I’m quoting our Narrative Analysis Editor Samanta Azpurua, who dived into Ugandan ecofeminism , exploring the narrative that “Women are essential to Uganda’s climate action” for her piece this month. Using the Civic Media Observatory methodology, she pulls up some important context on the history of the feminist and conservation movements in Uganda. That piece is what I call a very GV story: it makes it impossible to ignore the immense intersectionality of life in the global majority. Climate, feminism, Indigenous knowledge, technology used to curtail rights, capitalism, and postcolonialism all have a role to play. We are always stronger in solidarity At the end of the day, it’s the people of the global majority who are and will be the hardest hit by the climate crisis. We are also the people who benefit the most from communication and alliances between global majority nations and civil society groups. We have experiences, inherited knowledge, and approaches that escape the comprehension of the global north, and the more we hear each other’s stories, the better chances we have of surviving the climate crisis.


Three years of Pride: Santiago Méndez’s visual archive of queer Venezuela

For the past three years, photographer and visual artist Santiago Méndez Arvelaez has been documenting Pride celebrations in Venezuela’s capital city, creating a powerful visual record of queer life, visibility, and resistance. Born in Caracas in 1998, Méndez explores identity through photography, research, and multimedia visual practices rooted in Venezuelan popular culture. Méndez’s work stands out for its sustained attention to the country’s cultural and social complexities. As part of a vibrant tradition of documentary photography in Venezuela, he is establishing himself as one of the artists creating some of the most compelling archives of communities that remain largely underreported in mainstream narratives. His work approaches documentary photography with an anthropological perspective , capturing a country shaped by fashion, urban style, Afro-descendant traditions, and popular art, while tracing the connections between contemporary expression and long-standing cultural histories. Gabriela Mesones Rojo (GMR): Why do you think documenting queer experiences in Venezuela is so important right now? Santiago Méndez (SM): Venezuela is often explained through politics, migration, collapse. I grew up inside that and I have never experienced my country beyond Chavismo.


When everything is reduced to crisis, other stories disappear, but the ability to be yourself in public, love openly, and be recognized says a lot about the country you live in. Venezuela still has no marriage equality, no recognition for same sex couples, and trans legal gender recognition remains blocked in practice. The Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence recorded 461 cases of violence and discrimination in 2023, affecting 394 people, and five deaths. Queer archives prove that people were here. It leaves evidence of our existence. GMR: The last three years have shown deep political changes in the country. What changes have you noticed in Caracas’ Pride over the years, whether in participation, visibility, emotions, or political atmosphere? SM: In 2023 I felt a huge energy in the street. Pride felt crowded, loud, almost unreal. There was joy everywhere, and I believe in that joy. Still, I kept thinking about the pain carried under the music. Existing together in the street is political, even when people do not name it that way. 2024 feels important because it was a hinge year. I went with my mom and friends. The march happened three weeks before the presidential election, and the slogan was ‘Our existence is not public indecency.’


It came after 33 people were detained during a 2023 police raid at a Valencia LGBTIQ+ venue. They were charged with public indecency, criminal association and noise pollution, in a case organizations denounced as discriminatory criminalization in a private queer space. By 2025 the mood felt different . Smaller. More careful. Less formally accompanied. Some organizations reportedly participated discreetly. The landscape was marked by arrests and exile after the 2024 presidential election. Pride Month 2026 began with reports that at least 30 men were held in a police operation at a Barquisimeto LGBTIQ+ venue, after officers allegedly accused them of ‘committing the crime of homosexuality .’ Homosexuality is not illegal in Venezuela, but police still behave as if it should be. For many LGBTIQ+ Venezuelans, one of the biggest fears is an encounter with the authorities. I cannot describe these years as progress. There’s visibility, but also fear. My photos live in that tension. GMR: As a queer photographer and visual artist, how do you think about representation and ethics when photographing queer experiences? What responsibilities come with creating queer visual archives? SM: Being queer changes how I photograph these spaces. I recognize parts of myself in the people I photograph.


That closeness does not give me ownership over their stories. In Venezuela, a published image can expose someone to family, work, or police. Public space does not erase risk. So I work with doubt. Some photographs stay unpublished. Some faces stay out of the archive. I am skeptical of ‘photographer heroism.’ Photography can preserve, inform, and make people pay attention, but it does not replace action, context, or material change. Without research, there is misunderstanding. Without relationship, there is extraction. Representation is not about making the community look perfect. The Venezuelan queer community carries the same prejudices, desires and contradictions as the rest of the country. I am part of that reality too, so I approach it with honesty instead of judgment. GMR: Why is photography fundamental to preserving queer cultural memory? What does photography preserve that other forms of storytelling cannot? SM: Queer photography matters because much of our history was hidden, mocked, or told by people who did not love us. In Venezuela, the archive is full of gaps. Many queer lives were photographed only through shame, scandal, police language, medical language and meme language.


The Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence reported that at least 93 trans people were murdered in Venezuela between 2008 and 2023, all of them trans women. That number changes the meaning of celebration. I want someone in the future to see these photographs and understand that queer Venezuelans existed in public before the country recognized them. We love here. We make style here. We make noise here. We belong here, even when belonging was denied. GMR: What has photographing queer life taught you about Venezuela? SM: What I keep seeing is that visibility and safety are not the same thing. For many queer Venezuelans, showing up publicly still carries risk. Photography made me look at who feels free, who is supported, who is exposed, who arrives alone. Pride in Caracas is intense, but it has a strange quietness. It gives you time to read signs and stay with people’s faces. The Pride I photograph is people trying to be public where publicness has a cost. Queer life in Caracas is pushed into rooms, parties, clubs, coded friendships. The march puts bodies in daylight, but still, it has taught me that visibility is never distributed equally.


Denied by the State, demanded by the streets: Japan's LGBTQ+ turning point

The streets of Tokyo have transformed into a vibrant sea of rainbow flags, sharp techno beats, and thousands of chanting voices for Tokyo Rainbow Pride this June. This year’s Pride Month is more than a celebratory festival of visibility; the atmosphere feels electrified as the Japanese Supreme Court is expected to issue its first unified constitutional ruling on same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ+ communities are taking to the streets to push for equal rights to marriage with the slogan: “May love prevail in the Supreme Court” (最高裁で愛が勝つ). Legal battle: Marriage for all The Supreme Court ruling will settle constitutional debates among lower district courts over whether the Japanese Civil Code's current exclusion of same-sex marriage violates the Japanese Constitution in early 2027. Japan’s legal battle for the right to equal marriage began on February 14, 2019, with 13 same-sex couples simultaneously filing lawsuits against the Japanese government in district courts across Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Sapporo. In March 2024, the Sapporo High Court first ruled that the provisions of the Civil Code and the Family Register Act that do not allow same-sex couples to become families are unconstitutional.


Four other district high courts hold similar rulings, and the prevailing view is that the current system violates Article 14 (equality under the law), Article 13 (the right to the pursuit of happiness), and Article 24, Section 2 (individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes) of the Constitution of Japan. However, on November 28, 2025, a Tokyo High Court ruled against its peers, holding that same-sex couples are not included in the constitutional definition of marriage and that any change to that definition should be the responsibility of Japan’s National Diet. With the support of the LGBT+ activist group Marriage for All Japan, the plaintiffs have brought their case to the Japanese Supreme Court for appeal. As explained by l egal scholar Yasuhiko Watanabe , the Tokyo High Court’s ruling would grant “unchecked discretion to the conservative government.” The Japanese government's conservative stance Japan remains the only G7 nation that does not provide comprehensive national legal protections or marriage rights for same-sex couples. Despite data from both the conservative Yomiuri and the liberal Asahi showing solid majorities in support of same-sex marriage, at 66 percent and 72 percent, respectively, in 2023, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remain unsupportive of same-sex marriage.


During her election campaign in September 2025, Takaichi also referred to the definition of marriage to argue against same-sex marriage rights: 私は基本的には同性婚には反対の立場だ。憲法で結婚は両性の同意によるとされている。だから、現時点で同性婚に賛同する立場ではない。 I am fundamentally opposed to same-sex marriage. The Constitution defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. Therefore, at this time I do not support same-sex marriage. Currently, same-sex couples are excluded from spousal benefits in over 100 laws that involve insurance, pensions, etc. They rely on regional partnership certification systems, which began in Tokyo in 2015 and have since spread to more than 500 regions, that offer same-sex couples limited, non-binding benefits, such as hospital visitation rights. In response to the legal challenges in recent years, instead of amending the existing marriage law to grant sexual minority equal rights, the conservative government has recognized registered same-sex couples as “ de facto marriage status ” in a few dozen laws, and passed an LGBTQ+ Understanding Law in 2023 to promote public understanding of sexual minorities and prevent “unfair discrimination.” Only after three years of stalling did the government recently roll out its first national plan to raise awareness and strengthen support systems for the LGBTQ+ community.


However, the recognition of “de facto marriage” through the partnership certification system would institutionalize discrimination, l egal scholar Yasuhiko Watanabe argued : 仮に、事実婚制度の整備によって配偶者控除や相続権などの不利益が一定程度解消されるとしても、婚姻と区別された制度にとどまる限り、そこには象徴的な格差が残ります。異性のカップルだけが婚姻の制度に属し、同性カップルはそこから「排除された」別の制度に属するという構図は、社会的に“セカンドクラス”という印象を与えかねません。 Even if the ‘de facto marriage’ system could, to a certain extent, address some disadvantages, such as the spousal tax deduction and inheritance rights, as long as it remains a separate system distinct from marriage, it will institutionalise a symbolic segregation. If only heterosexual couples belong to the marriage system and same-sex couples are ‘excluded’ into a separate system, it risks creating a ‘second-class’ stigma [among the sexual minorities]. Moreover, even with the same-sex partnership registration and “de facto marriage” system, same-sex couples cannot enter into the national household registration system (Koseki) , which is structured around a heterosexual norm, with a wife, a husband, and their unmarried offspring under a single surname to track the family lineage. In Japan, rather than the individual, the family is the administrative unit, and the legal status, rights, and welfare of citizenship and parentage are registered through the Koseki system.


