Tag Archives: UN

Climate change and the complex complications of the Copenhagen COP

Posted on September 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Copenhagen climate conference in December is crucial for the future well being of the vast majority of humanity alive today and the billions yet to be born.  Its prospects are not good, however, and it is beset by multi-layered complexities. There needs to be much more political energy going into it now in order to achieve anything that can be politely called success in three months time.  Continue reading →

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Posted in Climate change

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Reintegrating ex-fighters is about more than the ex-fighters

Posted on September 10, 2009 | 4 Comments

A few years back, the universally acknowledged truth in peacebuilding was that, for a country to move from a peace agreement on paper into a real and sustainable peace process, the fighters had to disarm, demobilise and re-integrate – DDR. It was high priority on the ground, backed by a deal of international activity to learn lessons and sort out best practice. Lately, the energy seems to have drained out of DDR. It is time to renew it.  Continue reading →

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Posted in Conflict & peace, International development

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Climate adaptation: Brown paints the big money picture – now to get the details right

Posted on June 26, 2009 | 3 Comments

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stepped out in front of all the contending parties to state the UK’s position five months ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit in a speech today. Committing the UK to spend on helping poor countries adapt to the consequences of climate change on top of overseas development aid, Brown proposed “a working figure” for support for adaptation and mitigation from the world’s rich countries ”of around $100 billion per annum by 2020.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Climate change

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Climate, conflict, peacebuilding and adaptation: a need for leaps and links

Posted on June 16, 2009 | 4 Comments

To assist poor countries facing the double and connected problems of climate change and violent conflict, adaptation to climate change has to be combined with peacebuilding. For this to be possible, organisations – governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental alike – that work on development, the environment and peace issues have to move out of their boxes and make more than one leap of imagination and policy so the links are visible between both problems and solutions. It is not inevitable that the Obama administration will succeed in this. Help is needed! Continue reading →

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Posted in Climate change, Conflict & peace, International development

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Counting the most peaceful countries – and the least

Posted on June 2, 2009 | 5 Comments

How do you recognise how peaceful countries are and systematically compare them to each other? And how do you work out what makes countries peaceful? And if we all knew the answers to these questions would we be more able to make the world more peaceful? Figuring the answer to the third question is yes, the Global Peace Index tries to answer the first two. It is now published for the third successive year. Continue reading →

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Posted in Conflict & peace

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Peacebuilding is surprisingly (or self-evidently) personal

Posted on May 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

The work of building peace depends at every level on the human qualities of a surprisingly small number of people. Rebuilding communities after violence depends on the ability of individual community leaders to find a path to reconciliation and forgiveness. At the international level, the UN peacebuilding architecture is struggling to get out of a troublesome hiatus caused by the departure of the former UN Assistant Secretary General, Jane Holl Lute, to a position in the Obama administration. Continue reading →

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Posted in Conflict & peace

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Rubik’s crisis

Posted on March 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

As the economic crunch continues to unfold, commentators, politicians and thoughtful citizens alike are trying to get a grip on its multiple dimensions. Pity the policy-makers and political leaders who are trying to find the way to solve a six-sided boxful of dilemmas because this is a real Rubik’s Cube of a crisis. Continue reading →

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Posted in Climate change, Conflict & peace, G-20 London summit, The economic crunch

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Overstretch in UN peace operations

Posted on March 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

“In 2008 global peacekeeping was pushed to the brink,” says a new briefing paper from the Center on International Cooperation in New York announcing the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2009.  The authors chart out the basic peacekeeping figures – who contributes what peacekeeping forces where – but their main focus is on the serious degree of overstretch and the risk of operations breaking down. Continue reading →

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Posted in Conflict & peace

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