Minority ethnic and religious groups and women in Afghanistan have led the movement for democracy and human rights. Discrimination and violence against these groups in Afghanistan are not new. But under the new Taliban regime, they suffer the most. The human rights...
The withdrawal of US troops and immediate takeover by the Taliban in August 2021 marked a radical transition from Afghanistan’s status as a republic to an Islamic Emirate system. With this transition, the Taliban maintains the perception that peace has replaced their...
Several armed opposition groups launched attacks against the Taliban in multiple provinces over the last year. While these groups may be in their initial stages of formation, the number of casualties they have inflicted on the Taliban is enough to meet the definition...
When the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban asserted that the war was over and that they now had control of the entire country. But just a year into Taliban control, an armed opposition front is taking shape, albeit only in a few provinces. Some...
Conventional approaches to feminist justice often focus on demands for equality between genders without abolishing the relation of domination that governs patriarchy itself. In patriarchal worlds, where humans categorized as male are granted rights over those...
In the militarized geography of occupied East Jerusalem, a Palestinian girl named Lama described the erection of a new Israeli checkpoint, or what she and her classmates renamed “killing boxes,” in the communal space of Bab al-Amoud (Damascus Gate) as she walked to...
Photographs and paintings of formal peace negotiations over the centuries bear witness to the historic male domination of diplomatic processes. The absence of women, so visually striking, is documented by various analyses as well as lived experience. Recent advocacy,...
I grew up in the midst of a civil war in Sri Lanka. I have lived through the curse of violence and seen the prejudice and hate passed on by one generation to another. Sri Lanka has experienced many cycles of violence over the years. At each cycle, it was the youth...
Youth are key to creating sustainable peace, a just peace that is locally self-renewing, because they have roles, needs, and ideas that shape communities and cultures and they are uniquely-positioned change agents. As liminal actors connected to childhood and...
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that youth are not mere subjects of policy interventions, but vital actors in peacebuilding. I place this finding as the central starting point for peace research with youth in Colombia. For nearly a decade I have engaged in...
The word “integral” has become ubiquitous in the Catholic Church. It can be traced back to Pope Pius XII speaking of “integral peace” in his 1942 Christmas message, though it is more commonly associated with Pope Paul VI, who introduced “integral human development” in...
In 2019, the links between the extractive industry and the escalation of conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were documented in a report to the UN Security Council. For over two decades, experts on the Great Lakes region, including diplomats,...
Policies toward mining are a keenly debated aspect of development strategies. Extractive industries play significant economic roles in some sixty-three countries and challenges facing many of them, especially the most fragile, loom large. Topics at issue include...