Being excluded from the household registration system, same-sex couples could not enjoy automatic inheritance, spousal tax deduction, spousal visa, child adoption, etc. Yet, within the National Diet, conservative lawmakers are resistant to changing the marriage law, fearing it would lead to amending the Koseki system and thereby trigger a domino effect that would rewrite the nationality law and hundreds of civil laws related to government administration. Can love win? LGBTQ+ activists considered the Japanese Supreme Court’s monumental decision to bring the legal disputes to the 15-Justice Grand Bench a significant move to break the decade-long political stagnation. If the Grand Bench rules the current marriage law unconstitutional, the court may impose a deadline for the National Diet to rewrite the marriage and Koseki systems, or to establish a civic union registration system with a separate household registration system. The worst scenario is to follow the Tokyo High Court verdict and let the National Diet determine the mechanism for protecting sexual minorities’ equal rights. Since May 2026, Marriage for All Japan has launched a nationwide “Love Wins” campaign to demonstrate public support for full same-sex marriage rights and vowed to spread the message with the slogan, “May love prevail in the Supreme Court,” across 47 prefectures during Pride Month.


The lakes that should not exist in Pakistan’s mountain ranges

In the valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in northern Pakistan, farmers wake each summer wondering whether the mountain above them will hold. It is not an idle fear. Rising temperatures have melted glaciers across mountain ranges like the Hindu Kush , Karakoram , and the Himalayan ranges , forming lakes that now threaten millions of people. These lakes did not exist in their current numbers a generation ago. They are a product of rising temperatures driven by industrial emissions from countries far from Pakistan’s mountains, and they are growing faster than the institutions meant to manage them. Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) The numbers are stark. Glacier melt across the three aforementioned ranges has produced 3,044 glacial lakes , with 33 identified as highly vulnerable to Glacial Lake Outburst Floods , or GLOFs. A GLOF is not a slow rise of water. It is a massive flood outpouring that results when the natural barriers holding a lake break — often due to seismic activity, avalanches, or heavy rainfall.


These floods release millions of cubic meters of water and debris in hours. Peak flows can reach 15,000 cubic meters per second. A small mountain stream can become a torrent 50 meters deep, spreading ten kilometers wide across a floodplain. Villages, bridges, farms, and roads vanish before evacuations can begin. From 2018 to 2021, roughly 18 GLOFs struck the region . In 2022, that number jumped to 75 . In 2023 alone, authorities recorded 83 events. Each one carved through communities that had done almost nothing to cause it. The people absorbing this damage are among the least economically protected in the country. In Gilgit-Baltistan, 26.7 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, the figure is 22 percent. These are smallholder farmers, herders, and seasonal laborers with no financial cushion. A single GLOF can erase years of savings in an instant. The Bagrote Valley , home to over 10,000 people, sits under constant threat of an outburst that could swallow the entire valley floor.


Beyond the physical destruction, the repeated cycle of floods and extreme heat has produced a lasting anxiety in these communities, a fear, rarely spoken plainly, that the disasters will not stop and that ordinary life will not return. Read more: Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and the melting of the ‘Third Pole’ Paying the price for industrial polluters The injustice is not subtle. Pakistan contributes less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it ranks among the ten most climate-vulnerable countries on earth. The United States, European Union, and China together account for roughly half of all historical carbon dioxide emissions . Pakistan holds over 13,000 glaciers , the largest concentration outside the polar regions, whose accelerated melting feeds the floods. The 2025 monsoon season alone affected 6.9 million people, displaced three million, and killed over 1,000, including 275 children. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the moral case plainly in 2023: countries that produced the crisis carry an obligation to fund recovery in countries that did not.


That argument has produced some movement in international forums, but far less money than the words suggest. Read more: Flash floods ravage Pakistan: Cloud burst and melting glaciers create perfect storm of destruction The gap between pledges and payments is not a technical failure. It is a political choice. At the Glasgow Climate Pact in 2021, wealthy countries pledged to double adaptation finance for developing nations to USD 40 billion by 2025. CARE Denmark’s analysis found that bilateral adaptation support is likely to reach only USD 12 billion, just 30 percent of that target, and may fall further as aid budgets are cut . The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany have all announced reductions to their climate finance contributions . Only Denmark, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have explicitly committed to directing at least half of their climate finance toward adaptation, as the Paris Agreement requires. The rest have no binding plan. The Loss and Damage Fund , created at COP27 after years of advocacy by countries like Pakistan, opened its first USD 250 million call for proposals at COP30 in Belém, Brazil.


