Rethinking Security to Reframe and Advance Impactful Peacemaking
I want to tell you about an incident that changed my outlook on security programs forever. And, I hope it does the same to you. After spending four years in the tech world working as a software engineer, I set out on a journey to become a peacebuilder some eight years ago. I was grateful to have found a way into the field I was always passionate about. However, I lacked professional...Read More
Our journey for lasting peace
As a teenager, I would impatiently wait for my father to return home after work – because we did not know where the next bomb would go off. Buses, trains, buildings – nowhere was safe. For most of my life, I lived in a country that was grappled with war. People lived in fear. Some were affected more than others. Some lost their homes. Some lost their loved ones. Some lost their lives....Read More
Environment, Natural Resource, and Forced Migration
Since prehistoric times, humans have been impacting the environment. Whether it’s hunting for natural resources of food and water, shelter, exploring new territories, exploiting, displacing, and replacing other life forms (humans, animals, and plants). Contemporaneous advancement has seen humans creating boundaries and destroying nature through urbanization and industrialization. The...Read More
Children’s Right Over Climate Change : Taking the case of Ethiopian Safety Net Program
In Ethiopia, many agriculture dependent families have a long history of facing the effects of extreme weather events and unpredictable rainfall variations. Disasters disproportionately affect family members including children in the crisis period and afterwards. Regular intervention of humanitarian food aid has offset various crisis levels in assisting vulnerable families with provision...Read More
Peace and Conflict Analysis for Better Programming and Impact
Insightful analysis is essential to any conflict transformation process, from prevention to mediation to reconciliation. A one-size-fits-all approach cannot be applied given, for some examples, root-causes and the interests of stakeholders differ in each conflict context. Effective conflict transformation approaches must be based on the comprehensive use and understanding of peace, conflict...Read More
Non-Violent Movement and Storytelling
We are in the 13th week of the Rotary Peace Fellowship (Class 32) and just had a brilliant session lead by Dr. Jessica Senehi on Storytelling: Coexistence, Social Cohesion, Reconciliation and Healing. The professor helped us step back and think about storytelling in various contexts but starting with us. Stories. There are so many of them around us. Every day. Every interaction is either...Read More
Always Key to Peace Impact: People-centered Vision and Impact
Thinking and working in the peacebuilding field has become more nuanced and complex while every day is full of richness. After ten-weeks engaged in the Rotary Peace Center Fellowship Program with Chulalongkorn University, I have learned there is an important inter-relationship between different areas of thematic work and also sometimes confrontations between them. Based on this growing...Read More
Diversity: Peace & Development in Pakistan
Pakistani society is comprised of diverse ethnicities, cultures, languages, faiths, interpretations of faiths, and so on. Pakistani society is more diverse than it looks on TV channels or as portrayed in the textbooks of our education system. Usually, we read that there are four provinces and four languages i.e. Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtu, and Balochi in Punjab, Sindh, KPK, and Baluchistan...Read More