Last week at CIRSD - and Anja Jevic, a future Serbian leader?

During the last week of my internship I was lucky enough to coincide with the CIRSD Advanced Course on International Relations, which brought 30 young people from the region together for a very intensive week of lectures by an astoundingly broad range of fantastic and high-profile speakers.  My personal favourites were Alastair Crooke, who spoke in fascinating detail about the ideological heritage of ISIS, and Jared Genser, who has spent a large part of his career working tirelessly for prisoners of conscience, including Aung San Suu Kyi.

The CIRSD Team

The Class enjoys a lecture

But the part of the week that I enjoyed the most was being able to meet like-minded young people from Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.  They all, without exception, had done interesting things, and helped me to explore new perspectives on the issues we explored, but right from the beginning one of them stood out for me as particularly impressive.  AnjaJevic’s questions were always very well formulated, and got right to the heart of the issue we were discussing.  And, more importantly, her openness and sense of humour endeared her to everyone.

I therefore asked if I could interview her for this blog.  Her story is, in some ways, similar to many young people born in the dying days of the former Yugoslavia, but her intellect and ambition set her apart from most.

The fabulous Anja!

Anja, now 25, was born in Bosnia, but came to Serbia before the start of the war.  This sort of story was very common—many people moved between the 6 ‘countries’ that made up Yugoslavia, and most had family or close friends spread across the region.  Her father was in the Yugoslav Army, and her early years were very peripatetic.  From the age of 6, however, she was very ambitious.  Her first love was tennis, and she was asked if she wanted to make it her life (as another Serb has recently done so successfully!), but—having seriously considered it—she decided that the expenses would be too much for her family.  She therefore threw herself into school, where she excelled from the beginning.  A star at maths and natural sciences, she was expected to do medicine.  However, as she grew older, she found that communicating was both something that she was very good at, and something that she particularly enjoyed.  She therefore chose the faculty of political science.  I asked her why.

Anja:  I reasoned that politics is something that requires a broad skillset, and a holistic approach.  I favour an international approach—cosmopolitanism and multilateralism are hugely important to be, both within politics and in the way that I live my life.  I’m not interested in monocultural situations, but love to work within a team, and to mediate between different viewpoints and different interest.

Katie:  What do you imagine yourself doing in 10 years time?

Anja:  While at university I read broadly about the roots of the conflict here, and other conflicts worldwide.  I also became very interested in the UN and in international mediation.  I ended up graduating as one of the top students in my class.  [She laughs].  I suppose you could say that I’m something of a perfectionist.  In the next few years my priorities are to travel, to perfect my English, and to gain exposure to as many organizations and viewpoints as a can.  I want to build a career in international relations, though I have no aspirations to join a political party within Serbia; I want to stay a little outside the party system and remain objective.  I’d like to engage with politics at the international level.

Katie:  Do you worry that things will be harder for you because you’re a woman?

Anja:  I’ve never felt disadvantaged because of my gender, but I have heard a number of stories from others.  I feel that Serbia has already done a lot to tackle this, although obviously we can do better.  Women should never feel that they are in a minority, or that their voices are in any way less important than men.  There needs to be better policies on maternity leave, so that we create a society where there are truly equal opportunities.  We need to create a world in which all careers are a level playing field for everyone.  Politics is a particular problem at the moment – there aren’t very many powerful women to act as good role models.

Katie:  Do you therefore see your future as being outside Serbia?

Anja:  Absolutely not!  I love my country and I think that there will increasingly be great opportunities here.  Twenty years after the war we still have major issues in this neighbourhood that can be obstacles for real growth.  Even though great progress has been made, we always need to keep in mind that only together can we find effective means and appropriate policies to improve the quality of life of every individual and to make a better future for everyone in this region. Serbia is also a country that is both very beautiful and very historic—growing up through the war and the tragedy of the 1999 bombing has made me very aware of that.  There are many things in our history that I am proud of, including WWI and WWII, when many Serbians gave their lives to secure victory over evil, intolerance and fascism.  Although I see myself as a global citizen, Serbia will always be my favourite country.  It’s a country that has amazing raw materials, including water, forests and hydro potential, and a very talented and educated population, but we have simply never found the opportunity to leverage them.  We’re also in a unique geopolitical position at the intersection of East and West, which offers both huge opportunities and huge challenges.  Serbia has never yet been able to take advantage of this in the way that Yugoslavia was, partly due to its size.  We need a really good neighborhood policy.  And we also need to invest in the young and in education.  We need the best possible people in top position.

And you know what, if Serbia can find even just a few more young people like Anja I think they’ll be just fine.

