ASAP recognizes that, to stand against poverty, we must stand against racism. We are committed to the worldwide effort to overcome racism everywhere: in policing and the penal system, in housing and credit, in education and employment, in health care and social security, in politics and the media, in our hearts and minds and everyday lives. Everywhere. Black Lives Matter.

In our world, poverty and racism are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Impoverization through racist law, policy and practice facilitates the violence, marginalization and discrimination that has brought us to this moment.

ASAP stands in solidarity with the global movement for Black lives taking place in the US, UK, South Africa, Syria and around the world. This moment requires action! Stand with us:

•    Support the Movement for Black Lives call for economic justice and    invest-divest (invest in community and divest from policing).

•    Join and/or endorse Scholars for Black Lives – #S4BL

•    Learn and share anti-racism resources:

An Anti-Racist Reading List by Ibram X. Kendi

Communities United Against Police Brutality

George Floyd Memorial Fund

Minnesota Freedom Fund

Mutual Aid and Restorative Justice

National Bail Out – #FreeBlackMamas

Reclaim the Block

•    Follow and amplify movement work on social media:

#BlackLivesMatter Global Network

#DefundthePolice

#PoliceFreeCampus

#SayTheirNames

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

#JusticeForBre #IRunWithMaud

Paula Casal, Chapter Lead for ASAP Spain connected with colleagues in Colombia during the Summer of 2019.

Having spoken to colleagues in both the Universidad EAFIT and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the group of over 30 academics convened by Antonio Barboza, Constitutional Law Professor at Universidad EAFIT, have decided to convene a follow-up meeting later this year.

This event will include academics from different universities across Colombia to discuss how their respective research relates to “the structural drivers of poverty” in order to come together to agree on areas the new emerging ASAP Colombia chapter can work on with a view to organising a formal launch of ASAP Colombia in 2020.

The newest ASAP chapter was launched in June 2019 during at the 10th Interdisciplinary Conference on NATURE–HUMAN–CULTURE at the Pedagogical University of Cracow.

The event sought to promote responsible, sustainable and fair development at both a local and global level, and was also an opportunity to launch the Polish Chapter of ASAP. The Conference was jointly organized by the Pedagogical University of Cracow, ASAP and the European Foundation for Cooperation and Science, under the aegis of the Minister of Science and Higher Education, HE Jarosław Gowin as well as the Rector of Pedagogical University of Cracow, Prof. Dr Hab. Kazimierz Karolczak.

The event was attended by participants from a number of countries, bringing together 50 academics including Dr Muhammad Ashfaq, Senior Lecturer, Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands and CEO of Amanah Institute of Islamic Finance and Economics, and two ASAP Board Members, Professor Thomas Pogge (Yale University) and Professor Pahlaj Moolio (Pannasastra University of Cambodia).

Note: The Statement of the Polish ASAP Chapter can be found at the ASAP website [http://academicsstand.org/about/chapters/poland/] 

The conference, led by Yale Global Justice Program, the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Quinnipiac University, and ASAP will bring together academics, policymakers and NGO leaders for practice-oriented presentations and discussion. We plan to host a total of nine sessions: three longer morning panels, and six shorter afternoon sessions.

For the morning panels, keynote speakers include Branko Milanovic, Bridget Conley, and Alex de Waal. Branko Milanovic is a former World Bank researcher and is currently a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of \”Global Inequality, the Haves, and the Have-Nots\”. He will set the stage for the conference by presenting a historical perspective on inequality and by analyzing the dynamics of ongoing globalization: the main forces and trends that are likely to shape the evolution of the world economy and international relations over the coming decades. He will outline how extreme economic inequality and competition feed and sustain atrocious violence, which then, in turn, aggravates massive poverty and other deprivations.

The other panels will focus on problems closely related to, if not directly caused by, extreme inequality at both global and domestic level: first, political corruption and (lack of) access to political life; and second, the role, priorities, and constraints of NGOs; third, race and incarceration.

For more details about registration please contact: global@academicsstand.org

This year, Global Financial Integrity and Academics Stand Against Poverty will be awarding the seventh annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the two best original essays examining one particular component of illicit financial flows, the resulting harms and possible avenues of reform. Entered essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. There is a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000.

Illicit financial flows are generally defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used. Examples are funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational corporation seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); funds moved to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials. Illicit financial flows are explicitly recognized as an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and singled out as a separate target #4 of SDG 16.

Components of illicit financial flows can be delimited by sector and geographically. Delimitation by sector might focus your essay on some specific activity, business or industry – such as art, real estate, health care, technology, entertainment, shipping, agriculture, sports, gaming, education, politics, tourism, natural resource extraction, banking and financial services – or on an even narrower subsector such as the diamond trade, hunting, insurance or prostitution. Delimitation by geography might further narrow the essay’s focus to some particular country, province or region.

