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In Sudan, volunteer humanitarians are targeted by both sides

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Guest blog by Rebecca Tinsley Millions of civilians in Sudan's war depend on neighbourhood Emergency Response Rooms for food and medical help. However, the volunteers running these groups are targeted for kidnap, torture and rape by militia on both sides of the conflict. The Emergency Response Rooms were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize last year, but this does not protect their dedicated helpers from violence, or provide much-needed funding. A campaign has been launched to support the 800 Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) serving Sudan's besieged civilians. Often providing operating rooms in people's basements, the ERRs have appeared spontaneously wherever hospitals and clinics are destroyed. Respected human rights groups accuse both warring militias of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure since the conflict erupted in April 2023. For most of the war, both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the opposing Rapid Support Forces have prevented aid reaching 30 million ...
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Podcast Episode 1: The Rebirth of Sustainable Development from the book Rio+20 to the New Development Agenda

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This is Episode 1 of our new series based on From Rio+20 to a New Development Agenda: Building a Bridge to a Sustainable Future by FelixDodds , Jorge Laguna-Celis, and Liz Thompson .   Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, "The Earth Summit", the Rio+20 conference in 2012 brought life back to sustainable development by putting it at the centre of a new global development partnership, one in which sustainable development is the basis for eradicating poverty, upholding human development and transforming economies.  Written by practitioners and participants involved in the multilateral process of negotiations, this book presents a unique insider analysis of not only what happened and why, but also where the outcomes might impact in the future, particularly in the UN development agenda beyond 2015.  The book throws light on the changing nature of multilateralism and questions frequent assumptions on how policy is defined within t...
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Guest blog: Cutting Through the Fog: The Propaganda That Keeps Big Oil in Business

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Guest Blog from  Franz Baumann published as an article on Taylor and Francis Online here. Franz Baumann is the Vice-President of the Academic Council of the United Nations System. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.—Leon Trotsky Truth be told, people are not very interested in climate change. The sense of unease that things are going in the wrong direction does not broadly translate into willingness to invest time and energy to understand the causes of the climate crisis. Of course, Big Oil, airlines, banks, industry, and assorted rightwing lobby groups invest much money in politics, public relations, social media, and universities, to keep things that way. The upshot is that, like nuclear weapons proliferation, which is another existential danger, climate change does not by and large instigate momentous political activism, heated conversations, or major lifestyle changes. Given that we might be entering uncharted territory Footnote 1 —ever more intole...
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