News

Members of the CRISE team participated in a conference entitled The Politics of Poverty: Elites, Citizens and States on June 21 and 22 201. The conference explores 10 years of DFID-funded research on governenance and fragile states. Read more here.

CRISE Director Professor Frances Stewart was awarded the UNDP's 2009 Mahbub ul Haq Award at Busan, Korea, on 26 October 2009.

The award honoured Frances’ lifetime achievements in promoting human development.

Jeni Klugman, Human Development Report Office Director, who presented the award, said that Frances’ “contributions to developing, teaching and promoting the conceptual, empirical and policy foundations of human development have been truly remarkable, and very influential around the world.”

On 17-18 September, Oxford Department of International Development held a conference in honour of Professor Frances Stewart Overcoming Persistent Inequality and Poverty, and also named one of the Department's wings after her, to mark her 40 years here.

On 8 September Professor Frances Stewart had a series of meetings and gave a presentation on Horizontal Inequalities to the First Lady of Peru and with the Minister of Women and Social Development.

Read CRISE collaborator Andrew Fischer's recent article on Western China in FTChinese.com: Why Economic Boom Failed to Prevent Unrest in Xinjiang. This is closely connected to Andrew's work on Tibet (see CRISE Working Paper 69).

CRISE held a series of workshops during March-May 2009 to explore new areas of research. Click on the links below to read more:

Mobilisation for Political Violence: What Do We Know? March 17-18

Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Horizontal Inequalities April 16-17

How Can the Law Help Reduce Group-Based Inequalities? May 14-15

The latest issue of the CRISE newsletter, Research News, is now available to download. The Spring 2009 issue includes:

An introduction to the UNDP Report "Post-Conflict Economic Recovery: Enabling Local Ingenuity" by co-editor John F. E. Ohiorhenuan
Phil Clarke on the International Criminal Court's indictment of the president of Sudan
Johanna Svanikier on Ghana's 2008 elections
Corinne Caumartin on being one of the first outsiders to gain access to first-hand testimonies of Guatemala's civil war

CRISE has won funding from AusAID for a project to investigate The Impact of Humanitarian Aid/Development Funding Distribution on Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict Management. The principal investigators, Frances Stewart and Rachael Diprose, are working with Ariyanti Rianom and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in Indonesia, and with the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) in Sri Lanka. Read more.

CRISE Director Frances Stewart co-edited the UNDP's Crisis Prevention and Recovery Report 2008 entitled Post-Conflict Economic Recovery: Enabling Local Ingenuity. CRISE Research Associate Graham Brown and Researcher in Economics and Politics, West Africa, Arnim Langer were among the contributors. Read more. Download the report.

CRISE Director Frances Stewart and Sam Daws of the United Nations Association proposed in 2001 that the UN should establish an Economic and Social Security Council, on which the seats would be elective and the member countries selected on the basis of their population, income and their capacity to contribute to financial stability. In particular, each government would be empowered to act in the interest of all and not just in the interest of their own country.

Ahead of the G20 meeting in London, Daniele Archiburgi argued on guardian.co.uk that such an institution would be a more democratic and more representative forum in which to tackle the challenges of the global recession. Read the article.

CRISE Director Frances Stewart is chairing a conference on Commonwealth Educational Cooperation: Looking Ahead at 50 being held at Oxford University. The conference celebrates half a century of educational cooperation between Commonwealth member states. Read more.

The Colombo office of the UNDP's Regional Centre for Asia Pacific held a series of Policy Dialogues on Inequality in honour of CRISE Director Frances Stewart in December. Read more about the discussions.

rosemary

CRISE Senior Researcher responsible for the Latin America Programme Rosemary Thorp was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list. The award was for her contribution to education and international development.

Rosemary was also awarded an honorary degree (Doctorado Honoris Causa) by the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru in a ceremony in December. She was honoured for her work on the economic history of Peru and Latin America.

Read a letter to the Financial Times from CRISE Director Frances Stewart on the legacy of Samuel Huntington, who died on Christmas Eve.

The latest issue of the CRISE newsletter, Research News, is now available to download. The Winter 2008-09 issue includes George Gray Molina on the new Constitution in Bolivia, Rajesh Venugopal on post-conflict market reforms in Sri Lanka and Frances Stewart on inequalities faced by Muslims worldwide, as well as information on three CRISE workshops to be held in 2009 and new and forthcoming working papers.CRISE DPhil student Adam Higazi was interviewed by La Croix newspaper and IRIN news service about recent events in Jos, Nigeria, where a dispute over local elections sparked violence that has left hundreds dead and displaced some 10,000 people. Click on the links to read the interviews.

CRISE Research Officer Yvan Guichaoua was interviewed by Le Journal du Dimanche about the Bakassi Freedom Fighters, who kidnapped 10 oil workers from a ship off Cameroon at the end of October. Read the interview here.

CRISE is delighted to welcome Rajesh Venugopal as a new Research Officer in the Political Economy of Post-Conflict Societies. Rajesh, who has just completed a doctorate on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, is responsible for the CRISE Southeast Asia Programme. Rajesh takes over from Graham Brown who has left to become Senior Lecturer in Economics and International Development at the University of Bath. Graham will continue to work with CRISE as a Research Associate.

