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
peacebuilding
Peacebuilding is surprisingly (or self-evidently) personal
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
British government rethinks development, putting peace first
Few people have a good word to say for the British government these days, few British voters anyway. But I like not to follow the crowd. And on international development, they have got something worthwhile going on. There are signs of a real rethink that has a chance of paving the way to making overseas aid more effective. Continue reading
Companies and conflict sensitivity in the recession
It’s a truism that the poor get the hardest by any economic problem, downturn, crunch or crisis. Likewise, the poor get left behind when the economic good times are rolling. It’s perhaps a faint hope, but might it be possible for those truisms to be at least a little less true for poor countries during this crisis and as recovery comes around? Continue reading
Rubik’s crisis
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
Poverty, power, development and aid under discussion
The UK Department for International Development (DFID) is preparing a White Paper. It will be its fourth one since the department was founded in 1997 in the early days of New Labour government. On Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th it held a conference in London as part of the work on the White Paper.
Overstretch in UN peace operations
“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
Sustaining peace amid economic crisis
The hidden good news of the last two decades since the end of the Cold War is that, despite throwing up horrors to rank alongside history’s worst, this has been an era of growing peace. This progress is now threatened with reversal but it did not happen by chance and it is possible to prevent the worst from happening.
Dan Smith's blog 