News

‘UN peace operations need less jargon and more direction’ ran a headline in early April – just as we were testing a new version of our app, and just as we were posting a new blog in our peacekeeping series. It was virtual serendipity. The article asks if a new UN mission in Colombia should be design...

Conflicts are not only national or transnational, but above all local. This means that simply considering the international or national perspective in mission mandates will never be enough; policies have to be translated into concrete workable programmes at community level. So how can peacekeeping m...

Fatai Adegboye is one of our many part-time PhD fellows who also works for another UN body — in this case the World Food Programme (WFP) in Damascus, Syria. He came to Maastricht for our unique PhD Dual Career Training Programme in Governance and Policy Analysis (GPAC²). The questions are pose...

At the outset of the 2011 Syrian revolution, Syrian women played an active role in protests and grassroots mobilisation. They played leadership roles in local committees. They organised and participated in demonstrations and sit-ins. However, with the militarisation of the uprising, women have been ...

Predicting the future is a minefield, but undoubtedly one of the toughest challenges for the new UN Secretary-General will be how to steer the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). Not only because it is one of the most expensive activities of the system, but also because it needs to reconci...

When people ask me where I come from, my thoughts inevitably take me way back in time to the early 1930s and to a place on the other side of the globe, the Japanese city of Hiroshima. This is where my story starts. During those years of economic crisis, tens of thousands of Japanese people, includin...

A recent news article focused on the UNU-MERIT Master’s thesis ‘Competition for Talent: Retaining Graduates in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine’ by Julia Reinold.  The article looked at the advantages and disadvantages of living in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR): the tri-national crossroads ...

Five years on from the Great East Japan tsunami and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, we revisit an article by Prof. Luc Soete, our founding director. Does Europe face similar nuclear risks? Recent developments in Belgium do not bode well. ••• On 11 March 2011, I was attending a conference in Bruss...

Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges for the international community. Linked to a growing list of natural disasters – from droughts and desertification to floods and melting ice caps – climate change poses an existential threat to all of humanity. Against this backdrop, a coo...

Every March 8th the international community honours women for their many and various achievements in the struggle for gender equality. For centuries women’s movements have fought for the rights and freedoms of women and girls – but not in a zero-sum game. Already in 1792 British author and activist ...

As a migration researcher as well as a first-generation migrant descended of migrants, mobility has been a major feature of my adult life. I find it difficult to separate my own migration story from that of my ancestors because it is precisely their decisions and trajectories that enabled my own....

As Maastricht University enters Period 4 of the 2015/2016 Academic Year, University College Maastricht (UCM) is offering a new course on migration led by the Migration Studies Group at UNU-MERIT, including Melissa Siegel, Özge Bilgili, Michaella Vanore and myself, Katie Kuschminder as the Course Coo...

Our latest workshop on the ‘Design and Evaluation of Innovation Policies’ (DEIP) was co-hosted in January 2016 by UNU-MERIT, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Panama’s National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (SENACYT). This four-day course gathered a...

As of January 2016, coordination responsibilities for the UNU Migration Network were handed over from UNU-GCM in Spain to UNU-MERIT in the Netherlands. Dr. Melissa Siegel of UNU-MERIT is now the day-to-day coordinator of the Migration Network, assisted by Ms. Elaine McGregor, also of UNU-MERIT. Dr. ...

How can we encourage more people to lead active lives, not only in general but also in an educational setting? We know that obesity and health problems are linked to a lack of exercise and we see a clear relationship between leading an active life and better health in general. Both feature a great d...

It's nearly 100 years since the ‘Easter Rising’ in Dublin, an armed struggle that would lead to Irish independence after centuries of British rule. For the Irish side of my family, this was not an abstract moment in history. It changed all of our lives and all of our destinies; it meant new homes, n...

“The 2030 Agenda forms the new global development framework anchored around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a total of 169 targets covering economic, social development, and environmental protection… In particular, Africa can take advantage of this universality of the 2030 Agenda ...

Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Katie Kuschminder has won a ‘Rubicon’ grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Kuschminder will now spend two years at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, close to Florence in Italy. Research K...

Prof. Shyama V. Ramani of UNU-MERIT has been voted one of the #100 Women Achievers of India in the category of ‘Hygiene and Sanitation’, as part of a contest organised by the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development in partnership with Facebook. The result was made public on 1 Janu...

January 2016 marks a new round for our programme on ‘Evidence-based Policy Research Methods’ (EPRM) – specially developed for working professionals. For people who want to improve their understanding of research methods, but don’t have the time to spend months away; for people with duties at home or...