Peacemakers Trust posts news, reports or announcements of interest to people studying or working in the field of dispute resolution, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Inclusion of an item on the media watch blog does not imply endorsement or agreement of Peacemakers Trust with views expressed by authors of posted items.
Let women play a bigger role in the country's affairs and see what happens to the peace process.
By Ann Jones
Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it’s time to try something totally different, like putting into action, for the first time in history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325.
Passed on Oct. 31, 2000, the resolution was hailed worldwide as a great victory for both women and international peace. In a nutshell, it calls for women to participate equally in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking and reconstruction.
MOHAMED ALTAWIL could have been another Palestinian youth throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and tanks, but it was his father who encouraged him to seek a different path.
Mohamed grew up in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and during his late childhood and early teens would throw rocks at Israeli soldiers. For this he spent time in prison – at only 12 years of age. His father though did not want to see his son end up going in and out of prison.
“You have brains, you have to use them,” he said. “Throwing rocks doesn’t achieve much. You have to make your life a little bit different. You have to use more intelligence in how you approach this problem.” He began to instil in his son an idea that resistance did not have to involve bullets, but that it could be achieved through other, more peaceful means.
This led Mohamed into a life of study, earning him a place at the University of Hertfordshire on a Ford Foundation Scholarship in 2004 do a PhD on the ‘Effects of Chronic Traumatic Experience on the Children of Gaza’. He now works as a psychologist in The Palestine Trauma Centre in Gaza.
Filed under: Media and Conflict — story spotted by Catherine Morris @ 17:26 PDT
News source:
13 January 2011
Financial Times
By Richard McGregor in Washington
Barack Obama has won wide praise for his speech calling for greater civility in US public life at a memorial for the victims of the Arizona shooting, ahead of a tentative return to political jousting in Washington.
WASHINGTON – First lady Michelle Obama urged parents across the United States on Thursday to talk to their children about the Arizona shootings and use the event to teach them a lesson about American values…
“The questions my daughters have asked are the same ones that many of your children will have – and they don’t lend themselves to easy answers,” the first lady wrote in an “open letter” to parents on the White House website…
Echoing themes that her husband touched upon in his speech at the memorial service on Wednesday, Mrs. Obama said parents could teach their children to be opened minded even with people whose opinions they don’t share.
“We can teach them the value of tolerance – the practice of assuming the best, rather than the worst, about those around us,” she wrote. “We can teach them to give others the benefit of the doubt, particularly those with whom they disagree.”
Filed under: Media and Conflict — story spotted by Catherine Morris @ 17:25 PDT
News source:
13 January 2011
BuzzFeed | YouTube (Whitehouse)
By Barack Obama
President Obama addresses nearly 14,000 people at the University of Arizona in Tucson, calling for unity and service in the wake of the shooting on Saturday. The president also relayed the good news that, earlier today, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has opened her eyes for the first time since being shot.
The media can choose to provoke the least stable, most trigger-happy sectors of the population. Or it can strengthen democracy, civility, and the rule of law.
This WFDD report represents an effort to “map” the extraordinary array of faith-inspired development work and ideas in one country. The first effort of its kind, for WFDD and to our knowledge more broadly, this in-depth country review reflects the conviction that religious ideas, institutions, and leaders play critical roles in Cambodia’s development but are not well understood…
abstract posted 10 January 2011 | report March 2010
Abstract on Business and Human Rights Resource Center
By Salil Tripathi, policy director, Institute for Human Rights and Business
Businesses have operated in zones of conflict since time immemorial…Some businesses have played a direct role in conflict by providing the means with which wars are fought… To ensure that businesses do not contribute to genocide and that they aid in the peace process, it is necessary to determine clear rules for what they should not do, what they must do, and what they can do…
Monday, 10 January 2011 to Friday, 14 January 2011
Center for Civic Mediation
30-Hour Basic Mediation Training:
30 hours of small group exercises and role-playing.
It is designed for persons who want to acquire a strong foundation in basic mediation skills while satisfying training requirements of the California DRPA.
Wednesday, 5 January 2011 17:00 PDT to Tuesday, 15 February 2011 17:00 PDT
Over the last few months, CPTers have been thinking together about the story of our work as part of Mission and Presentation Re-visioning Process (MAPR). We’d like to invite you to join us in that pondering this advent season. We recognize that CPT’s way of working has developed and matured over the last twenty-five years and in thinking about revising our mission, we realized that we need to first be able to describe the kind of world that we and are our partners are working to create. We need a vision statement and we need your help to write one.
Over the next two months, we invite you to dream, think, pray and imagine an answer to this question: Were CPT to succeed fully as a movement, as a community, and as an organization, what would the world look like?…
You can send your submission by mail to one of our offices* or by email to timn [at] cpt [dot] org”>timn@cpt.org . Please respond by 15 February at the latest.