Against Pakistan’s actual losses, that figure is close to symbolic. Pakistan’s Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said at COP30 that the Green Climate Fund was mired in bureaucracy and the Loss and Damage Fund had made little real progress. Pakistan continues to borrow through costly multilateral loans to pay for damage it did not cause. Gaps in responses to GLOFs Inside Pakistan, the response has its own gaps. The GLOF-II project , a joint initiative between the Ministry of Climate Change and UNDP Pakistan, funded by the Green Climate Fund, aims to build 250 engineering structures and extend early warning systems across 24 vulnerable valleys. When complete, it should allow 95 percent of households in target communities to receive and act on flood warnings, protecting roughly 29 million people. These are meaningful targets. But the project has run since 2017 and has not prevented disasters across Gilgit-Baltistan. What is planned in Islamabad does not always arrive in a remote valley in Baltistan. A UNESCO review of Pakistan’s flood early warning system found persistent gaps between monitoring agencies and response teams.


A warning issued in the capital does not automatically reach a farmer in Upper Swat. When it does arrive, that farmer may have no evacuation route, no shelter, and no trained neighbors to help. The national Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and its provincial and district bodies form a chain where information stalls at every link. Early warning systems currently cover just 24 valleys across 18 districts against a landscape of over 3,000 lakes spread across dozens of remote ranges. Human pressure sharpens the risk further. Unplanned tourism, unchecked construction, and persistent deforestation are stripping the natural buffers that once slowed erosion and absorbed runoff. In Hunza and Astore, hotels have appeared near tree lines , with no waste management and no coherent land-use plan. Road construction for tourism has led to significant deforestation and soil erosion across northern valleys. The Gilgit-Baltistan Environmental Protection Agency has recommended a five-year ban on hotel construction in several parts of the Gilgit-Baltistan. That recommendation has not been fully enforced. Tourism brings real income to mountain economies, and local governments face genuine pressure not to restrict it.


But every hotel built on a fragile hillside and every stretch of forest cleared for a road leaves an already strained landscape even more vulnerable. The science has been consistent for over a decade. In the Eastern Hindu Kush alone, the number of glacial lakes rose from 101 in 2000 to 162 in 2020 , while their combined surface area expanded from 9.72 to 12.36 square kilometers. The Pakistan Meteorological Department has warned that if warm temperatures persist, the melt rate and GLOF frequency will both increase. A UN report ahead of COP30 estimated that developing countries need between USD 310 and 365 billion per year for climate adaptation by 2035. Rich nations provided USD 26 billion in 2023. For Pakistan’s mountain communities, that arithmetic is not abstract. In 2024, a GLOF in the Hunza Valley destroyed a bridge connecting two parts of a village and damaged homes and mountain gardens. That bridge was not a convenience — it was a lifeline. It was how families reached markets, schools, and hospitals. Its loss was not a statistic. It was a community cut off.


How to protect people in the future Pakistan did not cause the climate crisis, but it absorbs some of its worst costs. The glacial lakes forming across its northern ranges are a direct result of emissions from industrialized economies. The communities below them lack the infrastructure, the resources, and often the political voice to demand faster action. International funding through projects like GLOF-II is necessary but not sufficient. Wealthy nations pledged to double adaptation finance and delivered less than a third of that amount. The Loss and Damage Fund , won after years of advocacy, opened with USD 250 million against losses that run into tens of billions. Pakistan’s own authorities must treat prevention as a standing domestic priority, not a deliverable tied to foreign grant cycles. Stricter environmental enforcement, honest land-use planning, and full-coverage early-warning systems are not expensive dreams. They are the minimum that the millions of exposed people deserve. The lakes are already there. The question is whether the money, the institutions, and the will to protect people from them will arrive before the next outburst does.


The meme that became a movement: Inside India’s Cockroach Janta Party

On an ordinary day in New Delhi, an off-the-cuff remark in India’s highest court triggered something no one had planned for: Within days, millions of young Indians were publicly calling themselves “cockroaches” and signing up for a party that does not even exist on the Election Commission’s rolls. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began as a meme, yet it has quickly become one of the most visible expressions of youth anger over unemployment, examination leaks, and a political system that seems to talk about young people more than it listens to them. Origins and reappropriation The roots of the CJP stem from a Supreme Court hearing on May 15, 2026, about fake degrees and professional ethics. During the proceedings, Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly used terms like “cockroaches” and “parasites” to describe lawyers and individuals with dubious qualifications. According to accounts from the hearing , he said: There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them?


There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone … and you people file contempt petitions! Traditional media paraphrased the remarks, and they spread widely. Posts circulated online stripped of context, and social-media commentary quickly settled into a dominant narrative: that India’s top judge had compared the country’s struggling young people to vermin. The Chief Justice later clarified that his criticism was directed only at those with forged credentials. Youth users on social media seized the insult and reframed it as an identity, deciding that “ cockroach ” would be a badge of solidarity rather than a slur. Anatomy and demands While the movement initially appeared leaderless in its meme flows , one person emerged as its most recognizable organizer: Abhijeet Dipke , a 30-year-old Indian student in the United States with a background in political communication and social media work for Indian parties.


