WICID has refreshed its website – please visit here. This includes a relocated and refreshed Think Development  blog. Follow the links on the front page to find out more “about our blog” and “editorial policy”. You will also find you can filter all previous blog posts dating back to 2016, when it all started, through the ‘Read our Archived Blog posts’ tab.

Please check out WICID’s most recent policy brief  ‘Peace as Social Development: Preparing for the Second World Summit on Social Development’ authored by Briony Jones (WICID Executive Management). The brief makes the case for policies which acknowledge and leverage the intersections between peace and social development.

WICID welcomes a new Visiting Fellow, Justina Pinkeviciute. Justina’s research examines socio-economic justice in conflict-affected societies, focusing on power dynamics between the state, private sector, and civil society. She holds a PhD in development studies from Coventry University, where her thesis examined victims’ participation in Colombian Collective Reparations and Territorially Focused Development Programmes. Justina has previously worked in human rights advocacy with organisations like Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, as well as grassroots civil society groups. Her work bridges academia and policy, offering critical insights into transitional justice, development, and peacebuilding practice.

On 28 May, WICID successfully held the Annual Lecture ‘Foresight for Flourishing: Why we Need to Imagine the Futures that We Want to Create’ by Elaine France. The recording of this inspiring and interactive lecture is now available here on our YouTube channel. Please check it out for important questions about foresight and futures.

On 14 July, WICID has hosted an expert workshop ‘Partnership and Participation: Policy in Partnership with Conflict and Peace Affected Communities’, co-organised with the Humanitarian Advisory Group (HAG) and Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI). The workshop was attended by academic researchers, policy experts, and practitioners from several institutions including the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). Please watch this space for collaborative outputs.

WICID’s founder and now Advisory Board member Shirin Rai has won the Susan Strange Best Book Prize at the BISA 2025 conference last week with her latest book Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring. You can check out the book at Oxford University Press. 

Briony Jones, WICID Executive Management team member, is currently a Visiting Fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on her study leave. She has recently written a news report Beyond 2030: The Future of Social Development in a Changing World reflecting on a flagship event co-hosted by the UNRISD with the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. 

Vicki Squire (WICID Steering Committee) has published a new article in The Conversation on the impact of the defunding of aid on humanitarian data streams. This draws on research from the Data and Displacement project, and forms part of the ongoing work for the Data Literacies in Displacement (DLiD) project – an ESRC IAA project conducted with Funke Fayehun (University of Ibadan), Prithvi Hirani (International Organization for Migration), Briony Jones (PAIS), Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez (PAIS/Wolverhampton) and Dallal Stevens (Law). You can read the article here.

Melissa Johnston and Jayanthi Lingham have published a new article ‘War on two fronts: Gender regimes and the ethnonationalist state in Myanmar and Sri Lanka’ from the Monash Warwick Alliance project “Inclusive Economies” (2018-2020). The article argues that ethnonationalist states’ central logic lies in the reproduction of racialized social forces and, as a result, it strategically buttresses and depletes social forces through the weaponization of social reproduction. You can read the full article (open access) here.