Hello alumni! What’s new? We hope that you are doing well no matter the part of the world you may find yourself in now. We have been busy building our social media channels, connecting alumni locally in the cities they live in now, and organizing both virtual and in-person events. Keep on reading to find out what we have been up to in the past year and how to join us if you want to contribute!

Finding solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the not-inconsiderable task of the new Peace Academy in The Hague. Professor Maurits Berger and twelve students from different conflict zones are starting a creative thinking process that aims to discover the basic conditions for peace in the Middle East.

Let’s start with a quiz; what do Johan Sebastian Bach, Vincent van Gogh and Jackie Chan have in common? Can you guess the answer?

This time of year, when the sun rises increasingly later and sets always too early, when it is cold and often wet outside, and when we struggle to stay warm, snuggling up at home is very tempting.

What’s new, BAIS alumni? This summer, the BAIS Alumni Association hosted the yearly alumni reunion, organized in virtual format for the second time after the previous reunion also took place online in 2020. Feeling the need to compensate for the lack of in-person interaction, the Alumni Association prepared different activities to mark the occasion in an original way.

In complex times like the ones we are currently living in, one might wonder whether writing about the mid-term evaluations outcome is still an essential topic for the Newsletter of our Programme. A short answer to that is yes, it is.

“Are you tired of listening to never-ending-success-stories and feel like you might be the only one with certain problems? We, humans, pay so much attention to the best of the best that we don’t know what to do when we’re part of “the rest”. While reading these sentences, did you recognize yourself and thought ‘This is so right! I have a story of a study-experience that not went to plan’. Now is your chance to help these others yourself.”

This question was asked by Simon Anholt in an interview with Times Higher Education in January 2021. Simon who? Maybe not a household name, but Anholt is something of a ‘celeb’ within the broad field that stretches from corporate PR and marketing to inter-state public diplomacy and nation branding. More a policy advisor than an academic, and always operating on that interesting borderline between profound foresight and superficial entertainment, he’s been something of an intellectual shape-shifter for more than two decades. So what does he mean here?

For PRINS 2019, the Rainforest Alliance (RA) presented the case ‘Eliminating deforestation from global commodity chains’. With this case, RA was seeking effective approaches and technologies that reduce both deforestation and economic exclusion of farmers in the supply chains of cocoa, coffee, tea and bananas. In addition, they sought ‘feasible, adequate and comprehensible certification criteria’ that could be directly integrated into RA’s new small-hold farmers’ programmes across the agricultural sectors listed above.

Read here the stories of our students who went to a country in the area of Europe for their internship.