For the past few months, I’ve been toiling away with a great team of thinkers/practitioners at LSE and beyond, developing a new training course on influencing (as close followers of my occasional tweeted requests for extra references may have noticed). Now it’s being launched, as part of the Global Executive Leadership Initiative, so I can go a bit more public.

The Looting of Africa ht K. Diallo Human rights organising in Africa during a global pandemic. Write up of great lecture by my old friend Irungu Houghton with links to video and podcast. Also check out his book on Kenya: Dialogue and Dissent: A Constitution In Search Of A Country What all campaigners can learn from The Canary Craftivists. Nice

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In the second of their four-part blog series (first published on Global Policy), which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor (two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort), use Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to ask how activists can use the internet to achieve new forms of power and

This is the first of a four-part blog series first published on Global Policy, which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism. Written by two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor, it uses Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to interrogate power: asking how activists can use the internet to

It’s always a red letter day when a new paper from Graham Teskey drops. His most recent is Thinking and working politically: What have we learned since 2013? For those that don’t know him, Graham is a consummate insider-outsider within the aid sector – long stints at DFID (UK), DFAT (Australia) and now Abt (Management Consultants). From this vantage point

At what date will average UK persons’ 2022 emissions surpass annual emissions of other countries? Powerful number crunch/infographic on climate inequality from Euan Ritchie The Wordle craze is now spawning some (more) interesting mutuations (sorry, Covid language is hard to get away from these days). If you’re looking for a suitable timesuck, there’s an environmental version, c/o IIED, or try

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It appears to have turned into anti-corruption week on the blog (see Tuesday’s post on Heather Marquette’s work). Transparency International’s annual ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’ dropped the same day and makes an important link between corruption and human rights: ‘The 2021 CPI results show that countries with well-protected civil and political liberties generally control corruption better.’ Here’s the relevant section, which argues that

Got a very thought-provoking email from Romilly Greenhill at ONE Campaign over the weekend.  She was drawing my attention to the Aid Alliance, a group of NGOs (including Oxfam) working together to build public support for UK aid. This week it launched something called ‘We the Helpers’. Some thoughts: First the message: Aid is helping. ‘From aid workers to donors

Heather Marquette (occasional contributor to this blog) has started a new newsletter drawing on her work for SOC ACE – the Serious Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (and sister programme to SOAS ACE and Global Integrity ACE) and lots more on corruption, organised crime, conflict, security, foreign policy and development.. The first two editions dropped this week, and here are some highlights (minus

St George testing the dragon for Covid ht @ArtMemeLord Deaths vs. The Economy: An Unexpected Reversal. ‘assume that you do not know anything about how different countries have handled the pandemic so far and are given the following exam questions: there is a very rich country with a democratic government, and there is a significantly less rich country trying to