“Restoring confidence and transforming security, justice, and economic institutions is possible within a generation, even in countries that have experienced severe conflict.” 

World Development Report 2011, Conflict, Security and Development; The World Bank, April 2011; http://www.worldbank.org

“The worst times in European history were in the fourteenth century, during and after the Hundred Years War, in the seventeenth century at the time of the Thirty Years War, and in the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may be worse than any of these.”

Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations, 2003, Atlantic Books, pg. vii

“To understand the present we must first understand the past.”

Ibid, pg. 7

Over the past months, I have found my way back into writing. It has been an arduous process, and so many reasons were contributing to that it took so long. What appears to be the result of a brilliant or less brilliant idea, put into words then, in reality it is the product of many months where the subconscious parts of the mind wrestled with it. And then, all of a sudden, it comes up in to the clear of the conscious. That’s one part of the story.

Another one is that the theme of the articles I am going to publish into the testing ground of my blog could not be written earlier. In my line of professional work, 2015 has been a year with most important events which set the stage for this writing. The first article will highlight some of the strategic events.

Next is the reasons that 2015 saw an almost incredible amount of things happening which the world is struggling with. In my view, like for many others, it is changing the global fabric of what we are challenged with, for many reasons.

So there were operational challenges. And there was more reading blogs than writing. Witnessing how the world wrote about some events, including terror attacks, and forgot about others, like the areas in which my colleagues and I work. I watched the migration crisis, in amazement. And I watched the many visible aspects of xenophobia, and reverberating patterns, like ping-pong-balls, of radicalization of language, and cruel action. Look, in retrospective, on what I wrote about Charlie Hebdo. We now have many of these, many more, and many more worrying patterns of that the world becomes resentful, that simplifying and manipulative language drives the discussions, rather than educated and informed talking and writing, rather than compassionate thinking, breaking up the fiefdoms of egotism.

We need voices of compassion, empathy, rational understanding, able to contribute to the appropriate dealing with very complex development. The great simplifiers, we have too many of them, all over this world. It is their hour, they yell their manipulations from the rooftops. As long as the voices of reason stay silent, they find easy prey.

So, in order to write, another reason was that I needed to research, and to think. Sometimes, every sentence took me a day. And many days in order to rewrite that sentence, until I was satisfied. Behind some articles there is intense number crunching. And nothing is referring to data which would not be public. In everything I am writing I am referring to data and information that you can look up on the Internet, or books that you can buy.

I got the hang of it again, so now my writing, as a process, is much easier than it has been, say, summer 2015. And many other things happened that summer, of which none is to be shared here.

Alright then, if you like what I will post, enjoy!