Community Mediation

Much of Nepal is mountainous and remote, connected by unimproved roads and paths and far from the services and amenities of the city. Among those services is the formal justice system, a central function of the state that has long been out of reach for poor and rural Nepalis. It takes considerable time and money to travel to a district court and fi… Read more

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 3:00-4:30 PM Community-based mediation is a proven alternative or complementary mechanism for resolving conflict and ensuring equal access to justice in countries that face a combination of capacity, time and cost, and social and cultural constraints that limit public access to formal legal services. In Asia, mediated di… Read more

Seven years after a bloody, 26-year civil war ended, the Northern Province of Sri Lanka is still limping back to peaceful living. Issues related to security, housing, and livelihoods are rife, and negotiations over transitional justice mechanisms cloud the peace-longing landscape of the region. Yet, amid these more publicized issues, the people of… Read more

Development assistance is founded on countless theories about how foreign taxpayers’ money can be harnessed to instigate and catalyze economic and social development and provide humanitarian benefits abroad. Basic arguments for how positive change can be achieved…

There is a difficult tension in the evidence-seeking agenda: on the one hand, donors seek short-term, project-related outcomes to support claims about their impact on a grand scale in a society; on the other hand, society-level impact does not seem measurable…

In June 2014, almost five years after the end of the longstanding civil war in Sri Lanka, violent clashes broke out in several small towns in the south, including Aluthgama, Beruwela, and Dharga Town. The tensions were fueled by reports that a Muslim man had allegedly attacked…

“Informal” justice is increasingly on the international development agenda (for example see here and here), based on the recognition that in many parts of the world, “formal” justice systems are far from the first port of call for citizens with a grievance or dispute.