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Social implications are as follows: social activism; girls education; collaboration; collective action; and change agent.

Learning outcomes are as follows: evaluate the role of a change agent in a nonprofit organization; understand collaborative partnerships in a nonprofit organization; examine how a nonprofit organization is promoting education in conflict-affected countries; understand the importance of education for girls as a basic human right; understand and discuss the threats to girls’ education in conflict-affected countries; analyze the role of Malala Yousafzai in supporting girls’ education globally; identify the challenges unique to educating girls; and explore steps that Yousafzai needs to take to ensure girls have equal access to the knowledge and skills they need to learn and lead in a world affected by the pandemic and climate change.

The case discusses social activist Malala Yousafzai’s (She) diligent efforts to promote girls’ education in conflict-affected regions globally through her not-for-profit organization Malala Fund. Co-founded in 2013, Malala Fund worked to ensure every girl globally could access 12 years of free, safe, quality education. The fund worked towards this goal by building creative partnerships and investing in its global network of education activists and advocates fighting for girls’ education in communities where most girls missed out. Malala Fund supported girls’ education programs in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, India, Brazil, Ethiopia, Turkey and Lebanon. The Fund’s projects were aimed at addressing gender norms, promoting the empowerment of girls through education, imparting gender-sensitive training for teachers and raising awareness about the need for girls’ education. In 2016, the fund created the Education Champion Network to support the work of local educators and advocates to advance.

Post-graduate level students.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CCS 11: Strategy.

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

The purpose of this study is to define the communicational profile of unattached diplomats and explore the viability of state-centric concepts such as citizen diplomacy when discussing non-state actors emerging from civil society.

The paper uses a comparative, multiple case design focusing on descriptive case studies (Yin, 2018) that explore the diplomatic endeavours and social biographies of “citizens of the world” acting at a global or local level, not explicitly attached to or explicitly against an official, state agenda: Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates.

The unattached diplomats have organisational mobility but are attached to the cause they promote, a configuration that fundamentally opposes that of the traditional or organisational diplomat. Looking at individuals from a diplomatic perspective, not as instruments or as targets, but rather as agents with their own agenda, issues and diplomatic capital, the unattached diplomats define their lack of attachment through organisational mobility, adversarial positioning or personal financial autonomy with regard to state diplomatic institutions or for-profit/not-for-profit organisations.

A higher number and diversity of case studies can enable the identification of patterns and standards.

This study introduces and operationalises the concept of unattached diplomats. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to discuss it in the context of another emerging concept, currently insufficiently researched: civil society diplomacy.

The first two decades of the 21st century saw the rise of girl power discourses in international development, which argue that when girls in the Global South are given an investment to stay in school, they will lift entire communities out of poverty. Transnational Corporations partnered with, or even founded, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) aimed at educating girls. Yet many of these corporations face criticisms that their products, employment practices, or supply chains are harmful to girls and women. In this chapter, I employ a feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist approach, analyzing the transnational politics of corporate–NGO partnerships for girls' education. I argue that Apple Inc.’s sponsorship of the Malala Fund and Caterpillar Inc.’s partnership with Girl Up amount to transnational forms of genderwashing, aimed primarily at alleviating the concerns of publics in the Global North while doing little to address harm experienced by girls and women in the Global South.

The reduction in public services since 2008 has undoubtedly affected some groups, such as disabled people, more than others. Many of these cuts, ostensibly imposed in response to recession, bear similarities to measures previously tried and tested on disabled asylum seekers. I argue that the perception of national crisis was used by government as a smokescreen to expand the population affected by such policies, thereby asserting a predetermined neoliberal agenda of public expenditure cuts.

The inequality of this situation is compounded by the entitlements granted to people deemed exceptionally worthy. The Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme for Syrian nationals includes disability among the eligibility criteria, offering considerably greater entitlements than available to asylum seekers. If the response to certain people is markedly different to that offered to others, then negative consequences can be anticipated, as from any other example of inequality. Furthermore, this scheme promotes a significant shift in migrant entitlement. The UK government has no legal obligation towards this group; therefore, those people who are selected are recipients of gifts rather than people claiming their rights. I explore the nature and implications of such differences in entitlement, arguing that inequality in all its manifestations must be challenged to reduce deprivation and to avoid negative consequences for the wider population.