The Yorkshire English Defense League decided few days ago to demonstrate outside the Bull Lane mosque in York, Great Britain. The gathering had been promoted via facebook as a reaction to the killing of a British soldier in a London Street. The Islamophobia was spiking and incidents reported by Tell MAMA (Monitoring Anti-Muslim Attacks) were rising. The conditions for a violent case of religious fighting were all set up, but this time tea, biscuits and football served up as an intelligent and wholehearted approach was able to turn a problem into a happy ending story and an example that, even under tight conditions, a shared society is possible.

Just six followers of the EDL far right group turned up to protest at the mosque and, to their surprise, they were invited to have tea and biscuits. Imam Abid Salik said: “We did have a few people who did come to protest but when they came some of the members of the mosque went over and they engaged in a conversation.

“Some people went over with cups of tea and biscuits, they were talking for about 30 or 40 minutes and then they came inside, which was a really, really beautiful thing.”

For Neil Barnes, Hull Road ward councilor that was a “proud moment for York”. He said, “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day that the York Mosque tackled anger and hatred with peace and warmth – and I won’t forget the sight of a Muslim offering a protester tea and biscuits with absolute sincerity.”

The mosque reaction was also praise by Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu who described the response as “fantastic”, and underlined that “tea, biscuits, and football are a great and typically Yorkshire combination when it comes to disarming hostile and extremist views.”

Despite all the tense scenes seen across Britain these days, this hasn’t been the only interfaith solidarity episodes. In Leicester,  Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England, visited the city last week in a show of support to Muslim leaders, praising the diverse city, where just under a fifth of residents are Muslim, as a “a shining example of how communities work together”.

According to the World Bank, a fragile state is a country that faces particularly formidable development challenges. Such challenges often result in violence and undermine democratic transitions and societal improvements. At a global conference on Friday, Somalia became the most recent fragile state to take action for improvement by serving as the latest testing site for the ambitious New Deal Project.

The New Deal Project aims to help fragile nations achieve peace and stability and eventually the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set out by the United Nations. The project focuses on five peace- and state-building goals (PSGs):  legitimate and inclusive politics, security, justice, economic foundations (jobs), and revenues and services. What sets apart the New Deal, which was created by the g7+ group, from other initiatives is its supposed emphasis on the authority of local, rather than international, actors.

According to an article in The Guardian, Somalia is the ninth fragile state to accept the New Deal. In doing so, it has created a taskforce of members of the government, the World Bank, international organizations, and civil society.

This is a positive step for Somalia, which is in the fledgling stages of progress. It was only last year that the country installed its first democratically elected leader since 1991. Despite many positive developmental changes, it continues to struggle with violence—on Sunday, 35 were killed in an Islamist extremist attack on the capital city of Mogadishu.

Indeed, the successful implementation of the New Deal program could create the opportunity for a peaceful and Shared Society in Somalia and could serve as an example to other fragile states throughout the world. The PSGs aim to “[inform] the national vision, plan and a country-level compact to implement the plan. They also will help to guide global and country-level funding decisions to help ensure that all fragile countries, and their key peacebuilding and statebuilding priorities, are properly supported.”

It is significant that one of the peace- and state-building goals is legitimate and inclusive politics, which the Club de Madrid has also identified as one of the Ten Commitments that need to be made in order to achieving Shared Societies.  Somalia is a deeply fractured society with religious and tribal divisions hampering progress towards greater cohesion, and this commitment to inclusion is a positive step.

SSP believes that “most leaders, if given the arguments, options and tools, would prefer to lead on behalf of all their citizens and build safe, inclusive societies where all feel equally a part of and contributor to society.” By joining the New Deal, with specific reference to its inclusive politics goal, it is more likely that the ruling actors will commit themselves to inclusiveness and gain support from other partners. This top-level commitment should link with and support existing civil society efforts through policy and rhetoric, which would consequently nurture a peaceful, pluralist society Somalia, and would ultimately provide great benefits for the country and region.

Photo: Kate Holt/IRIN

It is oftentimes the case that the good is entirely overshadowed by the bad and society is unable to recognize those things that deserve appreciation. It is for this reason that we were happy to stumble upon this opinion piece from the South China Morning Post which lauded Taiwan’s human rights progress.

“During the past generation, since the end of martial law in 1987, Taiwan has experienced a gradual, peaceful political revolution that established genuine democracy, government under law and respect for many internationally guaranteed human rights,” states the article, written by a Taiwanese lawyer and an American member of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) review committee for Taiwan.

