Opinion & Insights

The recent presence of military coups covered in the news may lead people to believe that coups are more prevalent in 2021 than they have been in recent years, however, this perception may warrant further questions pertaining to what qualifies an event as a coup, and how loosely should the term be u...

Secure Fisheries Project Kalluun, a partnership with four Somali universities and Somali fisheries ministries, aims to enhance fisheries data collection throughout the region and train the next generation of Somali marine scientists. As participants in the project, students gain training from Secure...

The recent presence of military coups covered in the news may lead people to believe that coups are more prevalent in 2021 than they have been in recent years, however, this perception may warrant further questions pertaining to what qualifies an event as a coup, and how loosely should the term be u...

The world is complex enough when everyone is operating with the same set of underlying facts on any given topic. When those facts are hidden or manipulated, overcoming intractable conflict becomes nearly impossible. Sharing open source data among adversarial governments, within governments, and betw...

June is Pride Month and in the U.S. we also commemorate “Juneteenth” on June 19th, the marking of the end of slavery in the U.S. Already widely recognized, we applaud the U.S. House of Reps for recently voting overwhelmingly to formalize Juneteenth as a national federal holiday. OEF wants to extend ...

OEF and Alliance for Peacebuilding released a report last month detailing the findings of a survey of professional peacebuilders on their ideas about evidence-based practice in peacebuilding. The results suggest that despite the debate, the field has a pretty developed understanding of what evidence...

The challenges of peacebuilding involve maximizing the contribution of multiple technical experts in an often quickly changing environment, and one where participants may not always trust all other participants or where they may be concerned about maintaining their individual authority to make decis...

OEF’s Executive Director and Chief Operating Office, Jon Bellish talks about OEF’s commitment to Relentless Empiricism as core to its belief in and support of iterative problem-solving and careful, analytical design. He discusses how OEF relies on evidence to cut through complexities in order to sol...