To celebrate the 100th anniversary  of the Peace Palace, GPPAC with the support of the Municipality of The Hague organised an online contest for artists from around the world to share their work, telling a story of peace. The art contest closed 10th of April. The 5 winners are from Uganda, India, the Netherlands, Lebanon and Germany. Their artwork will be displayed in a large exhibition in The Hague. See the winners and their artwork of peace here. 

GPPAC has developed an online platform called the Peace Portal,  which is a space for people interested in conflict prevention and peacebuilding to share news, pictures and blogs, to work together in open or private communities, and much more. 

The Peace Portal has recently had an upgrade representing a major refocus of our online platform for peace building and conflict prevention. The Peace Portal is now centered around 3 main features: blogs, communities and organisation pages. The design has been updated too, giving the Portal a cleaner look.  It is now easier to put your workspace online, thanks to the new community creation page. We are now working with partner organisations to support their work online via the Portal. To see what the Portal can do for you and to explore the updated Peace Portal visit: www.peaceportal.org. 

After a successful launch of the Great Lakes Project earlier this year GPPAC joined its regional members, NPI-Africa and  ACCORD in Durban to undertake the practical planning for the first year. During the five day workshop NPI-A and ACCORD further defined their roles and responsibilities in implementing the project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and while working with the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR). This project, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs,  will support regional, national and local conflict management and peacebuilding initiatives in the 4 countries. 

The three organisations together broke down the project into achievable indicators and agreed on how to jointly monitor, evaluate and learn from this collaboration. The coming months field reviews of the four countries will take place. Based on this the curriculum and approaches for the trainings will be adapted to national needs. Initial engagements with the ICGLR have already started and will be sustained throughout the project. 

The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) is deeply concerned by the heightening tensions on and around the Korean Peninsula, and calls for an immediate return to dialogue and communications as the only way to deescalate the situation and make steps to prevent violence and promote denuclearisation, peace and cooperation on the Korean Peninsula. This should be carried out by convening as soon as possible both direct dialogue between the US-DPRK and the two Koreas, as well as a meeting of representatives of countries of the Six Party Talks, the most appropriate institutional peace and security mechanism in Northeast Asia. All efforts must be made to immediately convene such dialogue, working at the same time for both denuclearisation and the conclusion of a peace treaty to replace the 60 year old Korean War armistice. Read more.

Reframing the Comprehensive Approach

GPPAC and its members have engaged in the debate on how to implement a 'comprehensive approach' to security in different parts of the world, emphasizing the need to align it with the human security...