University for Peace

In the aftermath of violent conflict, Indigenous cultural practices have played a significant role in restoring peaceful relations among former adversaries. Processes such as Mato Oput in Uganda, Gacaca in Rwanda, and Kukeleeku ka tonu in Liberia exemplify community-based approaches to reconciliation and social healing in post-conflict environments. Today, scholarly research has begun investigating and exploring the relevance and applicability of Indigenous cultural practices to conflict resolution and peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts. These practices have proven effective in addressing conflict and restoring social cohesion within Indigenous, conflict-affected communities. However, a comprehensive synthesis of the scholarly work on this subject is absent. This neglect is twofold: while there is growing recognition of ritual and cultural practices in peace studies more broadly, Indigenous practices remain underrepresented because existing literature often sidelines Indigenous voices and rarely grounds analysis in empirical work led by or with Indigenous communities. This neglect reflects broader assumptions that Indigenous knowledge is unscientific, lacking empirical validity, and insufficient for addressing structural drivers of conflict such as political exclusion or economic inequality. Consequently, Indigenous cultural practices remain underrepresented in conflict resolution and peacebuilding literature. This article seeks to address that disrepair by providing a systematic review of English-language scholarly literature on Indigenous cultural practices in post-conflict peacebuilding. It offers a thematic synthesis of key findings, outlines prevailing scholarly perspectives, highlights research gaps, and identifies directions for future research.

The paper provides an overview of the patterns of communal violence in Kenya, as well as to highlight important drivers and prospective peacebuilding strategies along the borderland area in Mandera County of North Eastern Kenya. Several variables that have been identified as crucial in understanding the occurrence of violent communal conflict in Kenya include the politicised nature of ethnicity in the country, as well as the fact that elections and land tenure are intimately tied with ethnic identity. The following four primary factors that contribute to conflict were explored: electoral politics, local resources, boundaries and local authority. These factors were discussed in addition to the dynamics of national politics. The article has also emphasised that particular dynamics are at play in different conflicts. The precise way that different conflict drivers interact with one another varies from case to case, which suggests that actors who are looking to manage and resolve conflicts need to conduct comprehensive analysis of the conflict that is currently taking place. Not only does this imply that all conflicts should be viewed against the backdrop of a state and a political culture in which ethnicity is strongly politicised, but it also suggests that the impact of political dynamics at the national level on communal conflicts will differ from case to case. Keywords: Communal Conflict, Mandera County Borderlands, Electoral Politics, Resource Competition, Ethnic Identity

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) showcases tremendous potential to scale large language models (LLMs) with enhanced performance and reduced computational complexity. However, its sparsely activated architecture shifts feed-forward networks (FFNs) from being compute-intensive to memory-intensive during inference, leading to substantially lower GPU utilization and increased operational costs.

Public sector efficiency in Somalia is critically low due to weak governance and poor administration, leading to inadequate public services and citizen dissatisfaction. This study examines how accountability influences public service delivery in the Banadir region, focusing on two key factors: responsiveness and transparency. A correlational research design was used, with data collected from 315 respondents. The analysis was conducted using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results show a positive moderate relationship between responsiveness and service quality (r = 0.52, p < 0.01) and between transparency and service quality (r = 0.471, p < 0.01). These findings emphasize the importance of both responsiveness and transparency in improving public service efficiency. The study recommends improving responsiveness by making public services more accessible and adaptable and ensuring timely delivery. It also suggests increasing transparency by providing clear, reliable, and accessible information about procedures and costs to build citizen trust and improve service outcomes.

Trauma-informed therapies, particularly Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), have demonstrated individual efficacy, yet their broader societal impacts remain underexplored. This mixed-methods study examined how participation in a shared EMDR training program influences professional self-efficacy, intergroup openness, and reconciliation readiness among therapists working within a conflict-affected society. Twenty-four participants completed a post-training questionnaire that included quantitative Likert-scale items and qualitative reflective prompts. Descriptive and exploratory analyses indicated overall positive shifts in perceived professional growth, hope for reconciliation, and cross-group helping capacity, alongside greater variability in reported interpersonal understanding. Exploratory subgroup analyses compared Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian participants, revealing meaningful but non-significant trends reflecting each group’s distinct sociocultural perspectives. Thematic analysis of qualitative responses identified four main themes: interpersonal connection, experiential learning, hope mixed with skepticism regarding peacebuilding, and suggestions for enhancing intergroup dialogue opportunities. Together, these findings highlight that trauma-informed professional training can simultaneously support clinical development and foster initial steps toward intergroup empathy and social healing. Intentional facilitation of cross-group engagement remains critical to maximize the broader peacebuilding potential of such initiatives, and future research should examine longitudinal and comparative outcomes across diverse program settings.

