The study comes at a moment when two global trends are colliding with devastating consequences. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be over the age of 60, a proportion expected to double by 2050. At the same time, humanitarian crises driven by conflict, climate change, and disasters are increasing in both number and duration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the biological and social burdens of aging may emerge earlier in life among displaced populations, because chronic undernutrition, trauma, disease, and ageism accelerate physical decline. Yet despite this demographic reality, older people remain largely absent from the design and delivery of humanitarian programming, and older women are the most neglected of all.

To map this landscape of neglect, the research team conducted a global qualitative scoping study, interviewing 19 humanitarian practitioners drawn from 16 organizations working across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. Half of the participating organizations operated at the local level and half internationally, spanning older persons’ organizations, disability-serving groups, and sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence agencies. The researchers used purposive and snowball sampling, guided by a six-member advisory board of experts on older women and women with disabilities in emergencies, and followed COREQ standards for qualitative reporting. Transcripts were double-coded by two analysts, with discrepancies resolved through consensus, and interviews continued until thematic saturation was reached.

The findings paint a picture of layered, mutually reinforcing exclusion. Perhaps the most foundational problem is data: humanitarian needs assessments and monitoring systems routinely fail to disaggregate information by age, sex, and disability, and even when they do, the oldest age brackets are so thinly represented that the full picture cannot be seen. One practitioner described the situation bluntly, noting that data is often not disaggregated at all, and that even when it is, older age groups are not represented well enough to reveal what is actually happening. This statistical erasure has cascading consequences: if older women do not appear in assessments, they do not appear in budgets, program designs, or service delivery plans.

Displacement itself compounds the problem in ways that challenge standard humanitarian assumptions. Practitioners described how older women frequently remain behind during acute emergencies—a choice that is only nominally voluntary. Many feel like a burden and decline to relocate; others want to stay and protect their property, as observed extensively in Ukraine, where massive displacement over years of conflict has left large numbers of older men and women in active combat zones. The study found a striking absence of inclusive evacuation protocols and policies, meaning that those least able to flee are the most likely to be left alone without support, cut off from health services, clean water, adequate food, and safety.

Economic precarity emerged as another central theme, one that both drives and conceals abuse. Aid packages are rarely tailored to older women’s needs, and cash assistance programs often fail them in practice: mobility limitations may prevent travel to distribution points, while digitalized social protection systems create dependency on others to access benefits. That dependency opens the door to exploitation. Practitioners reported cases in which relatives collected money on behalf of older women and then withheld it—a form of financial abuse made possible by the very systems designed to deliver aid. Underlying these structural failures, practitioners identified a corrosive ageist perception that older women, especially those with disabilities, cannot contribute during displacement, leading to the systematic deprioritization of their needs.

The health and protection consequences are severe and, the study argues, deeply interconnected. Older women experience sexual violence, physical assault, denial of resources, and psychological abuse, yet are largely excluded from gender-based violence programming, which is designed primarily for women of reproductive age. Those who live alone are particularly vulnerable, and those who cannot flee are violated in place. Within homes, elder abuse and neglect by caregivers—often daughters-in-law—was reported across settings as diverse as Lebanon, Ukraine, and Indonesia, and remains underreported due to cultural sensitivity and the power families hold over the person being abused. On the health side, practitioners described missed cancer screenings, late-stage cancer diagnoses with no access to treatment or palliative care, elevated rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and unmanaged incontinence, all compounded by weak referral systems and the stigma and shame that keep older women from reporting violence or seeking care.

The researchers frame these barriers through an ecological model, showing how exclusion operates at every level simultaneously. Structurally, the data gap renders older women invisible before any program can be designed. At the institutional and community levels, inaccessible services, mobility limitations, and evacuation failures constrain help-seeking. At the individual level, economic insecurity intensifies dependency on others, which simultaneously increases exposure to abuse and reduces autonomy to escape it. Assumptions that older women are asexual or no longer in need of sexual and reproductive health care silence conversations about menopause, pelvic floor disorders, and conflict-related sexual violence, embedding stigma within the very institutions meant to provide protection.

