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As of today, customs duties will be levied on parcels of goods from non-EU countries worth less than 150 euros. These will be subject to a fixed fee of three euros per item type. Until now, such parcels had enjoyed an exemption. The tariffs are expected to hit online retailers which sell cheap goods, such as Temu and Shein, particularly hard. Commentators debate whether the measure will strengthen Europe's economy.

Jérémy Jacquet ist neuer Spieler des FC Liverpool. Der Franzose wechselt von Rennes auf die Insel, wo er einen Fünfjahresvertrag unterschreibt.

NASA und Lockheed Martin haben mit dem X-59 einen Überschalljet entwickelt, der ohne Knall fliegt. Am 12. Juni erreichte er Mach 1,4 und könnte künftig London-New York in drei Stunden ermöglichen.

32 Länderspiele hat Blick-Experte Blerim Dzemaili unter Vladimir Petkovic absolviert. Vor dem grossen Wiedersehen im Sechzehntelfinal spricht er im Interview über die Stärken und Schwächen seines Ex-Trainers.

Schweizer Flughäfen warnen vor längeren Wartezeiten an der Passkontrolle. Grund ist das neue Einreise- und Ausreisesystem der EU, das biometrische Daten erfasst. Reisende sollten vor dem Abflug in die Sommerferien frühzeitig anreisen – und am besten E-Gates nutzen.

Während der Besitzer auf Geschäftsreise ist, wird sein rund 430'000 Franken teurer Ferrari von vier Kindern entdeckt und kurzerhand als Spielplatz genutzt. Dabei entstehen Kratzer auf Dach und Motorhaube sowie Risse an der vorderen Stossstange.

The UN Peacebuilding Commission Celebrates 20 Years of UN Peacebuilding Architecture. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

From June 22 to 26, the United Nations (UN) commemorated its first annual Peacebuilding Week, marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Peacebuilding Commission’s inaugural session. Featuring discussions among world leaders, policymakers, civil society, and advocates, the event explored how collaboration among governments, international organizations, and the private sector can enhance the visibility and effectiveness of peacebuilding efforts worldwide.

The goals of the Peacebuilding Week are particularly critical today, as increasing geopolitical tensions fracture international cooperation and severe financing shortfalls deplete resources, hindering relief efforts for civilians trapped in conflict. Despite a historic surge in active armed conflicts worldwide recorded over the past two years, peacebuilding and relief funding suffered a severe 40 percent decline between 2024 and 2025, leaving millions of people around the globe in a state of extreme insecurity.

“Peace does not occur automatically. It is built through persistent diplomacy, collective action and political will,” said Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly. “Wars that never happen because of peacebuilding, conflict-prevention or sustainable-development efforts rarely make headlines. Yet, like everything else, peacebuilding is only possible when properly resourced.”

On June 26, the Peacebuilding Impact Hub—part of the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office (PBPSO) within the UN Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO)—launched its inaugural Peacebuilding Overview, titled Investing in Peace When the World Pays for War. This report analyzes data gathered from governments, civil society, scholars, and UN field operations across numerous, diverse contexts.

By addressing the root causes of conflict and encouraging the implementation of digital technologies—alongside active participation from youth and the private sector—the report aims to forge new paths for peacebuilding that are resilient, inclusive, and globally supported. Aiming to identify structural gaps in data sharing that prevent vital information from being shared internationally and from being fully utilized by policymakers and the public, the report was launched alongside a side event titled Building Peace in a Changing World.

At the event, Paul Fargues, one of the report’s authors and a Political Affairs Officer for the UN Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), told reporters that the world is currently at a “crossroads, where conflict is on the rise, good governance is declining, and civic space is shrinking.” He noted that this is compounded by severe budget cuts and disproportionate investment in military expenditure rather than civilian protection and prevention efforts, making humanitarian relief operations increasingly difficult.

According to the report, over the last two decades, the world has invested only one dollar in peacebuilding efforts for every 100 dollars spent on military expenditure. Fargues added that the world’s most vulnerable populations are projected to suffer the most, particularly in dire contexts where aid constitutes more than 60 percent of all external funding and acts as a vital lifeline. Additionally, the DDPA found that roughly two-thirds of the countries whose economies are most dependent on UN aid are also the ones most adversely affected by the funding cuts.

Fargues argued that some of the central obstacles in advancing peacebuilding efforts today are the persistent structural gaps in the dissemination of evidence and data, which is critically underdeveloped when compared to the development and humanitarian sectors.

