Saide Mobayed
Vienna femicide team
Huifang LIU: Can I ask a short introduction of what you are doing?
Saide MOBAYED: I have been working with United Nations Studies Associations since 2016. So, I mostly work with the Femicide Watch Platform, it’s a project that’s started in 2017, and it was launched during the CCPCJ (The Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice) at the UNODC(United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). It’s basically run by volunteers and it’s also an issue for us in terms of updating or keeping the updates up to date. And what I do for the webpage is that I upload content also do the Twitter communication, because I found out that it’s been quite useful for actually to connect to all the organizations. The idea of the platform is to create this sort of global knowledge hub that collect and curate information on femicide / feminicide from different regions. So, this information, as you can see in our banner, is the first data collection, definitions and so on. Originally we were doing some cases here as well to try to connect transnationally like for example in 2015 there was a really important case in Mexico, it was persecuted a femicide or feminicidio in the context, and that was only possible due to transnationalization, both of the legal systems, civil society activism, organisations working on this, the idea was to provide this transnationalized / global overview of how the concept has evolved. So, this is kind of what I do for the UNSA but I am also doing a PhD in sociology at the University of Cambridge, I am working particularly with data collection on femicide, how this data is being collected and contested with the use of digital technologies. I am moving a lot through sociology of data, sociology of knowledge, a lot of feminism theories as well. So, this is how, on the one side on the activist side with the femicide watch platform, and on the other a PhD, sort of academic.
H: Ok thank you, that is impressive! So maybe we can start from the basic of the definition, in France, the definition of femicide is closely related to intimate relationship. So, from your organization or your personal point of view, when you carry your research, how do you define femicide ?
S: I think there are multiple layers in which this question can be replied to. I think this is important to consider the genealogy of the concept, right? Femicide is fully charged with a historical connotation, and here it is also important to consider that the concepts are very fluid and under construction, and could be even seen as living memories, if you will. So, trying to come with a global definition has been a massive issue for everyone, from all levels, from the domestic level, to the international level. The reason why this is, is that it is extremely contextual, and it is a concept that should be re-politicized constantly in the context where it is being implemented. In this sense, I like a lot, for example, like Donna Haraway situated knowledges, to think that knowledge reflect particular conditions of possibilities. In this sense maybe it could be a bit clearer if we think about how the concept has evolved recently. So the first one I guess you really came across is the first time that the concept has been publicly announced, is in 1976 by Diana Russell, in the national tribunal on crime against women in Brussels, and she basically defined it as “the killing of females by males because they were females”. So, in the UNSA, and also in my work, I often define femicide as the gender related killings of women, which is like, the one layer of the concept.
However, it’s not that easy, because the gender category itself, can and should be contested. And the problem here has been that the international community has looked into genders as a difference, mostly male versus female, and not as diversity, as how this is theorized, originally, let’s say Judith Butler’s work and so on. So, gender has become this sort of all encompassing, but we don’t really stop to think about what gender really mean and can be impersonalized in different levels. So, Diana Russell coins this term in 1976, it’s really interesting, the cause of the femicide is fascinating because if you look at into the global international relations perspective, because it met with feminist social movements that were happening globally. I set the concept into the global scene, when women started to reunite and stand together, started to push forward for their rights. And then the role of Latin America has been really important, because they started to organize the “encuentros” in a way to differentiate themselves from feminists in the global north, and to say “we are fighting for different issues, so while you are fighting for equal payment, we’re fighting against violence”. So, in this sense, violence is an important interpoint for feminists in Latin America, to sort of voice transnationally their issues. Which is what leads me to the re-politicization of femicide into feminicidio during the 90’s, and this is really important to think about, because this means the difference between the concepts “femicide” and “feminicide” is not purely linguistic but there is also an epistemological difference, a cultural difference that gave birth to these both, different, concepts. In the 