Andrew Stroehlein
Covering crisis
Journalist Andrew Stroehlein is Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, the conflict resolution organisation, where he promotes responsible coverage of current and potential conflicts and helps draw attention to forgotten wars around the world.
Google Wave for NGOs
I've been playing around with the Google Wave preview and thinking about how it might change the way international NGOs communicate, both internally and externally. What follows are some very early thoughts -- written in Wave, naturally. First thing to know is that it is not a final product yet. One person I was waving with called it, no where near a beta version, and that seems fair. It's very early days. A lot of bits and pieces don't work, and you have to use your imagination to understand the potential it offers. ...
Sex and War
Biology is not destiny. But it sure explains a whole lot of human activity, as Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden describe in their book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World (Benbella Books, 2008), which I strongly feel is a must read for anyone dealing with conflict prevention and resolution today. Chimpanzees, our closest cousins, share more than 98 per cent of our DNA, and many of our social, and antisocial, behaviours. Most disturbingly, we are perhaps the only two species that deliberately torture and kill their own kind. The evolutionary success of genes that enhance team aggression by small groups of males on others, both male and female, have bequeathed both species' descendants a dark side. ...
No University, It's the Turkmenistan Army for You
The government of Turkmenistan has set up new travel regulations essentially barring hundreds of students from studying abroad. As the academic year begins, male students who were looking forward to starting or restarting their studies after the holidays will instead be drafted into the national army on 22 September. It all started with an announcement on television news one evening in late July, when Turkmenistan's Ministry of Education declared new rules for students' travelling abroad. Most students, however, learned about the regulations only at the border or airport, where they were asked for their official permission to study outside the country. ...
Sri Lanka: What Kind of "Victory"?
After months of battle, government forces tightening an ever constricting noose around the Tamil Tigers seem to have finally beaten the rebel group. Still, deep concerns remain for tens of thousands of civilians caught up in the fighting. The Tigers' international representative, Kumaran Padmanathan, has been quoted conceding defeat, though fighting is still probably continuing in small pockets where some groups of fighters remain. The Sri Lankan government released a press statement yesterday saying that all the civilians were out of the conflict zone. ...
Sri Lanka's plight highlighted at World Press Freedom Day
I just returned from the World Press Freedom Day conference in Doha, Qatar. It was a fairly typical affair as these sorts of conferences go -- until the final award ceremony, when murdered Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge was posthumously given the World Press Freedom Prize 2009. His niece, Natalie Samarasinghe, read out a statement from his widow, Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge, which was so forceful and so impressive, I feel it deserves a much wider audience than the few hundred people who gave it a standing ovation in the room on Sunday. With permission, I am publishing it in full below. ...
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