The thing that has impressed me about the Bologna Symposium has been, as expected, the wealth of learning that takes place outside of the classroom. Other students have already written about the real-world applications of [...]
‘IF YOU GIVE A BOY A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL’. Said John Prendergast at the beginning of his lecture on the conflicts in the DR Congo and The Sudan (Darfur to be exact). [...]
The week of post conflict and reconciliation started with the lecture of ambassador Alvaro De Soto. With extensive experience at the United Nations, particularly taking part in the negotiations that led to peace agreements in [...]
In his seminal work, Agenda for Peace, former UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali states that, “the concept of peace is easy to grasp” while that of security “is more complex”. Boutros-Ghali suggests that everyone already knows [...]
Many students took advantage of our second weekend in Italy, and trips spread out across the peninsula from Florence to Milan. Another group bound for Venice truly defined the global reach of the IPSI program: [...]
Friday was sort of a low day as none of the scheduled speakers was able to make it due to reasons beyond their control. The speakers scheduled for the day were Jeffrey Mapendere and Betty [...]
Day 11, and everyone was pretty keen for today’s speaker. To kick off proceedings Gareth Evans spoke to us on: nuclear proliferation, R2P and peace v justice. GREAT! Its exactly what we needed, after a [...]
Life can’t be just work, and brain needs some time out too. Here in Bologna, it feels a bit like “we work hard, so we party hard,” and on Wednesday afternoon, a bunch of us [...]
Today, our schedule started with the last set of negotiation training sessions with our hono(u)rary guests, Mark Young (from the Harvard Program on Negotiation Trainer) and Bjorn Hofmann (from the UN Office for the Coordination [...]
We wrapped up the negotiation training with Mark Yong and Björn Hoffman today. They've provided us with some good tools and things to keep in mind in negotiations. When some of us were wandering around [...]