CRISE held a workshop on The Persistence of Inequalities in Oxford on April 4 2008. Read more.

New Book

Gulliver's Troubles: Nigerian Foreign Policy after the Cold War edited by Adekeye Adebajo, Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, and Abdul Raufu Mustapha, CRISE Senior Researcher West Africa and Kirk-Greene Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, has been published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

The book offers the first comprehensive assessment of the post-Cold War foreign policy of Nigeria – one of Africa’s most important states. Expert contributors, comprising academics and scholar-diplomats, analyse Nigeria’s most vital domestic challenges and critical regional issues from historical and contemporary perspectives. Nigeria’s relations with its neighbours and other significant states and regional and international bodies also come under scrutiny. The debates here, while multifaceted, share the premise that an effective foreign policy must be built on a sound domestic base and democratic stability.

To read more about the book, click here.

CRISE Research Officer in Economics, West Africa, Yvan Guichaoua was interviewed by Radio France Internationale about the nature and role of the Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice (MNJ), Northern Niger’s Tuareg-majority rebel movement. Read the interview here.

CRISE associate Andrew Fischer of the London School of Economics has written an article for the Far Eastern Economic Review on the recent crisis in Tibet, arguing that China's policy of promoting rapid growth in the region has led to ethnically exclusionary patterns of development and exacerbated ethnic inequality. Read the article here.

Ismael Muñoz of the Catholic Univeristy of Peru and Maritza Paredes and Rosemary Thorp of CRISE have won a prize awarded by the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru for their article, Inequalities and the Nature and Power of Collective Action: Case Studies from Peru, published in World Development 35 (11): 1929-1946, 2007. The prize is designed to reward and incentivise publication outside Peru.

Read a brief report of a seminar on Ethnicity, Political Patronage, and State Resource Allocations: Explaining Educational Inequalities in Kenya given at CRISE by Alawiya Allui of the Center for Development Studies, Flinders University, Australia, on November 1 2007.

CRISE carried out a number of training and capacity-building exercises in West Africa in August-December. Read a report.

Conference notes from the CRISE Policy Conference on Conflict Prevention and Peaceful Development: Policies to Reduce Inequalities and Exclusion, held on July 9-10, are now available from the conference webpage.

CRISE is delighted to welcome three visiting scholars:

Mr Saboor Abdul is a Visiting Academic Fellow in the Department of International Development for one year. His Ph.D. dissertation is on growth, poverty and inequality in Pakistan’s perspective. He has extensive professional experience of teaching and research in the field of Applied and Development Economics. He is an honorary Director, Research and Development, of System Foundation, a registered NGO working on the education of neglected children in Pakistan. He also occasionally works as a freelance journalist in political economy and a consultant in the area of project management and evaluation.

At CRISE, Mr Saboor is working on the issue of violent conflicts of various sorts, studying horizontal inequality in Pakistan: the emerging dimensions in development thinking. He plans to explore time series images of Horizontal Inequality in Pakistan among geographic, agrarian, linguistic and sectarian groups.

Dr Ayobami Ojebode is on the faculty of the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research interests include development communication, mass media and conflict, media and minority issues, indigenous and political communication systems. While in Oxford, Dr Ojebode will be working to complete CRISE-funded research on media and cultural inequalities among minority ethnic groups in Nigeria.

Dr Kathlen Lizárraga Zamora, from Bolivia, has a PhD (Dr.rer.pol) in Economics from the University of Muenster in Germany in 2001 as Fellow of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. She is Professor at the Postgraduate Business School of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) in the Dominican Republic. In Bolivia she worked as Lead Consultant for the Study 'Financing the Technical and Vocational Education System in Bolivia' for the Inter American Development Bank and the Ministry of Education and was Research Officer for Education at the Economic and Social Policy Analysis Unit (UDAPE) of the Ministry of the Presidency. Her fields of expertise include development economics, economics of education, poverty reduction and institutional economics.

She is currently working on a project entitled Institutional Change in Bolivia: An Attempt to Explain the Persistence of Poverty

CRISE held a workshop on Affirmative Action: The Malaysian Experience in International Perspective in Singapore on 22-23 October, co-hosted by the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Read more.

CRISE Director Frances Stewart discusses the work of the centre and its impact on policy-making in the latest issue of Blueprint, the Oxford University magazine. Read the interview here.

Conference notes from the CRISE Policy Conference: Policies to support peaceful development in West Africa, which took place in Abuja, Nigeria, on February 28 2007, are now available online. Read more about the conference here.

The Summer 2007 issue of CRISE Research News, the CRISE newsletter highlighting key research findings, is now available to download. In this issue, Arnim Langer and Graham Brown outline the findings of a series of CRISE surveys carried out in Latin America, West Africa and Southeast Asia aimed at understanding people's perceptions of their own and others' identities and how these affect group relations. Maritza Paredes looks at what the perceptions survey in Peru revealed about the fluidity of ethnic identity there and Rosemary Thorp examines the constraints on collective action in Peru.