Anja and I

A Meeting with Astra - Anti-trafficking Action in Serbia

Last week I had a meeting with Astra, which I was really excited about.  And having had it, I'm even more excited!  I'd been having some difficulties in finding reliable information on either the facts about human trafficking in Serbia, or what is being done to counteract it.  I couldn't have struck more lucky than by reaching out to Astra.

Astra is a local grassroots NGO dedicated to the eradication of all forms of trafficking in human beings.  Established just at the end of the Milosevic era in 2000 by Tamara Vukasovic, who still heads up the organisation, and a colleague, it was founded in a situation where there was no mechanism of support for the victims.

I sat down with Tamara and three of her colleagues on Friday, and she ran me through the history of both recent human trafficking and the legal framework in Serbia.  Here's a short summary:

Two members of the fabulous team at Astra

The Evolution of Human Trafficking in Serbia since 2000

The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a protracted and bloody conflict.  A lesser known side-effect was the creation of a large number of bars and brothels in Serbia, which were frequented by many of those involve in the fighting.  This was instrumental in the rise of sex trafficking.  Serbia was, at this point, predominantly a country of transit and destination, with women most commonly being brought in from Moldova (as well as Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine) and, when travelling onwards from Serbia, heading to Western Europe, especially Northern Italy, France, Germany and Sweden.  The stereotype that most girls trafficked to Western Europe at the start of the century were Russian is in fact false; many more came from ex-Soviet republics.  There appears to have been little internal trafficking within Serbia, though at the time the law did not recognise such practices as trafficking.

The law also did not recognise trafficking for reasons of forced labour.  During the early 2000s sexual exploitation was much more common, but there was also some labour exploitation.  This was most common for construction workers in Russia, who generally had terrible working conditions and no pay.

In 2001 Dindic became Prime Minister, and Serbia became much more open to NGOs. Increased international attention to the problem of sex trafficking, so considerable support was received from other European countries.  However, there was a deep and pervasive distrust of NGOs within Serbia, some of which still survives today.

The Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe should be particular credited with helping to get things moving within Serbia.  Helga Konrad was the major anti-trafficking coordinator, and initiated almost all Western Europe activities against trafficking, as well as pressurizing the Balkan governments, particularly in Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Croatia.

By 2004-5, however, the phenomenon of human trafficking was clearly shifting.  There were fewer foreign victims and more domestic internally exploited individuals, as well as a larger proportion of children.  Up to 45% of victims were children, of which 90% were girls.  There was also a rise in labour exploitation.  The battle to have that acknowledged as trafficking continues to this day.

Tamara disabused me of a number of misperceptions about trafficking.  Forced abduction is, in fact, not common.  The abduction rate may be as low as 5%.  Job offers, or marriage and relationship offers are much more common.  Individuals leave their families to pursue what they are led to believe will be a better life.  The reality is often very different.

In some ways the development of the legal system in Serbia has been impressive.  The National Referral Mechanism, which aims to create a central body responsive for identification of victims, as well as to work on preventative measures through education (Astra has been working with them on this, and has an accredited program within the educational system) has been used as an international model (see here).

Until 2003 there was no legal framework in Serbia, but 2003 saw a raft of measures being past, and laws were then updated in 2006 and 2009.  Internal trafficking is now fully recognised as human trafficking, and the legal framework is generally perceived as strong.  Implementation has been more of a problem, however, as we shall see more later.  The 2009 law established a National Action Plan for dealing with trafficking, which expired in 2011.  Although there are plans to renew it, the process of doing so has been frustratingly slow.  A draft plan can be seen here.

Challenges related to working on Human Trafficking

I asked Tamara what the biggest challenges for the organisation were.  She's clearly a hugely capable, energetic, and inspiring woman, but the environment in which they operate is - equally obviously - very challenging.

Trafficking is a very dynamic phenomenon.Priorities and paths for any organization can shift quickly, so they need to be reactive and adaptable.  The problem, of course, is that many donors are not flexible.  They have strategic plans set years in advance, and global agendas that don’t give much wiggle room to be tailored to local situations.

One example is internet recruiting; this has become more and more of a common phenomenon, and Astra have been aiming to start initiatives in this area for some time, but they needed 4 years to find a donor agency prepared to support them.  Astra, as an on the ground agency, can really be tuned in to local issues in a way that global agencies cannot.  The world needs more of that.  Too often donors come with ideas and therefore don’t engage in sufficient grassroots discussions.  There are therefore lots of overlapping projects and badly-targeted programs.

