I thought I’d enliven the summer by posting some of the top blog posts from this year’s students in my LSE class on ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots activism‘. Their individual assignment was to design a campaign strategy for a cause close to their hearts, and write a blog about it. First up, Monica Moses on the plight of the sewer

This week, I’ll be highlighting some of the great work on activism and change from my LSE students. First up, could you comment on this draft paper please? Explanation below: Case studies are a crucial means of understanding how the world changes and informing our work as activists. Simplistic case studies reduce complex realities to linear morality tales, while useful

Did anyone notice the UK got a new Prime Minister last week? What’s Boris Johnson saying on aid and development, eg will he bring an end to DfID? And Ivanka Trump nails that warm, special relationship feeling. The LSE’s International Inequalities Institute is on a roll. First up bringing in Branko Milanovic as Centennial Professor (here he is on Russian

Don’t know about you, but watching the daily news isn’t much fun these days (nor is the weather/climate), and this week in particular, I am sorely in need of light relief. There was even a riot at my local swimming pool yesterday. So back to the abandoned series of ‘Friday funnies’: here’s a few previous FP2P posts that might just

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

We recently spent some time reviewing the first 3 months of #PowerShifts, the new iteration of FP2P, aimed at transforming its messengers, messages and formats over the next two years. The project is in the hands of Maria Faciolince, a Colombian-Antillean anthropologist and activist, supported by Oxfam’s Amy Moran (if you’ve noticed an improvement in the way this blog looks

I spoke to Jo Howard from IDS about How Change Happens for their book podcast Between the Lines. Here it is: With podcasts, I always try to provide a blog-length set of excerpts for people who prefer reading to listening, but I honestly couldn’t bear to listen to myself this time. So huge thanks to Maria Faciolince for taking the

Parliamentarians argue that the UK’s unfair visa system for African applicants isn’t fit for purpose; African lives are measured in fighting UK visa rejections (gonna just keep linking to these pieces until the UK takes action) British climate politics – this time it’s different (but the same). Good news – Matthew Lockwood is back up on the Political Climate blog

This book promised a lot, but only partially delivered. There’s enough substance there to warrant a read, though. The book’s starting point is an upsurge in ‘new activism’ around the world. Robert Putnam’s anomic world of lonely people ‘Bowling Alone’ is looking pretty silly right now. The new activism is very different from the professionalized advocacy and campaigning of traditional

What can we learn from history about how to rebuild the trust between political leaders and citizens that seems to have evaporated in recent years? This was the topic of a recent exchange with Paddy Radcliffe. Paddy has launched a project to ‘build trustworthiness and trust in and between our public leaders, institutions and citizens’ in the UK. The campaign involves

Had a really interesting conversation last week with Oxfam Intermon and its friends in the Catalan aid system (in Spain, aid is regional with provinces and even cities like Barcelona pursuing active aid policies). I gave my usual rap about how complex systems require aid providers to adopt iterative, adaptive approaches to cope with uncertainty and the response was basically

Guest post from Jaime Atienza of Oxfam Intermon Here we go again. Though different to their “first debt crisis”, which was incubated in the 80s, hit in the 90s and was resolved (partly) in the 2000s, the situation is again profoundly uphill for a growing number of African countries: in 2019 their debt repayments as a percentage of revenues will