The approach was adopted in a very different world when Europe was full of expansive and optimistic vision. The Euro and the big enlargement had been decided on. Economies were growing. It was less than three months before 9/11, nearly two years before the invasion of Iraq, just over seven years before Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering chaos in the financial markets and the biggest financial crisis and global recession ever.

In 2001 the EU girded itself to build peace far beyond its borders. In 2011 it couldn’t even manage to complete a ten-year review of what it has done, though an effort to do so was initiated by the Hungarian EU Presidency at the start of the year.

There has been an evaluation by an independent consortium commissioned by the EC, focusing on activities supported by EC money. It finds that the money has been well spent overall with some good impact and nevertheless some things that could be done better, the sort of balanced conclusion one expects from a review like this.

But perhaps, given the situation Europe is in, it is the right time to go a little further, taking a fresh look rather than just evaluating. And that means looking not just at peacebuilding and conflict prevention but a little deeper.

Policies are often founded on assumptions that are not just unquestioned but apparently unquestionable. They express a worldview. When policies run into the sand, unless the worldview changes, those responsible for implementation are told to refuel, rev up and drive harder. Such founding assumptions are part of the anthropology of policy and politics and they need to be brought out into the light by looking at unstated beliefs, unwritten rules, silent norms, the way things are done – rather than just by looking at policy positions, statements, decisions and actions.

Three founding assumptions of peacebuilding – and, indeed, of international development assistance – recommend themselves for a fresh look in these times:

• It’s for others;
• It comes from benevolent power;
• It brings its beneficiaries into a development trajectory that, roughly speaking, is the same as ours.

Taking a look at these underpinnings of peacebuilding does not mean that one is setting out to reject the whole edifice. Far from it in the case of this article. But it does entail an acknowledgement that some self-reflection could be most valuable.

It’s for others

The EU has always thought of peacebuilding as something for ‘out there.’ The grand enterprise of European unity was itself from the outset a project of building peace and it has successfully created and spread a zone of peace and stability. But this was an inherent attribute of the EU, a spillover effect from its core functions. In Europe, it hasn’t needed to do much that is particularly focused on building peace; it just had to go on trading and regulating, steadily breaking down the barriers, and peacefulness resulted.

Conflict prevention and peacebuilding were conceived as an extension of the EU enterprise to other regions that would only slowly (like the western Balkans) join the EU and others that never would. This was about a wealthy, stable and growing region offering others the benefits of its own success and simultaneously acting self-interestedly to protect that success from insecurity and instability in the wider global arena.

I don’t question that underlying motive. But I look around Europe and I ask myself if peacebuilding is really only relevant for ‘out there.’

No – us too

Everywhere we see signs of disaffection and a leaning to violence. From last summer’s riots in England to anti-austerity riots in Greece and the thin patina that many people tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland; from the youth movements in Spain to the simmering anger in Italy; to the country proclaimed by opinion surveys to be happiest in the world – Denmark, whose capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple of years; and from Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya,to immigrants murdered by right-wing extremists in Germany, to the surging anger the far right is feeding on.

These are different in form, in politics, in their social basis. Listing a few in the same paragraph does not imply they can be equated. But consider the state of the continent that they reflect.

Of course, not all are mass actions and one was the action of a seemingly psychotic loner. But none of these actions, regardless of the number involved – none is entirely divorced from a social and political background of disaffection, a sense of betrayal and exclusion, and an anger that is not far from violence. They occur in a political and social landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. Job opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes. Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the young.

So – no, peacebuilding is not just for others. It can be brought home. The kind of approaches that offer some degree of hope of stability and forward movement out of repetitive cycles of violent conflict in other countries are worth looking at here as well.

The benevolence of power

Closely related to the ‘out there’ assumption, the world the EU saw a decade ago was one in which the OECD countries – developed capitalist economies and democratic polities – had the wealth and power and the rest of the world did not. It’s the world of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ in which the rich North will henceforth have no grounds for internal conflict but outside of that zone is a world of turmoil where, from time to time, the rich North may need to intervene.

The EU version of this was considerably more subtle and far-sighted because the intervention would be long-term, multi-faceted, and involving as little force as possible. But the starting points were the same, albeit largely implicit.

Thus it went without saying that what was willed would be done and what was done would be effective. It might take time to get it right, there could be errors along the way, it would be necessary to be self-critical, but when power went to work on weakness – well, the power would work.

Er, what happened to the power?

Except, of course, it’s not like that. That vision of the world doesn’t coincide with reality at ground level and in fact it didn’t ten years ago either. There have long been plenty of actors around, powerful in their arenas, whom neither the EU nor the US could bend to their will, whether with aid, bribery or force. And some of those actors are powerful in very large arenas.

