By Professor Roger MacGinty. It might be a function of my advancing years, but I have noticed a set of policy-driven debates coming around again. These were debates that occupied scholars and policy-makers twenty years ago and they are now back again. Here are a few...
Category: Staff blogs
Humanitarianism in Practice: research visit to Rwanda and Uganda
by Adil Mohammed.In January 2017, I had the pleasure to accompany 24 of our masters’ students to Rwanda and Uganda on a research visit to explore humanitarianism in action. The aim of the visit was to give students from our 3 masters’ pathways fieldwork experience in...
Where’s the reconciliation?
by Roger Mac Ginty.December 16 is South Africa’s national reconciliation day. I am just back from a trip there and I was struck by the absence of reconciliation in everyday life. As ever, a short trip in a massive and varied country only affords a snapshot (I was in...
Civil society and the liberal peace: Top down interventions from below?
by Dr Birte Vogel.This blog post is based on Dr Vogel's article published in Intervention and Statebuilding.Over the past decades, peacebuilding has changed. The participation of non-state has steadily increased. This development has been promoted by, at best, mixed...
Questioning humanitarian action in Madagascar
by Eleanor Davey. From the Rova of Antananarivo, a former royal site set high on a hill, the view over the Madagascan capital extends for miles. ‘Tana’ – as it is nicknamed – was founded in the seventeenth century, adopted as the capital under French colonisation, and...
Working From the Ground Up – Everyday Peace Indicators
by Roger Mac Ginty and Pamina Firchow.Governments, international organisations, INGOs and academics have many ways of gauging war and peace. Many of these ways use official and public systems of gathering information, such as relying on statistics gathered by national...
Trump and the academic and policy bubble
by Professor Roger Mac Ginty.The pollsters got it very wrong. So did the experts. But then the experts and pollsters have been getting it wrong for some time. British general election: wrong! Brexit referendum: wrong! Colombian peace accord referendum: wrong! Trump...
The UN’s (Wonder) Woman Problem
by Dr Róisín Read.24 October marks United Nations Day and, as my colleague notes, there is much to admire in the UN, alongside some of its more problematic elements. Unfortunately, this blog is about one of those problems, specifically, the UN’s woman problem.This...
Two cheers for the UN
by Roger Mac Ginty, HCRI Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies.United Nations Day is 24 October. It is easy to criticise the UN. Where shall I start? Slow decision-making, weak leadership, expensive, often focused on conflict manifestations rather than conflict...
A very warm welcome to our first cohort of BSc students
by Gemma SouIt’s the start of a new academic year at HCRI and I must say it’s quite a special one too. This is the first year that we will be running our brand new BSc International Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but that’s...