Peace Studies Group
Recent events
International seminar 2010
"Global Interventionism: critiques and resistances"

This seminar, coordinated by Maria Raquel Freire, Daniela Nascimento e Sílvia Roque, was held on 12-15 July 2010, at the School of Economics, Coimbra University.
Development, humanitarian aid and post-war reconstruction policies, strategies and projects are often understood as response mechanisms to scenarios of institutional collapse and war. In this seminar, however, we intend to analyse how these global intervention mechanisms fail to accomplish the goals proclaimed by their supporting political discourses and how themselves produce dynamics of economic and social disruption, ranging from global to local scales, by promoting standartised models of economic, political and social organisation, which dismiss its long-term impacts and repercussions in time. Simultaneously, we aim to analyse the resistances which emerge vis-à-vis the global projection of this liberal peace project.

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Seminar "Violence and small arms: the Portuguese case", 20th May 2010

In this seminar, the team presented and debated the results of the research project (funded by the Science and Technology Foundation, Portugal), specifically regarding the following dimensions: the mapping of legal and illegal supply of firearms in portugal, the identification of its users/bearers and their motivations, the analysis of the differentiated impacts of armed violence and of existing prevention and combat strategies, promoted by both the State and civil society.

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See press release


The silences of gun violence. Women and guns in Portugal, Mozambique and Brazil, 24th May 2010

24 May is International Women's Day for Peace and Disarmament. The celebration of this day began in Europe in the early 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of women organised against nuclear weapons and the arms race. To mark this day, and in association with the “All my Independent Women” initiative, a cycle of exhibition and debates promoted by the Casa da Esquina, in Coimbra, the Peace Studies Group and the Observatory on Gender and Armed Violence (OGiVA/CES) and Acção para a Justiça e Paz (AJP) aim to reflect on the forgotten insecurities that affect women and girls as a result of global small arms dissemination, and particularly in Portugal, Brazil and Mozambique, as well as the experiences of female anti-violence activism that emerge in these scenarios.

See programme