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28 Oct 2009 19:51:00 GMT
Pakistan: Inconvenient Truths
When they realize youre a Mehsud, they treat you like a suicide bomber whos wearing an explosive jacket. -A displaced Pakistani from South Waziristan, quoted in Dawn

Pakistan is in the midst of an internal conflict with severe humanitarian consequences. Tens of thousands of civilians fled South Waziristan in the past few days, as the Pakistani army continues its offensive against the Taliban in the countrys northwest. With the UN declaring that 1.7 million displaced Pakistanis from the Swat and Buner districts returned home since July, its easy to forget that this crisis has been going on for more than a year, and will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, while I was in Pakistan in early October most aid workers insisted that their biggest challenge will be to sustain the required level of aid in the coming months. More than 700,000 civilians remain displaced, the families whove returned will need help to rebuild their lives. The armys operations continue to displace thousands. The humanitarian community is preparing to launch a fundraising appeal for 2010 based on projections of future large scale displacement. Its hard to fathom why, in the words of a high ranking UN official, the Pakistani government thinks the crisis is over.

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09 Oct 2009 08:33:00 GMT
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.

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17 Sep 2009 11:20:00 GMT
UN women's agency: Guys, what took you so long?
LONDON (AlertNet) - After years of foot-dragging, the U.N. General Assembly has finally approved a resolution to create a high-level agency for women's rights, which supporters have hailed as a historic breakthrough.

The decision this week to merge four U.N. bodies dealing with women's issues to form a single agency with greater clout comes after three years of political wrangling -- and decades after the world body created similar agencies to deal with children, refugees, environment and development.

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16 Sep 2009 21:10:00 GMT
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.

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11 Sep 2009 07:26:00 GMT
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.

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