An additional problem is that many UN agencies related to women do not work in the Balkans.  This means that most initiatives are very small scale.

Data continues to be very problematic.  The number of Serbians trafficked overseas is probably underestimated by a considerable margin; most victims go to countries with large Serbian migrant populations, such as Austria and Germany, and can be very difficult to identify.

In terms of the nuts and bolts of fighting human trafficking, this is clearly an intensely complex problem.  Some of the issues that Tamara mentioned (though it was clear that she could have chosen a number of others) were:

• The porous nature of today's European borders.  Serbia has a visa agreement with the Schengen area, which means that Serbians can travel visa free.  This means, in turn, that would-be traffickers need only for a girl to have a passport.  Train tickets to Vienna can then be bought for as little as 20 Euros.  In this situation it is very difficult to locate trafficking victims.
• Political considerations can lead to the state not taking serious action against other states (or even opening negotiations) where there are identified cases of trafficking.  Thousands of Serbian workers were exploited in Azerbaijan, for example, but the Serbian government is not even willing to open that case.
• Funds allocated for human trafficking sometimes end up elsewhere (here she was talking internationally I think, rather than specifically about Serbia).  Money can often be funnelled into anti-immigration organizations (under the guise of cutting trafficking), or can end up being used to prosecute poverty, or vulnerable groups such as the Roma.
• Dealing with victims of trafficking must be combined with preventative work.  A large portion of women come from violent families, and have experienced sexual abuse as children.  It is therefore the case that they are sometimes trying to find a means of escape, and end up in the hands of traffickers.  Sexual violence is a real problem in Serbia; 27 women were killed in the first half of 2015.  Femicide is common.  This is a big part of the problem with trafficking, as is the unemployment crisis, as well as the feminization of poverty (with women having suffered disproportionately from the closure of factories since the collapse of Yugoslavia, etc).  A large part of fighting human trafficking will tackling these issues.
  
  

The current priorities for Astra moving forward

Astra is engaged in a really impressive number of different projects.  Two core operations, however, are two phones lines they run: an SOS hotline for trafficking victims and those connected to them, and the European Missing Children Number.  In the latter case Astra is the Serbian link in an international system, and acts as a coordinator between the different parties (policy locally and internationally, parents, etc).  These hotlines clearly provide a very valuable service, and they also function as important data sources.  A lot of the data that Astra uses comes from their hotline (de-identified of course!), which they compare with data from the police, from social welfare centers, etc to confirm trends. 

There are two issues that Astra are really pushing at the moment.  First, they are really focussed on getting more compensation for victims of trafficking.  The 2003 legislation made provisions for compensation for the victims from the traffickers, but there has so far only been 1 case in which this has happen, and even that case was in the courts for 7 years before compensation was finally awarded.  Astra is currently doing a lot of court case analysis on this topic, and campaigning for a compensation fund from the government.

Secondly, in relation to their missing child hotline, they are looking to achieve an Amber Alert system in Serbia, which would enable prompt action when children are missing.  The Wikipedia page on Amber alerts is quite useful for an introduction to these hugely useful measures.

I left Astra hugely inspired by the work these women are doing, and even more firmly convinced that more needs to be done at all levels to tackle this issue.  Finding better ways to coordinate - and to bring examples of best practice like Astra to the attention of others who might be able to emulate core parts of the model - will be absolutely key.

Thank you Astra for meeting with me (and for all the great books you gave me!), and I hope we'll work together in the future.

Many apologies if there are any factual errors in the above - they are my own.

Gender and Migration - Finally starting to get the attention it deserves!

Sorry for the prolonged silence!  I've been busy writing some pieces for CIRSD on the New Silk Road (or the 'One Belt, One Road' Initiative) and the difficulty involve in getting labor mobility onto high-level policy agendas.  I'm now deep into research for the next issue, and have been tasked with getting to trips with social trends and the movement of people on both sides of the Mediterranean.  I've learnt a lot, but the thing that has really captured my interested (perhaps not surprisingly!) is the increased focus on gender in the burgeoning literature on migration.  I want to take a very brief look at some of the literature here, in the hope that I can inspire you to dig a little deeper and discover some of the really fascinating work that's going on at the moment.

Before turning to look at that, however, I wanted to draw your attention to a particularly good piece on the current position of gender within the development agenda.  It's written by Charles Kenny and Sarah Dykstra of the Center for Global Development (CGD) and is a really neat summary of where there has been progress, where there is room for more, and how more can be achieved with the funds that the US has already earmarked for gender-related work.  You can access it here.  (Full disclosure:  Sarah is a friend of mine, and an absolute wonder woman.  We met in Sierra Leone, where she was leading the analysis of a very exciting health initiative targeting rural clinics.  But our friendship isn't why I'm recommending the article, which absolutely stands on its own merits.)

Turning to gender and migration, the first thing I want to stress is what an exciting area of research this currently is!  As the below graph shows, there has been a very rapid rise in the proportion of development articles that have been concerned with migration, and within this gender has also - from a low base - become an increasingly active area of exploration.  This should be, in itself, hugely encouraging.  And it is not just the number of papers that has increased, but that the scope of issues addressed has fundamentally expanded.


Figure 1 - Fraction of Development Articles relating to Migration and Gender

Source:  Clemens, Ozen and Rapoport (2014):  Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances.  Accessible here.  

Why is gender research important within the migration literature?

Gender affects every aspect of the way in individual makes migration decisions, migrates, and assimilates into new areas.  Globally, the majority of migrants are men, and this led, for many years, to a single-minded focus on the types of migration patterns that are common amongst men, and the problems facing migrants of this sort.

This in turn led to the neglect of not only the female perspective, but also whole classes of migration that are dominated by women (such as domestic work) and issues that relate predominantly to women (such as the increased vulnerability to sexual exploitation or sex trafficking).  Migration has emerged as one of the most important means by which individuals can improve their income and economic prospects.  Understanding the barriers for women, and formulating appropriate policies to address them, is therefore a vital part of the effort to break down gender inequality.

The current literature shows a really encouraging willingness to tackle problems, but there is considerable more still to be done, and many fascinating areas still to be explored.

A couple of papers that particularly caught my imagination

(Again, a hat tip to Clemens et al here, who put me onto a number of these.)

Cortes (2014):  The phenomenon of young women migrating alone is a comparatively new one.  Many women from countries such as the Philippines are migrating to be house helps, or to look after children. This paper looks at what happens to the children who are left behind.  I particularly liked the identification strategy in this paper, as children with migrating fathers are used as the comparison group.  Her findings suggest that children with absent mothers do not do as well in school, even when the mother is sending home significant remittances.  I think this finding is particularly interesting as results such as this would be completely missed by standard migration research, which calculates costs and benefits only in standard material terms.  (I can't resist adding a couple of pictures here from a research trip that I took to Kenya and Ghana in 2013.  I don't know if these children had migrating mothers, but who doesn't like photos of cute kids?  I particularly love the brightly-colored uniforms.)

Kudo (2014):  This paper takes advantage of law changes in a number of villages in Tanzania, which enabled widows to inherit land.  This not only meant that widows were much more likely to marry again, but that they were less likely to migrate out of the villages where they had spend their married years.  Younger women were also more likely to migrate into villages with favorable land tenure systems, and overall the marriage rate of young women actually went up.  I like this paper a lot.  The status of widows in many countries is abysmal, with many losing the homes they have lived in for many decades or having to return to their birth families without a clearly defined place in that household. This is a particular problem in India, where widows often become homeless and drift to large cities, where they make up a desperately poor and vulnerable segment of society.  Law ownership laws are obviously not simple to change, but this study suggests that they may present a promising policy avenue in dealing with this issue.

Bertoli and Marchetta (2013):  This paper is unusual, in that it looks at how the migration of married men affects the wives they leave at home.  In particular, it looks at how the fertility decisions of Egyptian women whose husbands temporarily migrate to the Gulf are different from otherwise similar women whose husbands do not migrate.  This paper shows that families with a migrating male head actually have a larger number of children, perhaps reflecting how cultural norms (ie the large families of the Persian Gulf) are transmitted during migration.  The paper is careful to avoid branding this either good or bad - and I agree that the well-being implications are not clear cut - but I think this suggests an interesting line of further research: To what extent does temporary migration affect the opinions and aspirations of migrants?  How lasting are these effects?  I'm particularly excited by this research agenda, as I'm coming to believe that an increase in temporary worker schemes might be one way out of the migration deadlock in the Mediterranean, but it is absolutely vital that any proposed increase in such programs is accompanied by a thorough exploration of the social and cultural impacts of such schemes, both for migrants themselves and for those left back home.

Tiongson and Clemens (2014):  Again, this takes advantage of a policy change to explore the effects of migration on households.  A scheme in the Philippines sent migrants (both male and female) to highly-paid jobs in Korea.  These migrants were chosen in a quasi-random way, which means that migrants can be compared to non-migrants.  They find that one partner migrating has no effect on the labor force participation of the other partner (even though household income has increased considerably), but that there were significant shifts in the household decision-making process, with considerably more power accruing to the migrant/high wage earner.  This has all sorts of policy implications, given a long-standing finding in the development economics literature that men and women tend to make different decisions about household spending, with women tending to allocate more money towards the education of children. By this assessment, migration can be empowering, though there are, of course, many other factors to consider.