The conflict of Somalia has grassroot factors and complexities since last three decades in the absence of strong central government controlled the entire country, the complexity including Instability, and competition for resources. The war erupted in the late 1980s after the ousting of the Siad Barre regime, resulting in a power vacuum and the emergence of warlords. The situation deteriorated in the 1990s with the rise of Islamist groups, particularly Al-Shabaab, which continues to fight against the Somali interim government and international forces. for the case of west African countries, ten countries with the lowest (World Population Review, 2024) Human Development Index scores. Countries such as these are faced with widespread poverty, poor education, lack of adequate health care and, perhaps most importantly, stable governments. International Monetary Fund reports show that these countries also have some of the lowest annual rates of GDP perc capita in the world. This policy brief detailed the grassroot of Somalia conflict and in generally African democracy and governance for the cases of west Africa. The Paper has structurally two section which are the first section presents the conflict of Somalia, the grassroot and the possible options of resolving. In the next the paper discussed African democracy reversal and governance management in practical case. The paper has recommendation and feedback on research-based evidence. In the context of Somalia peace and conflict there were several efforts for peace and stability have been ongoing, involving various local and global stakeholders, but the country still faces significant challenges, including persistent violence, humanitarian crises, and political fragmentation. The African democratic journey has not been without its share of obstacles, despite these achievements. Sometimes progress has been impeded by instances of electoral irregularities, political instability, and corruption. Long-term authoritarian government has hindered the growth of democratic institutions in some countries. This sit-tight-in-power syndrome has been the bane of democratic leadership and electoral process in Africa (Aremu, 2024). The objective this brief policy is to understand the grassroot conflict of Somalia and its consequence and the beyond to identify African democracy and governance for the case of West African as constitutional changes, term power extension and reversal democracy.

This paper addresses the video summarization problem. For the given video goal is to find the subset of frames that capture the important events of the input video and produce a small concise summary. We formulate video summarization as a sequence labeling problem, where for a given input video a subset of frames are selected as a summary video. Based on the principle of semantic segmentation, here each pixel within a frame is assigned to one of the labels, where each frame is assigned a binary label indicating whether it will be included in the summary video or not. We propose a SegNet sequence network (SegNetSN) for video summarization and further extend the work by applying various feature fusion techniques to enhance the input. We performed experiments on the benchmark dataset TVSum.

The aim of this study is to determine the effect of incivility and envy behaviors in the workplace on the job satisfaction of nurses. For this purpose, data were collected from 288 nurses working in a hospital in Erzurum with convenience sampling method. In line with the research model, correlation and multiple regression analysis were performed by means of scales whose validity and reliability were tested. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that workplace incivility and workplace envy had a negative effect on nurses' job satisfaction level.

Foodborne illnesses significantly impact public health. Deep learning surveillance applications using social media data aim to detect early warning signals. However, labeling foodborne illness-related tweets for model training requires extensive human resources, making it challenging to collect a sufficient number of high-quality labels for tweets within a limited budget. The severe class imbalance resulting from the scarcity of foodborne illness-related tweets among the vast volume of social media further exacerbates the problem. Classifiers trained on a classimbalanced dataset are biased towards the majority class, making accurate detection difficult. To overcome these challenges, we propose EGAL, a deep learning framework for foodborne illness detection that uses small expert-labeled tweets augmented by crowdsourced-labeled and massive unlabeled data. Specifically, by leveraging tweets labeled by experts as a reward set, EGAL learns to assign a weight of zero to incorrectly labeled tweets to mitigate their negative influence. Other tweets receive proportionate weights to counter-balance the unbalanced class distribution. Extensive experiments on real-world TWEET-FID data show that EGAL outperforms strong baseline models across different settings, including varying expert-labeled set sizes and class imbalance ratios. A case study on a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium infection linked to packaged salad greens demonstrates how the trained model captures relevant tweets offering valuable outbreak insights. EGAL, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), has the potential to be deployed for real-time analysis of tweet streaming, contributing to foodborne illness outbreak surveillance efforts.