Got a grilling from an unusual audience (for me) last week. 100+ senior military officers (colonels and above) from 40 countries, attending what amounts to a UK-sponsored ‘military Masters’ (my words) – a year-long course on strategy for future leaders. Can’t be more specific as it was Chatham House rule. My task was to introduce them to the wonderful world

Bafflingly, I was recently invited to an online ‘Expert Group Meeting’ to help UN Women flesh out a really important new strategy – making norm change central to its role. This from the Concept Note for the session: ‘In recognition of the emerging emphasis on an articulated approach to social norms in international development and acknowledging that discriminatory social norms

Oxfam got a lot of coverage for its new report (with the Guardian among others) on the links between economic and carbon inequality – i.e. the carbon footprints of the extreme rich. A cartoon strip from the wonderful First Dog on the Moon definitely helped. Whole strip here As did this powerful graphic from Mumbai ‘Something’s different about the reaction

Links I Liked Voices of Gaza What do 70 Masters students from around the world want to campaign on? What to read on the new UK White Paper on International Development? What can we learn from looking at the overlaps between innovations in ways of doing research and neglected development issues?

The same subjects have been coming up again and again in random conversations recently, especially the ones where someone comes down to South London for a general chat in a local coffee shop (one of my favourite ways of avoiding work). In a recent discussion with Oxfam Mexico’s Estefanie Hechenberger, a small penny dropped – the value of looking at

When I joined Oxfam in the mid-noughties, it was a time of Big Documents: The World Development Report, The Human Development Report etc etc. At regular intervals, the latest tome would thud onto my desk and require study, debate, lots of panels and press commentary. The tomes combined in-depth research and narrative – lots of narrative – about the nature

I’ve just spent a busy few days giving feedback on students’ proposals for their assignments in my activism class at the LSE, which I teach along with Tom Kirk. For this they have to pick a topic that they feel strongly about, and design an influencing strategy to achieve a positive change. They have to work through the course content

Oxfam has been receiving increasingly desperate voicenotes from staff and partners inside the Gaza strip. Here are some edited transcripts and links to give you a sense of the suffering that is unfolding: The Oxfam Partner Eman Shanan founded Aid and Hope in 2009, to support women with cancer in Gaza. Oxfam has been funding Aid and Hope through its

Going from silly to deadly serious in descending order. Apologies for the jarring cognitive dissonance, but it’s an accurate reflection of my timeline these days. What’s your favourite band name from the 1978 Scarfolk Youth Indoctrination Festival? For Adam Sharp, it’s a three-way tie between Arrogant Sandwiches, Pavlov & the Dribblers, and Hitler Likes Twix ‘Can we change the world?

Why did the Street Movements of the 2010s fail? What Tactics are most Effective in Non-Violent Protest? Think tanks are struggling. They need to change. Whoop Whoop. Just made a personal Webpage it’s super easy. RIP Saleemul Huq, a true climate hero Why a “humanitarian pause” or “humanitarian corridors” are simply not the answer in Gaza Pracademics: just a clunky

Pracademics. Horrible word, interesting concept: people who straddle, however uncomfortably, the worlds of practice and academia. This week, I spent an hour talking through pracademia with fellow pracs Tom Kirk (LSE) and Willem Elbers (Radboud University), who’s editing a Development in Practice double issue on the topic as part of a new initiative to promote pracademia (they were inundated with

This post by Oxfam’s Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen went up on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog on Friday Why are Oxfam and other humanitarian organisations not welcoming calls for corridors, pauses and so-called “safe zones” to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza? Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen explain – and set out why a ceasefire is the only credible