Blog post by Tariku Sagoya Gashute, Arba Minch University, Ethiopia; Abebe Lemessa Saka, Haramaya University, Ethiopia; and Tompson Makahamadze, George Mason University, USA

Ethiopian federalism was introduced to manage ethnic conflicts that arose from questions of recognition and autonomy. However, it further solidified ethnic division and conflict: drawing ethnicity at the centre of politics, it created rigid ethnic boundaries that increased division and conflicts.

Our Identities article, ‘Shared identity approach to conflict transformation: the case of the Konso–Derashe–Alle area, Ethiopian federalism in focus’, was based on a research question formulated against these limitations of Ethiopian federalism to mitigate conflict. The emphasis was on its tendency to undermine important bonding and bridging spaces. The system has deemphasized shared sociocultural and historical values that sustained intergroup relationships while exaggerating ethnic differences mainly for elite political ends, in which some sociocultural differences are politicized for a share in the regional and national cake.  

Blog post by Ester Gallo, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
 
My Identities article, ‘Utility workers: religion and the migratory stratification of foreign nurses across generations’, explores the role of Catholic institutions in shaping Indian nurses’ mobility pathways to Italy. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the global demand for nurses, and in many parts of the Global North (such as Europe, UK, Canada or the US) the provision of healthcare relies on the recruitment of  staff educated in the Global South. India represents one of the most important sources for this international recruitment of qualified nurses, who tend to be women from poorer groups.
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The international mobility of migrant nurses raises numerous challenges. When countries invest in the training of healthcare workers ‘for export’ – often at the expense of educational quality, workers’ rights and retention – this can make it difficult for their own country to address healthcare needs due to nurse shortages. In receiving countries, foreign-born nurses are often hired through temporary contracts; mass emergency recruitment coexists with periods of unemployment, resulting in precarious working conditions.

Blog post by Imran Awan and Damian Breen, Birmingham City University, UK
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March 23rd, 2025 marked five years since the first national lockdown in the UK as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As an unprecedented series of events, the pandemic exposed and exacerbated a range of pre-existing health and social inequalities, with Black and South Asian minority ethnic groups being among those most impacted.

At the height of the pandemic, the risk of mortality from COVID-19 was around three times higher for Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups than the national average. Whilst this is far from a complete picture of Muslim communities in the UK, it is ordinarily as close as we get in terms of data pertaining to British Muslims where religion is not measured in publicly available national-level data. However, whilst there was some acknowledgement of the racialized disparities exposed by the pandemic, one aspect which was overlooked was the impact of lockdowns on faith communities.

As we show in our Identities article, ‘Islam and faith in times of crisis: religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic’, key focus of our research was ‘faith in times of crisis’, and specifically faith practice for Muslims in the context of local and national lockdowns. Our project drew attention to the emphasis on practise in the context of Islam, and what lockdowns and restrictions meant for Muslims in particular.