Commonwealth

Program polityczny dla dwudziestego pierwszego wieku

by Sandro Chignola

PT4_2011_Commonwealth

by Sandro Chignola

Beyond the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol: Next steps in managing teacher migration in difficult circumstances

by Jonathan Penson

Paper presented at the 11th United Kingdom Forum on International Education and Training International Conference on Education and Development, at the University of Oxford, UK on 13 September 2011. Co-authored with Barry Sesnan, Akemi Yonemura, Kimberly Ochs and Casmir Chanda.

The Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol was adopted by Commonwealth Ministers of Education in 2004. It provides... more The Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol was adopted by Commonwealth Ministers of Education in 2004. It provides a framework for managing teacher migration to maximise mutual benefits to countries and minimise negative effects. However, recent studies revealed the inadequacy of data about teacher migration for effective planning and policy-making. This is particularly true of education in difficult circumstances. In response, the Commonwealth Secretariat and UNESCO-IICBA jointly held the Sixth Commonwealth Research Symposium on Teacher Mobility, Recruitment and Migration in Addis Ababa in June 2011 and examined the implementation of the protocol and the relevance of its principles to education in emergencies. It aimed to answer how refugee teachers could best be managed so that their rights were protected, their impact on the destination country was beneficial, and they were enabled to improve educational quality and access. It explored systemic and structural issues as well as good practice, and identified future research directions. Ongoing quantitative and qualitative research was presented by field-based practitioners as well as educational managers and academics. In addition to making recommendations to policy-makers developing strategies for managing teacher migration, it provided more general lessons for the development of teacher recruitment protocols outside the Commonwealth’s.
Based on papers presented at the Symposium and a review of the literature, this paper asks what the issues affecting forced migrant teachers are compared to voluntary migrant teachers, and what policies are necessary to ensure their welfare. Noting the research gaps around the role and status of refugee teachers in emergencies, it is found that teachers are significantly under-represented in the refugee population. By analysing the reasons why this is so, and finding gaps in the existing policy environment and legislative framework, the paper attempts to determine the connections between the issues refugee teachers face, the protection of their rights, and the contribution they are able to make towards increasing access to and quality of education. To exemplify how these issues play out on the ground, the paper describes a case study of Sudanese refugees in Uganda. Following a review of how the learning from the application of the CTRP might be applied to efforts to improve institutional frameworks for the management of teachers in emergencies, the paper concludes with recommendations for policy-makers aimed at protecting the professional role and status of teachers forced to migrate and enhancing their ability to operate constructively in emergency conditions.

Rwanda and the Commonwealth: The Evolution of the BBC's Institutional Narrative on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

by Georgina Holmes

Published in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 416, 2011 519-530

As with most British media coverage in 1994, the BBC did not report genocide in Rwanda, preferring instead to depict... more As with most British media coverage in 1994, the BBC did not report genocide in Rwanda, preferring instead to depict political violence as tribal civil war and ‘primitive’ ethnic conflict. Yet when the international community declared that genocide had taken place, the BBC was quick to change its tack, moving away from reporting ethnic conflict towards memorialising genocide. Referring to the BBC's website, political discussion programmes and documentary films, the article considers how over time an institutional narrative on the 1994 genocide has developed. The author argues that the BBC has been required to reconcile the problem of depicting genocide—conventionally seen as modern, ‘Western’ political violence—in Africa. The ways in which the BBC has remembered Rwanda's genocide also conceal from view British foreign policy decision-making between April and July 1994. The author then considers how, since Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in November 2009, the BBC's reporting has shifted again—this time towards framing news in the context of democracy and freedom of speech.

Commonwealth Perspectives on International Relations

by Lucian Ashworth

Tim Shaw and Luke Ashworth, International Affairs (Chatham House)

The parallel development of the inter- and non-governmental Commonwealths on the one hand and the field of... more The parallel development of the inter- and non-governmental Commonwealths on the one hand and the field of International Relations and its oldest journal, The Round Table, on the other, should not go unnoticed at the start of the second decade of the century. This article suggests that the Commonwealth nexus has always constituted a distinctive perspective and debate in both the metropole and the rest of the Commonwealth's expanding official and unofficial networks. The Commonwealth 'School’ both reinforces and contrasts with other non-US and non-hegemonic approaches presently animating the field.