"What I'm interested in doing," explained Armenak Tokmajyan, "is to develop an analytical framework to enhance our ability to understand conflicts like the one in Syria." Tokmajyan, who is a research fellow at SPP's Center for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery, explained the concept of conflict cycles. He described how conflicts go through phases: latent conflict, non-violent conflict, violent conflict, conflict mitigation, conflict settlement, peace agreement, peace, etc.
"In the Visegrad 4 [V4] countries [Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia], the gap between wages and productivity worsened during the Great Recession starting in 2008," Associate Professor Martin Kahanec said at the Czech Senate.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes the pictures you don't see are worth even more. That was one of the messages that SPP Assistant Professor Dan Large shared during his presentation as part of the CEU Africa Research Group Seminar on December 9. Large contrasted the images surrounding the 3rd India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) in Delhi in October 2015, and the 6th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Johannesburg just two months later.
In too many places around the world, it is only the privileged members of society who are able to use the law to assert and protect their rights. There is a broad and growing movement, however, to change that. Namati: Innovations in Legal Empowerment is playing a leading role mobilizing and partnering with individuals, organizations, and governments around the world to provide all people with access to the tools and protection that the law offers.
In a presentation at the School of Public Policy on December 2, Gloria Lai (Mundus MAPP '11) offered a devastating critique of the global war on drugs – a war that, as she noted, has been enormously expensive: $1.5 trillion was spent on drug control efforts between 1970 and 2010 in the US alone. Despite this, there was no significant change in the levels of drug dependence.
