Category: Staff blogs

By Dr Eleanor Davey.A small but vigorous cottage industry has grown up around the instrumentalisation of humanitarian aid. It sustains both researchers and journalists. Perhaps the most pointed in the latter category is the Dutch writer Linda Polman, whose book...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...