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.
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
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.”
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 »
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.
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
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.
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 »
![Irina Bokova, Secretary General of UNESCO. By Chatham House, London [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://blogs.prio.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Irina_Bokova-292x277.jpg)
One candidate to become the first female UN Secretary- General: Irina Bokova, currently Secretary General of UNESCO. By Chatham House, London [CC BY 2.0]
The UN is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and has commissioned a series of reviews of, among other things, UN peace operations, the UN’s peacebuilding architecture, and measures to include women in its work on international peace and security. A recurring theme of these studies is the need for modernization, democratization and improved efficiency within the UN. These needs for reform will also be relevant to the election of the next Secretary-General.Read More
The UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals are ready for adoption. For the first time, the UN will measure the incidence of one of the most controversial, but important, development indicators: the amount of armed conflict in the world.
On 25 September this year, a UN summit will adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals. These will replace the Millennium Development Goals dating from 2000, which expire this year.
Originally Norway pressed for the Millennium Development Goals to include the goal of a more peaceful society. This turned out to be too controversial. Several countries feared that such a goal would legitimize interference by the UN in countries’ internal affairs.
Since 2000, however, it has become increasingly difficult to deny the clear connection between armed conflict and underdevelopment. The major breakthrough came in 2011, when the World Bank’s World Development Report addressed war and development. The report, whose contributors included PRIO and several other Norwegian research institutions, confirmed that war is development in reverse.Read More