Agrégateur de flux

The UN Peacebuilding Commission Celebrates 20 Years of UN Peacebuilding Architecture. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

From June 22 to 26, the United Nations (UN) commemorated its first annual Peacebuilding Week, marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Peacebuilding Commission’s inaugural session. Featuring discussions among world leaders, policymakers, civil society, and advocates, the event explored how collaboration among governments, international organizations, and the private sector can enhance the visibility and effectiveness of peacebuilding efforts worldwide.

The goals of the Peacebuilding Week are particularly critical today, as increasing geopolitical tensions fracture international cooperation and severe financing shortfalls deplete resources, hindering relief efforts for civilians trapped in conflict. Despite a historic surge in active armed conflicts worldwide recorded over the past two years, peacebuilding and relief funding suffered a severe 40 percent decline between 2024 and 2025, leaving millions of people around the globe in a state of extreme insecurity.

“Peace does not occur automatically. It is built through persistent diplomacy, collective action and political will,” said Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly. “Wars that never happen because of peacebuilding, conflict-prevention or sustainable-development efforts rarely make headlines. Yet, like everything else, peacebuilding is only possible when properly resourced.”

On June 26, the Peacebuilding Impact Hub—part of the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office (PBPSO) within the UN Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO)—launched its inaugural Peacebuilding Overview, titled Investing in Peace When the World Pays for War. This report analyzes data gathered from governments, civil society, scholars, and UN field operations across numerous, diverse contexts.

By addressing the root causes of conflict and encouraging the implementation of digital technologies—alongside active participation from youth and the private sector—the report aims to forge new paths for peacebuilding that are resilient, inclusive, and globally supported. Aiming to identify structural gaps in data sharing that prevent vital information from being shared internationally and from being fully utilized by policymakers and the public, the report was launched alongside a side event titled Building Peace in a Changing World.

At the event, Paul Fargues, one of the report’s authors and a Political Affairs Officer for the UN Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), told reporters that the world is currently at a “crossroads, where conflict is on the rise, good governance is declining, and civic space is shrinking.” He noted that this is compounded by severe budget cuts and disproportionate investment in military expenditure rather than civilian protection and prevention efforts, making humanitarian relief operations increasingly difficult.

According to the report, over the last two decades, the world has invested only one dollar in peacebuilding efforts for every 100 dollars spent on military expenditure. Fargues added that the world’s most vulnerable populations are projected to suffer the most, particularly in dire contexts where aid constitutes more than 60 percent of all external funding and acts as a vital lifeline. Additionally, the DDPA found that roughly two-thirds of the countries whose economies are most dependent on UN aid are also the ones most adversely affected by the funding cuts.

Fargues argued that some of the central obstacles in advancing peacebuilding efforts today are the persistent structural gaps in the dissemination of evidence and data, which is critically underdeveloped when compared to the development and humanitarian sectors.

“Peacebuilding has no underlying framework to create shared data practices, to generate insights at the global level to enhance evidence-based decision-making, or simply to communicate its value to broader non-technical audiences,” Fargues said. “Peacebuilders and those who support them must do a better job at measuring, proving, and communicating this. Given the incredibly challenging contexts, producing more robust data and evidence of impact is a bare minimum.”

Katherina Ahrendts, the Director-General for Global Order, United Nations and Humanitarian Assistance of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, stated that although the case for investing in protection and prevention efforts is clear, political and financial contributions lag significantly behind. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for every dollar invested in preventive macroeconomic policies, up to 103 dollars could be generated in returns. DPPA also estimated that with adequate investment in prevention and protection measures, humanitarian needs could be reduced by approximately USD 3.6 billion annually.

Despite these potential gains, the economic case for peacebuilding efforts has not sufficiently influenced global investment priorities.“We are indeed at a critical moment when violent conflict is increasing while budgets are under strain and multilateralism as a whole is increasingly challenged,” said Ahrendts. “From a domestic policy standpoint, we need a much stronger business case, more compelling narratives, and better evidence. We need to showcase that peacebuilding is a smart, strategic, and cost-effective instrument that prevents much higher costs later on.”

“This means framing peacebuilding not only as a moral imperative, but as a matter of security, stability, mutual interests and sound investments. In particular, we need to make clear that peacebuilding and investment are an integral component of an effective security strategy,” she added.

Ana Escobar, the UN Representative for Peace Direct, an organization that empowers local peacebuilding efforts and supports community-driven approaches, remarked that peacebuilding must be grounded in a community-based approach and tailored to match the specific needs of vulnerable communities. Peace Direct defines meaningful impact as seeing communities become safer and more resilient long after external support has ceased.

Rather than implementing a pre-established peacebuilding agenda, Peace Direct works with local peacebuilders and community leaders to define what success looks like to them and identify the changes that they want to see. “That means asking different questions,” Escobar said. “Are communities resolving disputes without violence, and how do we measure that? Do women, youth, and marginalized groups have greater influence in decision-making? Is trust increasing between communities and institutions?”

“Peacebuilding is most effective when power, resources, and evidence flow in the same direction, towards the communities that live with conflict every day…. For local peacebuilders, prevention means that children go to school instead of joining armed groups, farmers return to their lands, markets reopen, women move safely, families remain together. Those are the returns communities measure every day,” added Escobar.

Dr. Cedric De Coning, a Senior Researcher in the Peace, Conflict and Development Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), underscored the importance of adaptive peacebuilding. This approach calls for the continuous monitoring of data and updating of peacebuilding measures, acknowledging that a community’s dynamics are constantly shifting. Rather than framing peacebuilding as a rigid structure being “built”, Dr. De Coning argues that it is more of a continuous process that is “nurtured”.

“What adaptive peacebuilding says is that we cannot know that beforehand; it has to emerge from people affected by conflict or people in societies struggling to achieve peace themselves,” said Dr. De Coning.

“As peacebuilders, we have to accompany these societies, and we have to learn together with them constantly and adapt our understanding of what it is that we can support. But we should be careful not to measure peace as something that only makes sense for donor-funded projects…. Peace is something much broader, and we need to measure that broader social transformation: how societies are experiencing peace, how they are living the things they look at, is what we need to look at rather than measuring projects to please donors.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

  

 

Il en reste trois à la prison de New Bell à Douala au Cameroun. Trois mineurs, adolescents, détenus depuis huit mois après avoir été arrêtés dans leurs quartiers, lors des manifestations de protestation qui ont éclaté dans plusieurs villes du pays à l'approche de la proclamation de la victoire de Paul Biya à la présidentielle d'octobre.

How do grievances turn into collective action? This article examines how citizens' expectations in social contracts lead them to embark on street protests. It draws on original, nationally representative telephone surveys in Tunisia and Lebanon and unpacks popular preferences about the states' obligations to deliver social service provision, protection, and political participation. We measure empirically whether participation in protest can be explained predominantly by people's grievances with their states' social contract obligations or the position of people in society. Findings reveal intriguing differences between the two countries but also among social groups within societies. We find that socially privileged people are more likely to take to the streets in pursuit of their demands, lending support to theories that identify society's middle classes as drivers of protest action. We believe that the article's findings will have significant implications for studies of contentious state-society relations in the MENA region and beyond.

How do grievances turn into collective action? This article examines how citizens' expectations in social contracts lead them to embark on street protests. It draws on original, nationally representative telephone surveys in Tunisia and Lebanon and unpacks popular preferences about the states' obligations to deliver social service provision, protection, and political participation. We measure empirically whether participation in protest can be explained predominantly by people's grievances with their states' social contract obligations or the position of people in society. Findings reveal intriguing differences between the two countries but also among social groups within societies. We find that socially privileged people are more likely to take to the streets in pursuit of their demands, lending support to theories that identify society's middle classes as drivers of protest action. We believe that the article's findings will have significant implications for studies of contentious state-society relations in the MENA region and beyond.

How do grievances turn into collective action? This article examines how citizens' expectations in social contracts lead them to embark on street protests. It draws on original, nationally representative telephone surveys in Tunisia and Lebanon and unpacks popular preferences about the states' obligations to deliver social service provision, protection, and political participation. We measure empirically whether participation in protest can be explained predominantly by people's grievances with their states' social contract obligations or the position of people in society. Findings reveal intriguing differences between the two countries but also among social groups within societies. We find that socially privileged people are more likely to take to the streets in pursuit of their demands, lending support to theories that identify society's middle classes as drivers of protest action. We believe that the article's findings will have significant implications for studies of contentious state-society relations in the MENA region and beyond.

Si les préoccupations économiques gagnent du terrain, les Européens apprécient le caractère pacifique, protecteur et coopératif de l’UE, et la qualité de vie qu’elle leur offre.

Source : © Union européenne, 2026 - PE

Die wirtschaftlichen Sorgen werden zwar größer, doch die Menschen schätzen Frieden, Schutz und Zusammenarbeit in der EU ebenso wie die Lebensqualität, die ihnen die EU bietet.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

A növekvő gazdasági aggodalmak ellenére az európaiak nagyra értékelik az EU jelentette békét, biztonságot és együttműködést, illetve az ennek köszönhető életminőséget.

Forrás : © Európai Unió, 2026 - EP

While economic concerns grow, Europeans value the peaceful, protective and cooperative nature of the EU, and recognise the quality of life it enables.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

While economic concerns grow, Europeans value the peaceful, protective and cooperative nature of the EU, and recognise the quality of life it enables.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

By Vani S. Kulkarni
PHILADELPHIA, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

India’s new education policy asks a great deal of its teachers. The National Education Policy of 2020 and its NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement) training scheme, want teachers to be more than deliverers of syllabus. They are to be empowered professionals, agents of change who shape the future of children and, the policy says, of the nation itself. It is a generous and welcome ambition.

Vani S. Kulkarni

But there is a difficulty no policy can resolve simply by stating it. You can decree that teachers be empowered. You cannot, by decree, make them so.

For two decades, the dominant approach to teacher quality in India, as in much of the world, has run in the opposite direction. It judges teachers by individual performance and accountability, by what they deliver and how their classrooms score. Under that logic, a teacher’s agency quietly shrinks until it means doing well what someone else has already decided. The teacher becomes an executor of other people’s choices. This is the very habit NISHTHA hopes to break, and it will not break easily, because a system built to measure compliance tends to produce it.

