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Juan Daniel Cruz, before beginning his career as a teacher and writer on peace and decolonization, was immersed for more than eight years with communities and peace initiatives in conflict zones in Colombia and the border areas with Ecuador and Venezuela. The contact with creativity and ancestry of marginalized communities to resist or mediate peacefully with armed groups and political elites made Juan Cruz recognize other ways to co-create peace, motivating him to study Latin American critical and decolonial approaches, which he has applied in his undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. studies, also in his classes and multiple publications. 

Marco Donati has worked with UN civil affairs for more than 20 years and is the Civil Affairs Team Lead in New York. During this time he worked as a UN Civil Affairs Officer in Haiti, the DRC and Kosovo.

Lisa Schirch has 30 years of experience in peacebuilding research, policy advocacy, practice, and teaching. A political scientist by training, she earned her PhD in 1989 from George Mason University’s Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Schirch’s most recent book, Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy: The Tech-tonic Shift (Routledge, 2021) features thirteen local case studies from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The book maps how digital technologies drive “social climate change,” including polarization, extremist anti-immigrant, and anti-minority purity narratives. Schirch’s current research focuses on the positive roles of technology in “peacetech” and “digital peacebuilding.” She is a senior research fellow with the Toda Peace Institute, where she coordinates with civil society and technology companies to experiment and innovate new technologies that can scale social cohesion.

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Ubleha for idiots

  • Implementation

    A word that came into fashion in B&H with the war.  In English, to implement means to execute, to perform or to put into, however, the use of local language counterparts is not recommended lest the mystical aura of a project (See) gets lost. The English word implement originates from the Latin verb implere which primarily means TO FULFILL, TO FILL OUT, and even TO IMPREGNATE A WOMAN. Therefore, implementation is about sex or, colloquially, about screwing someone but most of the time it is only virtual, where either there is no intercourse but there are partners in intercourse or there is only a so-called active partner in intercourse while the passive one (technical term “the one on the bottom”; See: beneficiary) does not at all exist or s/he does exist but does not notice that s/he participates in the implementation. Implementation is normally the biggest challenge for ubleha (See) but the best protection from that danger is a report (See) or, even better, a status report (See).

from Ubleha for Idiots – An Absolutely non useful Guide for Civil Society Building and Project management for Locals and Internationals in BiH and Beyond by Nebojša Šavija-Valha and Ranko Milanovic-Blank, ALBUM No. 20, 2004, Sarajevo, translated by Marina Vasilj.