Our Views

The latest edition of The Spectator carries an opinion piece by Jonathan Foreman entitled 'The great aid mystery'. In a diatribe laced with rather tired tropes, and whose style undermines the argument he makes, Foreman’s main points when stripped of rhetoric can be summarised quite simply as:

I think Edward Saïd wrote somewhere that the USA can never hope to contribute to sustainable peace in the Middle East until it is willing and able to describe the situation there objectively, comprehensively and accurately. Good advice for President Obama and his new Secretary of State as they embark on four challenging years in the region. And good advice meanwhile for anyone, be they doctor, secretary of state, international NGO staff member or anyone else, who takes on responsibility to help others fix their problems.

The Nobel Lecture when the EU received the 2012 Peace Prize was a speech in two chapters, the first delivered by Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the Council (pictured), and the second by Jose Barroso, President of the Commission. It was van Rompuy who addressed the issues I raised in yesterday’s post and he did it pretty well.

The Nobel Lecture

Today, Monday 10 December, in Oslo City Hall and then in the banqueting rooms of the Grand Hotel in the evening, the European Union receives and celebrates the Nobel Peace Prize 2012.

Euro-phobes and sceptics

I took part in a round table discussion in a post-conflict country recently, looking at aid effectiveness there.

Among the salient details on the table, and which will be familiar from elsewhere:

It had been a long time coming. Since the first meeting of the High Level Panel, set up by Ban Ki Moon and co-chaired by the British, Liberian and Indonesian Heads of State in New York the massed ranks of civil society had been looking forward to this meeting with expectations and anxiety in equal measure.

One of my first jobs after finishing university was a temporary post at the Royal British Legion in 1997.

The UN High Level Panel looking at development goals after 2015 is coming to London and will meet representatives of British development NGOs who, it seems, don’t want to discuss development with them.

On Tuesday 9th, International Alert in Rwanda launched our report, Healing fractured lives, and the accompanying film (see my previous post) based on the photography of Carol Allen Storey.

The Philippine government (GPH) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have agreed a peacebuilding framework that will guide the next critical parts in the negotiations for a genuine and lasting peace in Mindanao. While the framework agreement itself does not declare a permanent end to hostilities and the demobilization and disarmament of combatants, it represents a very significant step indeed, and generates momentum for a definitive peace agreement that is expected to be signed in a year’s time.   

This blog post by Alert’s Director of Programmes Phil Vernon is also available on OpenDemocracy

Foreign Secretary William Hague announced this week a UK initiative on preventing sexual violence in conflict. This initiative, which forms part of the UK’s forthcoming Presidency of the G8 in 2013, will include the establishment of a dedicated UK team devoted to combating and preventing sexual violence in conflict.

International aid donors and the poorer governments they fund have overlapping, but far from identical interests. They overlap in their common desire to spend donor money in support of development progress, broadly put. But they often differ on what are the best development choices, and on issues like the need or opportunity for compliance with human rights and good financial stewardship norms.

In 2001 – a different time and a different world – the EU Gothenburg summit agreed to make the prevention of violent conflict a priority for the EU. Measured by money, it’s now the world’s biggest player in peacebuilding. But look around Europe now and we can ask, should peacebuilding also start to be a priority inside the EU?