I really hope this has made you a little more excited about the current research around migration and gender!  There really is some great stuff going on, and I've really enjoyed having a genuine reason to dive into this literature.  I'm also excited for the next issue of Horizons, even though I'm only around for the research stage - it will be touching on these, and other, very important topics.

The joys of Belgrade

My work has been gloriously engaging, but Belgrade has been equally so.  It's a really, truly wonderful city.  During my first day here I wandered (as I am generally prone to do) into a bookshop, and emerged a happy hour late with a book called "A Guide to the Serbian Mindset", by Momo Kapor, an artist and painter who had lived almost his whole life in Belgrade.  It is a deeply charming collection of his best columns and musings about the city he loved so much, and it has significantly enhanced my appreciation - and enjoyment - of this place.  The Balkans in general - and Serbia in particular - often get a lot of bad press in the West, for all sorts of good and bad reasons, so I thought I'd do my own little bit here to show the other side.  I do not, of course, claim to be any sort of expert, having spent just a month here, so please read the below with that in mind, and forgive me my inevitable errors, generalizations and inaccuracies.

If one wishes to understand Belgrade (either culturally or architecturally) the first thing one must know is that it holds the dubious honor of having been destroyed and rebuilt more than any other surviving city.  The jury is slightly out on the final number, but 42 and 47 are oft-quoted figures.  Yes, that's right, this city has been destroyed and rebuilt over 40 times.  Which, in my opinion, says enormously powerful things about both the resilience of its inhabitants and their attachment to this little plot of land.  And one can see this somewhat exhausting history every time when walks down a street in the old town, as Austro-Hungarian style buildings vie for space with squat Ottomon-influenced ones, communist monstrosities and grandiose early twentieth century mansions.  The whole city is a patchwork of the different influences that have passed across this territory over the last thousand years.

The geographical location of Belgrade has been a key shaping factor of this city in another way, however.  Belgrade sits on the confluence of 2 great rivers - the Danube and the Sava.  And just above the spot at which the two rivers intermingle there is a hill, which the denizens of Belgrade have, for centuries, understandably seen as a vital defensive location.  They therefore built - at various times and in various styles - Kalemegdan Fort.  Of all its incarnations I cannot imagine that any have been more pleasant than the current one, where all the nooks and crannies previously used for storage have been turned into outdoor sports facilities, and the two strategic towers are now lively bars featuring live music.

Every evening hundreds of people - mostly locals, as far as I can tell, promenade along the front looking down at the beautiful view, and gently shooing their children away from the precipitous edges.  

It's particularly beautiful at sunset, when the sky and river turn as many shades or orange and red as the mountains of nectarines, peaches and apricots that weigh down the many market stalls across the city.  Every time I walk there - and I go often - I discover another lovely corner, and another surprising view.  My camera isn't particularly good in low light, but I hope these give you some idea...

I find Belgrade to be a startlingly pleasant place to live.  I've lived in 'Great Cities', such as London, in some of world's poorest countries, such as Sierra Leone and Kenya, and in 'rising powers', such as South Africa.  But I can honestly say that I have never lived anywhere that seems to have been so successful in combining comfortable, cosmopolitan living with a relaxed sense of community.  All without losing its unique character.  The weather is delightful (if a little hot), the food is varied, fresh and reasonably priced.  And overall the atmosphere of the city feels a little like I imagine Berlin might have felt a decade ago; the streets are filled with art (of varying qualities...), new bars and restaurants pop up in every available space, and at the weekend the bass from the party boats that dot the river echoes faintly over the city.

And then, of course, there are the Serbs.  Who my (French) boyfriend repeatedly exclaims are remarkably similar to his own countrymen (and women): perhaps a little crusty initially, but boundlessly warm and generous as soon as one has scraped the surface.  

