Latest posts
- Responsibility in Focus / April 2024
Responsibility in Focus is a monthly roundup of pieces, events and stories raising questions about responsibility, from climate change mitigation, global health and armed conflict to research ethics and corporate responsibility 📢 🌐
New from the Collective 📌
- For International Women’s Day we spoke to Kristin Thue, Policy and Advocacy Coordinator for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Conflict and Communications and Engagement Coordinator at the Employers Initiative on Domestic Abuse. Kristin talked about the overlaps in her two roles, women’s rights and international security, and gave advice on breaking into the International Politics and Human Rights fields. 🎧 Episode here ⬅️
- ✉️ Do YOU work on a topic related to responsibility and want to talk to us about it? Contact our Interview and Podcast Series Editor Eleanor Smith at responsibilitycollective@gmail.com
On the reading list 📚
- James Pattison’s article State Borrowing and Global Responsibilities explores the concept of state borrowing to fulfil global responsibilities: from preventing mass atrocities, tackling global poverty, to mitigating and adapting to climate change. The article raises questions with a responsibility angle: How does borrowing contribute to an increasing trend in militarization today (Ukraine, Gaza, disruptions in the Red Sea, etc)? How does borrowing affect future generations’ ability to tackle crises? How do we avoid offsetting the costs of current crises to future generations? 📖
- In Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust, Andrew Port discusses the German state’s approach to genocides from 1948 to the turn of the century. Through three case studies – Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda – Port discusses how genocide entered common German consciousness in the 1970s through miniseries about the Holocaust. The book touches on how German reconciliation with history has affected the state’s approach to genocide pre- and post-unification, raising key questions: As the number of Holocaust survivors declines, will Germany’s approach to genocide change? How have Russian accusations of ‘de-Nazification’ in Ukraine affected Germany’s approach to Ukraine? 📖
Notes from the field 📝
- The research policy conference The Changing Arctic – security, environment and society at Copenhagen University in March generated discussions on justice in Arctic research and beyond, what it entails and its implications. Dr Miriam Cullen, Associate Professor at the Centre for European, Comparative, and Constitutional Legal Studies, unpacked the paradoxes in the research funding landscape: demand and intent to engage with and involve local and indigenous communities and knowledge in research processes, but a research funding system with systemic inequities. This is relevant beyond Arctic research and raises broader questions about research practice and funding: How are research funds allocated, to which disciplines and thematic areas? What can and should individual researchers do to ensure their research practice is ethically sound and fair? What systemic changes are required?
In our network 🎯
- Research article The permanency of mass atrocities: The fallacy of ‘never again’ by Adrian Gallagher, Richard Illingworth, Euan Raffle and Ben Willis is available online. Euan Raffle previously appeared on our podcast: Talking Responsibility 🎧 Read Adrian Gallagher’s guest introduction to a previous issue of the Responsibility to Protect Student Journal 📖
Emilie Caspar: The Neuroscience of Atrocity Crimes – Talking Responsibility
- Emilie Caspar: The Neuroscience of Atrocity Crimes
- Rishab Chatty: Atrocity Prevention, Extremism and Securing Internships in Foreign Policy
- Morgan Everman on Holocaust Education and Content Creation
- Tara Zammit: Ontological Security and the experience of LGBTQ+ individuals in the British armed forces
- Kristin Thue for International Women's Day
Dear Reader,
Ongoing social, economic, political, environmental, health, humanitarian, and security crises have forced a rethinking of what responsibility means in today’s world. How we conceive of, assign, and act on responsibility in the face of these challenges has important implications for the local, regional and global scale.
What does responsibility mean in our current global context? Why does it matter? What questions do intersecting local, regional and global challenges raise for responsibility? How might responsibility generate action?
The Responsibility Collective is a platform for thinking about responsibility critically and collectively. Its aim is to draw on a wide range of disciplines to explore how issues from human rights to climate change to healthcare equity, to name a few, connect to the notion of responsibility.
The Collective’s predecessor, the Responsibility to Protect Student Journal, has been a global, student-led, free online journal since 2015. Undergraduate and postgraduate students have discussed the R2P, responses to mass atrocities and human rights violations, international humanitarian law, international criminal justice and more. Whilst mass atrocities and human rights violations are a crucial and ongoing topic of discussion, the Responsibility Collective aims to broaden its scope to allow for a deeper debate on the multi-faceted critical issues shaping our world.
The Collective platform hosts three projects. Our Special Issues and Blog provide analytical and critical perspectives on how contemporary issues relate to responsibility. The Collective’s Interview Series features individual career and educational journeys across multiple disciplines, and issues linked to responsibility. Each project has its own call for papers and submission opportunities to explore in the menu above.
In the spirit of building a Collective engaged in critical and collective thinking, we look forward to hearing from you!
The Responsibility Collective Editorial Team
Emma Bapt, Kristin Smette Gulbrandsen, James Joseph and Eleanor Smith
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