One of the most interesting days of the course so far was facilitated by Bobby Anderson on Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) processes. Bobby is the Deputy Chief of Party at International Relief and Development (IRD) and currently works in Indonesia. He has strategic and programmatic responsibility for one of the largest peacebuilding program in Southeast Asia. As you can imagine he brought a wealth of knowledge to his workshop and I liked his realistic but pragmatic view of the world.
It would have been great to have spent the whole week on DDR as it’s something I’m personally very interested in. It did strike me however that although this process clearly happened at home as a direct result of our “Peace Process” (prisoner releases, decommissioning etc) the formalistic language associated with the ideology of DDR never really made it’s way into the general vocabulary of people in NI. Maybe this is because the modern terminology associated with DDR has only really emerged in the years following a large part of our formal process or perhaps it’s a good example of adapting the accepted discourse of peacebuilding to fit a cultural context (a rose by any other name etc.)
A United Nations peacekeeper from the Indian battalion of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) takes stock of weapons and ammunition collected during the Demobilization process in Matembo, North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2006). Source: UN Multimedia
We then spent Friday examining Security Sector Reform (SSR) from Arie Bloed. Arie has worked extensively Internationally and he focused particularly on Police reform in the afternoon. Not surprisingly we also discussed the transition from the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Practical Peace 