Featured image for “Don’t start with the issue, start with the people: lessons from a legend of community organising”

Don’t start with the issue, start with the people: lessons from a legend of community organising

May 8, 2025
Duncan Green reviews a new book by a giant in the field of community organising and explores the differences between that approach to driving change and the policy-focused advocacy typically used by NGOs.
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Featured image for “Civic Freedoms and The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Snapshot of Restrictions and Attacks”

Civic Freedoms and The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Snapshot of Restrictions and Attacks

October 14, 2020
Civicus, the international network of Civil Society Organizations, has just put out a brief on the impact of the pandemic on protest and activism around the world. Some highlights (my summary in square brackets) [Civic activism hasn’t entirely stopped, but it has moved from mass mobilization to a greater emphasis on symbolism and imagination] ‘2019 was a historic year for
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Featured image for “Supporting Feminist and Queer Activists Under Growing Threat Worldwide”

Supporting Feminist and Queer Activists Under Growing Threat Worldwide

July 25, 2019
This post first appeared on the Urgent Action Fund Africa site, under a Creative Commons License. Within women human rights activist circles, the recent rape and murder of Viktoria Marinova, journalist covering EU corruption, is all too familiar to circumstances surrounding the killing of Brazil’s Marielle Franco. And similar yet to the murder of Berta Caceres, a well-known environmental and human rights activist killed her
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What is new/the same about the world’s new civic activist movements?

May 10, 2017
Bumped into Tom Carothers in the DFID foyer the other day, and he handed me a copy of a fascinating new Carnegie Endowment Report, Global Civic Activism in Flux. Late last year, Carnegie set up a Civic Activism Network that brought together 8 national experts on new forms of citizen activism in Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, and
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