This guest post by Esther Brito Ruiz first appeared on the Global Policy blog. The impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine have been deeply gendered: from human traffickers targeting women and children fleeing airstrikes, to the increase in gender-based violence, rising feminized poverty, and haunting testimonies of sexual violence.  Yet despite these disproportionate vulnerabilities, Ukrainian women have also emerged as vital agents of resistance: as

I spent the summer toiling away on updating How Change Happens. Luckily the weather was pretty rubbish, so I didn’t resent it too much. Most of the chapter updates were just that – adding more recent stats, a few new references, a generally more sombre take, given that the first edition appeared just months before Brexit and Trump. But there

Fancy some good news? A fascinating piece in today’s Guardian outlines the magnitude of the norm shifts that have taken place in the UK after the last 40 years, based on the latest British social attitudes (BSA) survey, which is marking its 40th year of mapping Britain’s cultural and political landscape. Underneath the left-right pendulum shifts of political debate, the

I accompanied a project in Myanmar that ran from August 2017 to October 2021 implemented by DT Global. This blog is written together with guest bloggers Jane Lonsdale and Kelly Robertson. As part of the programme’s final output, we wrote a ‘reflection paper’, discussing what ended up as being an important natural experiment in Adaptive Management (AM), as a governance

I’m posting some of the best work from this year’s LSE activism students this week. Here’s Martin Caforio (mcaforio@icloud.com if you want to see his full campaign strategy and/or offer him a job) introducing his campaign. When you get a daily coffee, your local chain tells you the cup is “sustainable.” Recyclable plastic, compostable, responsibly sourced and produced. But even

I’m posting some of the best work from this year’s LSE activism students this week. Here’s Jessica Louise (jessalou1998@gmail.com if you want to see her full campaign strategy and/or offer her a job) introducing her campaign. As an active campaigner for Trussell Trust, one of the UK’s leading charities supporting food banks throughout the nation, I am constantly amazed by

While most of you (at least in Northern hemisphere) are hopefully enjoying a summer break, or at least a lull, my poor LSE students are trying to finish their dissertations. Thought I’d throw them a bone by putting up some of the best of their blog/vlog assignments on the course I teach with Tom Kirk on ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots

I’m a big fan of league tables for comparing performance by powerful players, whether governments, NGOs or corporates. If done well, they can prompt a race to the top, with players competing to move up the table in successive years. The latest one of these to cross my timeline was the 2023 Food and Beverage Benchmark Report, produced by ‘KnowTheChain’,

One particular chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research felt particularly relevant to me. For some years, I have been working with Exfamer Jane Lonsdale, in Tanzania, Myanmar and now in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where she helps run a big Aussie-funded programme on citizen engagement. I support Jane and the teams she works with by commenting

My favourite chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research (in addition to the one on Critical Friends which goes up tomorrow) was by Alice Owen, a prof at Leeds university, on ‘Supporting policy towards sustainability’. It’s a lovely reflection from a senior academic on the lessons she has learned in engaging with policy makers over the years.

Edited by a bunch of UK academics (Oxford Brookes and Manchester), this book is a gold mine for anyone interested in research for impact (R4I) – the holy grail (at least in terms of lip service) of much of modern academia. Best thing I’ve read on the subject, with something for more or less everyone, so I’m going to devote

Oxfam got some headlines last week with ‘World’s 722 biggest companies ‘making $1tn in windfall profits’’. This is a good example of a ‘killer fact’ – a memorable statistic that summarizes an injustice, in this case a massive windfall for big corporates at a time of global austerity and spiralling food and fuel prices. Here’s my 2019 guide to writing