Today, Monday 10 December, in Oslo City Hall and then in the banqueting rooms of the Grand Hotel in the evening, the European Union receives and celebrates the Nobel Peace Prize 2012.
EU leaders: where’s the headline energy?
EU government leaders have put no headline energy into trying to end the warfare torturing eastern Congo for the past month. And you can’t blame that on being distracted by Israel retaliating against random rocket attacks from Gaza with an 8-day bombardment until Egypt brokered the ceasefire on 21 November. Heads of EU governments weren’t headline visible on Gaza either. They’re distracted by other things. Continue reading
More, most and never before
What is the name of our age? The late Eric Hobsbawm wrote a series of brilliant histories that each named the era it covered – The Ages of Revolution, Capital, Empire and, for the age in which I grew up and whose aftermath still shapes us, the Age of Extremes. So what is the name of our age? Continue reading
The UN High Level panel on post-2015: new goals for old?
The UN High Level Panel looking at development goals after 2015 has been in London for the past three days for an intense round of meetings. In the late afternoon of Friday 2 November, about a third of the panel members met around 200 representatives of civil society organisations in a “town hall” style meeting – i.e., no speeches by the panel, everything driven by questions from the floor. Continue reading
Do British development NGOs not want to discuss development?
The UN High Level Panel looking at development goals after 2015 is coming to London and will meet representatives of British development NGOs who, it seems, don’t want to discuss development with them. Continue reading
DRC’s deadlock – new dangers, new beginnings
Democratic Republic of Congo: In Kinshasa , the summit meeting of La Francophonie replete with heads of state, resounding speeches and ringing declarations; in the east, 2 million displaced people and rising tension as the M-23 rebels sit just 15 kilometres from Goma, capital of North Kivu province, held back only by an uncertain ceasefire; on TV, repeated statements that this is the 187/8/9th day of aggression by Rwanda.
Reconciliation and Reintegration in Rwanda
On Tuesday 9th, International Alert in Rwanda launched our report, Healing Fractured Lives, and the accompanying film (see my previous post) based on the photography of Carol Allen Storey. Discssuing the vivid personal accounts in the report and the film brought out some insights about how peacebuilding can work in even the most extreme circumstances. Continue reading
Rwanda – healing Fractured Lives
I am making an all too quick visit to Rwanda, primarily for International Alert‘s launch of the report and film, Fractured Lives. This project combines trauma counselling, dialogue and microfinancing in Rwandan villages as the country continues, often painfully, to grow out of the shadow of the mass killing and horrors of 1994 continues. The work has been brilliantly captured for Alert by award-winning photographer, Carol Allen Storey. The results are on show both in this slide show
and in the exhibition featuring the same work and more – on for the next week and a bit at the SW 1 Gallery in Victoria, London.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the subjects and the quality of the photographs, one of the most striking things about the film and exhibition is the way the photographs have cracked the problem of getting visual images for the process of building peace. War has always been photogenic – now we see how peacebuilding can be too.
Assisting development = assisting what, precisely?
All around are the signs and sounds of a steady gearing up for the renewed development debate. Before it gets swamped by a demand for commitments based on GDP percentages, targets and indicators, it would be a good idea to reflect a little on what we really mean by development. Continue reading
Development aid debate – today and post-2015
Further to my 24 September post on the re-emerging debate in Britain about foreign aid, I neglected a major reason why the government’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance isn’t changing: Prime Minister David Cameron is co-chair of the UN High Level Panel on the future of development. No surprise, then, that he confirmed the 0.7 per cent commitment straight after the panel’s first meeting. Continue reading
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