General News

The battle lines are starting to be drawn over how development assistance and peacebuilding do or don’t support each other, or can or can’t be made to work together, and about whether bad governance and insecurity are the right targets for international development policy and assistance. 

Earlier this month, International Alert organised a three-day seminar for civil society aimed at exchanging information and increasing transparency in the management of oil revenues in the island state of São Tomé and Príncipe.

International Alert recently attended the 54th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women which undertook a 15-year review and appraisal of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA).

In partnership with the Eastern Africa Sub-Regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI), Alert organised a panel discussion to present the preliminary results of a joint research project on the nature and impact of women’s political participation currently being carried out in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

In February this year, International Alert organised an awareness campaign around the West African island of Príncipe aimed at informing those living in rural areas about forthcoming oil extraction. The island state of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea is the second smallest country in Africa and one of the poorest countries in the world.

International Alert recently conducted research into perceptions of security and access to justice among stakeholders in three districts of Lofa County in northwest Liberia, as part of its EC-funded Initiative for Peacebuilding (IfP) project. The eruption of communal violence in Voinjama while Alert’s team was visiting the county seat provided a stark reminder of the fragility of peace in Liberia and the challenges of security provision in a remote and sensitive region.

Between 25th-29th March 2010 International Alert held an Armenian-Azerbaijani Youth Peace Forum in Amman, Jordan. 25 participants from across the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict divide travelled to Jordan to meet with counterparts from the other side.

The young Armenians and Azerbaijanis took part in training workshops as well as in interactive exercises. The trainers and the facilitators of the Youth Forum were representatives of the older generation of peace activists who have been working in the region with Alert for more than a decade.

Equitable economic recovery is a key requirement for consolidating peace in Nepal, where the economic exclusion of various groups, ownership of productive resources by a small elite, and decades of failed development have fed both poverty and multiple conflicts. Public expectations of “peace dividends” remain high and are defined largely in terms of economic opportunity. The perceived failure of the peace process to meet these expectations thus far is fuelling increased frustration, particularly amongst young people.

‘Global Trends and Threats and the South Caucasus’ was the topic of a regional roundtable that International Alert organised in Tbilisi, Georgia on 13th April 2010. Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian experts took part in this one-day event, together with representatives from the international community and international organisations based in Tbilisi, as well as diplomats from some of the embassies in Georgia.

International Alert, together with the Bangladesh Institute for Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS) and  the Regional Centre for Security Studies and the Peacebuilding and Development Institute in Sri Lanka, co-hosted an expert roundtable on the Security Implications of Climate Change in South Asia in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 29th-30th March 2010.

International Alert recently published a report on Refugee return to eastern DRC, a discussion document that explores and warns of the dangers posed by the issue of returning refugees from Rwanda to North Kivu in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Members of the Chamber of Commerce from São Tomé and Príncipe recently met in Príncipe to discuss the role of the private sector as the country prepares to join the ranks of the oil-producing countries of Africa.

The meeting, which took place at the Príncipe Cultural Center on 20th April, was attended by seven representatives of the national Chamber of Commerce and over 45 members of the Chamber of Commerce of the island of Príncipe.  

Conflict-sensitive approaches to development and humanitarian interventions were the focus of a recent training course conducted by International Alert for senior programme staff from UNDP, UNICEF and UNRCO in Nepal.

Aiming to introduce a practical set of tools for programme staff to integrate into operations at a field level, the course imparted knowledge on how to identify conflict risks and impacts, mitigating steps and recognising potential opportunities.

Last year International Alert’s Secretary-General Dan Smith was selected to review the UK Department for International Development’s policy on state-building and peacebuilding, an issue which is a bit of a hot topic in many of the countries where Alert works. Smith challenged some of the UK Government’s key assumptions and provided new ways of thinking about the interlinkages between state-building and peacebuilding.

This article is an abstract from Dan Smith’s contribution to the new Foreign Policy Centre pamphlet Tackling the world water crisis: Reshaping the future of foreign policy.

Water is a basic condition for life. We depend upon it for daily use, agriculture and industry. Both declining availability and quality as well as an excess of water undermines welfare, impairs human security and generates risk of conflict.

Letter published in The Guardian on 5 June 2010

Andrew Mitchell, the new secretary of state for international development, has announced a new regime of transparency and accountability in how Britain's aid is spent. Welcome as that is, questions remain about what to measure, which means discussing the aims, and how to do it without distorting those aims.