90’s, I mean this story can go long but I try to summarize it. I am sure you are familiar with the situation of Mexico, what happened in Mexico during the 90’s? The NAFTA agreement was signed in 1993 between Canada, the US and Mexico, which meant that national companies, corporations, moved to the border of Mexico, which meant cheaper labour. So, when this was built, women from the peripheries, started to migrate to the north of Mexico, to work in these factories, mostly clothing factories. They started to enter the work forces, and then, this phenomenon started to occur, where they get abducted from the public space, kidnapped, tortured, rapped, and so on, and their bodies are disposed in the desert. So, this is during the 90’s, mid 90’s. And this is why feminists in Mexico coined the term “feminicidio”, to differ from the term “femicide” and the main element that differentiates these two concepts, is the role of the state. Because, what Lagarde said in her definition, during the 90’s, is the state play a big role, as in, she defines it as the state crime that result from the collapse of the institution, the breakdown of democracy, and the prevalence of impunity. So, during the 90’s we have this new feminist, Latin American feminists entering the global agora, they push forward this concept and then, a lot of international intention starts to come to Mexico, starts to come to the border. Upon until today we don’t really know who committed these crimes, and if these crimes are still happening, some argue that they still are, some that they happened and then stop happening, and then start happening again. But the Mexican cases are really important so I would definitely recommend you take a look into the Mexicans case, because it has set a lot of precedents. I mean, conceptually, legally, it was the first country in the world to have in their penal code for example in 2012. So Latin America has been quite different in relation to Europe, and I think the reason why is an institutional reason, like in Latin America, because we don’t have stable institutions, a lot is done through civil movements, so civil rights are mostly fought within civil movements basically, so that’s a difference with western democracies for example, where you have stronger institutions, where citizens can address the civil rights violation through these institutions. So this why, for example in Latin America, we have in 1994, the first Convention on violence against women (Convention Bélem do Para, ndlr), which is the preamble of the Istanbul convention in 2005 in Europe, so it takes Europe 10 years to have an instrument similar to the one that we were already using in Latin American. But a lot relates to this specific context, both of the regions and countries themselves, so when we discuss femicide, and this is something I often stress, is that we need to look into particular conditions within the context that it is happening in. You know in order for us to create better prevention, better mechanisms, sanctions, laws and so on. So, the context is extremely important, and I think it is being the biggest challenge in the globalization of the concept. There are certain particular and specific elements that vary widely across countries. So in France for example, or in Europe, or in the Western World in the end, it’s mostly in relation with intimate partner violence because I believe there is a stronger system of law in place, which decreases the risk of unaccountable killings in the public space, but this is the case with intentional homicide. So, homicide rates are lower, let’s say, in Western democracies that they can be in unstable political regimes. However I believe that the global institutions are mostly using “feminicide” as synonym of intimate partner killing or intimate partner violence, and I think that is a problem because, there are others regions, where it is not the case, regions where women are in danger, both in their household and in the public space. And Mexico has been a good example of this.
H: Ok, thank you very much. So, you were talking about the fact that… I wrote down a phrase which I didn't really get it, so you were talking about the re-politicization during the 90s?
S: Yeah, in the sense that femicide emerges as a concept to address certain political issues of course. And then during the mid 90s, this concept was re-signified because of the killings that were systematically happening at the border. So like Marcela Lagarde she took the femicide concept of Diana Russell and she said “we need to re-adapt this concept into the current context” which is why she uses “feminicide” because it’s says that there is a difference, a epistemological difference in this concept, where the state has an important role in the killings, either by ignoring them, or by perpetuating them, which was the case at the time.
H: Ok, so back to the point that you were talking about, for you it is very problematic that the Western world usually consider, or equalize femicide as homicide that is happening into an intimate relationship, so when you are coordinating all those data, how do you, because maybe those data you are collecting in France is just purely femicide happening in intimate relationship, but the data you are collecting from Latin America, like Mexico, can involve much more ?