About five or six years ago, in a discussion of the longer range and broader questions of peacebuilding and development with, for example, officials at the EC, DFID or SIDA, it would often be remarked late on in the meeting that there was a topic we hadn’t quite discussed, an elephant in the room. Today, China is not ignored. During the world recession it has continued to grow. Its clout as fastest growing major economy and the holder of massive amounts of American debt is undoubted. The December 2011 grand strategy for the Eurozone bail-out included asking China to stump up some funds. The markets stabilised at this, then China raised a quizzical eyebrow and the markets resumed their normal haywire ways.

So, no, peacebuilding and development can no longer be thought of in terms of what was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The development pathway

With our economies stagnant, joblessness rising, growth next to invisible, politicians impotent and politics alienating, plenty of people are asking what’s so attractive about a development trajectory that leads to where we are. And that’s before we even begin to think about environmental sustainability, climate change and the pressures of demography.

There is a well-established literature criticising development aid and, more recently, peacebuilding as an export drive for a normative model of economics or politics or both. The arguments are a bit shop worn these days because they tend to overdo the role of development aid in exporting norms and over-simplify the uniformity of social and political models among OECD countries. But there are worthwhile insights there still and a very large part of the policy discussion among European politicians and development NGOs unfolds without much reference to them. Instead, that discourse has got itself tied up in predominantly two things – money and measurable targets.

The thing about money and targets is that they guide you towards working out how to do more of the same only better. The next big issue for international development discourse is the new set of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals when their target date comes round in 2015. Current projections indicate that by 2015 not a single MDG will be met in any conflict-affected and unstable country. That is not something that better targets and more money will fix. It is something that should precipitate a rethink. And part of that rethink ought to be about the trajectory.

To which destination

In this respect, peacebuilding is quite different, perhaps because it is newer. It is worth spending time with the questions, what kinds of countries are stable and why? Both the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 and the independent Global Peace Index reflect this process of inquiry and analysis.

The more the development discussion keeps narrowly to targets and money, the more trouble it has with the issue of destination. With no destination, there is no direction for development assistance, there is only good works – a humanitarianism chronologically extended beyond the humanitarian emergency, doing good but not necessarily adding up to development.

That is the challenge that the peacebuilding discussion is taking on by attempting to identify the features of society that shape its prospects for peace – the peace factors. And here it turns out that, of course, there are features of relatively peaceful societies – including our own – that recur in a variety of different forms and guises. These are not only the principles of equality, however inadequately respected, but the deep foundations of the institutions that are the basis of how are societies run. (See the ground-breaking work on institutions, social violence and development of D. C. North, J. J. Wallis & B. R. Weingast, Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history, 2009.)

So, perhaps surprisingly, yes, warts and all, recessions and riots notwithstanding, there are things about western societies that make them attractive as development destinations. On the other hand, the destination looks different from country to country – sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly. And on the third hand, no, arriving at these destinations is not going to be achieved through recalibrating targets and spending more money on them.

Power and results

The first place to look for some practical conclusions from this quick look at some of the unstated assumptions underlying peacebuilding is not in the kind of actions that are undertaken. It is initially in the way they are understood and discussed. For example, the results agenda that now predominates in many governments’ overseas aid policies is predicated on an untenable assumption about power and effectiveness and has side-stepped thinking properly about the development destination. It could go badly wrong, especially as it gets transferred into the peacebuilding sector, by emphasising short-term results at the expense of understanding that these results are but small steps on a long journey. But if the results agenda can be contextualised by greater realism about power and a clearer view of destination, it could be very helpful. It will mean a downwards adjustment in the importance of individual results, which may sound bad to a politician, and greater attention to cumulative impact. The outcome could offer a useful map and compass for development aid and peacebuilding.

Destinations and the outsider

Of course, this presupposes a better discussion of destination. Here the problem for peacebuilding is the unwillingness of the much larger, better established development sector to change. Too often the international development community – NGOs, donors, international agencies – collude to present the key issues as essentially technical. But they aren’t and everybody knows they aren’t. This goes along with an unhelpful confusion between development and development aid – the latter is a small part of the former. Everybody knows it but only recently has it started to be respectable to say so. If there could be more honest and precise discussions about destination, it could be better understood that, so far as we know up till now, most peaceful societies have some features in common, which get to be arranged in very different ways by the ins and outs of culture and history. If a national political discussion identifies which way to go, the question then is how can outsiders help? There’s politics everywhere in this process, including in judging whether the national political discussion is a genuine one. But development and peacebuilding are political and it doesn’t help to duck it.

