IDEA academic statement: The war in Ukraine, disability and global implications

06 Apr 2022
06 Apr 2022

This statement expresses our deep concern with developments in Ukraine, and calls for action in an academic space that can be neither neutral nor inactive in the face of this human tragedy unfolding and witnessed in real time.

As we write, a global food crisis is looming. Ukraine and Russia are major wheat exporters, while Russia and Belarus are leading producers of fertilizer. This will push food prices up and impact food production, the effects of which will largely be felt in the global South. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently estimated that international food and feed prices may go up by 8 to 22 percent, while a staggering 10 million people in Africa and Asia will be pushed into hunger. Around 8 to 13 million people will be undernourished in the world in 2022/23.

We have enough knowledge of how wars and conflict impact everyone and everywhere, and that there is nothing like a localized war in an increasingly interconnected world. Wars create and export impairment. Reports are emerging of persons with disabilities stuck in the conflict in Ukraine, while others attempt to flee in the most desperate conditions. Others are, or will be, disabled by war. The global ramifications of this war will stretch beyond the walls of Europe, into the poorest corners of the global South to impact persons with disabilities too.

As academics from a global South university:  

  • We condemn the unprovoked violent invasion committed by the Russian Federation, reminiscent of the brutal colonial assaults known too well in the global South  
  • We call on all states parties to ensure the protection and safety of persons with disabilities and to respect their international obligations, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the UN Security Council Resolution 2475 (2019) on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities in Conflict.
  • We call on the international community to fulfil its obligations towards those caught in the crisis and beyond, including persons with disabilities, and to do this together with Organizations of People with Disabilities (OPDs)
  • We call for ongoing disability disaggregated data to inform policy alongside evidence-based practice to ensure timely, targeted and responsive intervention, and to monitor inclusion in real time
  • We call for active and close collaboration between academics and practitioners working on disability and forced migration, respectively, to carefully equip services supporting refugees with disabilities.  
  • We call on the humanitarian and emergency sector to operate in a disability-inclusive way at all times, and to do this in a respectful, non-disabling and responsive manner at all times.
  • We call for attention to those who are more vulnerable, including to sexual violence and assault, among them women and children with disabilities and to ensure adequate protection.
  • We call on Organizations of People with Disabilities (OPDs) to lead and guide on the process of including disability in emergency response and humanitarian action.
  • We call for a strategy and for targeted resources to be in place to ensure that the full, complex and heterogenous needs of all persons with disabilities are effectively attended to and sustained.      
  • The seriousness of the current tragedy highlights how Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction (DIDRR) needs to be prioritised as an area of study and practice. Correspondingly, we call for a Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) sector that is disability-educated and genuinely inclusive.
  • We call for active understanding of the impacts of disasters on multiple areas including education, health, livelihoods, food and nutrition, sanitation, safety, and water over space and time. Correspondingly, we call for multi-dimensional action in these and other areas that extends beyond the immediate crisis, and that is not merely reactive.    
  • The war in Ukraine and its global dimensions reaffirms how our academic work needs to work towards questioning and challenging forces that oppress and that contribute to disaster risk. We urgently call for a geopolitically educated disability studies informed about disasters and disaster risk reduction.   
  • We call for research and critical work that moves beyond uncritical and celebratory positions of global frameworks such as the Sendai Framework for the Prevention of Disasters (SFDRR) or the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Policies and declarations cannot be stripped of the (geo)politics and crises that frame and constrain them.  
  • Finally, we need prepared communities and community development programmes that effectively incorporate disaster risk reduction, and that are disaster-ready. This is not a matter of choice, but one of pressing demand in globally turbulent times.