US chat show presenter Jon Stewart's recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren't Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change. He lives in North Yorkshire and is currently working on political polarisation and learning dry stone walling. Full biog here.
No more US army blogging?
Wired.com has a piece today saying that: The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first...
Fixing the UK’s Foreign Policy Apparatus: A Memo to Gordon Brown
Note by Alex Evans and David Steven about how to restructure the UK’s foreign policy system in order to manage trans-boundary global risks better (April 2007).
Van Creveld’s lessons of Northern Ireland
Martin van Creveld, author of the outstanding The Transformation of War, has a new book out. Below, William Lind extracts from it van Creveld's key lessons on...
You couldn’t make it up
Heard the one about the World Bank President who launched a personal crusade against corruption in developing countries, only for the world to learn that he...
Peer-to-peer microcredit
Fed up with just paying your Oxfam subscription and never seeing where it goes? Help is at hand! Kiva.org uses partnerships with micro-credit lenders all over...
Raising a valedictory glass to Boris
Farewell, then, to the late, great Boris Yeltsin. And by way of a last raising of the glass, here's the story of when he visited John Major at Chequers (the...
Climate change and the Security Council
Last week's UK-sponsored debate on climate change in the Security Council this week was always going to be contentious, as the Guardian and the Times of India...
Disaster behaviour (2)
There's an excellent account of the flotilla of boats that converged on Lower Manhattan on September 11 2001 to assist with the evacuation of nearly half a...
How people really behave in disasters
This weekend's light reading: Principles of Emergency Planning and Management, by one David Alexander of the University of Massachussetts. Amid chapters...
Iran hostages: a last word…
In case Jules and David's outraged posts on the handling of the hostage crisis in Iran have left you still wanting more, let's give the last word on the...
Malthus’s ghost
ForeignPolicy.com is running a list of predictions that didn't come true, including free atomic energy for all, global cooling, Japan ruling the world,...
Resign!
It looks pretty bad for Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. The Guardian reports the reaction yesterday when he tried to address Bank staff in their...
De-radicalisation? It’s the networks, stupid
Roula Khalaf has a great piece leading today's FT about a new rehabilitation program underway in Saudi Arabia for former jihadis. One beneficiary of the...
Childhood: the key dividing line in UK politics?
Well, that's what Jenny McCartney argues in the Sunday Telegraph, anyway. McCartney argues that although stabbings of the kind that have dominated headlines...
Where next for NGOs?
What's a single issue NGO to do in a multi-issue world? It's no easy balancing act. On one hand, funding departments argue that members want to see them...
The Power of Nightmares redux
Jimmy Carter's NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski makes a strong critique in the Washington Post of the way the 'war on terror' has been framed. He writes: The culture...
Wired neighbourhoods
Wired has a story about a new technology being rolled out with the Police in Oakland, California: microphones have been dotted around a rough neighbourhood,...
Indonesian mud volcano: the showdown
Since June last year, a Javanese village has been subjected to a belching mud volcano producing 130,000 cubic metres of toxic mud a day. Thought to have been...
Monbiot on biofuels
George Monbiot has a piece in today's Guardian calling for a five year ban on biofuels. He writes: In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set...
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Our Unfinished Millennium Jubilee
Talk presented at Tearfund on why our Millennium Jubilee remains a work in progress - and what it would take to complete it (November 2014) Download Speech
How about this as a headline outcome from the Addis FFD summit?
Here's a conundrum if you like riddles: how on earth is next summer's Finance For Development summit in Addis Ababa supposed to take account of the vexed issue of reform of international financial institutions? On one hand, the issue is almost impossible for the...
From exclusion and inequality to humanity and Francisconomics? My personal reflections before a meeting in Rome
This month I'll be joining a meeting convened by the Vatican on overcoming social and economic exclusion, and was asked in advance to share my personal reflections ... My personal journey into learning about social and economic exclusion began at the grassroots. As a...