Copyright: Arif Hafiz

Since the past few weeks, the youth in Bangladesh have been protesting against war criminals and demanding justice for the victims of 1971. Bangladeshi blogger Paula Aziz says, the movement is an awakening of the masses.

In the second blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet of UN Women discusses the role of caste in promoting bias against women. According to the caste system, women, by nature of their biological processes, are “impure.”

The lights in the hall grew dim as  German writer Sarah Khan began reading an excerpt from her latest book Die Gespenster von Berlin or The Ghosts of Berlin at the Annemarie Schimmel Cultural Institute in Lahore, Pakistan’s  second-largest city.

Her eyes are fixed on the door. Shagufta is waiting round-the-clock for her son to return home. She denies the fact that her wait is never going to end. Nearly five years have passed since her teenaged son was killed. Shagufta is yet to overcome the trauma of his loss. She is still not ready to accept that she has lost her ‘Jimmy’ forever. “It can’t be true that Jimmy is no more, it has to be a lie,” she mumbles.

Kony 2012 was an online video campaign that sought to create awareness and exert pressure on the international community to act against Joseph Kony, leader of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army which is responsible for the longest running violent struggle in Central Africa. Kony 2012 succeeded in its campaign and in garnering international exposure for the victims of the struggle, but it is accused of portraying the African people as silent witnesses. Several women activists in Africa emphasize that the youth needs to know that Africa is there for them and perhaps this is exactly what will help the campaign against Kony succeed.