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Dear Listeners,

Thank you for joining us today for a new episode of Voices of Development.

Beginning of 2024, I recorded this interview with Serge Stroobants, who is one of the first, if not the first, international relations professionals I met when I was a student and who immediately inspired me by his career, but most importantly by his frankness and clear-sightedness, which were already refreshing in the well-too-theory-oriented studies I was in.  When I met Serge 10 years ago, actually on a boat between Riga and Stockholm, but that’s another story to tell, Serge was at the end of his career within the military and on the verge of joining the Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian think tank that has developed the concept of positive peace by bridging together peacebuilding with economic resilience and investment. Today, Serge is the regional director of the Institute for Europe and MENA and the global director on Defense, Security and Intelligence. Serge has then undergone a significant change not only in his career but also in his approach to peace, which will guide us throughout the interview as he shares how both worlds work and how together they could do better, with concrete applications to current conflicts in Ukraine and the MENA region, in particular.

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