Populism Speaks to Young Men – Why Don’t Human Rights?

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By Matilde Da Luz By now, most women recognize the script. Raise a point about sexism, feminism, or gender equality and the response is often predictable. You are “angry.” You are “too woke.” You have, somehow, made things awkward. The figure of the angry feminist woman has become so familiar that it no longer feels like an accusation so much as a reflex – a shorthand for dismissing political discomfort without engaging it. You become labelled, often unconsciously, as the “killjoy.” What is striking is that this stereotype persists at a moment when anger is hardly in short supply. Much of it belongs to men, and is increasingly confident, public, and political. It circulates online, where terms like incel and manosphere emerge in everyday vocabulary. It is surfacing in dating culture, classrooms, and family conversations, where feminism is framed less as a demand for equality than as a provocation. And it is showing up in electoral politics. According to a recent study that...
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Dayak Women’s Wisdom as A Pathway to Indonesia’s Climate Resilience in Preserving Kalimantan Forests

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By Devira Sari When the bulldozers came for Dijah’s land, she was not home to stop them. Dijah, a member of the indigenous Dayak people of West Kalimantan, returned from work to find her family’s ancestral forest being cleared for a palm oil plantation. The expansion has stripped communities of their forests, their traditional medicine, and a matrilineal way of life passed down through generations. When Dijah organized her community to resist the land clearing, she was met with state repression. Members of BRIMOB (The Mobile Brigade Corps) detained her, aiming to silence her defense of the communal lands. Dijah’s experience reflects the broader structural violence that underpins Indonesia’s palm oil industry where state-corporate collusion, gendered marginalization, and environmental destruction intersect. Yet despite intimidation, Dayak women continue to resist, embodying both ecological and cultural resilience against an economy that prioritizes profit over justice. Dijah’s story is not an isolated tragedy, it is a repeated experience of Dayak women who have long...
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It’s Not Pop Culture—It’s Racism and Fetishizing Roma Women

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By Mara Bulzan It’s 2024 and I could not stop staring in disbelief at the costumes worn by Columbia students at Halloween parties. Ostentatious reproductions of stereotypical Roma clothing (derogatorily referred to as “gypsies”) worn to frat parties by young, white, and highly educated women. And no one called them out for it. They were not Roma, so their smiles and dancing could not have been weighed down by a history of over 800 years of enslavement, genocide, forced displacement and eugenic policies. They were not stigmatized for “looking Roma,” so they could use it as a costume. When they looked in the mirror that night, the face of someone deemed a perpetual outsider did not glare back at them.  Contemporary popular culture has normalized the stereotypical depiction of Roma women to the point in which it has become an aesthetic with fetishistic tendencies. She is only allowed to be a free-spirited, sly seductress with fortune-telling abilities. It is preferable that she...
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The Return of the ‘Perfect Soldier’: Why Ukraine’s Landmine Decision Matters for Civilians Everywhere

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By Gracyn McGathy Ukraine’s recent decision to announce formal withdrawal from the Mine Ban Treaty should be a source of grave concern for the international human rights community. Their choice follows the scheduled exit of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Poland from the agreement later this year, all of which cited concerns over the Russio-Ukrainian war. Following two lengthy Russian invasions, Ukraine is now considered to be the most “mined country” in the world, with much of the forest terrain around the Kharkiv Oblast littered with trip-wire explosives, booby-trapped munition, and anti-personnel mines. The purpose of many anti-personnel mines is to “injure, rather than kill,” maximizing human suffering while attempting to create medical and evacuation burdens upon the enemy force. One of the defining characteristics of these mines is the little pressure required to explode, with some detonating at a mere 11 pounds of weight. Because of this, children around the globe are disproportionately at risk of threats posed by active minefields, and...
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Beyond Saving Her: Toward a More Ethical Human Rights Aesthetic

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By Matilde Da Luz  What do we see when we see suffering? In human rights campaigns, especially those addressing gender-based violence, the image of the suffering woman, often Muslim, veiled, and silent, has become almost inescapable. From post-9/11 “liberation” narratives about Afghanistan to humanitarian appeals that foreground school closures and barred windows, visual tropes have flattened incredibly multifaceted political scenarios into sentimental and victimizing stories. These images stir emotions. They drive donations. But at what cost? Feminist and decolonial thinkers have long argued that emotional appeals, despite their intuitive strength, obscure the structural and historical conditions of injustice surrounding victims of abuse. They do so by effectively depoliticizing harm, casting women as passive victims, and reinscribing colonial logics of moral superiority. Representation, in this view, is never neutral. And visibility, far from guaranteeing justice, may distort, contain, or even erase. The Sentimental Economy of Rights Human rights campaigns rely on what Professor Wendy Hesford calls “spectacular rhetorics”, which are visual and narrative forms that turn trauma...
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