In April 2016, InterAction visited Colombia to identify and document the key elements of results-based protection in practice. The visit led to key recommendations for actors in Colombia to strengthen the prevention and response to the use and recruitment of children by armed groups.
Mercy Corps’ new report, Youth & Consequences: Unemployment, Injustice, and Violence, tackles some of the most persistent assumptions driving youth programming in fragile states. Drawing on interviews and surveys with youth in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Somalia, it finds the principal drivers of political violence are rooted not in poverty, but in experiences of injustice: discrimination, corruption, and abuse by security forces.
Through interviews with community leaders and NGO workers across Colombia, this study aimed to unpack how and why many displaced individuals collaborate with armed groups and criminal organizations.
On 28 April 2016, the ICRC hosted a panel discussion at the Humanitarium with some of the leading experts involved in the update of the ICRC study “The Roots of Behaviour in War.” As part of the ICRC’s Conference Cycle on “Generating respect for the law,” the panel accompanied the first meeting of these experts in Geneva, highlighting their specific contributions, hypotheses, and approaches.
In April 2016, InterAction visited Colombia to identify and document the key elements of results-based protection in practice. The visit led to key recommendations for actors in Colombia to strengthen the prevention and response to the use and recruitment of children by armed groups.
n October 2, the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) convened a panel discussion on the new research within Oliver Kaplan’s book, Resisting War, exploring how communities use cohesion and social structures to non-violently influence armed groups. It explores how organization of civilians can implement nonviolent strategies to pressure government troops, or paramilitary or insurgent fighters to limit violence, through cases from Colombia, with extensions to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Philippines, Kaplan’s research shows in some cases, where communities are more organized, there is a 25% regression in violence.