I am particularly intrigued by Serbian women.  Momo Kapor had a wonderful essay about the thriftiness of the Serbian matriach, and painted a wonderful picture of middle-aged ladies in headscarves furiously pickling, drying and salting throughout the summer to a bounty of produce in the leaner months.  These women are still very much visible in Belgrade, picking over the bruised fruit at market stalls and haggling furiously with the butcher.  A bought some green beans from a lady such as this on Saturday, and despite each having only 3 words of the other's language we managed an engaging 15 minute conversation.  She signalled that Serbian men are very lazy, that she must work 2 jobs to look after her family, and that I must eat more or no-one would marry me.  This last comment was actually entirely mis-directed, as compared to the average young Serbian women is as lean, and elegant as a swan, and twice as beautiful.  I may ferociously disagree with the underlying premise, but I do understand where Momo Kapor was coming from when he stated that "Bringing your wife to Belgrade is like taking rice to China".  I have never been to a city so full of beautiful, stylish women.  And they are outperforming men on a number of metrics; the score higher on average in maths and sciences at school, and are significantly more likely to graduate from university.  They are, indeed, a force to be reckoned with.

Especially since their mothers and grandmothers will ensure that they go out into the world with enough cheese and pickled fruit to sink a battleship.

The Nuts and Bolts of Publishing a Magazine

Now that one issue of Horizons is almost put to bed (though the link won't be up online for a little bit - I'll post again when it is) I wanted to write a little bit about the process we've been going through.

Well... I'd characterize the process as brief periods of frenzied activity when trying to get contributions - and when contributions first arrive - followed by long periods of reading, and re-reading, and re-reading.  The contribution that first land on our doorstep (/inbox) are immensely varied, both in terms of content and level of polish.  Vuk Jeremic has an amazing network, so each and every one of our contributors has something important and innovative to say - we have Jean-Claude Juncker, Bert Koenders, Jacques Attali, Carl Bildt and Dominic Barton, amongst others, in the current issue - but for most English is not their first language.  This means that the first read through often takes a while as one tries to think of ways to make foreign-idioms-literally-translated-into-English sound more natural.  I really enjoy this part; it's deeply satisfying to take interesting, intricate arguments and try to present them in the best possible light.  We absolutely don't change any of the substance; it's just a matter of making sure that the reader can see immediately the power of an argument.  (I should say, of course, that a large proportion of our contributors submit absolutely flawless pieces, which are a joy to read, but render my role at this stage somewhat less meaningful.)

In theory I'm also looking for typos etc during the content read through, but in reality I pick up only a small fraction.  I'm getting better at this - one of the many skills I'm learning - but others in the office are still streets ahead of me.  My brain seems to only really be able to concentrate on content or grammar.

Which means that on my second go through I still tend to make lots of changes.  And on my third.  And fourth.  And even fifth.  It's amazing how good the human brain is at taking the sense of a sentence without actually looking at all the letters.  Great most of the time, but not so good if you're supposed to be tracking down little errors.  Being a child of the internet era I do the vast majority of my reading and writing on a computer screen, but I've learnt that actually it's often easier to miss things that way.  I'm much more accurate when physically marking a printed-out copy.  Sorry trees.

And then the piece, which is theoretically pretty much finished, get's formatted.  We use InDesign. There are then a couple more read throughs - all of which tend to pick up some previously neglected mistake; it's amazing how the change in layout brings some things to the fore.

As mentioned, my eye of typos is still very much in need of development, but there are a couple of things that I flatter myself that I am good at.  Firstly, I'm good at stopping formatting mistakes.  I seem to have an uncanny ability to judge if something is a fraction too high, or if there is a fraction too much space around a picture.  Or indeed if there are two spaces before a full stop (shock horror!  This is something that I actually pretty much always do when writing for myself, but apparently it's absolutely not allowed).  Secondly, I'm good at word ordering and synonyms.  I'm already got a reputation around the office for being able to quickly come up with just the right word, so my working day is peppered by people coming in to ask for a more impressive word for unity, or a good antonym for opprobrium.  (I really shouldn't flatter myself too much though - I'm one of only two people in the office who are native English language speakers).

This is pretty much where we are currently at with the current issue.  All contributions are in InDesign, and have been checked at least 10 times.  There are some that I can almost recite word for word so I must say I'll be quite pleased when the printing machines finally start whirring and it's too late to add any further changes!  And I'm really excited to hold the finished product - I already feel quite protective and maternal about it...

It's been a really great learning experience, and I can already feel how my editing skills have evolved, which is very satisfying.  I'm looking forward to getting started on the next issue over the coming weeks - researching authors and persuading them to write requires a very different skill set, and I'm looking forward to challenging myself, and to having the chance to interact with some truly fascinating people.

Sex Trafficking in South East Europe

We are between issues, so work at Horizons Magazine has been a bit slow, which means I've had the opportunity to contribute to some of our ongoing research into sex trafficking in South-East Europe.


This is something that I'd very much hoped to be able to be involved in, as it's a subject that has been close to my heart for some time.  I first came face to face with sex trafficking while living and working in Sierra Leone in 2011.  I volunteered with an NGO that taught English in some of Freetown's poorest slums, and was staggered to hear that one of the biggest causes of attrition in youth classes was sex trafficking.  This was not generally the forced abduction that I, in my ignorance, thought was the start of the process of most young women.  More commonly, girls were told that they would be found jobs or husbands abroad, but instead were sold to pimps in Europe or the U.S., who would take their passports away from them and force them to engage in sex work.  Targeted girls could be as young as 15.  This broke my heart; it was almost impossible to imagine that this could be the fate of the giggling teenagers that patiently bore my somewhat clumsy attempts at teaching English.

I saw a different side of sex trafficking when working in a women's drop in center in East London last year.  We saw about 50 women a day, most of whom were regular visitors born and raised in the local area.  Every now and then, however, we'd get referrals from various branches of social services, and would see women who had been rescued by the state having been allegedly held as sex slaves.  Most were from Africa or from Eastern Europe.  I have a basic grasp of a number of West African languages, and was therefore able to spend considerable time with these women.  Many of the stories they told were completely heartbreaking. They had truly lived through a nightmare and now, to make matters worse, many were struggling to get justice - or even the help they needed.  The British justice system too often simply bracketed them in with illegal immigrants, or treated them as if they had somehow been the perpetrators of crime.  It was, and is, a national disgrace.

Europe is, in fact, at the center of many human trafficking networks.  The scale of the problem is hard to estimate, due in part to the innately covert nature of the dealings, but the ILO estimates that about 2.5 million people were trafficked between 1995 and 2004.  A considerable portion of these come from Eastern Europe.

This is a problem that is surprisingly hard to pin down and tackle, but in the last few years there are signs that both origin and destination countries are prepared to exert more effort to track down and prosecute smugglers, and to rescue - and get some form of justice for - women and children who have been trafficked.

CIRSD, where I'm spending the summer, is committed to tackling gender prejudice and oppression in all its forms, and the salience of the issue of human trafficking in the Balkans means that a number of upcoming events and publications will be directly addressing the issue.  I've been able to assist with research around the issue, looking both at the current situation here and examples of best practice around the world.

Serbia is thought to be central to the current system of recruitment and transportation of trafficked women - it is itself an origin, transit and destination country.  Many women from across the Balkans are brought here en route to Italy and other countries.  Until recently NGOs have condemned efforts to shut down brothels as somewhat half-hearted, and therefore simply leading to the better concealment of victims of trafficking.  According to the US, Serbia did not fully comply with the minimum standards set for the elimination of trafficking by the US.  Thinks have improved since 2007, when the government established 11 new municipal teams to assist victims.  More work still needs to be done however; Serbian courts often impose relatively lenient sentences for convicted offenders, and trials can last months or even years, sometimes resulting in convicted traffickers remaining free and possibly able to continue to exploit victims.  In addition, the National Strategy to Combat Trafficking in Persons has yet to be fully implemented and the anti-trafficking team meets just once a year.  This is clearly something that needs to move up the domestic political agenda, and I'm proud of the work that CIRSD and others are doing to ensure this happens.  I hope to post a little more about what we're doing, and about best practice legislation from other counties, in the future.

(On a side note: if anyone is looking to learn a little more about this horrendous 'trade', I thoroughly recommend Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, which looks at all aspects from victim identification to liberalization, as well as touching on how policymakers in a variety of different western countries are trying to deal with the issue.)

The Sustainable Development Goals

2015 marks the year that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire.  There has been considerable debate over what should replace them, but the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will come into force in September this year, have almost been finalized.

How important are the SDGs?  They are designed as a universal set of targets and goals that the 193 UN members will use to frame their agendas and policies until 2030.  So far, so important.  The reality is likely to be more complex; the MDGs – though theoretically applicable to all states – were considered in reality as targets for the poorest countries.  The role of the developed world was generally seen as limited to finance.  Efforts are being made to ensure that the SDGs are different, and that the targets are all seen as equally applicable to all states.  At the very least, we can be sure that the rhetoric and framework of the goals will pop up again and again over the coming decades, and it’s therefore worth both acquiring a good working knowledge of what they are and what they mean, and maintaining a critical perspective as to ways in which these goals can and cannot help us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sustainable development goals recently.  There are a number of reasons for this.  Firstly, they are absolutely at the center of the mission of CIRSD here in Belgrade. Vuk Jeremic, founder and president of the organization, was President of the 67^th session of the UN General Assembly.  During his time in office he played a key role in shaping the UN post-2015 sustainable development agenda, and this is something that he’s deeply passionate about; it’s no coincidence that CIRSD stands for Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development.  Vuk – and CIRSD – believe passionately in the need for the rallying call provided by a set of concrete targets, and also in the philosophy that it is entirely essential that development both works for everyone and takes a long-term view; helping one individual at the expense of another, or at the expense of the future, is no solution.

