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Neutrality: an ethical or a pragmatic issue?
Last week I took part, with colleagues from Conciliation Resources (CR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), in a debate held at the Imperial War...
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Resilience: too accurate to be useful?
Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm...
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The welcome richness and diversity of debate about the post-2015 goals
Back in mid-2010, in time for the MDGs-plus-10-years summit, International Alert (where I work) published a review of the MDGs which criticised the Millennium Development Goals for being too narrow and...
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Soft Power
The House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s influence published its report this week, comeplete with mind map and pages and pages of evidence....
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Metaphors in peacebuilding: the need to take good care with our language
We use metaphor in language all the time, usually without noticing. That is the nature of language. But it brings risks of misdiagnosis and ineffective solutions in peacebuilding. In the past I have...
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Metaphor in peacebuilding?
International Alert is hosting what promises to be a fascinating encounter this evening on the role of arts in peacebuilding. It’s at the Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA. Not a new...
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Sustainable Development Goals – how deeply embedded is Peace?
The ‘Zero Draft’ of the Sustainable Development Agenda – whose main elements are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – was published by the UN this week. Entitled Transforming our World by 2030:...
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Peace in our cities
(This article also appears at http://www.international-alert.org/blog/peace-in-our-cities) Peace is not just when people aren’t fighting: it’s when they have the ability to resolve or manage their...
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What’s not to like about the UK’s new aid strategy?
The UK’s new aid strategy, released this week, resonates quite harmoniously with peacebuilding. It is increasingly and widely understood, not least at International Alert, that peace is not just the...
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What does ‘development’ actually mean?
(This was also posted by International Alert.) What with all the attacks on international development aid of late, at least in the UK, there has been talk of reviewing the narrative about what...
View ArticleDo international organisations distract civil society activists in conflict...
This post also appeared on the International Alert and Oxfam websites, with the launch of their joint report by written Monica Stephen: Partnerships in Conflict, 31st October, 2017 A healthy and...
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Does war have a future?
‘History is made by people who don’t know what is going to happen next’. With this truism – a truism we too often forget, whether thinking about our own future history, or trying to interpret the past...
View ArticleMagic dragons can’t build peace. Leaders can.
A central conceit of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s wise and beautifully crafted novel The Buried Giant (Faber and Faber, 2015) is that an uneasy peace between the Saxons who had migrated to the...
View ArticleIs peacebuilding just good development?
When writing International Alert’s report Redressing the balance last year, I shared the draft with colleagues for comments. When one colleague returned it, one of her main comments was that the report...
View ArticleAid agencies should be clearer about their ethical dilemmas
Are international aid organisations paying enough attention to the ethical complexities of what they do and how they do it? Last year, as one of my final projects before I left International Alert...
View ArticleWhat people say about peace
Two studies on peacebuilding were launched on the same day this week. ECDPM’s Supporting Peacebuilding in Times of Change, and the joint British Council / International Alert report of their Peace...
View ArticleTime for Peacebuilding NGOs to support the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda?
The UK’s Conservative government has made Levelling Up one of its slogans. If we put the rather strange tautology of ‘levelling up’ to one side, and think of it as ‘levelling’, then it’s intriguing to...
View ArticleMeasuring peace: is it so hard?
Measuring peace: it’s a challenge, for so many well-rehearsed reasons. Peace takes a long time to build. It’s a non-linear and unpredictable process, following variable, inconsistent and highly...
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