Crucially, the study does not portray older women solely as victims. Practitioners repeatedly emphasized the vital social roles older women play as caregivers, knowledge holders, and respected community figures. In some settings, an older woman helping a person with disabilities may face fewer questions and receive more community support than an external aid worker. Practitioners described using respected elders as allies to reach younger women and girls, to speak with male leaders, and to guide program design. Older people were identified as effective catalysts for spreading information, teaching skills, and driving income generation—approaches that build sustainable purpose rather than dependency. The study suggests that mixed-age programming, rather than singling out older women, may be particularly promising, and that older women should be included in project leadership, not merely consulted in focus groups.

The authors call for a fundamental reorientation of humanitarian practice: institutionalizing age- and sex-disaggregated data systems with the training and analytic capacity to capture nuanced age bands; designing universally accessible sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence programs; conducting participatory research directly with older women rather than only about them; and partnering with local older persons’ organizations on community-based and intergenerational programming. They also raise an uncomfortable ethical question about how donor-defined metrics of success may lead age-targeted services to be judged unworthy of investment, and argue that humanitarian protection principles—non-discrimination and accessibility for all—demand renewed commitment. As the world ages and crises multiply, the study makes clear that a humanitarian system that cannot see older women cannot claim to be equitable, effective, or ethical.

Subject of Research: Health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings

Article Title: Overlooked health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings: A qualitative study of practitioners

Article References: Falb, K. L., Stevenson, M., Hiscock, D., & Lasater, M. (2026). Overlooked health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings: A qualitative study of practitioners. PLOS Aging and Health, 1(3), e0000044. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.page.0000044

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.page.0000044

Keywords: older women, humanitarian crises, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health, ageism, displacement, elder abuse, humanitarian data, economic precarity, qualitative research, aging population, incontinence

The research, conducted by Hani Abdelhadi of Meiji University’s School of Commerce, analyzed the institutional responses of 29 major Japanese universities to the two conflicts. The results reveal a profound asymmetry. Twenty-eight of the 29 institutions—96.6 percent—issued public statements supporting Ukraine, and 27 of those backed their words with concrete aid measures such as emergency scholarships and streamlined admissions for Ukrainian students. By contrast, only three of the 29 universities—10.3 percent—addressed the Palestine-Israel situation at all, and none of those offered any material support. Both crises, the study notes, involved civilian deaths exceeding 10,000, destruction of educational infrastructure, mass displacement of students and academics, determinations by international legal bodies, and extensive global media coverage, making differential responses difficult to explain as a matter of capacity or awareness.

To interpret this pattern, Abdelhadi draws on two established theoretical frameworks. The first is Oliver’s 1991 theory of strategic responses to institutional processes, which describes how organizations choose among tactics ranging from acquiescence to manipulation when facing external pressures. The second is Brunsson’s 2006 concept of organized hypocrisy, which captures the gap between what organizations say, what they decide, and what they actually do. Combining these lenses, the study proposes a new concept—strategic neutrality—to describe institutional behavior in which claims of political neutrality mask a politically calculated selectivity. In other words, Japanese universities were not neutral across the board; they were vocal on one crisis and silent on the other, and that asymmetry itself constitutes a strategic choice.

The timing and content of the responses matter as much as their frequency. Ukraine statements typically appeared within days of the invasion and were framed in the language of international solidarity, democracy, and academic freedom. The three universities that did address Gaza moved at strikingly different speeds: Ryukoku University issued a statement just five days after the October 2023 outbreak of hostilities, Nagasaki University responded after 33 days, and Sophia University took 234 days, releasing its statement in late May 2024. Notably, the rapid responses by Ryukoku and Nagasaki matched the speed typical of Ukraine statements, suggesting that institutional capacity was never the limiting factor. Nagasaki University, which had also accepted 40 Ukrainian students, demonstrated that peace-oriented institutions can sustain engagement on crises regardless of whether their stance aligns with Japan’s national diplomatic posture.