Dipke describes CJP as “a political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth.” The movement launched on May 16, 2026 — the day after the CJI’s remarks — when Dipke posted a Google Form and an Instagram graphic bearing the caption “ Main Bhi (I am also a) Cockroach.” Within 48 hours, online registrations had surpassed 25,000, and by May 17 , membership estimates ranged from 40,000 to 45,000. On Instagram, the account surged from zero to roughly 500,000 followers in one day, hit three million by May 18, and crossed 10 million within four days — surpassing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s ( BJP ) 8.7 million subscribers. Dipke and a small circle manage central accounts and calls to action, but much of the movement’s vitality comes from decentralized participation: anonymous meme-creators, local pages adopting the cockroach aesthetic, and chat groups among students preparing for competitive exams. Calling yourself a “cockroach” in a social media bio immediately marks membership , turning the emoji into a badge of online solidarity.


Beneath the satirical aesthetic lies a coherent cluster of institutional demands. CJP posts and “manifestos” have repeatedly advocated called on officials to curtail judicial–executive revolving doors in the Indian Judiciary system; strengthen anti-defection norms in the parliament; expand women’s representation to 50 percent in Parliament and state assemblies; regulate partisan media to curb disinformation; and ensure the integrity of competitive public examinations through independent oversight and strict liability for question leaks . The speed of CJP’s growth can be explained by a convergence of structural grievances. The movement plugged into three overlapping frustrations among young Indians: Unemployment and underemployment , repeated examination leaks and institutional incompetence, and elite condescension that oscillates between paternalism and suspicion. The alleged “cockroach” remark fits neatly into a pre-existing narrative of systemic disrespect. From social media virality to street protests CJP’s first protest at Jantar Mantar (observatory) in New Delhi on June 6, 2026, marked a transition from digital to physical mobilization. Hundreds of supporters, primarily students and recent graduates, wore cockroach masks and carried worn examination preparation books alongside national flags.


Dipke returned from the United States to lead the rally, calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over recurring examination leaks and grading errors. Journalist Vijaita Singh shared on X (Formerly Twitter) By June 22, the protest had escalated into a sustained camp-out . The group explicitly stated it would not disperse until the Education Minister stepped down, linking the occupation directly to the NEET medical entrance examination scandal — a nationwide admission test to be eligible to enter into Medical Colleges and Universities was cancelled on May 12 after investigators uncovered a multi-state racket that had scanned and circulated a handwritten question paper on WhatsApp and Telegram, forcing over 2.2 million students to sit for a re-test. In addition to holding the National Testing Agency (NTA) directly accountable for these systemic failures, the movement has also broadened its scope to oppose the National Education Policy (NEP 2020). Condemning the NEP as part of an anti-student agenda , protesters and their allies are demanding systemic reforms to safeguard a genuinely equitable, accessible, and democratic education framework nationwide.


As of June 28, protesters remained camped at the site, where renowned innovator and activist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike after the Central Government failed to respond to his June 27 ultimatum over the student crisis; Dipke has also alleged that BJP supporters had assaulted protesters and journalists there during the demonstration over the NEET paper leak and exam irregularities. The physical presence served three functions: it proved that CJP’s following was not purely virtual ; it provided a media hook that amplified the narrative beyond the movement’s own channels; and it escalated the stakes, bringing policing and surveillance to the fore. Celebrated allies and cross-generational solidarity On June 2, Sonam Wangchuk — a well-known Ladakh-based engineer, education reformer, and climate activist — announced that he would join the June 6 protest if no action was taken by June 5, declaring that “any self-respecting Minister should resign if things go so wrong.” After speaking with Dipke, he concluded that the campaign was “highly patriotic” and free of “foreign forces,” explicitly rebutting the state’s emerging narrative of external manipulation.


Wangchuk joined the Jantar Mantar demonstration on June 6 and a Bengaluru protest on June 15 . Actor and activist Prakash Raj joined the 15 June Bengaluru protest at Freedom Park, addressing a rain-soaked crowd alongside Wangchuk and Dipke. Actor Atul Kulkarni likewise urged young citizens to join, while the movement named official spokespersons — investigative journalist Saurav Das, public policy professional Ashutosh Ranka, and political researcher Vijeta Dahiya — to manage its expanding media interface. The endorsement of figures with established records in education reform and civil society complicated the state’s discursive strategy of dismissing CJP as immature or foreign-funded . It also altered the visual register of the protests: alongside cockroach masks and memes, the cameras now captured nationally recognized faces standing under umbrellas with examination papers in hand. State and party responses Once CJP crossed a visibility threshold, state responses followed along three axes. Regulatory and technical measures included reports that , within a week of its launch, the CJP website was taken down and social media content mentioning the group was geo-blocked or restricted .