S: So, up until today, I think there is only one study that attempted to do global comparison on femicide so, it’s the 2019, UNODC Global Study on Homicide on the gender related killings of women, where they say 87 000 women died in 2017, and if you take a closer look into this report it only uses data from certain countries, and it only uses data where there is a clear definition or clear relationship between victim and perpetrator. So it is really, extremely complex and problematic, to do a global comparison of datasets, because every country has their own data collection system, which is why the UN Special Rapporteur on VAWG, Dubravka Simonovic, wanted to create femicide watch observatories, to try to make like sort of a supranational institution that collects data, independent from Nation states, on this issue. In my experience, it is extremely complex, I can only talk about Mexico because it is the context that I know best and there, it has been, a big, a huge challenge, to collect data on femicide on a national level. The reason why this is because Mexico, for example, is a federation, we have 32 entities, 32 states that are part of this federation. The first time that femicide became, like start to enter into the federal code was in 2012, It wasn’t until 2017 that we had comparable data between these 32 entities. The reason why is because each state has, of course because it’s a federation, has its own Penal Code, which slowly adapts to the federal Code. So, if you think that it took us 5 years to create a national comparison on this issue, imagine like at a bigger level, like a global level! So it requires a lot of will and efforts for institutions, if you think of those countries like Mexico, where, according to the ENVIPE, in 2018, the 93.2% of crimes go unreported. The preliminary investigation of half of those that were reported did not come with any result. Based on further research from Animal Político, 9 out of 10 homicides in Mexico go unpunished. For us it’s really complex to give the UN a victim’s perpetrator data set because for you to know, for you to have that data, you need to know who the killer was, and for you to find out who the killer was, or who the perpetrator was, you need to have like a strong rule of law. So, working with data is extremely challenging if you’re asking.
However, there are others attempts, so Latin America is a continent that has been working a lot on this, and there is the Latin America Initiative for Open Data, and it’s guided by Silvana Fumega and she recently wrote a very interesting article for the LSE blog, I recommend you to take a look into it. It’s a blog entry where she talks about the challenges that they faced in creating a regional comparative date on this issue. And then she talks about the importance of concepts, the institutional challenges, the role of the gender perspective... So, I think one positive element we can try to think of, like more into the future, is the role of technology, and how the technology may enhance us to collect data in a better way. But in my PhD research I look a lot into alternative data collections on femicide for example, and I think that it is an extremely insightful intake. There is, in France, there is a femicide map that is being collected, I think it started last year, and what these activists are doing, which I find very interesting, is they collect their data based on news report, they create their own categories based on that. So, I think that could give us an insight on certain patterns of femicide that may not be taken into consideration by the legal system for example. So in Mexico, there is this prominent activist, María Salguero, her work shows certain patterns that regional statistics are not showing. So that is important to take into consideration as well when we think about data collection and how we turn reality into numbers, which is a complicated task.
H: So, you were talking about the Mexican case… so when you collect data, where does this data come from?
S: So, the Mexican government has created in the recent years great efforts into collecting data on this issue, so there is a specific institution, which is the National System for Public Security (SESNSP), from the Department of Public Security of Mexican state, that is collecting these data. So yeah, and they collect data based on reports. So when you report a crime and then they open a file.So, they take from there, I mean the data that they’re using.
H: Ok, they need to wait for the victim to declare…
S: Well, not the victim because the victim cannot have a voice anymore, but their families yes. So, but then here again, if you think of access to justice in Mexico and most frequently femicide in Mexico are committed to poor peripheral women, with limited access to justice. There are a lot of filters before we have access to numbers. So even if we were to compare femicide, across time, it is extremely complex, we cannot do that, because the categories have changed so much. If you were to compare femicide in 2012 to femicide in 2020, you’d see a 300% increase of femicide. And the reason why this is, now they’re being categorized differently. So, in 2012, a certain killed body had a category that differs from the category it would have now. So, some argue that we should re-open certain files, certain cases that were categorized as suicide for example, you know, in order for us to re-categorize it, which could be a big challenge as well.
Cloë PINOT: Yes, we are working on the suicide issue and it’s a very interesting question.
H: This afternoon I was just reading a report about cyber violence, because of a lot of violence... like even though it’s not femicide, like, you can cause women to commit suicide.
S: So yeah, we have to think, that femicide is the end result from a long continuum of violence, so it’s not isolated situation. Particularly when it’s within the household, or when it’s committed by someone close to the victim. It’s like a spiral, it takes a long time to start, like the first act of violence, of physical violence, but then it becomes quicker and quicker, and it becomes more permanent, until you get to this horrific result. Which keep us helped in term of thinking that it can be prevented, femicide can be prevented. It’s not something that has no solution, we can prevent that. The problem is that we need public policies that last at least 15 years for example, we need a big cultural transformation. We can think about this as this ecological model of violence. It’s like we have the individual, the relationship, the community and the society, and how they all interact together, into creating that results in violence. We need to tackle each one of these specific circles in order for it to be prevent, and then again we should also think of the global political economy and how certain parts of the world are more vulnerable to this sort of crimes, so the idea of precarity is also important to take into consideration, which is why when we conceptualize it as purely as intimate partner violence, it invisibilizes all this reality that women are facing in particular context where, as I said, they’re in danger also in the public space, due to the precarity of the context itself. So, this is why the context is really important, and this is why we need to situate femicide into the specific situation where it is occurring. For example, in Mexico in 2009, we had this War on Drugs, and data has proven that the killings, both of men and women, has increased in the public space. What is interesting about this is, when you look into violence against women into the domestic sphere, you see that the pattern remains the same, it didn’t really change. Women are in danger in their household, and they have been for a long time. But now when we have this specific context of the war on drugs, violence against women increases also in the public space, and crimes get more violent, because there is more precarity. So, they are specific patterns, which are continuously changing, which is why it is important to also take a look into alternative data collections and to activist data collections because they can show us different patterns or different behaviour patterns of killings, which the statistics may not.
