On August 13th, at the request of the Pakistani Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency (PILDAT), USIP Senior Program Officer Nina Sughrue conducted a one day conflict management session for 21 Pakistani parliamentarians in Islamabad.
The Religion and Peacemaking program at USIP visited Colombia in November 2008 to support a joint-initiative of the Conferencia de Religiosos y Religiosas de Colombia, the organizing body of Catholic men’s and women’s religious orders, and Justapaz, a Menonite organization, to convene a four-day workshop outside of Bogota for Catholic and Protestant women peacemakers. This workshop provided an opportunity for women doing peace work on the ground through their churches to share best practices,...
USIP’s Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding organized an expert working group on April 26-27 in Erbil, Iraq to discuss how to create a multimedia program that will provide Iraqi teenagers the tools to help them grow into independent, empowered citizens within a complex society. USIP brought together 25 experts for the working group, consisting of educators, media, youth NGO representatives, government officials and USIP-trained conflict resolution facilitators.
The process of drafting and passing new “people friendly” criminal laws is a difficult one but it is certainly not impossible. USIP's Vivienne O'Connor visited Haiti recently to help work with the national actors engaged in the reform process by sharing with lawmakers a law reform tool –- the “Model Codes for Post-Conflict Criminal Justice” book -- that we developed in cooperation with the Irish Centre for Human Rights, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.N. Office on Drugs ...
A scandal involving murder allegations against the president and escalating violence from drug trafficking threaten Guatemala’s stability. Former USIP grantee Anita Isaacs recently traveled to the Central American country, where she witnessed massive demonstrations that exposed the fragility of Guatemala’s democracy.
Ted Feifer and Mike Lekson of the Education and Training Center/ International conducted the Institute's seventh workshop on negotiation skills in multilateral diplomacy for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, June 8-10, 2009.
Senior Program Officers Nina Sughrue and Noor Kirdar continued USIP’s support for the international Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU), run by the Italian Caribinieri in Vicenza, Italy. CoESPU, which was established on March 1st 2005, stems from an Italian initiative, supported by the G8 countries to provide technical and financial assistance in order to improve global capacity for sustaining peace stability operations, particularly in African countries.
USIP peace scholar Benjamin Schonthal provides a first person account of the excitement at the end of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war. And, he also reminds us that the hard work of peace is just beginning.
On Wednesday, April 22, the Institute’s Education and Training Center/International (ETC/I) hosted a half-day demonstration of the Strategic Economic Needs and Security Exercise (SENSE) for members of the Institute staff and a handful of outside guests. SENSE is a computer-facilitated simulation that models the conditions of an imaginary country (“Akrona”) emerging from conflict.
Religion is often cited as a cause of violent conflict, yet there is little recognition of how faith communities contribute toward peacemaking in zones of conflict throughout the world.