What distinguished these three institutions from their peers? The study identifies a common thread: explicit value foundations. Ryukoku is a Buddhist university, Sophia is Catholic, and Nagasaki carries a peace-oriented institutional identity rooted in its history as a survivor of atomic bombing. These normative anchors, the research suggests, gave their leaders a principled basis for action that transcended diplomatic calculation. By contrast, other religiously affiliated universities—including Rikkyo (Anglican), Doshisha (Congregational), Kwansei Gakuin (Methodist), and Aoyama Gakuin (Methodist)—did not issue Palestine statements, indicating that religious heritage alone was insufficient without a clearly articulated contemporary value commitment.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns Japan’s flagship internationalization program. Universities designated as Super Global Universities (SGU) receive substantial government funding precisely because of their mandates to internationalize and engage with the world. Yet the study found that SGU institutions demonstrated complete silence on Palestine while unanimously supporting Ukraine. This, Abdelhadi argues, exposes a fundamental contradiction between performative and substantive internationalization. Internationalization, in this reading, has been reduced to market-driven activities—recruiting international students, climbing global rankings, and building partnerships with strategically convenient countries—rather than a genuine commitment to global engagement and universal academic values. When geopolitical pressures made engagement with one crisis costly, the market-oriented model of internationalization offered no resources for principled action.

The structural context of Japanese higher education helps explain why. The study describes a governance regime characterized by managed autonomy, in which universities are formally independent but operate under subtle and pervasive pressures from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). One mechanism is amakudari—the circulation of former ministry officials into university presidencies and senior administrative posts—which creates information asymmetries favoring compliant institutions and exerts quiet pressure toward conformity. Japan’s official diplomatic position, which aligned strongly with Western support for Ukraine while maintaining a more cautious stance on the Middle East, thus filtered through the governance system into institutional communication. Universities reading the political winds found that supporting Ukraine carried reputational benefits and no risks, while addressing Gaza risked friction with government funders and key international partners.

Cultural factors add a further layer. The study invokes the Japanese concepts of tatemae—the publicly expressed principles that maintain social harmony—and honne—the actual intentions held privately. Abdelhadi is careful to note that this is not hypocrisy in the Western moralizing sense but a culturally legitimate way of managing contradictions. Applied institutionally, however, the tatemae of humanitarian solidarity was deployed selectively, voiced where it aligned with national interests and withheld where it did not. The result is what the study terms strategic silence: an organizational practice in which saying nothing is itself a communicative act, one that protects institutional relationships while allowing the appearance of principled neutrality to stand unexamined.

The theoretical contributions extend beyond Japan. The study demonstrates how managed autonomy in non-Western contexts produces distinctive patterns of organizational response that differ from the institutional neutrality debates playing out in the United States and Europe, where universities have faced their own controversies over statements on Gaza and Ukraine. It also extends organized hypocrisy theory through the concept of strategic silence, showing that silence can function as a deliberate organizational resource rather than a mere absence of communication. The findings carry implications for evaluating university social responsibility amid geopolitical pressures, and for assessing whether internationalization policies in different governance regimes produce institutions capable of principled action or only of strategically calibrated performance.

For the global higher education community, the study poses a pointed question: if universities claim universal values of human dignity and academic solidarity, what does it mean when those values are applied to one humanitarian catastrophe but not another of similar magnitude? The exceptional cases—Ryukoku, Nagasaki, and Sophia—suggest that institutional responses require clear normative anchors beyond market-driven internationalization. Without such anchors, the study implies, universities will continue to speak when speaking is safe and stay silent when silence is strategic, leaving the ideal of the globally engaged university hollow at precisely the moments it matters most.

Subject of Research: The asymmetric institutional responses of Japanese universities to the Ukraine and Gaza humanitarian crises

Article Title: The politics of institutional silence: Japanese universities’ asymmetric responses to international humanitarian crises

Article References: Abdelhadi, H. (2026). The politics of institutional silence: Japanese universities’ asymmetric responses to international humanitarian crises. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01761-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01761-8

Keywords: Japanese higher education, strategic neutrality, organized hypocrisy, university internationalization, Super Global Universities, institutional theory, humanitarian crises, Ukraine, Gaza, academic freedom, university governance, crisis communication