Screenshots of “account withheld in India” notices circulated online, reinforcing the narrative that powerful institutions could not take a joke. Within hours of the attempted restriction, CJP launched a replacement X account under the handle @Cockroachisback, with its first post declaring, “You thought you can get rid of us? Lol,” accompanied by an AI-generated poster reading “Cockroach Is Back.” The new account gained 23,800 followers in its first 90 minutes and carried a bio that simply stated: “Cockroaches don’t die.” Legal pushback came through a public interest litigation framing CJP’s use of courtroom remarks and judicial imagery as an illegitimate “commercialization” that misled the public and harmed judicial dignity. Discursively, the state and its allies dismissed CJP as “foreign-funded,” an opposition front, or merely irresponsible youth, avoiding engagement with the substance of its demands. Opposition leaders such as Akhilesh Yadav of the of the Samajwadi Party and Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have referenced CJP as a symbol of public frustration.


Other figures have offered more direct backing; for example, Communist Party of India (CPI) General Secretary D. Raja expressed unwavering support for the CJP-led protests regarding the NEET paper leak crisis. Despite this varied backing, some leaders still remain skeptical of the movement. Why this matters The movement has already produced a measurable effect : It has placed examination integrity, judicial–executive appointment patterns, and platform governance onto a public agenda that youth constituencies had previously addressed through individualized complaint rather than collective claim . Whether CJP consolidates into a formal advocacy structure, fractures under state pressure, or is absorbed into existing party architectures will provide further data on the lifecycle of meme-driven mobilization in an environment where formal bans are absent but infrastructural throttling is in effect.


No safety, no way out: The Rohingya girls caught between aid cuts and child marriage in Bangladesh

Despite living in Myanmar’s Rakhine State for generations, the Rohingya remain the world’s largest stateless population due to a systematic denial of citizenship. Nine years after 750,000 Rohingya fled violence in Rakhine State to find safety in Bangladesh, nearly one million refugees remain trapped in 33 congested camps in Cox’s Bazar. That legal limbo has seized basic rights to schooling, healthcare, or protection under national law, leaving them entirely dependent on whatever aid arrives. When a girl has no state to grant her rights and no functioning system left to enforce them, marriage becomes one of a family’s only pathways to give her a semblance of stability. Maryam, a Rohingya child in Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, was 13 years old when her learning center closed. Her teacher noticed the absence first — an empty chair where a quiet, attentive girl used to sit.


Within three weeks of the shutdown of schools after the USAID funding cuts in 2025 , Maryam’s mother had agreed to a marriage proposal. The groom was 34. A local religious figure told the family that since Maryam had reached puberty, delay was spiritually dangerous. Her mother — widowed, in debt, managing three younger children alone — accepted the reasoning. She also accepted the relief. The dowry asked for was barely two thousand Taka — roughly USD 16. Nobody objected, despite the fact that in Bangladesh, the legal minimum age for marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men. The block’s Majhee , a community leader in that camp, prepared the contract. Maryam is now 14 and pregnant. Her in-laws will not allow her to return to school, even as new learning centers slowly reopen nearby. Her teacher said, “When a girl gets married, she never comes back to the classroom with her small dream.” For Maryam, that is already permanent. A widow’s impossible choice Across 33 official camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf in southern Bangladesh, another story unfolded with quieter violence in camp 20.


Suriya, a 40-year-old widow managing her household alone after losing her husband during the sea crossing from Myanmar, owed a debt she could not repay. Her daughter Fatima was 14. Their block majhee — a man in his mid-fifties with three existing wives, controlling food distribution and marriage registration for the entire block — had been offering help for months. Extra food. Debt forgiveness. Promises of protection. Then came the proposal. Suriya experienced it as the best available option in an impossible situation. As a policy brief, published by the Center for Peace and Justice, BRAC University, documents precisely: “In most cases, this marriage pressure comes from those who give and offer other forms of protection and support.” The majhee needed a fourth wife — in his community, that number is not excess but evidence of leadership. “If a majhee doesn’t have at least four wives, he is not considered a leader,” a humanitarian worker said during an interview. Fatima became a transaction. The marriage happened informally. No Camp in Charge (CiC) office approval was sought. No age documentation was presented.


These two stories are not exceptional. They are the pattern. The numbers behind the silence What is happening inside the camps rarely appears in a single dataset. Verified child marriage cases among refugees rose 21 percent last year, child abductions more than quadrupled to 560 reported cases, and armed group recruitment of children grew eightfold in 2025. A 2021 study on the usage pattern of contraception among Rohingya in the camps found the average age at first marriage in the camps was 15.7 years, and over 62 percent of Rohingya women in the camps were already wed before age 18. These figures were documented before the latest funding collapse and have likely only risen since then. Patrick Halton, UNICEF’s child protection manager, connected the numbers to the school closures directly: “With the funding cuts, we had to downscale a lot in terms of education. It meant that children have not necessarily had things to do, and we’ve therefore seen this rise in children being married.” A female teacher who teaches higher grades confirmed during the interview.