And then there’s the perplexing issue of the outsider – the assumption that peacebuilding is for others out there. Extending the mandate of peacebuilding to include the problems within the EU would bring a new range of approaches to bear on familiar problems. It’s at least an option worth exploring. Also of benefit, it would change the way in which the enterprise of peacebuilding is presented, discussed and operationalized. It is not an issue that is dead, even in Scandinavian social democracies. Instead of treading dangerously close to presenting peace as a good to be brought from here to there – which is nonsense – it would allow us all to get on even terms, sharing with partners in the still vital task of building a more peaceful and secure world.

Source: Open Democracy
Author: Dan Smith has been the Secretary General of International Alert since 2003.

One of the ten contributors to the report, released by the non-profit research organization, Institute for Economics and Peace, was Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa.

Uprisings across the Middle East influenced the sharp drop in the GPI of nations in the region, especially Bahrain, Libya and Egypt. Bahrain fell 47 spots on the list to 123 and Libya fell 83 spots to 143 — putting it in the bottom 10 countries on the list.

On a global scale, Egypt scored in the “medium” category alongside China, the United State of America, Brazil and Indonesia.

The Institute for Economics and Peace notes in the report, “Peaceful environments generally create competitive business environments, societies with lower levels of corruption and stronger social cohesion.”

The study also analyzed international news reports and how often reports of violence made the global stage. The study found violence in Egypt was most over reported (compared to the GPI score).

On average over half of international news reports on Arab Spring countries were only covering violence. The “international news tone” while reporting on Egypt was negative in about 45 percent of stories, neutral about 43 percent of reports and positive only about 12 percent of the time.

In regards to international news coverage on the Arab Spring, the report notes that Nile News presented only 11 reports (below average) on the political movements outside of Egypt.

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa concluded the report with an analysis titled “Egyptian Revolution, One year later, challenges and prospects.”

Gomaa addressed the Islamist’s sweeping win in parliament, saying the rise of these parties can be attributed to a number of factors “not least of which is the weakened state of serious political discourse, and as a result any viable political opposition, under the Mubarak regime.

“As a result, voters were not left with many options that they felt were respectful of their Islamic heritage and their religious sympathies,” Gomaa wrote.

Gomaa also said these parties, and their members, shouldn’t be grouped together since they represent different positions on main issues such as “the economy, minority rights, and the precise role of religion in the public sphere.

“Though I may often disagree with the particulars of their stances, their success should be no cause for serious alarm in the Western world. Indeed, we are optimistic that for the most part, flexibility will take precedence in their political programs over doctrinaire readings of ideology,” he wrote.

As the highest official of religious law in Egypt, he said, “The Islamic faith teaches us that optimism and activism are constituent features of what it means to live a good life —constantly striving to do good works, with a strong faith that those good works will contribute towards the wellbeing on one’s community.”

Although Egypt’s Global Peace index score dropped significantly, it is still ranked in the upper half of the list.

Source: Daily News Egypt

Egyptian Revolution Part 1: “The Flood” | English version from Thomson Reuters Foundation on Vimeo.

The documentary aims to capture the main events through personal experience of one Egyptian woman and her family. The three part series includes: ‘The Flood’, ‘The Clash’ and ‘The Fall’.

It was through his nonviolent campaigns that after decades of marginalization Black Americans gained acceptance as equal members of society in the United States. Beginning in 1965, his campaign to ensure that Black communities registered to vote gave millions a voice, paved the way to the ending of discrimination before the ballot box, and ultimately changed American politics forever.

Martin Luther King was an outstanding man to say the least. Through life-long activism and deep beliefs in peace and freedom, he became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, an involvement that tragically cost him his life. He inspired and still inspires millions of people throughout the world. If the man has become a legend, it is his ideals and precepts that one should also honor today.

Indeed, all over the world countless nations and peoples are still walking in his footsteps and that of other prominent leaders such as Mahatama Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. From the Degar-Montagnards in Vietnam to the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, from the Haratin in Mauritania to the Mapuche in Chile, countless people around the world are still pressing for their right to live free from oppression and persecution while engaging in peaceful activism.

So today, as we celebrate the accomplishments and ideals of a truly great man, let us not forget about people whose existence is the object of a relentless struggle. Let us praise the values of freedom, equality and peace while remembering Martin Luther King’s words: “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle”.

