Hi everyone, I’ve just looked at the SCID Blog statistics and since this site was created nearly 4,000 people have looked at it and the site has had almost 10,000 views. Thank you all for your posts and comments over the last couple of years – clearly the site is of interest to people beyond those involved in the SCID course.

Please do continue to upload posts and comment on a subject related to security, conflict and international development – it’s great to read your posts and it can help bring attention to some very important issues.

Any ideas on increasing readership are very welcome – the more lateral the better! Let me know if you want discussion threads on the Blog (remembering it’s public) as well as on Blackboard – on any current development, thematic issue or novel approach to understanding and responding to the challenges of conflict and peacebuilding.

For example, this Blog is a good platform for discussing issues tangentially related to but not fully addressed in the SCID course e.g. social media, conflict and peacebuilding; interdisciplinary approaches to conflict resolution and peacebuilding; bridging macro and micro approaches to conflict resolution and peacebuilding; religion, conflict and peacebuilding; art/music, conflict and peacebuilding; science, technology and conflict/peacebuilding; and geospatial relations and conflict. These would be great topics to discuss so please don’t hesitate – any problems uploading (you need to join wordpress – click on ‘Discover’ if you don’t already have an account) send me your post (eg132@le.ac.uk).

Don’t forget we also have the SCID twitter for you to post any tweets, get in touch and share info/updates – Thanks lately to Nalini Maharaj and Richard Burne for tweets and RTs!

Image: Israeli data scientist Gilad Lotan who has mapped interactions across Twitter during the Israeli-Gaza conflict – BBC (2014) ‘Twitter’s Map of Mid-East Conflict’, London: BBC, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025lg7h, accessed on 15/02/16.