discovered’ and constructed as an imperial problem worthy of systematic scientific inquiry in the colonies. This period also coincides with the increasing attention paid by the international public health community to nutrition. In the west, the existence of food deprivation in the context of plenty leads to the scaling up of standards of nutritional requirements and for defining the welfare role of the state as a way of solving the problem of the agricultural industry. Nutrition enters public policy and public policy influences nutrition. The term malnutrition is coined to describe inadequacy in diets of impoverished colonial people and quality rather than quantity of food is emphasized in nutritional research and advice. At the same time, a differential standard of nutritional requirement for the ‘native’ population is recommended as a practical way of attaining realisable goals. Depending upon the prevailing economic reality, science is brought in to justify standards and norms and to explain the exiting nutritional state of the deprived (workers in the west and natives in the colonies). Within the nationalist movement in India, the dual standard does not go unremarked. However, the continuities within the scientific community ensure that the dominant notions of nutrition are carried over even after the country is decolonised.