View previous stories
	Women and Armed Conflict by UN Women   Women usually don’t start wars, but they do suffer heavily from the consequences. Conflict spurs much higher rates of sexual violence. It renders women acutely vulnerable to poverty, the loss of jobs and the destruction of assets such as homes. Essential health services crumble, underlined by a maternal mortality rate that is 2.5 times higher on average, in conflict and post-conflict countries.   Often the only recourse is to flee within countries or across borders. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, women comprise 49 per cent of the refugees worldwide (based on available data) mostly as a result of conflict, and are often put at greater hardship than men in these situations based upon their gender.   In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted the groundbreaking resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security. It recognizes that war, impacts women differently, and reaffirms the need to increase women’s role in decision-making related to conflict prevention and resolution. Progress is being made—in 2013, more than half of all peace agreements signed included references to women, peace and security.   But the pace of change is too slow. From 1992 to 2011, women comprised fewer than four per cent of signatories to peace agreements and less than ten per cent of negotiators at peace tables.   The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted in 1995 by 189 UN Member States, made women and armed conflict one of 12 critical areas of concern. It stated unequivocally that peace is inextricably linked to equality between men and women and to development.   The Beijing Platform for Action spelled out a series of essential measures to advance both peace and equality through reducing military expenditures and controlling the availability of armaments. It stated that women must participate in decision-making around conflict resolution, and recognized that women have been powerful drivers of peace movements.   It stressed that those who have fled conflict are entitled to fully participate in all aspects of programmes to help them recover and rebuild their lives.   Since then, fierce fighting has engulfed some areas of the world, dragging back development and women’s gains by decades. The Beijing commitments remain mostly unfulfilled, even as their urgency has never been more apparent.   http://beijing20.unwomen.org/en/in-focus/armed-conflict Visit the related web page
	Community Security: A vehicle for peacebuilding by SaferWorld, Insitute for Development Studies   Since the 1990s donors and other actors have increasingly recognised that security and development are mutually dependent. While most policy frameworks, both within the EU and globally, stress the need to take into account and address people’s security needs and concerns, and more broadly the governance aspects of security, this has proved difficult to translate into practice. As a result, many security-related interventions in the last decade have failed to make a real difference to local people.   This briefing explains the concept and practice of ‘community security’, an innovative and effective approach that builds security from the bottom up by empowering communities, authorities and security providers to work together to find local solutions to the security problems they face. It sets out how this approach can contribute to broader peacebuilding and statebuilding dynamics by strengthening the conditions for sustainable peace (for example, reducing inter-ethnic tensions or improving provision of security) and by supporting the establishment of sound state–society relations.   The briefing also highlights how impact at a local level can be scaled up by embedding community security into national level security policies and initiatives.   While the EU has been supporting several types of community-based security programmes over the years, community security approaches are not widely known across its institutions. This briefing aims to enhance understanding of the potential of community security to make a difference to people’s lives, thereby fulfilling the EU’s own commitments to peacebuilding and statebuilding.   http://www.saferworld.org.uk/resources/view-resource/833-community-security-a-vehicle-for-peacebuilding-and-statebuilding   Communities First   The problems facing Bangladesh, South Sudan and Yemen vary greatly, but those who live there have a common aspiration – to be free from fear and insecurity. And whether affected by corruption, political violence, disputes over land, scarcity of resources, domestic violence or any number of other issues, local communities in all three countries face a common challenge: being heard by those in power, and meaningfully included in the decisions that affect their own safety and security.   Communities First tells the story of individuals and communities in Bangladesh, South Sudan and Yemen, highlighting each country’s uniqueness, their shared challenges, and the drive for positive change. Featuring the work of award-winning photographer Marcus Perkins, with images from Tom Martin and Alex Potter, the exhibition aims to give a visual voice to people whose daily experiences of conflict and insecurity are too often marginalised and forgotten.   The exhibition seeks to highlight not only the symptoms of insecurity easily visible on the surface, but to go further and identify the peacebuilding opportunities that must be pursued in order to foster development and lasting peace.   