And this of course, is entirely right in theory.  The ‘practice of sustainability’ can be much harder.  I’ve been faced with this fact in a number of different ways over the years; it was a problem when working for the Central Bank of Sierra Leone (as trade-offs that are clear in theory become much more murky during resource-constrained policy making), it’s been a central theme of many of my courses at Harvard, and now I’m spending my days at CIRSD reading (and re-reading and re-reading!) pieces by politicians and practitioners who grapple with these issues every day.

But back to the new set of goals.  I’ve copied both the MDGs and SDGs in to the bottom of this article (for ease of reference), and I wanted to set down some thoughts based on what I’m doing and reading at the moment.

The first point that jumps out, clearly, is that there are many more SDGs than MDGs.  Each SDG is also more complex than each MDG as it contains a number of subsidiary targets; there are 169 specific targets across the 17 goals.  This is a response to a common criticism of the MDGs, which is that they were too narrow, and failed to consider the root causes of many issues.  There was also criticism both that human rights were neglected, and that the goals should address economic development more explicitly, rather than simply focusing on extreme poverty.  The resulting SDGs are clearly more exhaustive, but they are therefore also less succinct, and therefore perhaps less able to form a simple, coherent rallying call.  By broadening are focus are we, in fact, in danger of losing focus on the things that matter most?

There are some obvious shifts of focus in the SDGs compared to the MDGs, summed up nicely by this graphic from the Guardian Newspaper. 

This graphic first appeared in the Guardian article "Sustainable Development Goals:  Changing the World in 17 Steps", accessible here.

The most obvious winners?  The ‘Planet’ (hooray!) and ‘Prosperity’.  And the losers?  ‘People’ and ‘Dignity’ were clearly the focus of the MDGs, but have had their importance (at least numerically) significantly watered down in the SDGs.  Does this matter?  I think so.

To make this more concrete, let’s focus on gender issues, which are very close to my heart.  MDGs 3 and 5 clearly have a strong gender focus, as does SDGs 5.  Other SDGs clearly have a gender angle, not least in the insistence on ‘inclusion’ or ‘inclusiveness’ in no less than five.  But in moving from 8 simple goals to 17 more complex ones I cannot help but feel that gender is less center-stage than it used to be.  This is not, of course, to argue that any of the other goals are unimportant or unnecessary, but I think we should be very aware of the fact that the new, broader goals will make it easier for the focus to turn away from women’s rights.  And this is something that we should both be prepared for, and actively fight.

The other thing that struck me in reading through these goals is that one can almost see politics in action.  Again, I’m going to take gender as an example.  If we look at the specific gender-related targets (which I’ve put at the base of this post) there are a couple of sentence-ends that were clearly afterthoughts.  The most egregious, perhaps, are the ending to 5.4 (ie we should properly value domestic/unpaid work “as nationally appropriate”) and 5.7 (that we should give women equal economic rights “in accordance with national laws”).  Now I understand the need for politicians to be pragmatic – really I do – but this seems staggeringly unambitious.  So anything enshrined in law is sacrosanct? Should we not be aspiring to change state and judicial systems, rather than simply to act within their current parameters?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

1) Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger

2) Achieve Universal Primary Education

3) Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

4) Reduce Child Mortality

5) Improve Maternal Health

6) Combat HIV/AIDs, Malaria and other diseases

7) Ensure Environmental Sustainability

8) Global Partnerships for Development

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

1) End poverty in all its forms everywhere

2) End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture

3) Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages

4) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

5) Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

6) Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

7) Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

8) Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all

9) Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation

10) Reduce inequality within and among countries

11) Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

12) Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

13) Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

14) Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development

15) Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss

16) Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

17) Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development

(And within the SDGs – not added here! – are a proposed 169 targets to make concrete the aims of each.)

Targets sitting underneath SDG5:

5.1 end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere

5.2 eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation

5.3 eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage, and female genital mutilations

5.4 recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies, and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate

5.5 ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic, and public life

5.6 ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of theICPD and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences

5.7 undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance, and natural resources in accordance with national laws

5.8 enhance the use of enabling technologies, in particular ICT, to promote women’s empowerment

5.9 adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels, adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels