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Glossary

  • megatrend

    According to Oxford English Dictionary megatrend is “an important shift in the progress of a society or of any other particular field or activity; any major movement.” Term megatrends describe a set of changes in the world with massive impact, unprecedented magnitude and it is at least difficult or fairly impossible to stop them. They are at the same time global in nature, impacting societies, economies, cultures and our personal lives, in a way defining the future world we are going to live in. They are often associated with increasing pace of change, too. Example of a megatrend in the past was the invention of the steam engine, currently it could be the internet or artificial intelligence. But also global migration, climate change, urbanisation, global pandemics, population growth and many others.
  • messianism

    Messianism in the development context refers to the notion that certain societies or even entire whole continents should be ‘saved’ (though the notion may often be camouflaged in economic or political justifications) by the global north. Though during the colonial era this was often explicitly couched in religious terms, today it is more likely to be framed in terms like knowledge, modernity and development for ‘underdeveloped’ societies in the global south.
  • minorities

    According to the United Nations, these are the criteria to identify a minority – numerical inferiority to the rest of the population of a state; being a group in a non-dominant position; being a group whose members – being nationals of the state – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population; and being a group that shows, perhaps only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language (Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 1977).
    So for example, a minority might consist of people of a particular nationality or ethnic group; people who belong to a particular religion or people who speak a particular language.
    But being in a non-dominant position is perhaps the most crucial part of this definition. Lacking power in their society, members of minority groups are often unable to change their own situation, or to play the roles in society they might wish to. This dimension is sometimes not even connected with numbers. For example, women possess less power than men, even though there are actually more women than men in the world.

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