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.
Extending Communication Campaign from Health to Peacebuilding: A Locally Driven Communication Campaign Approach as Part of A Peacebuilding Initiative in Liberia
ABSTRACT A vast amount of literature exists on communication campaign design, implementation, and evaluation, especially in health contexts. Despite recent calls to center the role of local citizens in designing and implementing campaign initiatives, limited literature exists on how to integrate local expertise with the expertise of those external to the local context. Drawing on health communication campaigns literature, peacebuilding literature, and our experiences collaborating on a multi-year communication campaign for peacebuilding and health promotion in Liberia, West Africa, we advance a locally driven communication campaign approach that integrates expertise of local citizens, campaign researchers, and campaign practitioners. We make a critical linkage between health communication and peacebuilding to discuss implications about how a locally driven communication campaign approach can contribute to communication campaigns in general, as well as health and peacebuilding specifically.
Coronial Practice, Indigeneity and Suicide
All available data suggest that, like many other Indigenous peoples, Australian Aborigines are significantly more likely to kill themselves than are non-Aboriginal Australians. This statistical disparity is normally positioned an objective, ontological and undeniable social fact, a fact best explained as a function of endemic community disadvantage and disenfranchisement. This research explores the possibility that higher-than-normal Aboriginal suicide rates may also be a function of coronial decision-making practices. Based upon in-depth interviews with 32 coroners from across Australia, the following conclusions emerged from the data. First, coroners have differing perceptions of Indigenous capacity, and are less likely to have concerns about intent when the suicide is committed by an Indigenous person. Second, coroners have identified divergent scripts of Indigenous suicide, particularly its spontaneity and public location, and this supports rather than challenges, a finding of suicide. Third, the coronial perception of Indigenous life is a factor which influences a suicide determination for Indigenous deaths. Finally, the low level of Indigenous engagement with the coronial system, and the unlikelihood of a challenge to the finding of suicide by Indigenous families, means that a coronial determination of suicide is more likely.