September 2013

Latest research

Setting the post-2015 development compass: voices from the ground

The fresh perspectives from participants offer unexpected insights and challenge assumptions about what policies work, and for whom

Setting the post-2015 development compass, from CAFOD, aims to provide an insight into the experiences, aspirations, and priorities of poor and marginalised people. The intention of the report is to inform the ongoing debate around post-2015, by highlighted the voices people on the ground.

Advancing the prospects for peace: 20 years of civil peacebuilding in the context of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict

Taken together, [these reports] paint a picture of how the peacebuilding community itself assesses its role in transforming the conflict, looking back from the present.

Advancing the prospects for peace, from International Alert, looks at how local peacebuilders working on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, perceive peacebuilding efforts in their context. The study both looks back at the 20 year history of civil society peacebuilding in Nagorny Karabakh, and forward, to how civil society efforts to transform the conflict can be improved.

Sensing and shaping emerging conflicts

Monitoring and analysis of media, such as text, video, images, and audio, can yield valuable insights in developing strategies to mitigate or prevent emerging conflicts. Sensing and communication technologies will improve the detection of impending violent conflict and the options for response to such conflicts. 

Sensing and shaping emerging conflicts, from USIP, is a summary of a USIP-organised workshop examining the potential use of communications technology in conflict environments. The publication provides an overview of the discussions and issues around how real time information can not only give a picture of emerging conflict, but also enable effective interventions.

Measuring conflict exposure in micro-level surveys

Reconstruction policies in particular must build on local conflict legacies, taking into consideration how people were affected by war and violence, for example through death, displacement, disability, fear, asset loss or market breakdown. In essence, each person may experience a conflict differently, leading to different types of conflict exposure even within families or villages. 

Conflict affects different people in different ways, and precisely how they are affected has important implications for how to overcome legacies of conflict. Measuring conflict exposure in micro-level surveys, from the Households in Conflict Network, proposes a methodology for assessing how individuals and small communities have been affected by conflict, in order to better inform programme design.

Loosening Kony’s grip: effective defection strategies for today’s LRA

Though the LRA has ceased to be a political threat to any regional state, it continues to threaten vulnerable civilians across a large swath of Africa. The coming months represent a critical window of opportunity to encourage as many defections as possible before Kony is able to reconsolidate control of the LRA.

Loosening Kony’s grip, from Resolve, examines strategies aimed at weakening the Lord's Resistance Army by encouraging LRA fighters to put their weapons and reintegrate back into society.  The report looks at what methods have proved most successful, the challenges and obstacles to DDR and how they can be overcome.

Innovative response - Alternative ways of working in Somalia

This new approach uses indigenous knowledge and works within the community to ensure that the support is in line with the socio-political and cultural context of the community ... AWW aims to increase access beyond the secure areas in Somalia, especially for nomadic pastoralists, and form basis for cost effective and conflict sensitive programming with positive and long lasting impact.

Innovative response, from Oxfam, looks at the "Alternative ways of working" (AWW) approach to development in Somalia. AWW prioritises the needs and capacities of local communities in order to promote development with a long-lasting impact, and which reaches communities that have traditionally been difficult to reach.

From the blog

Where are the best new ideas and groups in peacebuilding emerging?

Time to stop dismissing the DR Congo as beyond hope

Sexual violence in the global war on terror

The Liberian Bus project: driving change for young Liberians

Peacebuilding in Nepal: Local First logic