As employees, researchers and lecturers of Ghent University, we want to express our deep concern for the 475 People Without Papers who have gone on hunger strike since May 23rd in the buildings of our colleagues at the VUB and ULB and in the Brussels House of Compassion. With this open letter we want to ask federal policy makers in this country to listen to their demands and work towards a clear and just policy.

As departments, research groups, unions, student organisations and individual employees, researchers and lectures of Ghent University, we condemn the violent Israeli attacks on the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and within Israel. We express our solidarity with the Palestinian people who have opposed, since 1948, a settler-colonial regime involved in ethnic cleansing, land annexations, population transfers and apartheid.

The European Association for Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) has published the essay “Justice not aid for the Global South” on its blog Debating Development Research. The blogpost was authored by Koen Bogaert, Marlies Casier, Brecht De Smet and Bernard Mazijn, of the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University, and Dorien Van den Boer, coordinator of the international Governance in Conflict Network, and Julie Carlier, coordinator of the Ghent Centre for Global Studies. The blogpost is part of a broader debate on “Thinking post-development.” Check out the other contributions on the GiC network blog. The original extended Dutch version of the essay was published on MO*Magazine.

The Ghent Centre for Global Studies is proud to announce that Ghent University has joined the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Global Studies: A European Perspective (EMGS), co-ordinated by the University of Leipzig. This international research-based Master is combining perspectives, methods and theories developed in history, the social sciences, cultural as well as area studies and economics to investigate phenomena of global connectedness. Read more →