mediatEUr was invited to give input on the Roundtable on Uses of ICTs for EU Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding. Miguel Varela, our Dialogue and Innovation Officer, shared our view from the work we have been doing in the last two years.
Still hungover from the recent “Brexit” vote, the world attends with a mix of anticipation and anxiety the nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate in the US. Two economic and political powerhouses taking a turn inwards, looking for easy answers to some of our globalised world’s most difficult questions. Where does dialogue fit in all of this? Wearing both his hats as a dialogue practitioner and a British citizen, mediatEUr’s Martin Leng explores the implications of Brexit and reflects on what the rise of populist politics says about our capacity to listen to each other.
When I recently interviewed several experts on stabilisation approaches for a research project mediatEUr was requested to carry out for the EEAS, one definition of the term stuck with me for a very long time:
“Stabilisaton is about people regaining harmony; it is about societies being able to reorganise their lives together”
When I first started working on dialogue in Ukraine, I sat down with two think-tankers from Kyiv. It was back in 2014, when the war in the East was fresh and European media was reporting on it on the daily. They walked me through the many conflicts they saw in their country, from corruption to a Soviet heritage of authoritarian rule; we drank tea and chatted for about an hour.
Despite the fact that landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is soon going to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the number of women who lead or participate in high-level peace mediation processes remains disappointing.
“What is conflict doing to me, how do I affect conflict and where can I engage to contribute to building and sustaining peace in Somalia?” To address these questions and strategise around them, mediatEUr’s board member, Kathrin Quesada, visited Mogadishu from 8 to 12 October, together with the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA).
We are heartbroken to announce the sudden death of our Board member, Luis Peral.
mediatEUr supported the organisation of the High-Level Internal Peer-Coaching Seminar on "Mediation Diplomacy in the Context of the EU Common Foreign Policy" alongside the Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the European External Action Service (EEAS) in La Hulpe (Brussels) on the 9th and 10th September 2019.
For the third year in a row, mediatEUr was honoured to give an intensive mediation training seminar to 10 selected diplomats from the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Last week I participated in a workshop organised by colleagues at swisspeace in Geneva, looking at social media and mediation. Under the #CyberMediation project and linking with the UN’s Digital Mediation Toolkit, we spent two days looking for ways to bridge the complex worlds of peace mediation and social media. Here are some of the thoughts that crossed my mind during the two days:
