SSIS Alumni Profile
Division of Peace Studies
Beat Weber (MA 2001)
My MA dissertation at the Department of Peace Studies in Bradford was on evaluating and monitoring peace building projects. As I had an interest in Lusophone countries, I spent three weeks in Angola in November 2000, doing field research with an international NGO called Development Workshop (DW), which has been working in Angola since 1980. After I finished my dissertation, DW offered me an internship, and in April 2001 I started working with the organization’s peace building programme, which was operating through a network of church and civil society institutions. After a few months, I also became interested in DW’s research on peri-urban land issues, which is a huge development issue in the country, given that some 40% of the population live in these areas. In 2002 I moved to DW’s office in Huambo, central Angola, where I worked as an advisor for a community publishing project that practices a very interesting bottom-up peace building approach. The main objective is to make marginalized voices heard, through the publication of a provincial bulletin, radio, and the publication of books. It also encourages awareness of the causes of war and poverty through an extensive literacy programme and community libraries. My interest in land issues and urban development continued, and I also started a PhD at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, with a focus on the participation of civil society in urban planning processes.
This might seem a bit out of the ‘peace building’ line, but the topic’s focus on participation of local civil society in a local governance process actually has a lot in common with bottomup peace building approaches that I experienced through my work.
During 2004 I spent a few months in Switzerland working on my thesis before moving back to Angola, where I worked for DW’s Monitoring and Research Unit until the end of 2005.
With the end of the war in 2002, the Angolan government engaged in a series of policy development processes, such as land reform and new legislation for the informal sector and the decentralization process. The Research Unit was engaged in several of these processes in close collaboration with different government departments and civil society organizations. Overall, it was a very interesting experience to constructively engage in policy development. Since the beginning of 2006 I’m only working part-time as I intend to finish the thesis by the end of the year, but I remain engaged in a peri-urban upgrading project that we implement in partnership with the provincial government of Huambo. I intend to stay in Huambo for the coming years; it is a mid-sized city with a pleasant climate (it’s on 1700metres!), a thriving local economy and beautiful surroundings that invite hiking and other outdoor activities.
On the other hand, social and economic inequality are increasing, the reconciliation process still has a long way to go and there are many other challenges for a country that is experiencing peace for the first time for almost forty years.
As Published in the Peace Studies Alumni News (2006)