General

International Alert has partnered with a leading digital and internet-based radio station, Passion for the Planet, in order to broaden the public’s understanding of peacebuilding.

Over the course of the next 12 months the station, which broadcasts to an audience primarily interested in environmental and health issues, will be featuring a series of interview clips that highlight both the need and the response of peacebuilders in conflict-affected countries across the world.

Mid August to Mid September 2009

As part of our partnership with radio station Passion for the Planet you can listen to the following interviews this month:

Could overseas aid be doing more harm than good?

We might have accepted climate change as a given, but what do the rest of the world really think?

Mid September to mid October 2009

As part of our partnership with radio station Passion for the Planet this month you can listen to the following interviews:

Why is it that some large western corporations have a negative effect on peace and yet others can be at the very heart of peacebuilding?
Are children the hidden victims of a conflict – their plight forgotten while the adults fight and then their needs ignored once peace returns?

International Alert Sri Lanka recently visited New Delhi in an attempt to further expand Alert’s regional work in the South Asia.

As part of our programme in the Philippines, Alert recently took part in the Philippines’ Month of Peace with many activities.

Day of Peace and World March for Peace and Non-Violence

International Alert recently organised a public round table on Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Creating Conditions for Building Peace – the Role of Russia, together with the Russian Centre for Strategic Studies of Religion and Politics of Contemporary World and the Russian Media Centre Izvestya, and with the participation of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation.

International Alert recently met representatives of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) panel negotiating with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Led by its chair, Foreign Affairs Under-secretary Rafael Sguis, the panel and the former UK Ambassador to the Philippines, Peter Beckingham, visited Alert offices in London before embarking on a tour to Belfast, upon the invitation of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to learn from the Northern Ireland’s peacebuilding experience.

Last month, International Alert conducted a week long communication training course for local peacebuilding organisations active in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The training took place against a backdrop of renewed fighting and multiple atrocities having been reported on all sides.

Local organisations taking part in the training were long term partners of the Life and Peace Institute, which is one of our partners in Bukavu, South Kivu province.

This article by Alert's Director of Programmes Phil Vernon is a reply to Oliver Richmond’s ‘Liberal Peace Transitions' for Open Democracy.

International Alert supports a series of small post-conflict initiatives in Burundi. And some of the values that motivate these are also dear to the liberal hearts of the international community.

As part of our partnership with radio station Passion for the Planet this month you can listen to the following interviews:

Can reconciliation after conflict really work? Hear about a boy from Liberia who became friends with his father's killer and a ground-breaking peace and cultural festival that took place in the country.

Plus, when it comes to negotiating peace, why a woman's touch often succeeds where men fail, and why some local chiefs are deferring to the women of the tribe?

As the people of Guinea were preparing to go to the polls to cast their vote to elect their president on 27th June 2010, the West Africa programme in collaboration with the Mediation Support Project – a joint venture between swisspeace and the Center for Security Studies (ETH-Zurich) – ran four mediation training workshops during May 2010 in N’zérékoré, Conakry, Labe and Kankan.

Read our 2009 Impact Report

Listing the peacebuilding NGO’s strategic achievements in the last 12 months, the report is also candid about the challenges the organisation faces, in light of global economic turbulence and the attendant risks to regions prone to violence in many of the 20 plus countries in which they work.

Between 28th June and 1st July, International Alert gathered together Georgian and Abkhaz civil society activists and experts in the latest in a series of “dialogue through research” meetings intended to shed new light on the conflict and explore different ways of thinking about conflict-related issues.

Since the widespread violence broke out in the south of the country in April and June this year, International Alert has sent staff members to Kyrgyzstan on three separate missions in the past two months. Their purpose was assessment and to start to engage in face to face meetings with politicians, religious leaders and leaders of civil society groups from all sides of the conflict. On this basis, we have put together a comprehensive peacebuilding plan for the country with three key strands:

International Alert is proud to present our new publication on "International Engagement in the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict Resolution Process", a collection of papers from Georgian and Abkhaz researchers analysing the effectiveness of international engagement in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict resolution process, with a specific focus on the post-August 2008 period.