H: Yes, while you were talking about this, it reminds me of the rapport written by the small army survey in Geneva, illustrating how the arms and drugs contribute to the increasing homicide rate or women killing…
S: Yes absolutely.
H: When you’re talking about the data collecting in Mexico, some families might signal the femicide but some families might keep silent due to the fear of potential revenge, are there some measures to take to encourage them to be vocal about it?
S: One thing that we also need to consider when talking about femicide is that there exists this layer due to global activism, it’s them who push this concept into what we see now. So for the families of the victims, it’s incredible the struggle that they’re encountered because the institutions are quite weak, so they often get a close door. but there have been some NGOs, international NGOs who support as well. these women were able to reach out, to have accountability and justice. so the case of Mariana Lima Buendía is an interesting case, so she was killed in 2010 by her partner, the state persecutes it as suicide (a lot of their accountability has been done through the activism of the mothers.) and the mother (Irene Buendía) was relentless, and with the help of the NGOs, she argued that, “no my daughter was killed by her partner, and her partner was a policeman, so he was somehow protected.” And they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and in 2015, she was the first case to be ruled as femicide in the country, and this was already possible with the constant leverage of the civil society.
And here is also important to mention that in 2009, the Mexican state was prosecuted by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights
from the OAS, in what's known as the Cotton Field sentence, I think it might be interesting for Cloë, because of the legal side of it. They call it the field sentence because it was the first transnational court sentence given to a state for the femicide of three women at the border of the Mexican and US, this happened in 2009 and since then, a lot has been triggered in the country. Now there’re femicides being persecuted in this category, and this been a product of the activism. So yes, of course, the families of the victims face a lot of institutional barriers, but again, through this constant support of the femicide activists, they manage to reach justice.
H: While you were talking about the strong force from those activists, what are the major ways to leverage the change that’s happening in the society?
S: This is an interesting question, so I think that a lot of the tactics they use is through street protest or performance protest, in the book Cultural representations of femicide at the US-Mexico border / Nuala Finnegan, the author uses a lot of activists that have been done in terms of art activism for this, to be more prominent, Nuala Finnegan is a very prominent artist who helps as well. So, a lot of this performative art, going on the streets, and basically, screaming for justice. And support from lawyers as well, certain NGOs that push the causes further, and the media! When we talk about this, we should be very aware of the mediatization that we’re embedded in. So, the media also plays a massive role in communicating this and giving voice to the voiceless females, to the families as well.
H: So, these media are more like mainstream media or alternative media that focus on social issues?
S: I think because of the alarming situations in the 90s and the way that has been talked about, the homicide, and then the 8th of March. In France as well, globally the 8th of March became an interesting date. A lot of Mexican women are kind of denounced. It was interesting to see that a lot of mainstream media were reporting on the case. I think this is due to due to certain political interests in the cause, in the human right causes to gain more votes? So, there are certain contexts and particularities. But recently, a lot of mainstream media have been focusing on the topic, alternative media as well. It’s very interesting that in France it has gained a lot of attention in recent years, particularly during 2019.
H: You have evoked a little bit in your self-introduction, but could you talk a bit more about how the Vienna femicide team has come into being and how do you orchestrate the work?
