Crisis in and around Ukraine is becoming the first show-case in multilateral diplomacy, where Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) and other technologies are deployed to produce information for the diplomatic processes of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)and to public at the same time. This has taken place in a very rapid manner without time for descent planning...

Since 2008, the UN Human Rights Council has been working on a declaration related to the right to peace. The Council has established an Open-Ended Working Group, which is refining the draft declaration. This paper discusses the relationship between the right to health and the right to life in peace; we argue that peace and the conditions that support peace are essential to realize the right to ...

Peace processes are complex, protracted, and contentious involving significant bargaining and compromising among various societal and political stakeholders. In civil war terminations, it is pertinent to measure the pulse of the nation to ensure that the peace process is responsive to citizens' concerns. Social media yields tremendous power as a tool for dialogue, debate, organization, and mobi...

The Dialogue Series is an offshoot of the Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation. Each topic in the series is chosen because it is particularly relevant to societies in conflict and the practice of conflict transformation, and because it raises important issues at the present time. In each Dialogue, practitioners and scholars critically engage and debate in light of their experience. Typi...

Regional integration agreements (RIAs) are examples of second best and have an ambiguous impact on welfare. This paper builds a model where RIAs unambiguously raise welfare by correcting for externalities. It assumes that trade between neighboring countries raises trust between them and reduce the likelihood of conflict. The optimum intervention in that case is a subsidy on imports from the nei...

BACKGROUND The evolving concept of peace-building and the interplay between peace and health is examined in many venues, including at the World Health Assembly. However, without a metric to determine effectiveness of intervention programs all efforts are prone to subjective assessment. This paper develops a psychometric index that lays the foundation for measuring community peace stemming from ...

* Christopher K. Peace represents the 97th District of the Virginia House of Delegates, which includes part of Hanover, King William, and all of New Kent County, Virginia. Peace serves on the Appropriations, Health Welfare and Institutions, and General Laws (Vice Chair) Committees. He is Chairman of the General Laws Subcommittee on Housing, Chair of the Appropriations Sub-committee on Transport...

The immune system's quieter side went unnoticed for some time, while inflammation inducing proteins soaked up all the attention. Fiona Powrie stepped in just after the concept of inflammation-reducing " suppressor " cells had emerged. In Don Mason's laboratory at the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit in Oxford, Powrie and her colleagues lent the vaguely described cells definition, by showing that on...