A report was released following a review by 10 experts in February 2013, and the findings verify the claims. “The Experts consider that the Government and people of Taiwan have demonstrated exemplary commitment to the process of monitoring compliance with the relevant human rights obligations,” the report states.

This is not to say that there is no progress left to be made. Among the concerns cited in the report was the lack of recognition of indigenous people. The report recommended that the government “clarify its policy of identifying indigenous peoples based on international human rights standards” and initiate “effective enforcement of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples Basic Law.”

The Shared Societies Project is pleased to see such strides made on both the governmental and communal level for human rights, and is ready to assist the Government to respond to the challenge of taking seriously the recognition of indigenous people. We hope that Taiwan will continue its progress and will work to fulfill the 10 Commitments and Approaches of a Shared Society, so that they address the concerns and make an inclusive society for all.

The government of Turkey has taken small steps to right the years of wrongs it has propagated against its Kurdish population of more than 20 million people.

These efforts have been related to linguistic freedom for the long persecuted Kurdish langauge. According to Didem Collingsworth of the International Crisis Group, language recognition is essential.

“[Kurds] see it as a recognition of their Kurdishness, of their identity, of their culture,” he remarked.

Kurdish was banned entirely from the 1980’s until 1991. Following this period, severe limitations were placed on the language (prohibition in schools, Parliament, official settings), accompanied by severe punishments. According to an article from Public Radio International, one could be “arrested by security forces, blindfolded and taken to an underground prison and tortured” for speaking Kurdish. In 1991, Kurdish lawmaker Leyla Zana took an oath in Parliament in Kurdish, and was consequently stripped of legislative immunity and sent to jail for a decade.

In June of 2012, the ban on Kurdish in schools was lifted. Erdogan announced that, “enough students come together, Kurdish can be taken as an elective lesson, it will be taught and it will be learned.” A Kurdish TV station was created. In January, the Parliament of Turkey voted 236-41 to allow Kurdish to be used in court.

Many are critical of the implementation of these measures. Since its implementation last summer, the elective Kurdish program has proven to be very limited, accepting only a few students and meeting only for a few hours each week. Many teachers believe it will be nearly impossible for students to truly learn Kurdish in such a program. Others object to the teaching of Kurdish as if it was a foreign language. As one teacher remarked in an article in The Atlantic, “Kurdish is not a foreign language. It lives here.”

Nonetheless, these developments have the potential to vastly improve the equality and acceptance of Kurds in Turkish society, especially in light of the recent ceasefire between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) following three decades of violence and the deaths of more than 40,000 people. The country is in the process of drafting a new constitution. This combination of events places Turkey at a split in the road—one path regresses to vengeance and intolerance; the other progresses towards a Shared Society. One can only hope that the country will embark on the latter, that the two sides will continue taking steps towards peace, and that the government will make great strides by codifying inclusion into law.

Language is a powerful tool. It creates ideas, shapes opinions, develops actions. Without some sort of communication, the amelioration of society could not occur.

Yet one could argue that the opposite is also true. Language can serve influential impetus to the degradation of society. Hate speech can skew perceptions, rile up emotion, drive people to discriminatory and hateful and violent action.

For example, during their reign of murder, Hitler and the Nazis called upon “good” Aryans to destroy all associations with “Untermensch” (subhuman) and “Judenschwein” (Jewpig), the names they used for Jews. In the early months of 1994, Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines spurred Hutu listeners to “exterminate the cockroaches,” referring to the Tutsis.

The aim of these linguistic tricks, and the implicit aim of all hate speech, is to dehumanize the other. Once dehumanized, there is a perception of acceptability in doing the unimaginably unacceptable to that other. Indeed, according to Genocide Watch, language comprises a quantifiable step towards genocide. So the question arises: if one can stymie the language that prompts the perceptual shift, can they stop the action?

The Sentinel Project, a Canadian group that aims to use social media and other technology to identify early warning signals for ethnic conflict, believes that the answer is “yes.” In conjunction with software developer Mobiocracy, they have developed Hatebase, a tool meant to map hate speech in the efforts of preventing violence.

Hatebase is comprised of two features. The first is a database which allows users to classify terms of hate speech according to region and group to which they refer. The second allows them to detail occurrences in which they have heard hate speech used. It is hoped that this feature will bring background necessary to make accurate judgments.

Some question whether concrete actions could actually result from this data when viewed in relation to freedom of speech. Additionally, there are concerns over the impossibility of being to able to properly contextualize hate speech. In an article in Foreign Policy Magazine, the Human Stain conundrum is raised—that is, what about words that are only hateful in specific contexts?

The site responds that “[its] goal at this point is to focus on vocabulary as low-hanging fruit, and over time broaden our focus to encompass a broader perspective on hate speech.”

Given that hate speech is, to one degree or another, present in almost every society, the site is focused on regions that are believed to already have potential for ethnic conflict. While the site’s developers are aware that their data cannot be used as a singular predictor of conflict, they hope that it will help prevent violent words from becoming violent actions.

In the Shared Societies Project blog we have looked very carefully at the recent Kenya presidential elections, five years after the last content in 2007 left more than 1,000 people killed in political and tribal violence. We analyzed the political messages of integration launched during the presidential debate, and also the results of the elections and its implications on the future of Kenya. The first conclusions are inspiring: the country learned from its mistakes. Politicians and civil organisations made a great effort to fight against tribal messages on the campaign and violence was avoided.

In the same line, Mwangi S. Kimenyi have analyzed for The Brookings Institutions this kenyan elections. Mr. Kimenyi is the senior fellow and director of the Africa Growth Initiative, and also the founding executive director of the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis. In his intervention, he seemed optimistic about the country’s future: “The post-election violence told a us a good thing. I mean, it was a bad thing, but we as kenyans have been able to learn something from that, he have been able to fast-track the reforms.”

You can watch the complete Mr. Kimenyi’s intervention here:

As one can see throughout the world today, exclusion of people on both personal and societal levels can lead to violence. It has often been posited that the root of exclusion lies in lack of understanding of those perceived as the “other.” It is argued, therefore, that the path to inclusion is through the demystifying this otherness.

As outlined in the Shared Societies Project, it is the responsibility of governmental and communal actors to dispel the misperceptions that result in exclusion. However, at the 5^th United Nations Alliance of Civilisations (UNAOC) Global Forum held in Vienna at the end of February, it was contended that the media should be involved in this process as well.

“The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations…sees the role of media in shaping public opinions and behaviours is crucial,” outgoing UNAOC High Representative and Club de Madrid Member Jorge Sampaio said.

Indeed, the media wields great influence in the perceptions of citizens in a society. It is essential that media outlets remain truthful in their coverage and representation of events and people in order to avoid exacerbating existing conflicts and instead promote intercultural dialogue.

“The growing responsibility of media is portraying the right image of the other while avoiding prejudices and stereotyping others, and looking at the facts to judge accordingly,” the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani said.

This commitment to truth is especially important when reporting on controversial issues within diverse communities, minority groups, and cultures such as migration. Honest reporting involves members of the media putting aside their own preconceived notions and biases—something that may be a slow and difficult process.

“By nature I think that human beings just don’t reach out to people who are different to them and the media is no different in that respect,” Alison Bethel McKenzie of the International Press Institute said.

Journalists who attended the conference added that the path to achieving this goal is more complex than was indicated. Beyond the journalist’s personal commitment to inclusiveness, the media as a whole would have to become more inclusive. Minorities are underrepresented in most newsrooms and many ethical codes and reporting guidelines are ignored. Moreover, censorship continues to exist throughout the world.

However, there is hope that independent media in repressive countries and all media in countries with freedom of the press will commit themselves to working alongside individuals and government as agents of inclusiveness.

“I am convinced that through our joint efforts we can promote the noble goals of the Alliance, foster international peace and security and strengthen relations between nations and cultures,” UNAOC High Representative Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser said.

More information:

http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/qatar/227228-media-should-act-responsibly-emir.html

http://www.globalissues.org/news/2013/02/28/15973

http://www.unaoc.org/2013/02/unaoc-mobilizes-to-improve-media-coverage-of-migration-recommendations-released/

http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/qatar/227228-media-should-act-responsibly-emir.html

When one mentions the word “minority,” aspects such as race, ethnicity, or gender often come to mind. However, few think about those who comprise what is known as the “world’s largest minority:” people with disabilities.

“For most of history, in every country in the world, people with disabilities were generally invisible. People don’t think about them often, policy makers don’t talk about them,” Syracuse University College of Law professor Arlene Kanter said.

However, the prevalence of disabilities is far from invisible. People with a disability comprise approximately 10% of the world’s population. That amounts to around 650 million people, with this number increasing every year. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 80% of this populace lives in developing countries.

