In March 2019, Rukmini Banerjee (President of HasNa) traveled to Nepal to attend the South Asian Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Strategic Nonviolent Action organized by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Center for Social Change, National Network for the Families of the Disappeared, and Department of Conflict, Peace, and Development Studies, […]
Asian Action Institute 2019: South Asian Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Strategic Nonviolent Action
Earlier this month, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) partnered with Nepal’s Center for Social Change (CSC), Department of Conflict, Peace, and Development Studies, Tribhuvan University, and the National Network of the Families of the Disappeared (NEFAD) to organize a week-long, intensive training program on non-violent civil resistance. The Asian Action Institute was held […]
A Case for Change in Turkey
(This blog post is contributed by Harper Clark, a summer ’16 undergraduate intern with HasNa Inc. All views and opinions reflected in this article strictly belong to the author.) With a number of complex social and economic issues abound, there seems to be no immediate solution for Turkey’s entrance into the EU, especially after […]
Turkey’s Kurdish Predicament
On June 15th 2016, HasNa hosted two guest speakers, Omer Taspinar and Gonul Tol at George Washington University’s Marvin Center. Dr. Taspinar is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the National War College. Dr. Tol is the founder and director of the Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies […]
The Much-Needed Case for Profitable Peacebuilding
A major challenge in peacebuilding is its case for profitability. Unlike conflict, there is a resounding silence when justifying the economic benefits of peace. “The dominance of the securitized approaches may be attributed to much more consistent and powerful lobbying, by political and commercial interests in the defense sector. In contrast, the peacebuilding field has […]
The Power of Storytelling
On May 21, 2015, HasNa screened Hüseyin Karabey’s 2014 Turkish film, “Come to My Voice,” at the Avalon Theater in Washington, DC. It is a simple enough premise, but powerful in its ability to bring to light the realities of a typical Kurdish village’s unfortunate interactions with police through a storyline that seems at once […]
Water: The Principal Resource for Humanity
Water is essential for human life and the depletion of clean water resources is a serious global threat. According to the International Water Management Institute, one third of the global population does not have access to clean drinking water and another 1.5 billion people live in areas experiencing water scarcity. Some scientists argue that within […]
The Art of Building Peace
In his meditative essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin spoke of the decay or withering of the aura of art that comes with mass reproduction through photography and printing. As the importance of art pour l’art or ‘art for art’s sake’ decreases with the advent of […]
4 Million Knots of Peace: One Thread at A Time
opera mini for androidA friend (and dedicated HasNa volunteer) recently shared a Twitter message with me about the display of the “Ghazir rug” at the White House. Sad to say, I was not familiar with it; but the Tweet referenced the rug’s “symbolism of the Armenian genocide” and I decided to do some investigation. The […]
Youth Engagement in Armenia
A study conducted in every household in Armenia in 2010 looked at real employment rates for different groups of individuals on the basis of various parameters such as socio-economic status, gender, age, level of urbanization, etc. One of its findings was that the employment rate is the lowest for the youth in Armenia (age group […]