“I have found a significant number of dropouts because of marriage in my classes,” she said. “When a girl gets married, she never comes back to the classroom with her small dream. Mostly, her in-laws don’t allow her to return to school.” Faith, puberty, and the architecture of consent Why do families like Maryam’s not resist? How does religious framing function? The logic circulating in many camps is specific: once a girl reaches puberty, she is marriageable, and delay invites sin. The above-mentioned policy brief records a religious leader’s position directly — that as long as a child has grown up and the situation allows, parents must marry them to safeguard against fornication. It is the dominant operating framework for many families, especially those without educated male heads of household. A humanitarian project manager, interviewed via email, described the reality plainly: “Girls are given in marriage before having sexual knowledge. They don’t know anything about sexual safety.” She added something more disturbing still — that many of these girls have no concept of what torture or rape means within marriage.


“They believe the husband has the right to torture her,” she said. The violence is not hidden from these girls. It is pre-explained as normal. Parental preference for religious madrashah education over the general stream of schooling deepens this architecture. This education focuses on basic Quranic recitation, and deeper Islamic jurisprudence operates alongside the official NGO-led learning centers. The camps also host around 1,000 madrashahs, which have become deeply trusted community infrastructure across 33 camps. “Most parents don’t want their daughter to get a formal education at school. They prefer sending their daughters to madrashah for religious education only,” the same project manager observed. This means that even when learning centers were open, they were fighting parental ideology. When dowry collapses Academic research shows that in Myanmar, child marriage was partly suppressed by the sheer cost of marrying — bribes to military officials, dowries ranging from USD 2,300 to USD 3,300, and additional formal fees. That financial architecture no longer exists in the camps. Dowry costs have fallen. No bribes are required. No military fees apply.


Previous research notes this directly: “In some cases, this means marriage happens before age 18.” The camp system, by removing financial barriers, inadvertently removed one of the few practical brakes on child marriage. The camp ration system introduced further incentives. Because all refugees receive food rations regardless of household size, men can feed multiple wives without earning income. The traditional economic argument against polygamy — that a man must provide equally for multiple households — collapses entirely. Silence, impunity, and the collapse of protection Child marriage and gender-based violence in these camps happen, overwhelmingly, in silence. Camp-in-Charge (CiC) offices , the highest authority within each camp, have approval processes and age verification requirements on paper. In practice, the BRAC University policy brief documents widespread evasion — easy to accomplish because “CiCs do not have any monitoring team to investigate the issue deeply.” Marriages happen informally. Majhees do not report what they have been paid not to report. Community members who witness violations often stay silent to avoid conflict with those who hold power over their rations, their shelter, and daily survival.


The result is a protection ecosystem that exists structurally but fails operationally. The girls are already married into households that forbid their return to school, already trafficked, already pregnant — they are not recoverable within this crisis response cycle. The rise of child marriage in Cox’s Bazar is not a single-cause crisis. It is the product of layered failures that reinforce each other. Polygamous marriage , enabled by collapsing dowry costs and ration-based food security, concentrates women and girls as resources in the hands of powerful men. Maryam’s chair in the learning center remains empty. Fatima’s silence continues as she is moved into the majhee’s compound. These are not tragedies at the margins. They are the logical outcome of a system that has run out of tools to protect the people it was built to serve. The question is no longer whether child marriage is rising in these camps. The question is whether the international community, having cut the funding that protected these children, will acknowledge that it helped build the conditions for what is now happening.


Why gender diversity matters in technology

When NASA was preparing for the launch of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983, the engineers asked Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, if 100 tampons were enough for a six-day flight . In November 2025, the US Transportation Department unveiled THOR-05F, the first crash test dummy specifically based on a woman’s body, and not just a scaled-down version of the crash test dummy based on men’s bodies. Several new model cars today, by default, unlock all doors as soon as the car is put into “park’ or when the ignition is turned off, which can be particularly unsafe for women and LGBTQ+ people. This setting has to be manually changed. Closer to home, in various social justice spaces and conferences, there are often panels and conversations taking place that only have men speaking and moderating. Colloquially called “manels,” they are a visible indicator and reminder of how the lack of gender diversity in a conversation is not seen as a problem or even as something unusual.


The literal absence of women and gender diverse people across all levels of design and decision-making can be, and is often, dangerous and life-threatening to over half the global population. Inversely, in many contexts where non-heteronormative sexuality and gender expression are legally and socially criminalized, LGBTQ+ people and women are often scapegoats for moral social decay and are positioned as the reason for failed governance or even natural disasters . Through digital misinformation and disinformation, and with widespread platform apathy and inaction , narratives around women and gender-diverse people and communities have been manipulated to promote language that results in violence experienced both online and offline by these communities. A recent poll by Gallup in the United States, a country previously considered progressive for its inclusion and legislative advancements for women and LGBTIQA+ people , found that, for the first time in nearly two decades, positive public sentiments for same-sex marriage and trans identities (the entire range of diverse trans identities beyond the man–woman binary) and rights are on the downturn.


