violence

Oxfam today called upon the Israeli government to compensate Palestinian villagers after the Israeli army demolished 79 structures in the village of Al Farisiya in the West Bank on Monday, forcing families into further impoverishment after years of harassment.

The violence in Kyrgyzstan last month sparked an exodus of refugees into neighbouring Uzbekistan. But a smaller group of ethnic Kyrgyz fled in the opposite direction in fear of retaliation on the other side of the border. WFP is helping both communities cope in the aftermath.

The people of Karamoja, a poor region in northeastern Uganda , face at least five perennial problems when it comes to building livelihoods and beating hunger: weak agriculture, severe environmental degradation, poor infrastructure, high poverty rates and gun violence.

The WDR is published in the fall, but this year’s WDR director, Sarah Cliffe, gave a preview of its contents at Harvard recently.

Meghan St. John is working as an intern in the Volunteers & Community Partnerships department at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. This is her first blog post for Fieldnotes.

I just returned from my third visit to La Ceiba, Honduras, where I spent time at the Children of the Light, a small organization that provides education, care and safety to the homeless children of Honduras.

Ann Putnam Marks and Karen Turney work in the development department at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. On Sunday, March 14, they leave for a four-day field trip with donors to visit UNICEF programs in Panama.

The countdown to Panama has begun. We are finalizing our plans and look forward to sharing what we learn about UNICEF’s lifesaving programs in FieldNotes.

This debate is organized by Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR), working in partnership with the International Center for Transitional Justice – Africa, and The Darfur Consortium. For PDF documents of the debate please go to www.csls.ox.ac.uk/otjr.php.

There exists in Africa a general agreement about the need for accountability, but a divergence exists as to how this could be pursued. Some countries use criminal prosecutions to address the aftermath of mass violence. Others prefer non-punitive mechanisms, like truth commissions and amnesty, as alternatives to criminal prosecutions. Some countries use truth commissions in combination with criminal trials to address the aftermath of human rights violations. Most recently, traditional methods of conflict resolution feature prominently in the anti-impunity arsenal of some African countries.

The Centre for the Study of African Economies in Oxford (home to Paul Collier, among others) is putting out some fascinating two pagers on its work, including two recent papers on ‘dirty elections’.

Afghanistan’s next government must urgently devote greater resources to building up to 6,000 new schools, training upwards of 5,000 new midwives and professionalizing the policread more