Marie-Odile Zanders: When neutrality and distance stop holding

Marie-Odile’s moment did not come from a programme decision or a leadership role, but from living through violence as a minority in a place she had come to see as home.

While working in Gujarat, India, she experienced the inter-communal violence of 2002 at close range. What changed her perspective was not only the scale of the violence, but the lived experience of fear, misinformation, and exclusion.

For the first time, she became acutely aware of what it means to be visibly outside the dominant groups in a deeply polarised context. This was not an abstract insight. It was a question of personal safety. She describes a moment where she seriously considered whether she needed a weapon to protect herself, and then realised that leaving the country was the only real option available to her.

That realisation exposed an assumption she had previously carried without questioning it: that one can remain professionally committed, analytically neutral, and personally insulated at the same time. The violence made clear that this distance was fragile and unevenly distributed. As a European professional, she had an exit option. Many of the people she worked with did not.

What followed was not a new theory, but a shift in how she understood inclusion, safety, and responsibility. Concepts she had known intellectually took on a different weight once experienced bodily and emotionally. Inclusion was no longer only about access to services or participation in programmes. It became about what it means to live without a guaranteed way out, and how profoundly that shapes people’s choices, risks, and vulnerabilities.

This moment redirected her professional focus. Housing, safety, and inclusion became central, not as technical domains, but as conditions that enable people to live without constant fear or exclusion. Her later work on housing finance and inclusion reflects this recalibration. The emphasis is less on solutions designed at a distance, and more on addressing the structural conditions that make some lives inherently more precarious than others.

Marie-Odile’s moment illustrates how assumptions about neutrality, privilege, and professional distance can quietly guide action until they no longer hold. When those assumptions fall away, what changes is not certainty about what to do next, but a clearer sense of what it would mean to act in ways that are credible and right to those who live with the consequences.