What will governance and public service be like post COVID-19? We will not and should not revert to “business as usual” after this crisis. We should draw on the maxim from the United Nations (UN) 2030 agenda – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – to “leave no one behind” in achieving a more sustainable, equitable, inclusive and secure/peaceful future. We should start a dialogue about the current and future implications of COVID-19 on governance and…

The goal of this report is to shine a spotlight on the important issue of immunising children affected by conflict and to ensure vaccine investments, policies and actions address the needs of these children. The report draws on evidence from published literature; and on the insights of vaccination experts who work on the ground with Save the Children to deliver vaccinations to children in conflict zones.   Download

During events to commemorate 75 years since the formation of the United Nations (UN), Secretary-General António Guterres repeated his earlier call to world leaders to achieve a global ceasefire. In this call, the UNSG correctly stated that it is “time for a stepped-up push for peace to achieve a global ceasefire”, because we are all confronted by “one common enemy: COVID-19”. Indeed, in a year that is so significant in many ways, there has never…

Women need to be given roles as negotiators, not just offered representation through advisory groups, Agnieszka Fal-Dutra Santos from the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP) told IPS. Santos spoke with IPS after the Wednesday, Oct. 28 webinar “Beyond the Pandemic: Opening the Doors to Women’s Meaningful Participation”. At the conference,  policymakers and analysts spoke about ways to ensure that women have more leadership roles in society. Santos was responding specifically to comments by Kavya…

Key findings: Civic activism continues during the COVID-19 pandemic and people have continued to mobilise to demand their rights Violations of protest rights have been documented: protesters are being detained, protests are being disrupted and excessive force is being used by states. Restrictions on the freedom of expression and access to information continue. States are enacting overly broad emergency legislation and legislation that limits human rights.   Download

Based on a survey of 398 journalists, civil society workers, activists, and other experts as well as research on 192 countries by Freedom House’s global network of analysts, this report is the first of its kind and the most in-depth effort to date to examine the condition of democracy during the pandemic (see full methodology). The research strongly supports the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating the 14 years of consecutive decline in freedom….

COVID-19 as a truly global pandemic presents a unique opportunity to reflect – through an ‘anti-colonial’ lens – on the role that WHO plays in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) versus high-income countries (HICs). This divide, also referred to as the global south and the global north, coincides in many ways with the separation between former colonies and colonial powers. This commentary will use COVID-19 as a case study to argue that the WHO can…

Peacebuilding traditionally depends on face-to-face meetings, but social distancing makes these difficult. This blog post looks at what this means for the ‘localisation agenda’ and how the problems could be overcome. Around a third of COVID-19 cases and fatalities are happening in places dealing with humanitarian or refugee crises, or those that are more vulnerable. Indirectly, the pandemic is likely to cause increased poverty, starvation, higher child mortality rates, lower life expectancy and less education….

Most discussion of Africa’s response to COVID-19 takes place at the national level, focussing on the role of formal state authorities. However, less is known about the role of ‘public authorities’: traditional chiefs, self-help groups, kinship networks, professional associations, faith-based groups, civil society organisations, multinational companies, humanitarian agencies, organized criminal gangs, militias and rebels. These often operate below the national level and are particularly important in areas where the state is weak or absent. To…

COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited ‘big one’: a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 – as a health and development crisis – unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of…