As I sit in front of my computer, reading the news about the escalation in violence in Iraq, my heart fills with sadness. According to UN reports, more than a thousand people have been killed in May.

For me Iraq is not a distant, Middle East country, full of Muslim extremists. It is the place I live, work, and wake up every morning. I live in Sulaimaniya, far from the violence, but have colleagues and friends in Baghdad and I hear their frustration, and…

Civic Education Resource Guide

Are you a member with experience or interest in the field of civic education?  If so, please share your knowledge and thoughts with us! 

Resource Guide Summary: 

This guide will provide readers with an overview of the purpose of civic education, different definitions of civic education, and what makes civic education effective.  The…

Achieving and maintaining democracy—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”[i]–is an ongoing challenge.

Perhaps President Lincoln had no alternative to preserving the Union than to wage war, but the wounds of that deadly conflict can still be felt today.

Where are the models for better ways of resolving disputes, righting wrongs, and pursuing democratic institutions?

Our nomination, in honor of this year’s United Nations…

By Beverly Bell

September 5, 2012

Beverly Bell interviews Leslie Thatcher, content relations editor at Truthout, one of a number of independent, non-commercial news sites that offer an alternative to corporate-controlled media. In a world where corporations are considered persons and a few individuals are funding the lion’s share of the presidential elections, independent media is critical to keeping citizens informed and motivated defenders of…

Cross posted from the Learning Portal for DM&E for Peacebuilding

As discussed in this week’s blog, accountability—as defined by the UK Department for International Development—is “the ability of citizens, civil society and the private sector to scrutinize public institutions and…

Dear Colleagues,

My latest post for The Common Ground Blog on potential common ground between the tea party and the occupy movement is below. This is a cross-post, you can find the original here.

The problem with experts

As the movement was in its early stages, Occupy Wall Street played…

• The UN-mandate University for Peace’s Centre for Executive Education is offering an online course on Skills for Effective Negotiations starting March 15^th.
• The Center on International Cooperation completed its Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2012, covering both UN and non-UN peace…

As a professional mediator, I am always encouraged by the use of mediation to resolve international conflicts. However, in the case of Syria, I have little confidence that mediation will bring peace to the conflict. Very few of the essential elements for successful mediation are present in this conflict.

The first consideration in convening any mediation is deciding who the parties at the table will be. In this case, the current Syrian government will certainly be a party. However,…

About the book:



Globalisation has created an interconnected world, but has not diminished violence, militarism and inequality. The Economics of Killing describes how the power of global elites, entrenched under globalisation, has created a deadly cycle of violence.



In this groundbreaking work, Vijay Mehta shows how attempts at peaceful national development are routinely blocked by Western powers. He locates the 2008 financial crisis in US attempts to…

Commenting on the Occupy Wall St protests recently, the anti-war activist Matthew Good complained that protesters were wasting their time camping in downtown Manhattan. They should, he argued, be gathering around the Pentagon. After all, the 700 billion dollars that US spent bailing out the bankers is a pittance when set against the annual one trillion dollar US defence budget.

His analysis assumed that the issues of rogue banks and outlandish defence spending were separate. Yet our…

As a professional peacemaker, I tend to look at conflicts from the perspective of the people instead of politics. In the process of mediating thousands of conflicts, large and small, I find that conflict dynamics tend to fall into predictable patterns. This is especially true in family business conflicts. The same themes arise over and over again such that the conflict dynamics are predictable and systematic.

 While reading about the Syrian uprising some months ago, I read a brief…

• The London based International Institute for Environment and Development released a policy paper on Thursday that warned of an alarming number of African governments that seem to be signing away water rights in their countries for decades, with major implications for local communities.
• A…

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21519

Evidence Project Internship Opportunity - The National Security Archive

The National Security Archive* is seeking an intern to work on its newly founded Evidence Project for the fall 2011 semester in Washington, DC. The internship entails providing support on researching human rights cases and gathering documents to be used as evidence in human rights trials around Latin America and in Spain.

Internship tasks may include:

• Research details…

Mexico Documentation Project Internship Opening - The National Security Archive

The National Security Archive* is seeking an intern to work on the Mexico Documentation Project for the fall 2011 semester in Washington, DC. The internship entails preparing the set of Mexico documents for publication. The set contains declassified U.S. government and Mexican government documents about human rights and democracy building in Mexico. (To see an example of a published…

By Mobeen chughtai - Look around you today and what do you see?

Confusion? Disorder? Apathy and distrust?

Is this the gist of the world? Is this the promised culmination of thousands of years of human progress? Have we been reduced to this? And perhaps the most important question of all: in this era of corporate prosperity why are we so empty?

In order to understand the world around us today we must accept that we, as human beings, have entered the era of capitalism. But…

Lund, Sweden, March 15, 2011

Dear friend

I am very happy to tell you that we have received a lot of positive responses to TFF's idea of a new type of pro-peace platform - "Imagine A Better World".

Our board has deliberated quite a lot on how best to utilise all the energy and all the suggestions and ideas people put in this idea. We want to make this highly participative even before it exists - to have YOU shape it and discuss with…

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

In the late 1990s, the Filipinos were aghast over the discovery of factories—owned by Taiwanese “businessmen”—that employed children as slave labor. The children were practically housed in cages, and brought out only to work and be fed, then brought back at night to their cage sleeping quarters. Needless to say, the mere tots were never paid for their labor and lived wretchedness like the way the Chinese suffered in the hands of the…

Bad Guys and Good Guys.

By:  Firouzeh Afsharnia

Well.  2011 certainly started with a bang.  I don’t know whether it is the winding down of the Mayan calendar, or the alignment of the astral bodies which has triggered the cascade of what some call events rivaling the fall of the soviet empire. 

I have been permanently tethered to Al Jezeera.  Not just because unlike its American counterparts, it offers actual…