No abstract

Drawing on data from more than forty peacebuilding initiatives and hundreds of interviews with Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders, this briefing discusses the impact of international donor policies on peacebuilding in a context of stark asymmetry of power. More specifically, it investigates the way in which specific funding regulations—the designation of primary and subpartners, the location of local donor offices, and the restrictions placed on politically sensitive advocacy and activism—have magnified the challenges peacebuilding organizations face in terms of cultivating and sustaining legitimacy, recruiting individuals for the projects, managing internal conflict, and building sustainable partnerships. The issues are complex; substantive concerns underlie the donor policies in question, including accountability, security, and transparency, as well as the maintenance of sufficient political support for aid programs in the donor country—yet the same policies nonetheless have unintended negative consequences on the ground. We argue that donors must do more to balance their legitimate domestic concerns with understanding of imbalances in the conflict context.

No abstract

International Relations (IR) “Realists” John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have entered the realm of identity politics. Their maiden voyage inside the “black box” of the state, a recent paper entitled “The Israel Lobby,” is likely their most famous but least credible work. In apportioning blame for the US invasion of Iraq, they dismiss any influence of energy dependence or geopolitical interests, while attributing causal responsibility to an expansively defined “Israel Lobby,” claims as specious as they are ethnically charged. Where their critique of US and Israeli policies is right, it suggests that key parts of their theories of international politics are wrong. In ivory tower IR, “The Israel Lobby” represents a theoretical transgression on the part of orthodox “Realists.” In real-world politics, Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay presents d/Democratic opponents of the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with the opportunity to distinguish principled protest from scapegoating.

Codification and preservation of traditional knowledge is of great importance, more so by professionals from the library and information science. Acquisition and management of traditional knowledge in academic libraries is one of the evolving areas of research and this is why this paper examined the impact of institutional support for professional competence of librarians to improve the codification and preservation of traditional knowledge in Lagos State, Nigeria. It provides a perspective from which institutional support can be viewed as an important element for codification and preservation of traditional knowledge in the libraries. In addition, the paper identified institutional support as funding, motivation, staff training/development, facilitative policy; including the inadequacies. The paper discussed the concept of professional competence and the competences required of professional librarian for codification and preservation of traditional knowledge in the library. This include: educational qualification, understanding the source of traditional knowledge, ability to locate traditional resources, possession of knowledge of traditional knowledge codification and preservation, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills. In conclusion, the paper reiterated that there is need to include other librarians apart from the library management staff in the formulation of institutional policy for improvements in codification and preservation of traditional knowledge in Lagos State. Moreover, the library management should make adequate provision for regular training and retraining of librarians to improve the codification and preservation of traditional knowledge in Lagos State.