Thanks to Marc Gustafson for his comment on the Pronk podcast, where he pulls me up on the incompleteness/bias in my summary. Marc writes:
Archives for May 2009
Jan Pronk answers your questions
May 26, 2009 by 4 Comments
In this 30-minute podcast I ask former UN Special Representative to the Secretary General for Sudan, Jan Pronk, questions that you submitted through the website, plus a few follow-up questions of my own. (My apologies for the poor sound quality at the beginning of the interview – it gets better once Pronk starts speaking at […]
Coming up this week
May 26, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Hi everyone Apologies for the scarcity of posts the past fews days – my travel schedule has made accessing internet time a little tricky. [And on a personal note, it meant I missed reaching my foster brother by phone back in Australia on his 25th birthday – so great to speak to you today though […]
From Sarajevo
May 23, 2009 by 1 Comment
I’m in Sarajevo right now, which is a stunningly beautiful city, but the recent past is viscerally present – not only in the buildings ridden with bullet holes, but in other ways too. An explosion went off in the hills that surround the town yesterday morning – people were speculating a landmine, but it sounded […]
Charging for attacks on peacekeepers
May 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment
The Age – one of Australia’s main national broadsheets, just published a piece I wrote about the charges against Abu Garda at the ICC. I’m not a fan of the headline they put on it, but my hat goes off to them for continuing to cover Darfur (like this piece they ran on JEM rebels being […]
Questions for the advocacy community: Q2 – Jill Savitt
May 21, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Q2: Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue , or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make? Jill Savitt: The answer is, of course, somewhere in between: In my experience, citizen advocacy is most effective when it generates maximum noise […]
Questions for the advocacy community: Q2 – Alex de Waal
May 21, 2009 by 1 Comment
Q2: Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue , or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make? Alex de Waal: The two cases in question suggest that it is not a question of either/or but of getting the right combination […]
In favor of policy prescriptions
May 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment
In today’s posts, Eric Reeves and Erin Mazursky both argue forcefully that “noise” is not enough. In contrast to Marc Gustafson’s post yesterday, which suggested that SDC advocates may have transitioned from noise-making to policy recommendations too quickly, Reeves argues that they didn’t move quickly enough. Mazursky adds to the mix a point that I […]
Questions for the advocacy community: Q2 – Eric Reeves
May 20, 2009 by 2 Comments
Q2: Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue , or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make? Eric Reeves: The value of advocacy “noise” per se varies as a crisis emerges; it is obviously most useful when there is simply […]
We need both – but the devil is in the detail
As this week’s posts have been articulating so well, advocates need both noise-making and policy-prescriptions in their toolkit – at varying degrees over different times and, I would add, depending on which kind of advocates we are talking about (grassroots vs. grasstops etc). Today Jill Savitt makes the important point that “the cost of having […]