In such countries, people with disabilities are often faced with grave challenges. 90% of children with disabilities in developing countries do not attend school. People with disabilities are discriminated against in the job market. The discrimination often results in violence. For example, according to a report issued by the Equal Rights Trust (ERT) and the Socio Legal Information Center, people with disabilities in India face brutal treatment.

“People with various forms of disabilities face inhuman treatment at various places including healthcare centres, schools, hostels, detention centres etc.,” activist Seema Baquer stated in regards to the report. “Females with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to becoming victims of rape and sexual violence.”

A 2004 study in Orissa, India supported this conclusion, finding that almost all women with disabilities were beaten in their homes, 25% had been raped, and 6% had been forcibly sterilized.

Even in developed countries such as the United States, those with disabilities face hardships. They must deal with physical and informational and communicational barriers. Only 20% of people with disabilities are employed in the U.S., compared with 70% without disabilities. Moreover, due to nature of the nation’s health care system, many with disabilities are discouraged from working.

“For a lot of people with disabilities they think: ‘What’s the point? I’ll have just enough money to survive, but not to thrive.’ And we gauge success in your ability to not just survive, but to thrive,” said Duane French, Division Director of the state of Washington’s Disability Determination Services Department.

Moreover, people with disabilities in the U.S. and other developed countries are confronted with widespread societal discrimination. They are often excluded on even interpersonal levels or infantilized and patronized. “Attitude regarding disability is still the number one barrier for people with disabilities,” Don Brandon, Alaska’s coordinator for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) claimed.

There have been national and international efforts which have worked to varying degrees of effectiveness in order to create more inclusive societies for those with disabilities. In the United States, the ADA is meant to stop discrimination against people with disabilities, especially in employment and insurance, as well as to provide accessibility to buildings and services. On an international level, the United Nations created the Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (SCRPD).

According to its website, SCRPD’s objectives are “to support the full and effective participation of persons with disabilities in social life and development; to advance the rights and protect the dignity of persons with disabilities and; to promote equal access to employment, education, information, goods and services.” The SCRPD includes the World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons (1982), the Standard Rules on Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (1994), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006).

Many are still awaiting global progress for this largest of minorities. However, there is hope that initiatives will create actual results. Said Kanter of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, “[it] has the potential worldwide to advance the rights for people with disabilities, not because it’s a law, but because, rather, of its potential to mobilize people with disabilities and their allies to demand change.”

More information:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/01/201312717417999561.html

http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/govt-urged-to-ensure-proper-monitoring-of-rights-of-disabled-113022500451_1.html

http://www.thelamron.com/news/president-s-diversity-lecture-focuses-on-global-disability-rights-1.3001665#.UTYNj6KQVcw

http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/facts.shtml

http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?navid=3&pid=17

The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung New York Office just launched a new publication, “The Future We the People Need: Voices from New Social Movements in North Africa, Middle East, Europe & North America”. The document talks about the need of a development with a human face, an idea wich the Shared Societies Projects supports and includes in its work.

Many new social movements have sprung up since the financial crisis in 2008, says the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, our partner in the Shared Societies Project. In North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America they emerged out of social protests against economic austerity, inequality and political exclusion.

The publication features 20 contributions, from activists and analysts in Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, Greece, Ireland, Spain, the US, Canada and Mexico, who were invited to critically and constructively examine the creative proposals and campaigns that have emerged from the protests, not to just look back at them.

The motifs that come through— frustration with government for failing to address political and social exclusion, lack of faith in official political processes and actors, the belief that new social movements are sowing seeds of a more direct democracy—are common in each country and all regions. However, the theme that is emerging most strongly is that of a deep crisis in political representation.

Read here the full publication

The UN system is now immersed in discussions to construct a future for sustainable development, what the Rio+20 outcome calls “The Future We Want”. A new generation of development paradigms to success the 2015 Millennium Development Goals. After the Rio+20 Summit, simultaneous discussions have emerged about whether the world needs this new paradigms.

Following these issues, last november the Club de Madrid co-organized with the Friederich Ebert-Stiftung an event at the UN headquarters in New York, “Towards a New Generation of Development Goals, A Day of Informal Discussions”. Alejandro Toledo, former President of Peru (2001-2006) and Member of the Club de Madrid, participated in this event. “We have to figure out the world we want for 2050. We will aim for economic inclusive growth, and rights and democracy, but we also need equality and sustainability”, said Mr. Toledo in his intervention, that you can watch below this lines: