Message to APPRA Members

From John Synott, Secretary-General

Greetings to all APPRA members across Asia Pacific. I hope you are well and finding success and satisfaction in your peace-building activities in the many different ways we pursue. We look forward to your contributions and stories of your work, so please send them to appra@qut.edu.au  as an email attachment in Word. We want more everyday accounts of the work you are involved in and the issues with which you are having to contend.

Items to Note:

Global Action to Prevent War.  The Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies recently held a conference in which the centre piece for discussion was the new Program Statement of the Global Action to Prevent War. This is an important practical and aspirational document with over 60 strategies to achieving the goal of a peaceful world. Check out GAPW and their work on:   Several IPRA/APPRA members attended the conference, which was hosted by Kevin Clements, Head of ACPACS and former President of IPRA, and former Secretary-General of APPRA, and also there was Katsuya Kodama former Secretary General of IPRA and also APPRA.One of the most important papes was presented by Dr Aurelio Guterres from the Peace Centre in Dili, Timor Leste.

IPRA Conference coming up in Leuven Belgium, July 15-18. No doubt this will be another stimulating and well-attended conference. Many APPRA members will have made paper/panel proposals and you are urged to follow this up with registration once your paper has been accepted. Many APPRA members are relying on scholarships to support them to attend the conference. This is a difficult situation for the organisers, as there are many more applicants than funds to support them. If applicants are able to show that they can obtain some funds from other sources and need some added contribution form IPRA, this can allow a wider distribution of scholarships across applicants from the global South. So, if you are in this situation, please try all your local institutional, government, ngo and community networks. Try local businesses and organizations, so that your presence at IPRA will bring new knowledge and approaches back to local development issues.

There is a link to IPRA on the APRA website, if you wish to attend the conference or distribute information about it.

In the next period we will try and identify possible corporate/institutional sponsors in the Asia-Pacific region, with the hope that APPRA members may be able to access regional sponsors in order to attend such meetings.

There will be an APPRA regional meeting at the IPRA conference. More information and call for agenda items for this meeting will be posted on this site in May.

APPRA Conference. We have been searching for a suitable site and host for the next APPRA Conference which I would like to hold in 2009. There are a few possible options including in Japan, Taiwan or Singapore, but nothing solid has been determined at this stage. If any members wish to propose or offer possible location, we will be interested to hear your proposal. Suitable, moderately priced conference and accommodation facilities are the key pre-requisites. I would hope that we can determine a place, time and themes before the IPRA Conference so the APPRA Conference can be publicised there.

Peaceful regards to you and your loved ones, until next time, John