“Peacebuilding has no underlying framework to create shared data practices, to generate insights at the global level to enhance evidence-based decision-making, or simply to communicate its value to broader non-technical audiences,” Fargues said. “Peacebuilders and those who support them must do a better job at measuring, proving, and communicating this. Given the incredibly challenging contexts, producing more robust data and evidence of impact is a bare minimum.”

Katherina Ahrendts, the Director-General for Global Order, United Nations and Humanitarian Assistance of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, stated that although the case for investing in protection and prevention efforts is clear, political and financial contributions lag significantly behind. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for every dollar invested in preventive macroeconomic policies, up to 103 dollars could be generated in returns. DPPA also estimated that with adequate investment in prevention and protection measures, humanitarian needs could be reduced by approximately USD 3.6 billion annually.

Despite these potential gains, the economic case for peacebuilding efforts has not sufficiently influenced global investment priorities.“We are indeed at a critical moment when violent conflict is increasing while budgets are under strain and multilateralism as a whole is increasingly challenged,” said Ahrendts. “From a domestic policy standpoint, we need a much stronger business case, more compelling narratives, and better evidence. We need to showcase that peacebuilding is a smart, strategic, and cost-effective instrument that prevents much higher costs later on.”

“This means framing peacebuilding not only as a moral imperative, but as a matter of security, stability, mutual interests and sound investments. In particular, we need to make clear that peacebuilding and investment are an integral component of an effective security strategy,” she added.

Ana Escobar, the UN Representative for Peace Direct, an organization that empowers local peacebuilding efforts and supports community-driven approaches, remarked that peacebuilding must be grounded in a community-based approach and tailored to match the specific needs of vulnerable communities. Peace Direct defines meaningful impact as seeing communities become safer and more resilient long after external support has ceased.

Rather than implementing a pre-established peacebuilding agenda, Peace Direct works with local peacebuilders and community leaders to define what success looks like to them and identify the changes that they want to see. “That means asking different questions,” Escobar said. “Are communities resolving disputes without violence, and how do we measure that? Do women, youth, and marginalized groups have greater influence in decision-making? Is trust increasing between communities and institutions?”

“Peacebuilding is most effective when power, resources, and evidence flow in the same direction, towards the communities that live with conflict every day…. For local peacebuilders, prevention means that children go to school instead of joining armed groups, farmers return to their lands, markets reopen, women move safely, families remain together. Those are the returns communities measure every day,” added Escobar.

Dr. Cedric De Coning, a Senior Researcher in the Peace, Conflict and Development Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), underscored the importance of adaptive peacebuilding. This approach calls for the continuous monitoring of data and updating of peacebuilding measures, acknowledging that a community’s dynamics are constantly shifting. Rather than framing peacebuilding as a rigid structure being “built”, Dr. De Coning argues that it is more of a continuous process that is “nurtured”.

“What adaptive peacebuilding says is that we cannot know that beforehand; it has to emerge from people affected by conflict or people in societies struggling to achieve peace themselves,” said Dr. De Coning.

“As peacebuilders, we have to accompany these societies, and we have to learn together with them constantly and adapt our understanding of what it is that we can support. But we should be careful not to measure peace as something that only makes sense for donor-funded projects…. Peace is something much broader, and we need to measure that broader social transformation: how societies are experiencing peace, how they are living the things they look at, is what we need to look at rather than measuring projects to please donors.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Mit der unerlaubten Weihe von vier Bischöfen hat sich die Piusbruderschaft von der katholischen Kirche abgespalten. Nun droht bis zu 600'000 Mitgliedern der Gemeinschaft der Ausschluss.

In den sozialen Medien berichtet Lia Wälti von einer unangenehmen Zugreise mit einem Mann. Nati-Captain Wälti schildert in einer Instagram-Story, wie sie lange angestarrt wurde und sich zunehmend unwohl fühlte.

By Vani S. Kulkarni
PHILADELPHIA, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

India’s new education policy asks a great deal of its teachers. The National Education Policy of 2020 and its NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement) training scheme, want teachers to be more than deliverers of syllabus. They are to be empowered professionals, agents of change who shape the future of children and, the policy says, of the nation itself. It is a generous and welcome ambition.

Vani S. Kulkarni

But there is a difficulty no policy can resolve simply by stating it. You can decree that teachers be empowered. You cannot, by decree, make them so.

For two decades, the dominant approach to teacher quality in India, as in much of the world, has run in the opposite direction. It judges teachers by individual performance and accountability, by what they deliver and how their classrooms score. Under that logic, a teacher’s agency quietly shrinks until it means doing well what someone else has already decided. The teacher becomes an executor of other people’s choices. This is the very habit NISHTHA hopes to break, and it will not break easily, because a system built to measure compliance tends to produce it.

