“Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation.....is a dive over a cliff,” - Antonio Guterres, UN Chief

A methodological review of the paper titled ‘Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women in Peace-Building.’ by Hilary Charlesworth.  According to Charlesworth, the paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. In reviewing this paper methodologically, I will endeavor to look at answering three questions which as stated by Punch(2009) include the ontological question of what reality is like, the epistemological question of what relationship is between that researcher and that reality, and finally the methodological question of what methods can be used or were used in studying the reality. Ontological questions are prior because they deal with the very nature of ‘being’; literally, an ontology is a theory of ‘being’...

I am not a fun of communism or socialism whichever way you may look at it despite the fact that I do accept capitalism has its weaknesses. Nevertheless, there is no system I know of that has lifted many out of poverty like capitalism. Enough of myself, I am here to write about the Odingas! Capitalism is simply an economic and political system whereby control of trade and industry is under profit-making private ownership rather than the state. When it comes to communism, ownership is with the community hence everyone contributes or receives based on their abilities or needs whereas socialism entails a political system that ensures all citizens have an equal allocation of state resources and social ownership of the means of production. The fall out between Jaramogi Oginga Odinga the then Vice president and his boss President Jomo Kenyatta not long after Kenya’s independence threw the young state into an ideological battle of ‘ East and West’ despite attempts to portray a non-aligned i...

“Eastleigh is our umbilical cord. You must arrest anyone who is spoiling Eastleigh — even if he is Adan Barre’s brother. Those who are detonating explosives in Eastleigh should do it elsewhere.”- Majority Leader, Aden Duale (“Duale in tight spot over Shabaab attack and his 30-day list”, 2015). I have retrieved the above quote from the online archives of the Daily Nation, a leading newspaper in Kenya. Wars have been with us for ages so much that there are those who have theorized it as part of human nature. Realist thinkers like Hans Morgenthau in his ‘ politics among nations’ all the way to Kenneth Waltz’s ‘ theory of international politics’ believe the world system is anarchic with no central government thus states must help themselves more so militarily because war is inevitable.   But is war really inevitable? Although inter-state wars have reduced and that partly due to liberal policies of democracy, transnational relations, complex interdependence and institutionalism wh...