Graffiti shows the presence of guerrillas in the Nasa area. Demotix/Joana Toro. All rights reserved. In negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla forces, the country served as a laboratory for almost every issue of modern peacemaking. We asked the Colombian experts who acted as advisers and decision-makers in the negotiation table in Havana, Cuba, both the lessons learnt from other processes and the innovations created for each major challenge that arose: including process design, land reform, disarmament, political participation, illicit drugs policy, transitional justice, gender issues, endorsement or ratification and implementation mechanisms, and much more. Many lessons could be learned from this impressively creative process. Anyone interested…

THE GOOD NEWS: 1.5 million volunteers in India planted 66 million trees in 12 hours to set a world record and combat the effects of climate change.   It just might be time for us to make every day Arbor Day. According to the Arbor Environmental Alliance, one tree can absorb about 50 pounds of CO2 over the course of a year, while a full acre of trees can remove the emissions equivalent of a car that’s been driven 26,000 miles. It’s no secret trees are one of the cheapest, easiest ways to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere. That’s why the Madhya Pradesh region of India went above and…

This initiative started by French Imam Chalghoumi and Jewish writer Halter toured Europe in July, 2017. According to one IPSOS Survey, the perception in France is that 31% of the population is Muslim.The true figure is 7.5 %. Paul Zinken/Press Association. All right reserved. Often, one of the gravest threats to an open and transparent democracy is that political decision-makers act not according to the reality of the facts, but according to how people interpret that reality. It might be argued that how people imagine the world has now become more important than how the world actually is, and that politics is frequently little better than an exercise in crowd-pleasing.…

On Tuesday, ESPN host Jemele Hill was suspended for two weeks for violating the network’s social media policy with a tweet proposing that angry NFL fans could always boycott to be heard. However, many in the world of sports and celebrity were quick to come to the often-political host’s defense in a time when “sticking to sports” doesn’t feel like an acceptable course of action.  The offending tweets came in response to outrage at Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ ultimatum that he would bench players who didn’t stand for the national anthem.  Hill tweeted:  She clarified her comments the next day, though it’s not known if that act was voluntary…

“Write a letter to Moscow” – an action in Kyiv, 2015. From left to right: Andrey Ignatchuk, an actor from Minsk; Varya Darevskaya, Natalia Bugreeva. Photo: Elena Podgornaya.Of all the possible post-Soviet models of political behaviour that might be adopted in the face of separatist conflict, Ukraine appears to have opted for the least successful one of all – namely, the Azerbaijan-style strategy of blockading territories not under its control and limiting contacts with its neighbouring state. In these conditions, the actual everyday experiences of citizens of both countries are easily supplanted by propagandist bravado, and any attempt at diplomacy from below becomes risky. It feels as if the conflict…

THE GOOD NEWS: The contemporary art world is expanding far beyond cities that have traditionally been centers for creative output. Frontón Mexico has lived many lives. Built in 1929, the art deco building served as an event space and jai alai venue. It once hosted a farewell party for poet Pablo Neruda in 1943, and in 1968, it even held events when Mexico City was home to the Olympic Games. After the building closed in 1996, it became abandoned for many years. But today, Frontón Mexico has returned to the glory of its heyday, keeping its original color and features intact after a recent renovation by the National Institute of…

View of the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) field trauma clinic with an emergency room, operating theater, intensive care unit and in patient department. The facility was opened on the 16th February in a village south of Mosul. For more than one month it has been the closest surgical facility to West Mosul. Picture taken on 02 April, 2017 by MSF/Alice Martins. Used with permission.Not long ago, I was dispatched by the medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to an MSF-run field trauma hospital in Hammam al-Alil, which, for a brief while, was the closest surgical facility to West Mosul. The trauma hospital is an exceptional project. About two months…

Almost six years ago, Xela de la X, a local Los Angeles community activist and musician, organized the first Luna Ride, a nighttime bicycling event that takes place beneath the full moon. This event marked the founding of the Ovarian Psycos, a collective of brown and black women who are reclaiming the night, the streets, and cycling, as their own in a city that is famously hostile to both cyclists and women of color. The Ovarian Psycos are no novelty, however—they’re representative of a new shift in the world of cycling, which has a reputation for being excessively white and male-dominated. Since that first Luna Ride, the Ovarian Psycos have…

29 November 2017 – Slobodan Praljak, one of the six Defence appellants in the Prlić case, at the Appeals Judgement, November, 2017. Flickr/ UN International Criminal Tribunal. Some rights reserved. After a quarter of a century of activity, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) closed its doors at the end of 2017. It was the first international criminal court to be established after the experiences of Nuremberg and Tokyo, restoring hope that the perpetrators of international crimes could be prosecuted even outside their own state. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who care about the defence of human rights have carefully observed this venture. After the…

THE GOOD NEWS: The world is both a bigger place and a smaller place than you probably previously thought it to be.   A video created in 2016 by RealLifeLore shows the Earth is actually different from how it’s depicted on traditional maps. The simple reason is this: The Earth is a sphere and that means it is impossible to accurately depict its surface on a two-dimensional map. The traditional map we all used in school is known as a Mercator projection. According to RealLifeLore, it’s “actually a really useful map for navigation and on keeping the correct shape of countries,” but it fails to accurately represent the actual size…