06/2010 –
On June 18-19, 2010 Berghof Conflict Research hosted an expert workshop generously supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation on the topic “’Subsidiarity’ in Peacebuilding in Afghanistan”. Numerous researchers, practitioners and other experts on Afghanistan were welcomed to the institute for the 2-day workshop, in order to participate in a brainstorming session on how to use local capacities more effectively for the peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Afghanistan. The workshop was presided over by Prof. Dr. Hans J. Giessmann, Director of Berghof Conflict Research. Also in attendance were Johannes Zundel, CEO of the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies, and Dr. Michael Hanssler, CEO of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
The main discussion themes of the workshop were local governance; security and policing; potential for conflict transformation within religion, culture and gender; and civil society involvement and the interaction of state and non-state actors on the local level. Furthermore, the workshop was an excellent opportunity for an exchange of knowledge and practical experience among the participants as well as a welcome chance to discuss future potential collaboration.
06/2010 – News Archive
The first public hearing of the newly-established Sub-Committee “Civil Crisis Prevention and Cross-Linked Security” of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) was held on June 14, 2010 in Berlin. The new Sub-Committee had been invited to this hearing in order to become informed about the challenges and current tasks of civil crisis prevention. BCR Director Dr. Hans J. Gießmann was one of the six invited experts who testified.
06/2010 – New Publications
We are very pleased to announce the release of Berghof Handbook Dialogue No 9: “Human Rights and Conflict Transformation: The Challenges of Just Peace”. Berghof Handbook Dialogues aim to address topics of particular relevance for societies in conflict and the practice of conflict transformation. In each Dialogue, practitioners and scholars debate and critically engage in light of their experience. At the centre of the latest Dialogue is the relationship between human rights protection and conflict transformation, which seems straightforward, but is not an easy one. Over and over again, the question has been asked whether the two share a common agenda or actually pursue competing goals. Contributors to this Dialogue aim to go beyond the divide and polarising language of “peace versus justice” in order to gain a clearer understanding of the potential – and limits – of bringing together human rights and conflict transformation in specific contexts. Drawing evidence from contexts such as Nepal, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Uganda and Colombia, they argue that a more thorough emphasis on human rights – as causes and manifestation of conflicts, but also as normative and practical intervention tools – contributes to bringing conflict transformation closer to its aim of tackling conflicts at their deepest roots. The lead author and her respondents engage in a rich dialogue on areas of tensions as well as complementarity between the two sets of practices: they encourage mutual learning and joint work, and stress the importance of locally-designed, timely and context-specific initiatives, as well as of hard-nosed analysis of the political context and use of human rights and conflict transformation discourses.
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