Global

Firstly, thank you to International Alert for inviting me to join this forum. The blog entries so far promise to provide for plenty of interesting debate tomorrow. I hope to be able to contribute to this debate with some comments on Spain's experience.

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:

On 10th December we held our first Conflict Ideas Forum at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London.

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.

Our Programming Framework provides International Alert peace practitioners with some guidance in the complex and difficult task of building peace. It also offers those we work with and are accountable to greater clarity about what we do and why we do it. Most importantly, it is designed to enable peacebuilders to be better able to identify and measure the impact of their actions, so that they can be more effective in what they do.

Programming framework

International Alert has called for a radically different approach to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in our written submission to the UK’s International Development Committee (IDC).

Here Chris Underwood, Senior Policy Advisor at International Alert, recounts his recent trip to the UN General Assembly in New York.

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.

To be effective as peacebuilders, we need to respond to the power dynamics and norms that influence peace and violent conflict at the household, community, national and international levels.

This report reflects the findings of the preparatory phase of a three-year research project exploring the role of gender in peacebuilding. Whilst addressing key research questions, the report identifies three approaches to gender that are evident in peacebuilding: gender-blind, those based on UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and gender-relational. The third – and hitherto unexplored – approach, is based on a strategy of benefit-sharing and solidarity-building between men and women, and uses a context-specific gendered power analysis as its starting point.

Full report