The real question, then, is not whether we wish teachers to have agency because we do. It is where agency actually comes from.

I spent a year, between 2023 and 2025, looking for an answer in an unlikely place: a small, non-governmental teacher-preparation programme in Gurugram, north India called I Am A Teacher (IAAT), which has spent a decade training teachers in a humanistic tradition that cuts against the accountability grain. What I found there was a claim that sounds almost too soft to matter, until you watch what it does. Agency, in this programme’s account, does not begin with autonomy handed down from above. It begins with self-knowledge. A teacher who has examined her own assumptions, her own fears and habits of judgment, is a teacher who can finally exercise judgment of her own.

That self-knowledge expressed itself, in the teachers I met, in three widening circles.

The first was the classroom. Teachers spoke of designing their own curricula and lesson plans, and of sharing in decisions about assessment, as the very substance of their professional dignity. To be handed instructions to execute, one teacher said, is to have your voice taken away. And teacher autonomy, several insisted, is not for the teacher’s sake alone. When a teacher can read her own classroom and meet children where they are, the children begin to experience an agency of their own, becoming creative and imaginative rather than merely obedient.

The second circle was the inner life of the student. These teachers refused to see their work as the transmission of knowledge and content alone. A child’s social and emotional wellbeing, one told me, matters as much as the subject on the board. They understood it as part of their agency to steady a struggling child, inside the classroom and beyond it, on the conviction that learning and wellbeing cannot be pulled apart.

The third and widest circle was the world the school is embedded in. The most striking thing about these teachers was that their sense of agency did not stop at the classroom door. They spoke about how political and economic forces shape what gets taught and what gets funded, and about the inequality that public education is meant to counter and too often deepens. Education can never be equal, one teacher said plainly, naming the way wealth sorts children into schools and teachers into salaries. Some met that knowledge not with resignation but with initiative, volunteering in underserved areas or starting small independent learning centres of their own. That is agency in its fullest sense, a teacher who sees the system she is part of and acts to make it fairer.

A training module alone can produce none of this, and that is exactly the point. The NEP is right that teachers should be agents of change. But agency is not a permission a policy grants. It is a capacity, and capacities have to be formed, through self-reflection, mentoring, time, and the experience of being trusted to decide. These are precisely the things an accountability-driven system finds hardest to fund, because they do not show up on a dashboard, and their results appear years later, in a classroom run by someone who knows her own mind.

A teacher who has been told only what to do can comply. A teacher who has come to know herself can decide. India’s classrooms, and the children in them, need far more of the second kind. No policy can issue that teacher by order. But a country that understood where her/his agency begins could choose, at last, to help make her/his.

If NISHTHA is to be more than a circular, its success will be measured on the ground, in whether teachers actually come to exercise the agency the policy promises them. And one concrete step is within reach now. The country need not invent this formation from nothing. Small programmes such as IAAT, quietly and against the current, already practise it and have done so for years. Recognising them, learning from them, and resourcing them would cost little and teach a great deal.

Vani S. Kulkarni is a sociologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research and teaching appointments at Harvard and Yale universities. Her research navigates the intricate crossroads of Global Health, Education, Race and Caste, Gender, Sociology of Trust, Development, and Democracy.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Auf einem Flug der britischen Fluggesellschaft Jet 2 attackierte ein Passagier einen anderen Fluggast. Als Polizisten nach der Landung die Maschine betraten, stellten sie fest, dass der Mann ohnmächtig geworden war. Er kam sofort ins Spital, wo er jedoch starb.

Mit klarer Kommunikation und einem cleveren Chat-Modell trennen die Beachvolleyball-Schwestern Anouk und Zoé Vergé-Dépré Berufliches von Privatem. Wie sich die beiden beim Elite16-Turnier in Gstaad schlagen, zeigt sich ab Mittwoch.

Seit rund vier Wochen werden die Fabrikhallen der Chemieindustrie besetzt. Am Mitwochmorgen startete der Räumungs-Einsatz. Die Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten bleiben.

Nach dem Exportverbot dürfen Nutzer weltweit bald wieder auf Claude Fable 5 und Mythos 5 von Anthropic zugreifen. Das US-Handelsministerium hat die Blockade aufgehoben.

A protester holds up a placard thar reads ‘Resist, don’t compromise’ at a mass march held under the slogan ‘The people are hungry, the prisons are full’ through popular neighborhoods in Tunis, Tunisia, on 16 May 2026. Credit: Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

In May, Tunisian lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani was handed her second conviction of the year. Her latest sentence, a two-year jail term, came in reaction to her criticism of poor prison conditions. She previously received an 18-month sentence for calling out the government’s anti-migrant policies. Dahmani faces five more charges under a 2022 cybercrime law that criminalises the spreading of what it calls ‘false information’.