Your essay should describe the problematic activity and evaluate the adverse effects of it that make it problematic. Also, in quantitative terms insofar as this is possible, you should estimate the magnitude of the relevant outflows as well as the damage they do to the institutions and to the affected populations. This might include harm from abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of individuals, harm through subdued economic activity and reduced prosperity, and/or harm through diminished tax revenues that depress public spending.

Your essay should also explain the persistence of the harmful activity in terms of relevant incentives and enabling conditions and, based on your explanation, propose plausible ways to curtail the problem. Such reform efforts might be proposed at diverse levels, including supranational rules, national rules, corporate policies, professional ethics, individual initiatives, or any combination thereof. The task is to identify who has the responsibility, the capacity and (potentially) the knowledge and motivation to change behavior toward effective curtailment.

We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2020 to Tom Cardamone at SenPrize@gfintegrity.org. While your email should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.

The June event hosted at King\’s College London in partnership with World Leaders Forum, Club de Madrid and Global Justice Now aimed to critically analyse the structural shifts and reorientation in attitudes and rhetoric that need to be taken regarding migration-related policy decision making.

The symposium bought together interdisciplinary specialists from academia, policy, and NGOs to explore and outline the challenges and recommendations on methods to tackle some of the structural challenges associated with the current framing of migration.

The output report of this event was used to help inform the framing of migration discussions by World Leadership Alliance – Club de Madrid members at the UN General Assembly this September 2019.

A short report on the outputs of the event can be found here.

Hosted by Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu in March 2019 colleagues from ASAP Spain supported the launch of our new chapter ASAP Nepal at the Conference on Collective Responsibility

Dr Hari Timalsina of Tribhuvan University was joined by colleagues from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and the University of Oxford (UK) to discuss issues of collective responsibility including:

• Sea Access for Landlocked States
• Against Collective Responsibility
• Fertility and collective Responsibility
• Collective Responsibility, Population and Health

Paula Casal (ASAP Spain) is a Professor in the Law Department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral PhilosophyProfessorial Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Andrew Williams, Research Professor at ICREA and Pompeu Fabra University

Cracow | Poland  | 13-16 June 2019

We are pleased to invite you to the 10th Interdisciplinary Conference on Nature–Human–Culture combined with the launch of the Polish Chapter of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), held in cooperation with Academics Stand Against Poverty and the support of the Pedagogical University of Cracow.

The event will be held in Cracow, Poland on June 13-16, 2019.

The launch of ASAP-Poland will be supported by the special panel Poverty and Development and a book publication

This Conference will bring together researchers from around the world who are engaged in a variety of different topics in a field of Humanities, Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Social Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Health and Medical Sciences and Art

https://nck2019.up.krakow.pl/

Official language of the Conference is English.

https://nck2019.up.krakow.pl/

A workshop jointly organized by ASAP and Juris North at IVR 2019, at the University of Lucern from the 7th – 13th July.

We aim to attract contributions that will deepen and broaden the understanding of how to address partiality and unfairness in the world order (Special workshop number 46).

This year, Global Financial Integrity and Academics Stand Against Poverty will be awarding the sixth annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the two best original essays on assessing the human, social, political and institutional impacts of illicit financial flows out of Latin America as well as measures to curtail them in order to positively transform states and societies. Entered essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. There is a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000.

Illicit financial flows are generally defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used. Examples are funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational corporation seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); funds moved to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials. Because many Latin American countries have large natural resource sectors with relatively weak administrative controls on officials and powerful enablers operating locally (global banks; global tax, law, auditing and consulting firms; fiscal havens, etc.), illicit financial flows out of these countries tend to be substantial relative to their GDP or overall
trade. And because structural poverty and inequality persist there, Latin
American societies cannot afford such losses of capital and tax revenues that greatly hamper their ability to mobilize domestic resources to provide services and policies needed toward sustainable development.

Mindful of the Sustainable Development Goals (esp. SDG target 16.4 with
indicator 16.4.1) and seeking to inspire effective political action toward reducing illicit financial flows out of Latin America, we are inviting essays that assess the human, political and institutional impact of such illicit outflows. Your entry may focus on one or more specific countries and on one or more specific kinds of illicit financial flows and strategies/policies to curtail, control or avoid them. It should then estimate the magnitude of these outflows as well as the damage they do to the institutions and to the affected populations – for example, through depressed investment and through reduced tax revenues leading to, inter alia, lower public spending on health, education, social security and development.

We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2019 to Tom Cardamone at tcardamone@gfintegrity.org. While you email should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.