General

Six young cross-party Sri Lankan parliamentarians and political representatives visited the UK from 25th February to 5th March 2013 to explore its governance and democracy models, and continue their engagement with UK-based diaspora.

Article published on 28th February 2013, The Huffington Post

The latest agreement for peace in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) offers a fresh and much needed glimmer of hope for ordinary Congolese citizens suffering from two decades of violence.

This report analyses the activity and influence of civil society organisations in Tunisia over the last two years, identifying the implications and opportunities for the broader Middle East and North Africa region.
 

Full report

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.

The state is the organising principle of national and international politics and states are the subject of abundant historical research, academic theory and contemporary analysis.  That perhaps makes it a little strange to say that both the state as a category and states in general tend to be taken for granted. But that’s how it is – and it’s a problem.

I recently read volume one of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (Profile Books, 2011) in which he explores how different models of governance have emerged and decayed “from prehuman history to the French Revolution”. Volume two is forthcoming, and will bring the story up to the present day. As someone who works in peacebuilding, which is largely about fostering good governance today, I have a keen interest in how different governance regimes have emerged and decayed in history, if they provide us with clues for the present.

The International Development Select Committee, which scrutinises the Department for International Development (DFID), has issued a long awaited report on the post-2015 agenda.

Peacebuilding organisation International Alert yesterday published a new report, Voices across borders, which calls for greater engagement between the UK government and diaspora communities, in order to improve peace and development.

In the first ten years after the EU decided at its 2001 Gothenburg summit to have a policy on conflict prevention, the European Commission spent €7.7 billion on what we would now call peacebuilding, about 10 per cent of its total spending on external aid. That made it the world’s biggest peacebuilding spender.

Sri Lankan parliamentarians Honourable Vasantha Senanayake MP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party), Honourable Harin Fernando MP (United National Party), and Mr Raghu Balanchandran (Tamil National Alliance) visited the UK from 25th-31st October 2012 in the second of a series of dialogues between this cross-party group of Sri Lankan parliamentarians, political activists and Sri Lankan diaspora communities in the UK.