Dahmani is one of many victims of President Kais Saied, who continues to steer Tunisia in an ever more repressive direction. Saied won a free and fair election in 2019, but in 2021 he removed the prime minister and parliament, ruling by decree instead. The following year, he rewrote the constitution to give himself near-absolute power, approved in a low-turnout referendum held after key opposing voices had been jailed. When he won his second term in 2024, credible opponents had been criminalised and barred from running. It’s all a long way from the democracy that sprang into life after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.

Growing criminalisation

Saied’s repression operates behind a facade of legality, with the criminal justice system serving as a tool of presidential control. In 2022, Saied sacked judges who disagreed with him and gave himself the power to control judicial appointments. Courts now do his bidding and jail opponents. At least nine staff of civil society organisations have received prison sentences so far this year.

Journalists Borhen Bssais and Mourad Zeghidi received three-and-a-half-year sentences on trumped-up money laundering and tax evasion charges in January. In 2025, 37 journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians and other dissidents were found guilty of terrorism and plotting to destabilise Tunisia. Following a mass trial, some were given decades-long jail terms. A November 2025 appeal court hearing that defendants weren’t allowed to attend upheld almost all convictions and increased some sentences.

The latest phase of the crackdown is targeting anti-racism campaigners. Since 2023, Saied has deployed the populist strategy of attacking Black African migrants to distract from the economic problems he’s failed to address. He’s repeatedly accused migrants of being responsible for crime and disorder, fuelling violence against them from security forces and the public.

Saied has branded organisations that stand up for migrants’ rights as traitors and foreign agents. Vilification prepares the ground for incarceration. In March, Saadia Mosbah, president of Mnemty, a Tunisian association that fights against racism, received a staggering eight-year sentence on bogus illicit enrichment and money laundering charges. Five of her colleagues were convicted alongside her.

Mnemty faces the threat of being closed down, part of an assault on associational freedoms that has seen dozens of other civil society organisations suspended. Hundreds more could face the same treatment. In 2024, courts ordered the closure of the Tunisian Council for Refugees. Last November, two of its leaders, Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi, received two-year sentences for offences under a 1975 law on passports and travel documents.

No one appears to be beyond the state’s reach. In March, a judge ordered the pretrial detention of seven people on money laundering charges for their involvement in the first Global Sumud Flotilla, which last October attempted to take humanitarian aid to Gaza’s besieged population. Meanwhile being one of the organisations that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize offered no protection for the Tunisian League for Human Rights. The group was slapped with a one-month suspension in April.

For civil society organisations, suspension marks the start of a process that can lead to dissolution. Civil society organisations also face asset freezes, lawsuits and tax investigations. The combination of criminalisation, legal harassment and top-down vilification results in a pervasive chilling effect.

Judges that don’t do Saied’s bidding are also at risk. Anas Hmedi, President of the Association of Tunisian Magistrates, has been subjected to criminal proceedings since 2022, with a summons on fresh charges issued in January.

Europe says little

Tunisians continue to protest. Hundreds marched in the capital, Tunis, on 6 June to demand media freedoms and the release of political prisoners. Protesters in May also called out Saied’s failure to address the economic crisis. But they need international support.

Last October, Saber Ben Chouchane was handed a death sentence for criticising Saied on Facebook. Authorities interpreted his posts as constituting crimes of attempting to change the form of government, insulting the president and spreading false information. But this time the repression backfired. The severity of the sentence caused such an international outcry that Saied was forced to pardon and release him. This shows that international criticism can make a difference.

The European Parliament spoke up last November, passing a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the false information provisions. But such gestures have limits, as shown by Saied’s dismissal of the resolution as ‘blatant interference’.

Resistance to autocratisation takes more than words, but the EU isn’t acting. It’s in a weak position towards Saied because it pays the Tunisian government to help prevent migrants crossing into Europe, and in April 2025, it classified Tunisia as a safe country of origin. This means it believes migrants can be deported there on the basis that they won’t be at risk of persecution, a claim that rings hollow for the many from civil society now in jail.

EU policies have contributed to the rising number of migrants in Tunisia, since people can make it there but no further. This makes them a ready target for Saied’s scapegoating. The EU must acknowledge its responsibility and change course. It must recognise that migrants’ rights in Tunisia aren’t being protected and that, in the current situation, only civil society can do that. In its dealings with Tunisia, it must insist that civil society freedoms are respected and people are free both to defend migrants’ rights and criticise the government’s decisions. Continuing silence will make it complicit in the consolidation of a dictatorship.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

 

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