Romina joined Ashoka in 2005 and works for Ashoka’s Youth Venture, primarily supporting and creating a strong global movement of young changemakers around the world. Read all of her posts here.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently published their World Report 2010 on how well governments are doing (or not doing) in protecting their citizens’ rights. “Every government is at times tempted to violate human rights,” says Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director of HRW and from his Report it seems like many governments have in 2009. 

Melanie Kawano is the Program Manager of the BEFORE Project: Action to Prevention Political Violence. Read all of her posts here.

Guest blogger Derek Brown is Executive Director of the Peace Appeal Foundation. In this two-part blog entry, he describes the state of the art in the field of peacebuilding as we leave behind an extraordinarily conflict-ridden decade and enter a new and hopefully more peaceful one.

Exploring Touchstone's "If": The State of Peacebuilding - Part 2

(Click here to read Part 1 of this essay)

The need for skilled, sustained, on the ground peacemaking, working with political leadership to develop new alternatives in conflicts remains acute. Historically, technical advice in this arena was provided sporadically by international diplomats (and occasionally independent solo practitioners), who often parachuted in and out of conflict zones, with mixed results. Today we recognize the need for more robust, comprehensive initiatives that can address the adaptive complexity of our world’s most challenging conflicts.

Guest blogger Derek Brown is Executive Director of the Peace Appeal Foundation. In this two-part blog entry, he describes the state of the art in the field of peacebuilding as we leave behind an extraordinarily conflict-ridden decade and enter a new and hopefully more peaceful one.

 Exploring Touchstone's "If": The State of Peacebuilding - Part 1

“Your If is the only peacemaker, much virtue in if” - William Shakespeare, As You Like It

As Shakespeare’s fool Touchstone noted four centuries ago, peacemaking requires the exploration of the possible. Peacemakers challenge us to look at the world as it can be: What if violence was not the means we choose to resolve conflict? What if we recognized the grievances of our enemies, What if...? This insight applies as much today as it did in Shakespeare’s time.

How to promote the exploration of “if” is then the central question all peacemakers. How do we equip and aide ourselves and others in conflict with the knowledge, material and human resources - be they ideas, insights, skills, relationships, funding, arguments, or institutions that can lead to peaceful relations?

Ashoka Peace is proud to present a recently published article in the latest issue of Beyond Profit that describes the rationale and goals and inspiration behind our work.

In this article, we discuss the stories of two classic social entrepreneurs - Jerry White and Neichute Duolo - who came up with new solutions for problems of violent conflict, and through those stories, we begin to elicit the principles and patterns that are driving innovation in the peacebuilding field.

You can also read the article in full on the Beyond Profit blog.

We welcome your comments, suggestions and dialogue.

----------------------------------------

Kissing the Tiger: Peace as a Pre-Requisite for Development

Roshan Paul and Sarah Jefferson

Ashoka Peace is proud to welcome Melanie Kawano of The BEFORE Project as one of our contributors. Melanie will be blogging regularly about the progress of The BEFORE Project, and we look forward to participating in the journey along with her.

I’ve always understood the best ideas in social entrepreneurship to fill the gaping holes in our answers to the most pressing social problems. Whether those social problems involve economic instability, insufficient food resources, population displacement, power struggles among political elites, the breakdown of societies and families, or an event in which a combination of all of these problems come to a forefront: war.

In war a multitude of humanity’s worst problems combine. The result is devastating. Paul Collier estimates it takes a decade and a half for a country to recover from a war. In fact, war is such a complex and nuanced problem that most of us have decided nothing can be done about war, that it’s merely a part of human nature.

The numbers though tell a different story. Globally the frequency and severity of war have dropped by more than 40% in the last 15 years.

A while back Ashoka Peace featured a post from Beyond Profit magazine entitled Can You Be A Social Entrepreneur If You’re Not the Head Honcho? It lead me to think about whether there is indeed something unique about the character traits held by the social entrepreneur - the founder or initiator of the social enterprise, and whether these traits are distinct from those of other employees working for the social enterprise.

Then I came across a recent post on Social Velocity, The Long View of Change, that got me further comtemplating. Social Velocity points to the work of Jon Katzenbach who was thinking about this exact issue over a decade ago, and he wrote about it in his 1995 book entitled Real Change Leaders. According to Katzenbach, Real Change Leaders are not necessarily the CEOs or top echelon of a company, but rather they are the mid-level employees who are drivers of remarkable, but often unrecognized, change within companies.

Priya Parker is a contributor to AshokaPeace. Read on to learn about what motivated her to discard her skill-building curriculum during a dialogue workshop for reconciliation efforts in Gujarat, India.

As a continuation to yesterday's post “What does peacebuilding look like in an interconnected world?”, I wanted to point to an interesting document titled Systems Theory and Peacebuilding compiled by Lisa Schirch from the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. In the brief Schirch highlights seven aspects of a 'system' and the implications each has for peacebuilding. We've outlined them below and are interested in hearing about people or organizations putting these ideas into action.

1. Each part of a system can only be understood in relationship with every other part.

Implication for Peacebuilding: Conflict assessment processes should map the system of conflict, all of its stakeholders, its history and how a conflict at the local level is “nested” within larger conflicts.

2. In systems, there are multiple causes that contribute to effects.