Somalia

Ebba Tellander defended her PhD successfully on 20 Septeber 2022 at the Erasmus Univeristy Rotterdam. The title of her thesis is: The Wind That Blows Before the Rain: Resistance against oppression in Northern Somalia in the 1980son 20 September 2022.

Congratulations from all at PRIO! 

​Successful MIGNEX consortium meeting in Istanbul, with inspiring discussion as the project members continue to build new knowledge on migration, development and policy.

​Over four sessions in October, 20 academics and practitioners from around the world met virtually to discuss the question of how education can enable refugee individuals and communities to build durable futures when there is great uncertainty about where these futures will be? Recognizing the protracted nature of refugee situations, the latest UNHCR education strategy prioritizes the integration of refugees into the national education systems of host countries. While this strategy may increase refugee children and youth's access to 'inclusive and equitable quality education' (SDG4), it fails to recognize the limbo in which refugees find themselves in low- and middle-income host countries: they are non-citizens who cannot access the durable futures that education promises them.

Little is known about how accountability is understood and practiced by (local and transnational) citizens in comparison to professional humanitarians.

Holding aid accountable: Plural humanitarianism in protracted crisis (AidAccount). This is a 3.5 year project that now has received funding from the NORGLOBAL Programme of the Research Council of Norway.

Congratulations to project leader Cindy Horst, and her team at PRIO: Marta Bivand Erdal, Mohamed Aden Hassan and a Post-Doc position!

The large PRIO-led project ​MIGNEX examines migration and development at the local level across Africa and Asia. A milestone was reached when the specific research areas were selected.

The second issue in 2017 the PRIO Gender, Peace and Security Update is now out. 

The lead story in this issue includes an interview with researchers Christine Amisi (ICART) and Gudrun Østby (PRIO) about their research on support programmes for survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

​Mohamed Aden Hassan has recently been appointed PRIO Global Fellow. Hassan works with PRIO researchers Cindy Horst and Ebba Tellander on projects related to accountability, diaspora and transnationalism, youth and migration in Somaliland. 

​​​The project will focus on how individual deeds, in times of radical uncertainty and flux, inspire collective action or lead to new institutional practices in ways that determine the direction a society takes. The emphasis will lie on the small but often heroic everyday acts of common people who attempt to challenge dehumanizing trends of exclusion and abuse in violent conflict and civil war in Syria, Somalia and Myanmar.

​​​The lead story in this issue of the GPS Update is an interview with PRIO’s research partners from Nepal and Myanmar about the new project ‘Gender Equality, Peace and Security in Nepal and Myanmar’.

​​Øystein H. Rolandsen is co-editor of a new volume highlighting the violent struggles of Eastern African nations from the end of colonialism and throughout the Cold War. 

​​The lead story in the first 2015 issue of the GPS Update is a report from a conference on ‘Somali Women’s Civic Engagement: Past, Present and Future’ organized in Nairobi on 6 February by the GENSOM project. In this issue you can also read an interview with PRIO Senior Researcher Inger Skjelsbæk about a new project at PRIO entitled ‘Equal Peace? Women’s Empowerment and Multicultural Challenges in War-to-Peace Transitions’. You will also find reports from the launch of the new Norwegian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, the fifth High-Level Seminar on Gender and Inclusive Mediation Processes, a seminar at PRIO on national action plans with the Institute for Inclusive Security, and PRIO Senior Researcher Torunn L. Tryggestad’s recent appointment to the 4th Advisory Group of the UN Peacebuilding Fund. As usual, the GPS Update also gives you an update on relevant seminars, reports and policy briefs, as well as a list of publications which might be of interest to our readership.​