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? John Norris: Much has been made over the influence of single issue advocacy and its supposed […]
Podcast from Sarajevo
May 27, 2009 by 2 Comments
This 35-minute podcast is what I would call an “audio postcard” from Sarajevo. As I make clear in the recording, I did not go to Sarajevo as part of my research – I went because friends from there had impressed upon me how beautiful it is, and so when I found some budget flights, I […]
What would you ask Zeid Al Sabban?
May 27, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Zeid Al Sabban is Head of the African Affairs division at the League of Arab States. I’ll be speaking with him in Cairo early next month. He has just agreed “in principle” to do a podcast – it will just be contingent on timing. You have between now and June 6 to submit a question […]
Clarification on podcast summary
May 27, 2009 by 1 Comment
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:
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 […]
We need both – but the devil is in the detail
May 21, 2009 by 2 Comments
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 […]
Questions for the advocacy community: Q3 – Alex de Waal
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? Alex de Waal: The big question facing the landmines campaign was how to relate to the […]