S: I think it’s very interesting, and the fact that it’s started in Vienna is important, because in Vienna UNODC has its main headquarters, so that allows the group to gain visibility. It’s founded in 2015, by Michael Platzer, when it was still a part of ACUNS (The Academic Council on the United Nations System), it had a Vienna liaison office. And the role of ACUNS to the United Nations is to create certain leverage for the stakeholders…The team is mostly composed of students who are interested in the topic. I was doing my Master in Vienna at that time, and I met a colleague who was working for ACUNS at that time and then I joined the team. One of the greatest figures in our achievements has been Michael Platzer, he has worked for UN for decades and now he’s retired. So, he’s a very interesting character, he used to work for the ACUNS and he strengthened many bridges between the ACUNS liaison office and UN stakeholders (particularly at UNODC). And he is actually the one who keeps the volumes to be alive and fights for us to have a place to talk about this.
2015 is really an important year because that’s the year were the Femicide Team was formed and there’s a resolution that ACUNS pushed forward as well. The CCPCJ (The Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice) has been an important fore. Every year the Vienna femicide team organizes a side event in which we present our volumes and discuss topics and it’s an important space that we have. And it’s quite organic, it changes a lot actually. A lot of people leave Vienna, or they find a full-time job, which then makes it hard to keep pm volunteering. However, after the UNSA took over the Femicide team and Helena Gabriel has been in charged, our actions have become more structured.
It’s quite interesting because in my research I encounter people who quote the volumes. I think it has given femicide a good platform. And the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women has been a great help too. We created the Femicide Watch platform to gather more information on this matter. The support from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability has been important as well. Myrna Dawson has helped us a lot.
My master’s thesis was concerned with how the concept of femicide/feminicide has been transnationalized, it’s interesting to see how the concept has gained a certain prominence, for example in South Africa. In Europe, it has gained a lot of prominence in the last five years. It’s interesting to see the expansion of it and how the popularity of the recent ten years is incredible. If you create a timeline for the femicide you see that the first time it was published in a UN document, it was 1997. That’s the first time I saw that UN used the word “Femicide”, and to see it today, less than 25 years, the expansion is incredible. You have 18 countries in Latin America that have it in their penal code. Now Europe wants to implement it as well.
There’s a book called The Seductions of Quantification, by Sally Engle Merry, and I highly recommend it because she also does this sort of genealogical work on how the violence against women has become an object of quantification. This is a good book, she doesn’t directly address femicide, which is what I’m doing in my PhD, I specifically do this genealogy for the concept of femicide, whilst looking into the role of digital technology as well. There are many views on data, we like to say “ten women are killed every day in Mexico” or “87,000 women were ‘globally’ killed in 2017”, but we need to be careful about these numbers and to question and remain be critical about them, to dig into how this numbers are being collected and who is actually collecting them, whose interests play a role in this kind of quantification.
Femicide emerged as a political concept and then it evolved into a statistical indicator. This epistemic translation has been extremely difficult. One of the reasons why that is, is because I believe, the definition is flawed. Because when you say, “ a woman has been killed because of her gender” — don’t get me wrong, this is the definition that I’m using and the definition that a lot of stakeholders are using — it’s problematic, how can you say that this person died because of her gender. What does gender even mean? There’s a very interesting book, Femicide, Gender and Violence, where the author questions a lot the definition of gender, at least in femicide definitions, and how the category in itself has been challenging. So now the Mexican state has, in my opinion, created some good variables to differentiate from intentional homicide and femicide. Therefore, the importance of categories. So, the first is — this is what UN pushes us as well — the victim perpetrator relation, so there’s someone within the family, or previous partners, so the killer was typified as femicide.
C: I thought about the seven categories which are a good example for France, because a lot of lawyers are against that femicide be included into the penal code, because they think that gender killing is so difficult to be defined and the solution that Mexico found seems really good …
S: Honestly, I agree that categorising what killing constitutes a femicide is really difficult. However, I think these nine categories have the potential to be used in other contexts that’s for sure.
H: So, these categories are included in the Mexican law?
S: Yes, this didn’t happen until 2018. Of course, in 2012, the concept entered into the penal code, along with its definition. However, the methodology was modified in 2018. This new methodology contains more precise variables concerning the characteristics a killing should have for it to be considered a ‘feminicidio’. Because as what I’ve said, it’s very difficult to quantify.
H: Talking about the position, do you have some allies, who share your opinions, if so, who are they? What is the link between these allies and your work? What are your shared interests?
