The African Great Lakes region, especially Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has witnessed decades of war and ethnic conflict since their independence in the 1960s. Hostilities continued throughout the 1990s and early 2000s leaving community...
The Sixth International Conference of Ministers and Senior Officials Responsible for Physical Education and Sport (MINEPS VI) held in Kazan, Russian Federation was a fruitful opportunity for Peace and Sport to appeal to governments for enhanced effort to develop...
Peace is much more than the absence of war and negative peace has endured on the Korean peninsula for decades. The continued division of the Korean people limits the realization of their full potential. Although pessimism about the relationship is rife here, there is...
“If you want peace you need to prepare for Peace”. Inspired by the motto of the University for peace, the Karamoja Cluster Project (KCP), a cross-border program through sport, was conceived to tackle traditional pastoral and communal violence within the Karamoja...
United Nations World Refugee Day on 20 June has reminded us of the recent wave of immigration to Europe, caused by the wars that currently ravage Iraq and Syria. This has propelled the issue of how to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees without jeopardising...
World Refugee day, marked on June 20, is an occasion to reflect about challenges refugees are facing in their everyday lives and opportunities that could be offered in host countries. This day is also a moment to envisage refugees not merely as victims, but also as a...
The world woke up with devastating news on June 4th: a third major terrorist strike in the UK in three months. That same week, within days, it was reported a pair of terrorist attacks in Tehran and Paris. The horrific level of violence around the world overwhelms me...
In social contexts with a history of conflict, sport for community development transcends the idea of a healthy alternative to use spare time and becomes a tool to develop skills among the community to respond assertively to social threats. Besides, sports favor...
As an athlete and an artist, I struggled for years to balance both sport and art in my life. But on my journey to becoming an Olympic athlete and then an Olympic artist, I realized that these two, seemingly different subjects, aren’t different at all, in fact they are...
In a recent skype conversation with Nicolai Zeltinger, the Head Coach of the German male wheelchair basketball team and the Coach of the RSV Lahn-Dill, the German, we learned how big is wheelchair basketball in Germany: “Here people, when say, they are going to watch...
Sports promotes cooperation, builds a common identity, and provides an overarching language to communities in conflict. I learned it first hand, because tennis changed my life. Growing up as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I struggled with an identity crisis, feeling...
At the beginning of April, I participated in the Harvard and MIT Brazil Conference, an event organized by students at these institutions with the mission of bringing together brilliant minds and key influencers in various fields to discuss Brazil’s social, economic,...