Our Views
Is overseas aid an instrument of soft power?
I was giving evidence to a UK House of Lords select committee on aid as an instrument of soft power yesterday (watch the meeting here), so spent a bit of time researching what “soft power” actually means.
Wanted: EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security
Person specification for the High Representative - Vacant at Christmas 2014
Baroness Ashton will step down as High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security, and First Vice President of the Council – effectively the closest the EU has to a minister of foreign affairs, at the end of 2014.
Climate change, resilience and peace
International Alert convenes an expert roundtable, Building resilience – building peace, in Kathmandu on Monday 8 July. It’s the culmination of two and half years of research on the impact of climate change on local communities in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. I can’t be there, so we recorded four minutes to camera as my contribution to the day's events.
Natural resources in a conflict context
For a developing country facing high poverty levels, a growing population with high expectations despite a poor revenue base and weak institutions, but with an abundance of natural resources, exploiting them looks like the path to glory. Experience from a range of countries shows that, to put it mildly, it's not so straightforward.
Why young people are so critical to peace
In conversations last week about youth and peacebuilding, it occurred to me again that we too easily fudge things by referring to "youth". Unless we qualify "youth" with a narrower description, we risk being vague and patronising; and by our imprecision to lose the meaning of what we intend to say. Especially given that more than half the world's population probably fit the category, one way or another.
Syria: intervention - or the great power game?
Mon, 17/06/2013
International development post-2015
The UN High Level Panel (HLP) on the Post-2015 Development Agenda has reported.
Overseas aid and military spending, Round Two
The argument about whether overseas aid money can be spent on the military seems to be kicking off again. Indeed, it seems not only to have started up but to be institutionalised in negotiations between the UK Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development.
Is mining a development industry?
In an earlier post I wrote about how mining companies have evolved to take into account the needs of their host communities.
New Deal - real deal?
In both low and middle income countries, well established arguments and solid evidence confirm that there is no real development without peace and only the peace of the graveyard without development. These conclusions have shifted the fulcrum of discussion about development over the past several years. But they have not yet added up to telling anybody how to do it.
Women, men, violence - neither from Mars nor from Venus
This opinion piece appeared in The Huffington Post on 12 March 2013
Recent high-profile cases of gang rapes and murders of young women in India and South Africa have caused anger, anguish and soul-searching across the world. However these brutal cases are only the tip of the iceberg.
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 published a review of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which criticised the MDGs for being too narrow and too technical; for confusing ends with means; for being top-down and for being used in statistically illiterate ways; and for creating perverse and unhelpful policy incentives.
Development aid and peacekeeping: what can the money be spent on?
This week it was confirmed that in 2013 the UK will hit the target of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on official development assistance (ODA). A long-standing campaigning goal for development NGOs and a moral goal for the country have been achieved.
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 trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away.
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