CRISE held a Policy Conference on Conflict Prevention and Peaceful Development: Policies to Reduce Inequalities and Exclusion on July 9-10 at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. The conference programme and participant biographies can be downloaded from the conference webpage. Session notes will be available in September.

CRISE and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) held a policy conference on Conflict Prevention and Peaceful Development: Policies to Reduce Inequalities and Marginalization in Indonesia on June 7 in Jakarta. Read the conference activity report.

CRISE West Africa Research Officer Arnim Langer was interviewed about CRISE Working Paper 45, Horizontal Inequalities in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire: Issues and Policies, by the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre for its "Research in Focus" feature. Read a transcript of the discussion here.

CRISE is launching a series of Policy Briefings, providing concise reviews of the implications of CRISE research findings for a range of policy issues.

Policy Briefing 1: Using Aid to Prevent Conflict, which explains why aid policy needs to address horizontal inequalities and sets out how this can be done, is now available to download.

A special issue of the International Journal of Educational Development on Education, Ethnicity and Conflict has been published (Volume 27, No. 3). Edited by Frances Stewart and David Johnson, the issue draws on a CRISE workshop held in Oxford in March 2005. Find out more.

CRISE is participating in MICROCON, a new EU-funded research project that is managed from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex and is composed of a consortium of researchers from all continents sharing a micro-level approach to conflicts.

Past and present violent conflicts, ranging from civil wars to riots and violent mass protests, affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people every year across the world and have resulted in significant lost opportunities in terms of human and economic development, the process of building democracy, as well as establishing peaceful international relations and reducing lawlessness and terrorism worldwide. At a fundamental level, conflict originates from individuals’ behaviour and their interactions with their immediate surroundings, in other words, from its micro foundations. Therefore, identifying factors responsible for violent mass conflicts requires an in depth understanding of why individuals engage in collective acts of violence and how conflict affects their standing in society.

The main objective of MICROCON is to address these questions by measuring and analysing individual and group interactions leading to and resulting from violent mass conflicts; and linking the micro foundations of violent conflict with regional and national initiatives of conflict prevention, resolution and mediation.

MICROCON is divided into a dozen “Work Packages”, each focusing on a specific theme (concepts, measurement, health etc.). CRISE is responsible for a Work Package on group mobilisation. The package includes researchers from Germany, Norway and South Africa. CRISE itself will engage in comparative research on violent political groups in Mali (Touareg rebellion) and the DRC (the Mai-Mai armed groups) using methods already tried in previous CRISE research in Nigeria.

The following link will soon be activated:

www.microconflict.eu

At the moment, some details on the project can be found here:

http://www.hicn.org/MICROCON.html

CRISE held a policy conference in Abuja, Nigeria, entitled Policies to Support Peaceful Development in West Africa on February 28 2007. Read more.

Read a review from Nigeria's THISDAY newspaper.

CRISE, together with the UN Human Development Programme in Bolivia, held a workshop in Santa Cruz from September 18-20, 2006. Researchers presented recent work from Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. Read more and download the workshop papers.

CRISE Director Frances Stewart spoke on Inequality: A Neglected Dimension of Aid Policy at a Wilton Park conference entitled "Scaling Up and Absorbing Resources: Challenges for Poverty Eradication" on October 27. Download her presentation here.

CRISE, together with its partner institution Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) and the United Nations Development Programme in Guatemala, held a public meeting on the subject of Horizontal Inequalities in the World and in Latin America in Guatemala City on November 14.

The meeting brought together government officials, politicians, indigenous leaders, academics and representatives of international bodies, national NGOs, and the private sector to hear presentations by CRISE researchers Rosemary Thorp and Corinne Caumartin, with commentary by the Mayan economist Hugo Uz.

CRISE is delighted to welcome Zulfan Tadjoeddin as a visiting scholar. Zulfan, who is an associate scholar at the Brighten Institute and a consultant at the UNDP in Indonesia, will be working on a comparative study on natural resources and conflict in Indonesia, Nigeria and Bolivia during his time at CRISE.

Research News, the CRISE newsletter highlighting key research findings, is now available to download. The latest issue includes articles on cultural status inequalities by Arnim Langer and on the links between education, ethnic identity and conflict by David Johnson and Frances Stewart. Also featured: Frances Stewart summarises the preliminary conclusions of CRISE research to date, Rachael Diprose describes her experience of conducting research in Nigeria and Indonesia and Gudrun Østby reports on life as a visiting fellow at CRISE.

CRISE hosted a conference on Decentralization, Federalism and Conflict in Oxford on October 5-7. Read more. Download the programme and list of participants.

CRISE is delighted to announce that Arnim Langer has been appointed as Research Officer in Economics and Politics, specialising in West Africa, with effect from September 1. Before winning a three-year doctoral scholarship from CRISE in 2003 to study for his DPhil on inter-group inequalities and violent conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, Arnim was a Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Leuven.

CRISE held a workshop in Accra, Ghana, on March 23-25, to take stock of existing research and decide future directions. A public meeting was held during the workshop to disseminate CRISE findings, attended by MPs, NGO activists and other civil society representatives, journalists and students. Read a review.

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