Violence Prevention Articles & Essays

Dear All:

The International Academy has received a small grant  from the Secure World Foundation. After careful deliberation of how to best use these funds, we decided that collaboratively writing an e-book about violence prevention would be a good starting project for the Academy.

This new e-book will have chapters that ask and answer hard questions, highlight the ethical and moral dilemmas, and set violence prevention on its best contemporary footing.

Therefore, we suggest that the style of writing be “loose” and “reflective” - a ” thinking out loud” which captures key issues and insights about violence prevention on paper.

Additionally, to ground the chapters in real-world experience and to keep them from becoming too abstract or academic, we ask that you focus either on a country you have recently worked in (i.e. as a “case study” ) or, practical experiences relating to policy and its applications.

We hope this kind of writing process will result in a book that gets beyond the surface treatment of conflict sensitive programming and preventing failed states to a deeper understanding and more “buzz” about the importance, challenges and ways to do effective violence prevention.

We have created a blog ( http://iarpv.blogspirit.com ) that will allow authors to post their material and others a chance to add comments too. This overall exercise of writing the book will provide the authors with a chance to reflect on their own practice and force us to examine our working assumptions, successes and failures in violence prevention.

Getting Started

So, to get started I urge you to visit the blog and look around to familiarize yourself with the layout and operation of the site.

There, you will see the list of Possible Chapters and you will be asked to select a chapter which you would like to be the principle author of or suggest a new chapter topic.

Once chapters have been selected (hopefully over the next 4 weeks) we will ask you to write and post a first draft for comment on the blog. The draft does not need to be very long (5-15 pages would suffice).

Please email your drafts to Evan at iarpv@yahoo.ca and he will post them online for you.

If you have any questions about how to add a new post or respond to someone else’s post then please email Evan Hoffman for technical assistance.


Please ensure that all drafts are posted online for comment by January 9th. 2006.

Once this has been done, please read the others’ work too and add your comments to their pieces by using the "add comment" button.

Please make your comments on the others' articles by January 15th.

After this step the International Academy will hire an editor to pull the material together and format it into the e-book. Also, a graphic designer will “spice up” the book with some interesting art and graphics.

The finished e-book will then be available to the public free-of-charge on the blog by April 1 2006.

Thanks everyone, and I look forward to us working together in a dynamic way to build a very interesting new book over the next 6 months!

Sincerely,
Ben Hoffman



POSSIBLE CHAPTERS AND THEIR AUTHOR(S)
PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME TO THE CHAPTER TOPIC WHICH YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE THE PRINCIPLE AUTHOR OF AND/OR SUGGEST A NEW TOPIC BY USING THE "ADD COMMENT" BUTTON.

-role of power in preventing violence

-facilitating the peaceful transition of political power to prevent violence

-how to network and/or collaborate effectively

-key skills needed for the violence prevention practitioner

- how central to preventing violence is eliminating corrupt governments?

-the role and challenge of advocacy in Early Warning and Early Response

-new directions: future concepts and emerging trends in violence prevention

-the importance of local actors in violence prevention

- domestic and international violence prevention: is there a difference?

- what is needed to deal with terrorists: more enforcement or more talk?

-why I fund violence prevention