Source: UNPO

The report provides a comprehensive assessment of the global state of democracy, and points out that in many regions it has been worsening over the past five years. The report features:

• a snapshot of the state of democracy for 165 independent nations and two territories, with comparisons against 2010

• key developments in 2011 which contributed to changes in democratisation

• regional analysis of trends in democracy in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia

• and the Americas

• an analysis of a new wave of democracy in the Middle East and North Africa

Download the Democracy Index 2011

“The World Peace Game is about learning to live and work comfortably in the unknown.” John Hunter

Musician, teacher, filmmaker and game designer, John Hunter has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. His own life story is one of a never-ending quest for harmony. As a student, he studied comparative religions and philosophy while traveling through Japan, China and India. In India, inspired by Ghandi’s philosophy, he began to think about the role of the schoolteacher in creating a more peaceful world.

As his online biography says: “Accepting the reality of violence, he would seek to incorporate ways to explore harmony in various situations. This exploration would take form in the framework of a game – something that students would enjoy. Within the game data space, they would be challenged, while enhancing collaborative and communication skills.”

In 1978, at the Richmond Community High School, Hunter led the first sessions of his World Peace Game, a hands-on political simulation. The game has now been played around the world, on a four-tiered board. It’s the subject of the new film World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.

We are not, however, suggesting radical reforms in ways that Washington has already witnessed. We are recommending a rethink in how we deal with a range of realities prevalent in all 50 states, not just Washington. It may seem self-evident but the high rates of violent crime, homicides, incarceration, policing and the availability of small arms, are costing this country hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of jobs, per year.

Illustrating how much money America is mismanaging, the first-ever U.S. Peace Index, launched this year by the Institute for Economics and Peace, cites conservative estimates of the economic effect if the U.S. were on par with Canadian policy on all five aforementioned fronts: $361 billion per year and a stimulatory effect of 2.7 million jobs. Given America’s high debt and high unemployment, it could benefit from both of these boosts.

If the U.S. is interested in realizing these savings and seizing these jobs, the answer lies in the U.S. Peace Index. The top five most peaceful U.S. states on the index — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota and North Dakota — landed there because of their low levels of violent crime and homicide, low rates of incarceration and small arms availability, and reduced policing. Since there are substantial minority population percentages in both the Index’s top 10 “most peaceful” and bottom 10 “least peaceful” states, the answer lies in a state’s social and economic policies.

The Index’s top five most peaceful states have some of the highest population percentages with health insurance, the lowest percentages of teenage pregnancy, the highest high school graduation rates, the greatest educational opportunity, the least inequality among all household incomes, the best perceived access to basic services (e.g., clean water, medicine, etc.), the least amount of poverty and the lowest rates of infant mortality. Given published findings by credible economists regarding correlations between inequality, poverty and violence, none of these rankings is terribly surprising.

Graduate your students, insure your residents, provide basic services, prevent teenage pregnancy and infant mortality, and lower poverty and inequality rates, and the less prevalent and pervasive violent crime, homicide, incarceration, policing and small arms trafficking will be. A state’s ability to provide for its population in these areas dramatically increases its capacity to lower its levels of violence.

Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida, then, whose budget cuts this year have eaten away at education, health care, basic services or economic opportunity, would do well to reconsider. For Wisconsin, a mere 25 percent reduction in violence would save the state almost $1.7 billion annually. For Ohio, the same 25 percent reduction would save it more than $3.6 billion annually. For Florida, the savings would surpass $9.3 billion — just for reducing its violence by 25 percent.

Halve the violence in all three states and you’d save almost $30 billion, but these are conservative cost calculations. On homicide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculate that for each life cut short by homicide, the economy loses $1.65 million (medical costs, loss of lifelong employment, economic productivity costs).

On incarceration, this country spends $80 billion annually on its correctional system, at about $35,000 per inmate. Total costs of this lost productivity: $97.7 billion. On violent crime, the total cost to this country in 2009 was $94 billion (medical costs, lost productivity), more than half, or $58 billion, of which was associated with assault, $11 billion with rape and half a billion with robbery.

America’s tendency is to pursue policies that react primarily to violence, not aim to prevent it. As a result, not only is America less economically prosperous, it is less peaceful. The way forward, then, is to learn from what the index is telling us. A peace dividend is possible, but primarily through policies that prioritize equal opportunity, health, education and poverty alleviation. By doing so, America saves lives and saves money, a proposition that should appeal to the pragmatist in all of us.

Source: Huffington Post

Author: Michael Shank and Rep. Mike Honda

North Korea is one of the world’s most secretive states. Some info about the country and its people are known, though most is based on estimates from outside agencies – the statistics from North Korea itself would probably read quite differently.

We’ve pulled together some key data from the Datablog. See what you can do with it.

Population

The population currently stands at around 24.45 million, according to the UN Population Division, a growth of 151% since 1950. The UN estimates that the North Korean population will rise to 24.55 million by 2100.

Corruption

North Korea is officially the world’s most corrupt country, according to the
Corruption index 2011 from Transparency International, which ranks countries on a scale of one to ten. Kim Jong-il‘s homeland made its index debut this year with a score of one.

Capital punishment

North Korea ranks third for meting out the death penalty, behind China and Iran, according to Amnesty International’s death penalty statistics. 60 people were executed there in 2010.

Military strength

According to the IISS Military Balance 2011, North Korea has 1.19 million people on active duty (1.02 million army personnel, 60,000 navy and 110,000 air), plus 189,000 active paramilitary personnel, and a further 600,000 reservists. 5.7 million North Koreans are reservists in the worker/peasant red guard, which is compulsory to the age of 60.

Nuclear capability

North Korea is a nuclear power, but only has two nuclear warheads (2009 est.), lagging far behind the world’s other atomic powers. According to 2009 research by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Russia has nearly 13,000, the US 9,500 and the UK 192.

North Korea v South Korea

Between 1958 and 2010 there were around 150 incidents between North Korea and South Korea (that we know about). The Datablog mapped them in 2010.

Poverty

North Korea scored 19.4 on the 2010 Global Hunger Index, a level classed as alarming by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The situation has worsened since 1990, when the country scored 16.2. The proportion of the population that is undernourished has risen from 21% to 32% in that time.

Peace

North Korea ranks 149th on the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Peace Index 2011, with a score of 3.09. Only Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan are less peaceful.

Carbon dioxide emissions

North Korea ranks 44th on the world carbon emissions index (using 2009 figures from the Energy Information Administration), with a CO2 emissions level of 79.55m tonnes (3.51 tonnes per capita). That’s an increase of 14.3% year on year, the 14th highest (a rapid increase is an indicator of economic growth).

Football

The North Korean football team scored one goal in the 2010 World Cup(though that was against Brazil), conceded 12 goals and received two yellow cards. They didn’t make it beyond the group stage.

Source: Guardian Data Blog

Holding Libya Together: Security Challenges after Qadhafi , the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the challenges stemming from the large number of local forces and militias which were decisive in ousting Qadhafi’s regime but are now becoming a significant threat to the country’s security. Having swiftly achieved broad international recognition, the National Transitional Council (NTC) quickly became the face of the rebellion. On the ground however, the picture was different. The uprising was highly decentralised with essentially autonomous, self-armed and self-trained military brigades in both east and west and an array of forces in Tripoli. Today, over 125,000 Libyans reportedly are armed and members of well over a hundred militias. These are in the process of institutionalising themselves, mimicking the organisation of a regular military and engaging in independent activities (registering persons and weapons; arresting and detaining suspects) that are becoming ever more entrenched.

“Libya was liberated in piecemeal fashion, mostly by local rebellions and ad-hoc military groupings that used both military means and negotiations to achieve their goals”, says William Lawrence, Crisis Group’s North Africa Project Director. “As a result, a large number of local forces and militias grew up that could legitimately proclaim themselves national liberators”.

The problem posed by militias reflects hard truths about the political landscape from which they sprung. Defectors from within Qadhafi’s regime, who were instrumental in forming the NTC and the rebel National Army, stand accused by revolutionary fighters of belonging to the old order. Rifts between regions as well as between Islamists and secularists play into this dynamic. Weapons are in abundance and suspicion among armed fighters runs high. Above all, the NTC has inherited a country with a long tradition of local government and divided, indecisive ministries, reinforcing mistrust of central authority.

Until a more legitimate governing body is formed and until more credible national institutions are developed, notably in the areas of defence, policing and vital service delivery, Libyans are likely to be sceptical of the political process, while insisting on both retaining their weapons and preserving the current structure of irregular armed brigades. To try to force a different outcome would be to play with fire, and with poor odds.

But that does not mean doing nothing. The NTC should communicate clearly, act with transparency and consult closely with local military councils and community leaders on all issues related to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR). Together, they should agree on and enforce a common set of rules and behaviour for all armed fighters – particularly in terms of treatment of detainees — and join their efforts to reintegrate armed rebels, notably the youngest among them, by offering alternative civilian employment. The international community should offer its own advice and technical assistance.

“A top-down disarmament and demobilisation effort by an executive lacking legitimacy would backfire”, says Robert Malley, Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program Director. “Qadhafi centralised power without building a central state. His successors must do the reverse”.

Source: The International Crisis Group