Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning: Toward a Participatory Approach to Human Security
Achieving human security requires strategic peacebuilding; and too often, critical steps in this sequence are missing, or conducted by different groups of people without coordination. The Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook aims to improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding by better linking practical conflict assessment exercises to self-assessment, theories of change, designing and planning, and monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding efforts. Recognizing that many groups skimp on assessment fearing an analysis paralysis, or design programs based on untested assumptions, this approach provides basic as well as advanced tools to improve peacebuilding practice. This concise and lucid handbook tackles the problem of too much data by suggesting ways to sort, categorize and prioritize data to make it useful. Through its synthesis of a wide range of conceptual frameworks into a convenient and logical framework useful for practitioners such as NGOs developing projects, journalists wanting to write conflict-sensitive stories, or government/military agencies designing large scale efforts, the Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook is an essential scholarly and practical tool for the study and implementation of peacebuilding efforts.
A Pedagogy for Peacebuilding: Practicing an Integrative Model for Conflict Analysis and Response Una pedagogía para la consolidación de la paz: Práctica de un modelo integrador para el análisis y la respuesta a los conflictos
This article introduces an original teaching model -a «pedagogy for peacebuilding» -designed to help students and practitioners integrate conflict analysis in response interventions. The author discusses the importance of conflict analysis and compares alternative approaches, focused on theory vs. context vs. technocratic priorities. The article then explains the author's «integrated theories of change model» and weaves together seven elements: 1) context analysis and needs assessment, 2) overall goal of intervention, 3) theory of change, 4) specific objectives and activities, 5) beneficia - ries, stakeholders and spoilers, 6) scope, resources and risks, and 7) indicators of success. In a fragmented world beset by diverse social, political, and familial conflicts, we need comprehensive tools (and hands-on training) to better understand and respond to conflict.
Land and Class in Kenya
policy; in the golden age of the 1970s, Nigeria could wield its 'oil weapon* to discipline recalcitrant neighbours and even intimidate Britain. A third shared outlook is a certain disposition to question Nigeria's credentials as a genuinely non-aligned state, despite the evident changes since the civil war; here, the discussion is hampered by the absence of any clear and consistent definition of non-alignment. Finally, there is general recognition of Nigeria's global dependence, though opinions differ concerning how serious this is. Overall, this book offers a series of highly informative and occasionally provocative interpretations of salient aspects of Nigerian foreign policy. In addition, the bibliography is excellent and the index adequate.