Intolerance for and active exclusion of women and gender diverse people is on the increase, and these shifts do and will continue to have a negative effect on advancements that have helped create a more equitable world. Gender diversity broadly refers to the equitable representation and inclusion of people of different gender identities and expressions. Improving gender diversity is commonly understood as the intentional inclusion of women in various spaces and fields. It should be understood to also include non-binary, transgender, genderfluid, agender, and other gender-diverse individuals. True gender diversity needs to move beyond traditional binary understandings of gender and look at gender as a galaxy, rather than fixed categories and boxes. Why does gender diversity matter anyway? The experiences and lived realities of women and LGBTIQA+ people from all walks of life differ fundamentally from those of people whose lives conform to dominant socially and legally accepted power structures, often presented as normative, such as heterosexuality and patriarchy. This exclusion of women, genders, and sexualities seen as “not normal” to a certain society adversely affects the whole society, as well as the targeted groups and individuals.


This exclusion has wide-reaching consequences, including but not limited to the formulation of policies and laws that limit access to life-saving healthcare, foundational education, and identity and travel documents. Rolling back advancements on gender diversity and inclusion creates unequal societies. Studies have shown that societies that exclude on the basis of gender and sexuality, as well as race, class, caste, disability, and religion, advance much more slowly than societies that create more equal opportunities for the whole community, regardless of differences. The current trend of rejecting and reversing existing initiatives that have sought to right various inequalities (including gender diversity), puts our collective potential for change at risk, and threatens to undo centuries of progress towards a world with better lived experiences for all. Gender diversity and technology There is a widespread opinion, or maybe even an aspiration, that technology is perceived as neutral. This is not true or possible because the biases and lack of inclusion from the offline physical worlds get translated into online spaces and are built into technologies, which are then marketed as unbiased.


In today’s world, where technology is integral to and enmeshed in our lives and bodies, attention to gender diversity in technology is urgent. Technologies and their applications need to be supplemented with digital rights and safety conversations that take into specific account how they further widen existing gaps. Facial recognition technology, generative artificial intelligence, and other surveillance technologies are being increasingly used to influence democratic and governance processes and by local authorities in policing, welfare systems and more. The prejudices and biases that exist in the physical world and societies are also reflected in the data used to train these technologies, which replicates the biases against women and gender diverse people, Black people and people of colour, and other structurally marginalised communities. Large Language Models (LLMs), which power generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., are more likely to give users of African American English lower-prestige jobs, more likely to convict them of a crime, and more likely to sentence them to death rather than life imprisonment for committing murder .


A UN Women study found that nearly one in four women human rights defenders surveyed have been subjected to AI-assisted online violence with severe repercussions in the offline world. Without pushing for gender diversity in technology, women and gender diverse persons will continue to be pushed through the gaps in the systems. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence disproportionately impacts the safety, access, and rights of women, LGBTQ+ persons, and other structurally silenced communities, especially those who are vocal and visible on social media platforms. Because our lives now exist in the continuum of online and offline, this impact is felt in both digital and physical spaces and lives, as well as in the mental health of the survivors. Dr. Joy Buolawini and Dr. Timnit Gebru’s 2018 landmark study, “ Gender Shades ,” revealed that facial recognition technology by Microsoft, IBM, and Face++ had the lowest error rates of 0.8 percent with lighter-skinned male faces, and the highest error rates of 34.7 percent when it came to identifying darker female faces.


This study and several others that followed led to bans on the use of facial recognition by police departments in several states in the US because of its inbuilt racial bias and capacity to exacerbate structural racial inequalities. In India, a 50-year-old welfare program denies food rations to pregnant women and new mothers , as the AI facial recognition technology now used to verify identities fails to match the changing faces compared to photos taken years ago as part of identity systems. A recent study showed that popular artificial intelligence models reproduce harmful caste-based stereotypes and bias , and discriminate against people from oppressed castes who are comparatively underrepresented in the media and online. This highlights that, while gender diversity is an essential lens in how we approach digital rights and technologies, this will be incomplete without factoring in the intersectionality of race, caste, location and ability.


The time is now The current rightward spin of the world and the constant attacks on gender diversity and other social justice interventions by governments, Big Tech, and other powers make it hard for us to push for rights and liberties at this moment. Which is why now is the time to hold the line by continuing to tell our stories and demand presence at the tables where decisions are made in all our intersectional glory. Because we understand that all our oppressions are interconnected, and that the role technology plays in our lives is impossible to escape, we all need to gather our resources, ideas and skills towards more collectivist actions and less siloed approaches to problem solving. In the face of interconnected systems of heteropatriarchy, racism, settler colonialism, caste oppression, rampant capitalism, militarisation, technoauthoritarianism and commodification of the planet and the global south, our hope rests on the strength of our diversity as we move together imperfectly towards our collective liberations.