Hi everyone
As I’m researching and writing this book, there are a number of issues that come up time and time again – and that I therefore spend a lot of time thinking through. One of these relates to strategic choices that the advocacy community has faced – and continues to face today.
To both develop my own thinking, and hopefully encourage a conversation among the advocacy community, I have invited a range of people to post reflections on the following questions (additional contributions and suggestions for future topics are also welcome):
Q1. Can pressure from citizens ever ‘add’ a foreign policy issue to the list of traditional national interests? Or can citizens only impact the sense of urgency around an issue that was already a traditional national interest to start with?
Q2. Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue (letting government know its citizens care about the issue without presenting particular policy prescriptions to deal with the issue)? Or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make? What are the costs/benefits of each approach?
Q3. What are the costs/benefits of single issue advocacy? Does the focus on a single issue crowd out the potential to focus on structural changes that would be required to deal with both the single issue and other related issues?
Starting this week, I’ll begin posting the reflections on Q1. I’ll aim to post the contributions on Q2 the week of May 17 and on Q3 the week of May 24. The people who have agreed to contribute are all fabulously busy, so I want to thank them in advance for agreeing to take the time out to reflect on these issues with me. I look forward to seeing the conversation unfold . . .
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