Deq (Arabic: دەق) or xal (Kurdish: خاڵ) are the Arabic and Kurdish words for tattoo respectively. Traditional Deq (tattoo) or Xal has long been a part of cultural heritage in Kurdistan and Iraq, it is ...

On 25 February 2025, the University of Duhok hosted a conference titled ‘Preserving Cultural Heritage in Kurdistan – Iraq’. This event, organised in collaboration with the Institute of Development ...

How did the e-levy become so unpopular, and what will repealing it mean? Over three years, researchers from the IDS-based International Centre for Tax and Development worked with partners in Ghana to ...

Calls for action to acknowledge and address caste power dynamics and prejudice based on caste in Higher Education.

In this first blog, we introduce the work of the Full Spectrum Coalition evidence and learning group and the challenge it responds to.

On 28 March 2025, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit central Myanmar, a country going through a civil war and an already worsening humanitarian crisis under the military junta. The earthquake was the most ...

Young people’s urban lives are often riddled with inequalities and everyday obstacles inhibiting their full societal ...

This review of the evidence on sexuality and poverty is undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) as part of a larger Accountable Grant from the UK Government’s Department for ...

Resilience has, in the past four decades, been a term increasingly employed throughout a number of sciences: psychology and ecology, most prominently. Increasingly one finds it in political science, ...

This background paper focuses on the potential role that international science and technology ‘foresight-type’ activities might play in informing decision-making processes about innovation, ...

Nutrition surveillance – or the systematic and periodic collection of information on nutrition – is vital to the capacity of governments and other agencies to track their progress towards reducing ...

The cuts to ODA budgets have severe consequences for climate change projects around the world, warns experts at IDS.