S: In the USA, we’re definitely in line with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, UN Women, the Spotlight Initiatives of the European Union...and initiatives from Latin America directly addressing femicide. So, these are the stakeholders we are in line with. The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability as well. We are trying to connect with organisations in Mexico as well for example. Here is where my role as a researcher comes along in the sense of, I know how difficult it is for us to use the concept of ‘the global’ right, and this sense I‘m really align with the decolonised feminism, where we need to include marginalised voices in the process as well. I think it’s important to include the activists for them to be part of the knowledge making. It’s something that I argue in my PhD research or in Vienna Femicide Team. We need to have allies that are knowledge makers in their own context, and to discuss the particularities from within these contexts. We also want to organize a conference where we could bring together activists, practitioners from the global south and the global north — I don’t like this category, but we still use them because we know what they refer to. But I don’t know whether it will really happen.
Which is why it’s important to look into the alternative data collection, because, for example, this map that I’m taking a look at in Mexico, includes transgender femicide for example. I know that this information is based on media report which means they can be biased as well. However, human rights activists can create categories that state is not counting because at least in Mexico, the citizens are female or male and that’s it. You don’t have other options. Which then relates to the question of “what is a woman?”, so I think this idea for data activists to create better patterns, as I previously said, is one possibility to take into consideration in relation to quantification practices of femicide. I think the technology will allow us to create more inclusive datasets that don’t prioritise one type of killing (e.g. intimate femicide) over another. I think in the future, we’ll have a new way of visualizing data and making the data more humane, rather than just a number or a graph. For us to try to look into the stories instead of just isolated, generalised data. Which is why I use a lot of work Tommaso Venturini, Bruno Latour and Gabriel Tarde, since they argue for these alternative ways of looking at data. In September there’ll be a conference dedicated to the data collection of femicide, so you can check it out as well. This would be the first one, as least in the European context.
H: Apart from the allies, do you perceive also some opponents
S: It depends on the context. I think some are reluctant to collect data specifically on femicide. They much rather call it the “the gender-related killing of women”, I don’t know if you’ve come across this case, for example UNODC does not use “femicide” but “the gender-related killing of women”, I think there are certain frictions in the conceptualisation there. So, I think for certain institutions it’s been quite challenging to describe this kind of killings, I think the difficulty of data collection relates to the complexity of the definition itself. So, on the one hand I guess there are institutions that resist to the concept, they still prefer terms like “homicide” for example. On the other hand, I also encounter some ‘opponents’ on Twitter, saying “there are more males being killed than females”, this is the kind of argument that we often come across with. The response is: yes, but women die in different ways from the way men die, also the structural relationship is different, so for example, man are killed in the public space with the use of guns, whereas women tend to die in their households, and they are killed violently, sexual violence. Gun fires are used as weapons as well, but other instruments prevail, they are choked with cords or sharp instruments, beaten up, and so on. Also, their bodies are disposed differently as well. In addition, women are mostly killed by intimate partners or family members, they tend to be exposed to public space, inside plastic bags...so there’s definitely a difference between killings.
On the institutional side, they might not be as vocal about their frictions with the concept like some are in social media, particularly twitter.
Language also plays an important role in understanding the category of femicide and its possible frictions. Some early documents from 2000 tend to intertwine gender and woman, using it as the same category, which is pretty problematic. Sally Engle Merry, who is a law anthropologist and wrote that book I previously mentioned on The Seductions of Quantification suggests that there are different social worlds discussing violence against women (not particularly femicide). She says, there’s the human right framework, the feminist framework, the criminological framework and the statistical framework. She argues how each of these frameworks approach violence against women differently, and I think this is something that happens with femicide as well since it has been a very politically charged concept with great importance to the feminist movement. In this sense, when it tried to permeate the statistical field it has been hard to create good, comparative data on femicide, particularly because the data is collected in so many levels. UNODC’s document tells you it’s global but when you take a deeper look at it, there are only a few countries presented and it’s mainly about intimate partner perpetrators. When you think about some other countries, they don’t have this kind of data because they have weak institutions. I think we should also think about the ways using data and trying to make the problem visible, beyond the numbers.
H: To clarify your position, what kind of « proof » did you apply? (statistics, numbers… etc) How do you produce these « proof »?
S: So, we upload official statistics from nation states or from international institutions, also some grassroot data collection, that’s also important to take into consideration. But again, it’s complex, to give legitimacy to certain forms of knowledge more than others.