Dear members and friends of Asia Pacific Peace Research Association.  I am very pleased to tell you that the reconstructed web site for APPRA is now up and running and you can visit it on   http://www.appra.org

 

It has been a long and difficult task for us to get this facility working, due to our lack of technical expertise and because we had to negotiate a mazeway of institutional procedures in the university at QUT and arranging for the site to be repositioned from its previous base in Philippines and Canada to Brisbane, Australia.

 

The site at this stage is somewhat sparse in content because we have focussed on some core areas. What is required now is your input to make the site a rich and valuable resource for APPRA members and all who are wanting to source and contribute information relevant to peace-building, research and education in the Asia Pacific.

 

What can you do?  Here are some suggestions:

  1. Pass on information about the APPRA site to your colleagues and encourage them to register as APPRA members, providing advice on their expertise
  2. Get your organizations (ngo’s, university departments etc. to post the APPRA site as a link)
  3. Feed in information on current issues in the region to us by email to appra@qut.edu.au. We will establish a ‘Current Issues’ page and post your communiqués. Keep these messages brief and to the point. We particularly seek information by members who are directly involved in current crises, such as the floods in Bangla-Desh or the military repression in Burma/Myanmar. This is a way to directly share information and build our understandings of events through the region
  4. Send in information on effective peace-building strategies that you are using or aware of, so others can learn from your effective practices. For examples, you might be using certain strategies to save and protect women and children from exploitation - tell us what you do, so others can learn from your experiences; or effective actions in peace education, or resolving conflicts. We want the APPRA website to be a source of practical information for peace workers in the field as well as a site of academic resources. If you can suggest useful information sites we can add to our Tools for Development, please tell us by email us
  5. If you are located in a university or research centre and would like to have your location linked to the APPRA site please provide: the name, the URL, a 2-line summary of what activities are conducted there. We intend to build a comprehensive profile of peace research centres in the region.
  6. We are looking for photos of members at work, so send these in, with a brief description

 

I look forward to hearing from you with your contributions and suggestions. John Synott (APPRA Secretary-General)