Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet – Immediate Thoughts on the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize

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Chair of the Nobel Committee, Kaci Kullman Five, announcing the Nobel peace Prize 2015

The choice of the Tunisian quartet as the receiver of the Nobel peace prize is surprising, but by no means unreasonable. Unlike the case of US President Barack Obama, who received the prize for his intentions rather than his achievements, this time, the prize is awarded to politicians who are in the midst of a difficult transition process. The award should remind us just how remarkable it is that Tunisia’s political elite has managed to avoid armed struggle and civil war, when all the other countries affected by the Arab spring have descended into civil war or renewed authoritarianism.

However, it is important to keep in mind that Tunisia has not completed its democratic transition. Problems abound – let me just mention a few: The alienation of the young generation; the worrisome increase in salafi-jihadist activity; the simmering discontent in the inland regions; and the flawed process of transitional justice which has still only just started. While Tunisia’s political elite deserve praise for their unusual will to compromise, they are not in touch with the Tunisian street. A 2014 Pew poll showed that while fewer people now agree with the statement “democracy is preferable to other kinds of government”, more agree with the statement “Sometimes non-democratic government can be preferable.”

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Santos and Jiménez: Fraternal Enough?

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Celebration. The best work for fraternity during the precedent year. Abolition of standing armies. The formation and spreading of peace congresses. Conferring the greatest benefit on (hu)mankind. These where the elements that Alfred Nobel had in his mind when he imagined a peace prize. These elements combined in extraordinary manners should embody Alfred Nobel´s spirit every year.

President Juan Manuel Santos. PHOTO: Creative Commons

Colombia. A Latin American nation with 45 million inhabitants and infamous for a 50 year long armed conflict that internally displaced around seven million people and did force approximately half that number to live in exile. With one foot in the dichotomies of the cold war and the other in the terrain of progress, Colombians now desperately call to put an end to the longest raging war of the Americas. President Juan Manuel Santos and guerrilla leader Timoleón Jiménez – “Timochenko” – are currently following this calling.

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Merkel Should Win the Nobel Peace Prize

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Angela Merkel in April 2015. PHOTO: Creative Commons/Initiative D21 on Flickr

Odds on who’s going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, to be awarded on Friday, are so hard to make that one could easily arbitrage various bookmakers. I’m not a betting man, but I hope the prize goes to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She’s the favorite now, with average odds of about 6-1, and she deserves to win.

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The Time Has Come for Dr. Denis Mukwege to Win the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted by and & filed under Civilians in Conflict, Gender

Last year the Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several years in a row, frequently hailed among the favorites. Tomorrow the winner of the prize for 2015 will be announced. We think it is high time that the focus is directed towards Mukwege and his co-nominees Mama Jeanne and Mama Jeanette for their outstanding services to survivors of sexual violence, and their efforts to bring those responsible to justice.

Dr. Denis Mukwege received the Sakharov Prize in 2014. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

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So, Who Will It Be This Year?

Posted by & filed under Nobel Peace Prize

It is that time of year again. No, I’m not talking about the announcement of this years’ winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, but rather the announcement of my shortlist of favorites. This is a tradition that won’t go away. I keep, as Foreign Policy put it, soldiering on, silently hoping this will be the year I get it just right.

My favourite this year, as many of you will have noticed, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She tops a shortlist consisting of five candidates, each of whom I consider to have a fair shot at winning this year’s prize.

Last year’s winners were Malala Yousafzai and Kaliash Satyarthi. PHOTO: Creative Commons

But why keep up with this practice, which started with my predecessor here at PRIO? Not just are the chances of actually predicting the winner very slim (there are hundreds of nominees, most of them secret), but even the announcement of personal favorites and predictions are enough to cause a stir. The committee itself has complained about the noise and ruckus which follows the predictions of self-proclaimed experts (I guess that group includes me), claiming it is a distraction from their work.

However, this activity is important. The way I see it, speculations inspire a debate on what the Nobel Peace Prize should be about. Those of us privileged with spending most of our time studying issues of peace and war have a duty to contribute to that debate. The will of Alfred Nobel, written in 1895, is both brief and succinct. The Peace Prize shall be awarded “to the person who [during the preceding year] shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

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This Week in South Sudan – Week 40

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Monday 28 September The UK will send 250 to 300 troops to help the UN peacekeeping forces in South Sudan. The troops are supposed to take an advisory role and assist with engineering work and combat training. According to a South Sudanese foreign affairs spokesman the government is against the increased deployment of UN peacekeeping… Read more »

Putin’s Syrian intrigue has yielded zero dividends

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Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war appeared to gain momentum every day over the past month, up until President Vladimir Putin’s address to the UN General Assembly on September 28th. The intention behind moving troops and equipment to Syria, while denying these deployments, was quite possibly to build momentum for Putin’s initiative. The content of this initiative has been clear since early August, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov proposed building a broad international coalition against the so-called “Islamic State” (or ISIS). Yet, the proposal fell flat. It looked fairly agreeable until the point that this coalition should include forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime.

This was plainly unacceptable to most stakeholders in Syrian conflict management, ineffectual as it has been, so Putin’s furious networking never made much sense. He met with King Abdullah of Jordan andEgypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, tried to charm Saudi princes and to appeal to an old friendship with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan but found no takers to his suggestion that only the “legitimate” government could restore stability to devastated Syria. Yet, he persisted with pushing this hopeless initiative assuming that he would be able to make, if not a significant impact as with the September 2013 initiative on Syria’s chemical disarmament, then at least a strong impression.

What underpinned this Russian initiative was a deepening state of confusion resulting from Western as well as regional policies in managing the Syrian catastrophe. The US administration had to admit the embarrassing failure in training and equipping anything resembling even a battalion of moderate opposition forces. The EU was hit by a wave of refugees so great that its migration policy and the very principle of solidarity were badly shaken. Neither the US nor the EU could draft the beginnings of a feasible plan for addressing the crisis at its core. The latest French air strikes on ISIS are perhaps symbolically important but hardly any more effective than the US air campaign. Turkey seeks to combine limited strikes on ISIS targets with a more determined application of force against the Kurdish groupings and is yet again provoking a violent destabilisation of its own Eastern provinces.

For the rest of the comment, visit European Leadership Network.

Pakistan’s Crippling Energy Crisis and Increasing Remittances

Posted by and & filed under Business and Peace, Cities and Populations, Environment, Governance, Migration, Urbanization and Environment

 

Quetta in Pakistan. Photo: Ecology Today

Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems.

This summer CNBC run a report titled Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems after more than a thousand people died during heatwaves during the first days of Ramadan. Insufficient preparedness for the heatwave is largely seen as the cause of deaths, yet the context of the protracted electricity crisis in Pakistan is also widely connected with the scale of deaths and hospitalization during this summer’s heatwave. Pakistan’s energy crisis has worsened over the past few years, with increasing gaps between electricity supply and demand in the country. The crisis has been reported on in international media for several years, and future solutions have recently been examined by the United States Institute for Peace and the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF). According to Pakistani daily The Dawn, however, ‘poor governance, incompetence, lack of transparency, distribution and transmission losses (a euphemism for theft), have made powering Pakistan impossible’. Future scenarios seem rather bleak, as private electricity providers are blamed for the current critical situation, together with the Government of Pakistan.Read More

Non-violent Resistance and Double Repression

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January 12, 2013: Israeli armed forces dismantle a peaceful Palestinian sit-in in the West Bank, arresting several of the organizers.

July 6, 2012: the Palestinian Authority’s security forces violently attack a peaceful demonstration against normalization with Israel in Ramallah, the West Bank.

Palestinian Grafiti. Photo: Wall in Palestine

These episodes illustrate the predicament of Palestinian non-violent activists. These activists experience what I call double repression, being harassed and persecuted not only by the Israeli occupation forces, but also by their own authorities in Gaza and in the West Bank. Yet it is this very activism that today holds the most promise for the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler activities and occupation. Here’s why.

This Week in South Sudan – Week 39

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Monday 21 September SPLM/A (IO) leader Riek Machar says he will return to Juba to assume his position as First-Vice President in December. According to a recent fact-finding mission, SPLA troops killed civilians, burnt homes, looted shops and local government institutions in Central Equatoria State. Five more civilians were allegedly killed by SPLA troops following… Read more »