The real question, then, is not whether we wish teachers to have agency because we do. It is where agency actually comes from.

I spent a year, between 2023 and 2025, looking for an answer in an unlikely place: a small, non-governmental teacher-preparation programme in Gurugram, north India called I Am A Teacher (IAAT), which has spent a decade training teachers in a humanistic tradition that cuts against the accountability grain. What I found there was a claim that sounds almost too soft to matter, until you watch what it does. Agency, in this programme’s account, does not begin with autonomy handed down from above. It begins with self-knowledge. A teacher who has examined her own assumptions, her own fears and habits of judgment, is a teacher who can finally exercise judgment of her own.

That self-knowledge expressed itself, in the teachers I met, in three widening circles.

The first was the classroom. Teachers spoke of designing their own curricula and lesson plans, and of sharing in decisions about assessment, as the very substance of their professional dignity. To be handed instructions to execute, one teacher said, is to have your voice taken away. And teacher autonomy, several insisted, is not for the teacher’s sake alone. When a teacher can read her own classroom and meet children where they are, the children begin to experience an agency of their own, becoming creative and imaginative rather than merely obedient.

The second circle was the inner life of the student. These teachers refused to see their work as the transmission of knowledge and content alone. A child’s social and emotional wellbeing, one told me, matters as much as the subject on the board. They understood it as part of their agency to steady a struggling child, inside the classroom and beyond it, on the conviction that learning and wellbeing cannot be pulled apart.

The third and widest circle was the world the school is embedded in. The most striking thing about these teachers was that their sense of agency did not stop at the classroom door. They spoke about how political and economic forces shape what gets taught and what gets funded, and about the inequality that public education is meant to counter and too often deepens. Education can never be equal, one teacher said plainly, naming the way wealth sorts children into schools and teachers into salaries. Some met that knowledge not with resignation but with initiative, volunteering in underserved areas or starting small independent learning centres of their own. That is agency in its fullest sense, a teacher who sees the system she is part of and acts to make it fairer.

A training module alone can produce none of this, and that is exactly the point. The NEP is right that teachers should be agents of change. But agency is not a permission a policy grants. It is a capacity, and capacities have to be formed, through self-reflection, mentoring, time, and the experience of being trusted to decide. These are precisely the things an accountability-driven system finds hardest to fund, because they do not show up on a dashboard, and their results appear years later, in a classroom run by someone who knows her own mind.

A teacher who has been told only what to do can comply. A teacher who has come to know herself can decide. India’s classrooms, and the children in them, need far more of the second kind. No policy can issue that teacher by order. But a country that understood where her/his agency begins could choose, at last, to help make her/his.

If NISHTHA is to be more than a circular, its success will be measured on the ground, in whether teachers actually come to exercise the agency the policy promises them. And one concrete step is within reach now. The country need not invent this formation from nothing. Small programmes such as IAAT, quietly and against the current, already practise it and have done so for years. Recognising them, learning from them, and resourcing them would cost little and teach a great deal.

Vani S. Kulkarni is a sociologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research and teaching appointments at Harvard and Yale universities. Her research navigates the intricate crossroads of Global Health, Education, Race and Caste, Gender, Sociology of Trust, Development, and Democracy.

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

  

 

Au territoire de Mambasa (Ituri), la lutte contre les fausses informations est désormais une priorité pour les forces vives locales.

REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the changing geopolitical situation in East Asia and the need for closer cooperation with like-minded partners in the region
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Adam Bielan

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the changing geopolitical situation in East Asia and the need for closer cooperation with like-minded partners in the region
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Adam Bielan

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Le calvaire administratif des légalisations consulaires touche à sa fin. Le ministère des Affaires étrangères a annoncé mardi que la Convention Apostille de La Haye, […]

L’article Documents algériens pour l’étranger : l’Apostille remplacera la légalisation consulaire dès le 9 juillet est apparu en premier sur .

OPINION on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Union Civil Protection Mechanism and Union support for health emergency preparedness and response, and repealing Decision No 1313/2013/EU (Union Civil Protection Mechanism)
Committee on Security and Defence
Reinis Pozņaks

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

DRAFT REPORT on shaping the EU's external action to address the human rights challenges posed by artificial intelligence
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nacho Sánchez Amor

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

DRAFT REPORT on shaping the EU's external action to address the human rights challenges posed by artificial intelligence
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nacho Sánchez Amor

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

The emotionalism in Indian politics obscures the strategic logic of U.S.-India ties.

Alors que l’État français s’est engagé sur un objectif de 18% de la surface agricole utile dédiée au bio d’ici à 2027, date de l'élection présidentielle française, la Maison de la Bio, fédération qui va des agriculteurs aux distributeurs de la filière, publie mercredi 1er juillet 2026 quinze propositions pour les politiques, en affirmant que l'agriculture biologique est « une réponse crédible » aux défis sur la santé, l'eau, l'environnement et la souveraineté alimentaire.