http://galleries.saferworld.org.uk/gallery/communities-first/#/gallery/communities-first/slide/introduction/ http://www.saferworld.org.uk/news-and-views/comment-and-analysis http://www.saferworld.org.uk/what/issues   Jan. 2014   Making the Urban Poor Safer: Lessons from Nairobi and Mumbai, by Jean Pierre Tranchant. (IDS)   Nairobi and Mumbai are very good examples of highly unequal megacities. 40% of Nairobi''s inhabitants and 60% of Mumbai are slum-dwellers; in Nairobi it is estimated that half of the people live on about 1% of the land area. Yet both cities are also very modern metropolises with plentiful opportunities to offer; are key engines of growth, and are poised to recieve even more people coming from rural areas or smaller towns.   Both cities are also affected by urban violence, including crime and (ethnic) riots. These different types of urban violence are inherently linked. In both Nairobi and Mumbai, neighbourhoods where riots or post-electoral violence occurred tend to have prevalent crime and gang activities rooted in poverty.   Research was done by IDS researchers in urban Maharashtra and IDS and CHRIPS researchers in Nairobi, which included the use of original data, the participation of key local actors, and extensive desk-based review, on how we can make the urban poor safer. A policy brief summarising the main lessons learned has now been published as well as two longer evidence reports for each case study   We draw some key lessons from the research:   Existence of a strong connection between vulnerability and violenceIn Nairobi and Mumbai, urban violence concentrates in the poorest areas where lack of employment, adequate housing and public goods, and individual and collective coping strategies are most acute. As a result of these vulnerabilities, criminal violence and protection provided through hybrid criminal organisations in Nairobi have become a way of life in the city’s poor neighbourhoods.   Vigilante groups mushroomed from the late 1990s in response to worsening security in poor neighbourhoods and ineffectual, corrupt, or altogether absent policing of these areas. Original data in Mumbai and urban Maharashtra suggests that, even among violence-prone areas, those where the lack of service provision and unemployment are most acute are also those most affected by episodes of violence. Within violence-prone areas, it is the most socially and economically vulnerable households who suffer most from disruptions caused by the presence of urban violence.   To tackle urban violence, policies must address the vulnerability-violence nexus   Prevailing responses to violence and crime in Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods assume that there is a lack of law and order and that more robust policing and tougher laws can increase security. Police action in Maharashtra is also disconnected from development efforts, as seen in the absence of thinking on safety issues in the slum relocation and rehabilitation schemes. In urban Maharashtra, we found that concerns about crime and riots are second only to unemployment; and given that conventional development policies are bound to have effects on safety and crime, such a disjointed approach is unwelcome.   There have been efforts such as the Safer Nairobi Initiative, which was endorsed by the Nairobi City Council, that aspire to a more coordinated effort to improve urban security by involving agencies and departments with mandates to deliver public services and create work opportunities. While these have had mixed outcomes, the spirit of such efforts to develop a joined-up approach is essential to improve security for the urban poor.   While top-down joined-up approach proves difficult to implement, community-led initiatives have had success   Slum-dwellers routinely link up issues of urban vulnerability and safety. As a result, a number of community-led initiatives aimed at improving safety through vulnerability have emerged. In Nairobi, the GettoGreen initiative includes clearing public dumpsites and starting micro-enterprises for youths such as carwashes. The group’s chair explained, ‘If you are economically stable, your community will be stable. Having money prevents us from needing to steal or from being manipulated by politicians.’   In Mumbai, more formal initiatives such as the Slum Police Panchayats (SPP) and Mohalla Committees attempt to bring together slum dwellers and police to improve safety. The SPP consists of a long-term partnership between one community police officer and 10 representatives of slum-dwellers (seven women and three men). At the heart of the SPP is the idea that the social distance between slum-dwellers and police is too high and that the former have a wealth of local knowledge on the best ways to improve local safety that the police could benefit from.   To conclude, we found that there is a strong need to (i) generate data on violence in development processes; (ii) to learn from previous institutional efforts and (iii) to seriously engage and help evaluating current small-scale community initiatives that have the potential to link up effectively safety with issues of vulnerabilities, as well as linking vulnerable citizens with police and institutional actors. Concerted actions between citizens, state, builders and urban planners are unlikely to succeed if root causes of powerlessness and social distance are not tackled.   http://vulnerabilityandpoverty.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/making-urban-poor-safer-lessons-from.html http://www.ids.ac.uk/idsresearch/addressing-and-mitigating-violence http://www.eldis.org/go/latest-news/news/addressing-armed-violence-challenges-and-approaches#.Vqg9Gk-pXh5 Visit the related web page
	View more stories