General News

The pressure of participatory politics it taking its toll on Tunisia’s ruling Nahda party. Factions within the Nadha party are all the more prevalent after the resignation of Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali on 19 February. The Secretary General of Nahda relinquished his role as prime minister after failing to convince his party of a plan to unite Tunisia.

Conflict deaths are decreasing as a result of fewer civil wars and inter-state wars. However, a quarter of the world’s population still lives in the shadows of different types of organised violence, including armed insurgencies, terrorism and violent extremism, gang-violence and violence associated with organised crime. This suggests that the constituents, landscapes, cycles and dynamics of pervasive violence have changed.

In northern Uganda, the Acholi communities are settling back into their villages after years of insecurity and internal displacement as a result of the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government.  The conflict, displacement and return process had different impacts on men, women, boys and girls. The consequences of this require gender-relational approaches to peacebuilding.

On 7 February, Janani Vivekananda, International Alert’s Climate Change and Conflict Programme Manager, spoke at the Strengthening Responses to Climate Variability in South Asia conference at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. Janani presented four case studies - on Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh - to illustrate levels of risk and resilience to environmental change at village level.

Last month representatives from the youth wings of 18 political parties in Lebanon shared a joint declaration on the rights of Palestinian refugees. The declaration was the result of a series of discussions supported by International Alert to encourage peaceful debate among the political parties in the country.

International Alert recently launched a new book called Out of the shadows: Violent conflict and the real economy of Mindanao.

The book presents the results of research into the linkages between violent conflict and the informal or ‘shadow’ economy in Mindanao, the conflict-affected region in the southern Philippines.

International Alert is included in this year's list of top 100 NGOs in the world by The Global Journal, for the second year running.

Last year, staff from our economy and peacebuilding and international institutions teams attended the conference ‘Business after conflict: Investing in the new Africa’ in Nairobi, Kenya.

Our second Conflict Ideas Forum was on the topic of large-scale violent conflict that neither fits formal and familiar definitions of "armed conflict", nor does it fit into the mandates of international institutions.

On Tuesday 4th December the southern Philippines was hit by Typhoon Bopha (known locally as Pablo), with the island of Mindanao worst affected.

International Alert has been supporting more inclusive and conflict-sensitive economic governance in the Compostela Valley province of Mindanao, which bore the brunt of the devastation.